Obamacare as a Microcosm of What Is Killing Us

THE BIG LIE of the so-called “Affordable Care Act” – an Orwellian name if ever there was one – is already obvious in its prohibitive co-pays.

Moreover – as if there were any remaining doubts – the death of any rational hope  for achieving single-payer/public option health insurance in Vermont underscores what was obviously one of the key purposes behind Obama the Orator's shape-shift to Barack the Betrayer. ACA – “Obamacare” as it is ironically labeled – cares only for ensuring insurance-company profiteering.

Yes, as Vermonters have learned to their embitterment, ACA methodically perpetuates the deliberately genocidal U.S. policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.

And it does so with typical Madison Avenue cunning. In the eyes of those fortunate folks who are neither Obamacare's victims nor its supplicants, it creates the illusion of an actual national health care system. It thereby silences that global chorus of humanitarian critics who were rightfully damning the United States as the only industrial nation on earth which refuses to accept that health care is a basic human right.

Said one U.S. physician in a 2012 protest-letter  to The Wall Street Journal:  “(ACA) will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million individuals uninsured. It will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and it will not control costs...It denies care in order to increase insurers' bottom line, and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.”

The law – or rather the absence of humanitarian reform the law locks into place – is also driving an unknown number of U.S. doctors to seek professional asylum elsewhere.

A physician recruiter  quoted by The Star, the newspaper of Windsor, Ont., says that over the past decade at least 105 U.S. doctors have relocated to that city alone.

One of these soon-to-be exiles is Dr. Emily Queenan MD, a family physician in upstate New York. She is moving to Canada  because, as she put it in an Evidence Network piece republished by Truthout, “I'm tired of doing daily battle with the same adversary that my patients face – the private health insurance industry, with its frequent errors in processing claims (the American Medical Association reports that one of every 14 claims submitted to commercial insurers are paid incorrectly); outright denials of payment (about one to five percent); and costly paperwork that consumes about 16 percent of physicians' working time, according to a recent journal study.”

“I've also witnessed the painful and continual shifting of medical costs onto my patients' shoulders through rising co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses,” wrote Dr. Queenan. “According to a survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, 66 million – 36 percent of Americans — reported delaying or forgoing needed medical care in 2014 due to cost.”

As I cannot say too often, such is life – and death – under capitalism. For what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue? What is capitalism but the malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth? Just ask the late Ayn Rand, whose fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf polls as second only to The Bible as the most influential book  in the United States.

Given that background – given my horror at the Moron Nation to which my homeland has been reduced – I suppose my response to the Truthout piece was in a sense predictable. But several others made supportive comments. Hence I reproduce it here in totality: 

I commend Dr. Queenan for her courageous decision to embrace civilization by moving to a nation not ruled by Ayn Rand savagery. May she, her family and her future patients all thrive.

That said, her naive belief "the U.S. will get there some day" is a classic example of the futility of hope.

The ultimate fate of any and all efforts to achieve single-payer/public-option health insurance in the U.S. is proven beyond dispute by the (Democrat) gubernatorial treachery that killed – forever – the apparently successful grassroots effort to create such a system in Vermont.

Indeed the lesson of the Vermont debacle sends a terminal message to health insurance reformers everywhere in the U.S.: don't bother trying for single-payer/public-option because even your best most diligent efforts will be defeated in the end by political betrayal.

And so it shall remain until the oligarchy is overthrown or our species renders itself extinct, whichever comes first.

Another poster noted that “Vermont activists haven't given up on seeking Single-Payer.”

True – but only in that some people will never acknowledge the U.S. experiment in representative democracy has failed (or, rather, has been murdered), and that these same people will always continue banging their heads against the proverbial stone wall.

As long as the One Percent owns and rules the U.S. political system – that is, for how ever much longer the United States exists – a public-option/single-payer system will never be allowed.

To imagine otherwise is to ignore the primary purpose of Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer: to prohibit socialism (especially including socialized medicine), and thereby ensure the neo-Nazi savagery of Ayn Rand capitalism is forever. All this, of course, with the additional cover provided by the Republicans accusing the president of being a "socialist."

Such is the diabolical methodology of de facto one-party rule.

In which context note that Obamacare cunningly prohibits the states from initiating public-option/single payer insurance – which would have killed it in Vermont even without the (Democrat) governor's service to his One Percent masters.

The tragic failure of the U.S. Left to understand realpolitik – specifically to acknowledge the extent to which we have already been subjugated and enslaved – defines this Left as being as much a part of Moron Nation as the Right.

Until we admit the magnitude of our powerlessness, we will remain unable to evolve an effective response to it. Which – particularly given the extinction of our species made inevitable by the combination of terminal climate change and the looming thermonuclear war with Russia -- relegates such hope to the realm of nonsense.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. The hydrogen bomb trumps everything, and even without that, if you understood the true magnitude of the climate-change disaster (even now at its alleged "beginning"), you'd recognize Nature has clearly decided our species is unworthy of survival.

Later, in response to multiple posts, I wrote:

I had not meant to trigger an extended discussion, but it appears I have done just that. Hence this reply is to Ted, PGreen and whomever else might choose to to join in.

Admittedly I write and speak from the cynical perspective of one who has been an activist/journalist (or a journalist/activist) since my late teens in the 1950s. 

During the subsequent 58 years, I have witnessed the defeat of every cause to which I committed time, energy, a brief stay in jail, some bloodshed and a helluva lot of suffering and deprivation. These causes include organized labor (the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO); post-Sputnik education reform; the Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail, 1963); the anti-Vietnam War Movement; the Back-to-the-Land Movement; the alternative press; the creation of an anti-capitalist Counterculture, and of course the associated defenses of the Bill of Rights.

Every one of these causes has failed. Given the time-span involved – I say again 58 years – these failures cannot be dismissed as short-term or temporary phenomena.

Each failure is in fact symptomatic of the relentless destruction of U.S. liberty begun by the One Percent in response to the close proximity of Communist revolution that evolved during the 1930s. The retaliatory purge – and that is precisely what it is – began literally the day World War II ended and continues even now.

Ideologically speaking, the abject failure of the U.S. Left to combat this aggression is rooted in its rejection of the historical truth of class warfare. Thus it has blinded itself to the nature and lineage of capitalism.

But what marks the U.S. Left as part of Moron Nation is actually a triple failure.

The first failure is failure to understand that capitalism is literally infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – precisely as Ayn Rand states in her fictionalizations of Mein Kampf. the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Failure number two is refusal to recognize that capitalism is the direct descendant both of patriarchy and patriarchal religion. It is therefore the immediate, innately misogynistic ancestor of both fascism and Nazism. In other words, Nazism (whether in its misogynistic anti-Jewish German form or in its misogynistic Christian/exceptionalist U.S. form), is the ultimate form of capitalism. Its savagery is therefore as inevitable as the death of a corn crop after a hard freeze.

In the past, the ostensibly Marxian domains of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Peoples' Republic of China offered enough competition to capitalism, the U.S. One Percent was forced to ameliorate capitalism's most obvious savageries. Now, with the Soviet Union dead and China co-opted by Wall Street, there is no such strategic or even tactical need. Hence capitalism now openly displays its tyrannosauric nature.

Failure number three is the U.S. Left's refusal to recognize the ONLY reason the One Percent yielded to the humanitarian demands of labor, the Republican Progressives and finally the Democrats' New Deal was the One Percenters' abject terror of Communist revolution. (Note that The Communist Manifesto, which from the perspective of the capitalists is the most dangerous document in our species' history, dates from 1848.)

What all this means in terms of any present-day prospects for humanitarian change is that there are none.

History shows us such change has four prerequisites. These are (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organization; (3)-mastery of extant technologies military and civilian; and (4)-the aid, overt, clandestine or both, of a major foreign power.

None of the first three prerequisites exist in the United States today. Our society has been deliberately dumbed down or "moronated" into Moron Nation precisely to rob us, forever, of the requisite intellectual skills and psychological reflexes. Meanwhile the moronation of other realms (which includes the radical Islamization of the Middle East), continues apace.

And with the death of the U.S.S.R. and the co-optation of China, there is no longer any source of revolutionary outside agitation or support or even any effective antidote to capitalist depredation.

Nor will there ever be again. The U.S. will literally destroy the world before it allows any rival nation – with or without a rival ideology – to emerge.

Couple that with the already ruinous apocalypse inflicted by what should properly be labeled "terminal climate change" – for that is exactly what it is – and you have then begun to arrive at a realistic assessment of our present circumstances: literally the darkest, most hopeless epoch in our species' 200,000-year history.

However, this does not mean we should give up. It merely means we should recognize that surely the notion of revolution by a dying species on a dying planet is the ultimate cosmic joke. We should therefore give up the grandiose in exchange for doing the best we can, locally, to better peoples' lives.

(Even at a physically disabled age 75, I still manage to serve my community by producing an informationally vital monthly newsletter and, as its editor, sometimes functioning as an unofficial ombudsman.)

But to attempt anything on any greater scale is merely to court despair.

Though I cling, perhaps foolishly, to the belief that if we can strip off the Norman Vincent Peale blinders with which the One Percent has shackled us – that is, if we can acknowledge the extent to which we have been defeated and conquered – we might yet evolve an effective response.

However, until then we are at best doing nothing more than dancing a 21st Century version of the Ghost Dance.

Meanwhile the same administration that promised us "change we can believe in" now assures us U.S. aggression in Ukraine will not require nuclear weapons. 

LB/17-24 May 2015

-30-

Capitalism as Death: Bald Tires, Ebola, Ferguson, Malicious Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters

CAPITALISM'S INNATE MURDEROUSNESS is manifest everywhere we look.

We see it in the Ebola epidemic and in how the Obama Administration's decision to permanently define health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right has already spread Ebola to two nurses here in the United States. We witness that same wanton lethality in the escalating atrocities committed by federalized, militarized police against blacks and other minority people. The same deadly dynamic t underlies the methodical disenfranchisement of college students and minorities and lower-income people in general. The fewer anti-capitalist voters, the more of us the capitalists can exploit, work to death or otherwise murder with impunity.

And last Wednesday, the furtively hidden poverty that is a consequence of capitalism's morally imbecilic restructuring of the USian domestic economy literally came within a telephone-pole's thickness of killing me.

I had been shopping for a few mid-month essentials and was walking along the sidewalk to the bus stop on the northeast corner of Tacoma's Pacific Avenue South at South 72nd Street. It was 5:15 p.m. on 15 October, unseasonably very warm, terminal-climate-change muggy and drizzling in what is already by far the most uncomfortably hot autumn ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest. I was traveling via this seaport town's vindictively downsized  public transport because I am loathe to inconvenience my vehicle-owning friends with unnecessary requests for rides; my own carefully maintained V6 Ford Tempo died at 260,000 miles in mid-2009, the same year capitalism's deliberate contraction to a wage-slave economy cost me nearly 70 percent of my annual income, which in turn decreed I will never again in this lifetime have enough money to own an automobile.

Hence the bus, and hence my near-death encounter with a newish bright-yellow Jeep Wrangler that was meticulously polished and cared-for in every superficial way but was nevertheless running on – and skidding wildly toward me on – four utterly bald tires. I heard it before I saw it – the terrifying sound of a speeding vehicle out of control on wet pavement. My reactions are said to be unusually quick for a person of my 74 years, but by the time I had turned my head toward the threat, the jeep had already slammed into the telephone pole that saved my life. The collision, no more than 10 feet away, was as startling as an unexpected artillery round. I hardly felt its shrapnel, a matching yellow “KC Daylighter” headlight cover flung by the impact as it brushed its sinister happy-face smile across the backs of my legs. My exclamation was not thankful but outraged: “Jesus fucking Christ!” 

An elderly, half-toothless woman ran from the entrance to an adjacent store to make sure I was ok; I suspect she feared that, given my obvious age, the momentary terror evoked by the accident might trigger a heart attack. I reassured her. She returned to her shopping.

But the driver of the jeep would not so much as acknowledge my presence. A dark-haired, slightly plump but attractive 30-something white woman in a baggy gray sweat-suit, she had turned the corner from 72nd Street onto Pacific, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere and going way too fast for conditions, and the combination of her defiantly bald tires and the pavement's slick emulsion of oil and drizzle turned her intended 90-degree turn into a 180 degree skid and transformed her jeep into a potentially deadly projectile that, but for the pole, would have bounced up over the curb and onto the sidewalk and into my body and over it no doubt either crushing me to death under its oversized and (say again) bald tires or smashing me into a vegetable or, infinitely worse, a hopeless cripple fully aware of my irremediable wretchedness yet physically unable to end my life. (This is not hyperbole; I have seen, as a newspaper reporter, how human flesh is ground to raw hamburger when a vehicle crushes a pedestrian against pavement.) Thus there is no question in my mind that, had I not been saved by the telephone pole, my death would have been the best possible outcome of our encounter.

Meanwhile the jeep's driver continued to behave as if I were invisible. Nor was I surprised. Her demeanor was the typically hostile reaction of a Puget Sound-area motorist to a pedestrian. It was also a commonplace local expression of class warfare. In this oppressively auto-centric society, pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users – people who by definition seem to lack motor vehicles – are assumed to be absolute failures, worthless bums, parasites, the ultimate dregs of society (note again the material linked under “vindictively downsized”). Especially when mass transit is a subject of public debate, those of us who ride the buses are often the targets of insults shouted by passing drivers: if you're elderly, it's “hurry up and die, you fucking bum,” or if you're younger, it's the more commonplace “get a job – and get a car.” And there at the bus stop on Wednesday 15 October not only was I obviously a pedestrian and a bus-rider; I was also obviously old, obviously burdened with my purchases – and therefore, given the no-doubt bigoted, probably suburbanite perspective of Ms. Bald Tires, I was likely a homeless bum and undoubtedly a non-person, someone to whom a respectable citizen would never speak, someone to be ignored at all times and in every circumstance, one of those Others the Ayn Randers would happily exterminate.

Now, because Ms. Baldies and her smashed-nose jeep were blocking rush hour traffic, I figured the cops would be there within minutes, particularly since a passing motorist shouted out he had called 911 to get the woman help. But instead of the cops, an elderly male Good Samaritan in a pickup truck pulled up behind her, climbed out and helped her tie down the ruptured hood and otherwise get her damaged vehicle mobile again. Their interaction was perplexing. Sometimes they seemed to be strangers. At other times they seemed oddly comfortable with one another. But there is no doubt his assistance, which after maybe only 10 minutes enabled her to flee, saved her from a ticket. She'd have been charged with defective equipment at least, and probably reckless driving as well. Though it was not until she fled the scene of the accident I saw the condition of her tires and understood why and how she had lost control of the jeep that might have killed me. As for the cops, strangely enough they never showed. 

Riding a typically herky-jerky bus and halfway home, I suddenly understood what a telling lesson the jeep incident had taught me about USian capitalist reality. The woman or more likely her husband bought the jeep. Then one or both of them was thrown out of work by capitalism's downsizing and outsourcing of jobs to cheaper labor overseas. Rather than admit their circumstances – rather than acknowledge their victimhood to others and build a solidarity of resistance – they hid in shame, carefully washing and waxing their jeep and otherwise doing everything in their power to conceal the poverty proven by the bald tires, trusting the rugged treads on the sides of those flagrantly unsafe tires to hide the total absence of tread where the rubber meets the road. It is a genuine microcosm of capitalism in action: not just how capitalism victimizes all of us, but how most of the victims have been brainwashed to such fretfully conformist what-will-the-neighbors-think helplessness, they will never find within themselves the honesty – much less the courage – necessary to rise up against their masters.

A teachable moment indeed – that is, if it really was an accident...

******

Something to remember: as a student of history, I am of course aware that any ideology or system of government, however emphatically humanitarian its stated ideals, can be corrupted into an apparatus that serves its Ruling Class an the expense of everyone else. But only capitalism – its morally imbecilic credo spelled out by Ayn Rand – brazenly elevates infinite greed to maximum virtue, thereby publicly rejecting every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. And only capitalist governance openly declares, as in the Powell Memo,  that its sole purpose is providing absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class while totally subjugating all the rest of us.

******

 

I began this week's OAN by mentioning Ebola because that is mostly all I have written about for the past seven days.

Admittedly, the Ebola crisis had remained at the periphery of my consciousness until two detailed reports brought it into sharp focus as yet another capitalist atrocity. The first of these texts was “Assassination' of Public Health Systems Driving Ebola Crisis,” a cutting-edge exposé published by Common Dreams that documents how capitalist greed – chiefly the downsizing and privatization of public health facilities – has inflicted this out-of-control epidemic on all of us.  The second article, “Ebola In The US: Story Of A Broken Healthcare System,”is an anthology of damning revelations  collected by Dr. Margaret Flowers MD and published by the ever-more-informative website PopularResistance.org. Its most important disclosure is that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas sent the now-dead Ebola victim home with minimal treatment – and thereby jeopardized us all – because “he was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay.”

Capitalism is thus threatening us with a disease for which there is no known cure – not because science cannot find a cure, but because there is no profit in developing cures for diseases that (hitherto) afflicted only woefully impoverished Third World peoples. Ebola is 70 percent fatal, and now as a direct consequence of capitalist greed, the deadly virus may be loose in the United States. Worse, an Obama-specific expression of that greed, the so-called Affordable Care Act – its title nearly as grotesque a Big Lie as “change we can believe in” – forever defines U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth. Meanwhile, capitalism has reduced fully half the nation  to lower-income status. This means the prohibitive fees required by ACA's no-treatment-without-advance-payment policy will force even some of the most desperately sick people to avoid care and spread disease. (Or if they seek care as paupers, they'll be rejected as unprofitable, precisely as the late Thomas Eric Duncan was by Dallas Presbyterian in its telling display of Christian charity.) And yes, that health-care-only-as-a-privilege-of-wealth definition truly is “forever” because the windfall profits from mandatory insurance are sufficient to fund the perpetual bribery of every politician in the nation, thereby ensuring the system imposed on us by the insurance barons and the prescription drug lords through Barack the Betrayer's treachery is eternally immunized against humanitarian reform.

While I did not comment on “Ebola in the US” – Popular Resistance threads do not encourage any sort of extended dialogue – I commented at length on “Assassination of Public Health Systems”:

Wake up, people. The Ebola epidemic is intensifying exactly what the neoliberal social model is intended to do: facilitate the genocidal extermination of all Third World peoples and all lower-income peoples everywhere else in the world. That's why the virus is being allowed to run amok – to eliminate all of us the One Percent regards as surplus workers.

Never forget: the entire planet is now ruled by capitalists – people for whom, by definition, infinite greed is maximum virtue – that is, the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Our Ayn Rand-minded overlords are thus truly moral imbeciles by choice – literally the personification of incarnate evil. And their policies – such as the methodical destruction of public health facilities and social-services in general – are shaped accordingly.

In response to a poster who poignantly hoped my analysis was wrong, I wrote:

Unfortunately, no other analysis suffices to explain what is being done to us.

Obviously it is no coincidence that just as medical scientists started warning us of the inevitability of deadly disease spread worldwide by the global transport network, the One Percent – the capitalist Ruling Class – began methodically destroying the public health and social service facilities that would have enabled us to cope with any such outbreak.

In this context, once we recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is literally the greatest evil ever unleashed on this planet – all the rest becomes obvious. Final-stage capitalism is behaving exactly as Marxian analysis predicted, maturing into fascism at home and world-conquest imperialism abroad.

Just as importantly, the capitalists themselves – in the ultimate expression of the Shock Doctrine – are seizing upon the looming environmental apocalypse to restructure global governance into an electronically policed, drone-enforced, zero-tolerance tyranny akin to that of Hitler's Third Reich but infinitely worsened by modern technology.

Doubt me? It's already happening. Look at the methodical killing of blacks in the United States, the drone-massacred wedding parties in Afghanistan and the U.S. military's gleeful machine gunning of civilians in Baghdad. The United States is already the de facto Fourth Reich.

The capitalists' ultimate motive is of course their own survival – maintaining their present-day, obscenely lavish lifestyle by stealing from all the rest of us, forcing us into a wretchedness that can scarcely be imagined. To accomplish this, they're restructuring global governance into a system that is half neo-feudalism (with the corporations in place of the medieval baronies), half Nazi-style terrorism to keep us – the 99 Percent – in total subjugation.

Part of that terrorism is the elimination of surplus workers. The Nazis did it in death camps, but those have become unfashionable. Hence – at least until now – the main Ruling Class methods have been less than obvious, chiefly low-intensity genocide by elimination or reduction of the social safety net. (In this context, the primary function of Obamacare is to perpetuate and enforce the U.S. modality of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Those too poor to pay are abandoned to die. Again, it's already happening.)

But now the One Percent have the Ebola virus on their side, and their destruction of public health and social services are having exactly the effect they intended. The long-term result will be a world reshaped into the global equivalent of an antebellum plantation. The One Percent will be absolute masters and we – those of us who survive – will be their slaves.

Could anything alter this terrible prognosis? Yes: a global socialist revolution. But there is neither the uniform ideology nor the discipline – much less the solidarity of popular will – necessary for such an event. In which context remember that, since the advent of patriarchy about five thousand years ago, democracy has never been more than a very occasional, very brief, very faint spark in the timeline of our history. The norm has not just been tyranny – it is tyranny infinitely worsened by every technological advance. Thus the past shows us our real future – if indeed our species survives at all.

And in response to a skeptic I wrote:

Three points in rebuttal:

(1)-The malice you deny is overwhelmingly evident in the works of Ayn Rand, which show us the core doctrine of capitalism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue – and are in fact a fictionalization of the principles set out in Hitler's Mein Kampf. These principles include the glorification of the übermenschen (the One Percent), the condemnation of the üntermenschen (the 99 Percent), and the implicit demand we 99 Percenters be exterminated for our own good. The train wreck scene in Atlas Shrugged is in fact an endorsement of genocide.

(2)-Rand's murderous (and consciously, deliberately immoral) ideology is now openly declared the ideology both of capitalism and of the Republican Party. Though closeted, it is also the ideology of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by their collaboration with the Republicans in attacking the social safety net.

(3)-To label the One Percent “stupid” and to otherwise dismiss their conscious, deliberate, Ayn Randian espousal of moral imbecility is to make the strategically and tactically suicidal mistake of under-estimating the enemy. It also provides the official propagandists with a convenient “they didn't know any better” defense for the capitalists' deliberate embrace of policies and practices our species defines as evil. Were the capitalists motivated by “stupidity,” they would not own half the planet's wealth and possess the capability of tyrannizing all of us. Nor would the capitalists have developed the technologies of death and oppression that give them powers earlier generations deemed divine – powers that in the real world of today give our overlords true (and probably eternal) omnipotence.

Another skeptic cited past decades of humanitarian aid to Africa as an argument against neoliberal genocidal intent. I responded with a brief history lesson:

Government programs often have inertial momentum. Note for example how Great Society programs continued almost into the Reagan era despite the staunch anti-social-services positions of the Nixon, Ford and Carter regimes.

 

I do not know how to assign a date for the total conquest of the planet by Ayn Rand economists. But I do know that in 1955 (and well into the 1980s at least), the occidental governmental consensus toward Africa, though capitalist/imperialist, included a facade of humanitarian concessions to obstruct the professional revolutionaries of the Soviet Union and (then-genuinely-Communist) China.

Now, with the Soviet Union gone and China totally co-opted by Wall Street, there is no need for any such deception, which is why capitalism now openly displays its true savagery without fear of any consequences.

Further researching the Ebola crisis, I found several informative links on Global Research, the website of the Center for Research on Globalization, a Left-leaning international think tank headquartered in Montreal. These include:

“World Health Organization Says Ebola Cases Could Reach 10,000 Per Week,” here. 

 “U.S. is Responsible for the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Liberian Scientist,” here. 

“Instead of Appointing a Medical Expert, Obama Appoints a Lobbyist as Ebola Czar,” here. 

And a general primer on the Josef Goebbels/Big Lie factor, “US Propaganda: How Corporate America Manipulates the American Public Into Unwitting Support for Corporate Fascism,” here.

***

Meanwhile on an Ebola-related Reader Supported News thread, my denunciation of the pathetically unfunny “comedian” Andy Borowitz   garnered not just a record-number of 59 thumbs-down but a couple of nasty accusations of cowardice as well. This and the general tone of the thread suggests RSN's present-day readership is notably more Democratic Party-orthodox than it was even a few months ago – which perhaps explains why RSN in these pre-election weeks seems ever more desperate for sustaining donations. By contrast, my remarks on Common Dreams, where in the past I was often jeered by doctrinaire Democrats and obvious agent-provocateurs, brought me a record 67 clicks of approval and no disapproving clicks at all. (Could it be the Democrats are running a clandestine site-destroying operation, trying to oust genuine Leftists by deluging us with disheartening Democratic disdain, thereby discouraging the donors who would otherwise keep the site alive? Hmm...wonder if the same tactic was being employed, obviously unsuccessfully, against Common Dreams? Obviously too, the Lev Bronstein rule applies: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”) In any case, here is what I wrote on RSN that provoked so much ire:

I find Mr. Borowitz's “humor” sophomoric at best, buffoonish at worst, grotesquely “American” at all times. But to belittle our fears of this looming Ebola epidemic – which government has been deliberately rendered powerless to combat – is like jeering at our legitimate terror of ending up crippled (as one of my sisters did), or dying in an iron lung (as a neighbor child did) during the Polio epidemics of my boyhood years. 

Then I took on a poster who implied the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital nurses had infected themselves:

The two nurses who are now facing death in Dallas did not “slime (themselves) in an infected person's body fluids.” This fact tells us two things:

Either (A), the supposedly 100-percent-safe protective apparatus touted by for-profit medicine is as defective as most other capitalist products; or (B), the government is lying to us (what else is new?) about the communicability of the virus.

Then there's possibility (C): that both (A) and (B) are true.

The one absolute truth – given we know with 100 percent certainty the government routinely lies to us – is that we don't know what the truth is.

Worse, given that our major media is no more than a privatized government propaganda apparatus, its mode of operations guarantees we will never find out...until it's too late.

(Exactly, by the way, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and “change we can believe in.”)

Disclosure: At age 74, I am hardly subject to panic at the prospect of yet another mode of death, though I will admit I am not enchanted by the possibility of drowning in my own blood, which is how Ebola kills most of its victims.

But I do fear for all those who have not yet lived their lives – especially since I do not believe the U.S. government (run as it is by, for and of the One Percent) – has the capability of containing the epidemic. 

In which context note Obama's “czar”: a Josef Goebbels-type propagandist – which tells us all we need to know about government intent. 

Finally I realized the entire dialogue was not so much a defense of Borowitz as of the underlying capitalist ideology that defines USian health care:

What astounds me about this thread is the majority of posters who are implicitly defending for-profit doctors, for-profit health care and access to care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. 

As I have observed throughout my adult life, scratch a U.S. citizen – even a self-proclaimed "progressive" – and you'll most often find a fascist. 

No wonder real health-care reform – that is, single-payer public-option health care – was dead on arrival, never really part of the Big Lie of “change we can believe in.”

And that – another example of how capitalism kills – is the point of the entire Ebola story.

But, precisely as this thread demonstrates, any sort of genuinely humanitarian socialist consciousness is forever beyond the (sorely limited) capabilities of the (infinitely selfish) USian mind. 

And when one of the very few supportive posters gently chided me for not mentioning Cuban socialism and how its doctors and nurses are the primary effort against Ebola in Africa, I responded accordingly:

Consider those Cuban doctors now praised.

Cuban socialism has in fact done more for health care in Latin America and the Third World than all the capitalist intrusions combined. A good source on this subject is here.

Meanwhile the best the USian Empire can do is send troops (Why? To euthanize the victims?) and appoint a Josef Goebbels-type propagandist (instead of an MD) as its Ebola "czar."

With a propagandist as “czar,” it's obvious the USian anti-Ebola campaign will be a microcosm of capitalism itself – that is, a Big Lie to cover a miasma of deception, exploitation, (unnecessary) death and (obscene) profiteering.

******

What is carefully avoided by the Southern Poverty Law Center report entitled “How Cliven Bundy Defeated the US Government” is there is only one logical conclusion to be drawn from the government's apparent "inability" to prosecute the armed Right.  It is that our political overlords are so terrified of the revolutionary fervor now building on the Left – particularly the advent of various forms of eco-Marxism – they are making secret alliance with the armed Right to bolster the defenses of capitalism. Relentlessly logical though it is, it is also clearly too disturbing for the forcibly optimistic, perpetually happy-faced, “have a nice day” USian mentality.

Meanwhile, as I noted on the associated RSN comment thread, capitalism is in fact fulfilling all the predictions of Marxian analysis by (inevitably) maturing into fascism. That the USian Empire is thus becoming the de facto Fourth Reich is further indicated by the refusal of the so-called "Justice" Department to intervene in the burgeoning atrocities  committed by federally militarized police at Ferguson and elsewhere.

The national direction is obvious. As we the people awaken to the Big Lie of USian "democracy," the Ruling Class moves ever closer to unabashed fascism, perhaps even – in the escalating murder and imprisonment of minorities – to an USian variant of Nazism. Likely in anticipation of the eventual, no doubt inevitable USian de jure criminalization of already de facto criminalized minority status and/or lower income status, the Ukrainian Nazis are already rioting for official public recognition.  And how bitterly ironic the key Judas-goat in this entire process of subjugation and enslavement is himself an African-American.

LB/13-19 October 2014

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Did Obama Throw Women under the Hobby Lobby Bus?

WAS OBAMACARE SECRETLY INTENDED to betray women? When you consider the utterly predictable outcome of the United States Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision and its de facto endorsement by President Barack Obama's refusal to employ his executive powers against its sweeping ban on birth control, the possibility becomes too evident to ignore. Indeed it clamors for investigation. Moreover, Obama's long and embittering record of making campaign promises he had no intention of keeping suggests the betrayal may have been part of the Affordable Care Act's hidden agenda from the moment the newly elected president began his closed-door scheming  with the health-insurance-industry executives who actually authored the legislation.

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

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(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)