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

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Reflections on Despair and Hope; Ukraine Crisis Anthology; Hitler Lives: How U.S. Funds and Facilitates Re-Nazifaction; Obama's Choice of Bigot for Federal Judgeship Is Another of His Ever-More-Defiant Betrayals

DANCING IN THE RAIN – A child whose parents were attending the $15 Now rally on 3 May at People's Park in Tacoma celebrates her own private May Day festivities. She was joined immediately afterwards by two other kids who also danced in the rain, but by then I was out of film. The rally was part of an ongoing national campaign to raise the local, state and federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014.)

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TO ACKNOWLEDGE DESPAIR is not the same as surrendering to it. The above photograph is implicitly and explicitly hopeful. It refutes those obnoxious disciples of compulsory positive thinking who self-righteously nag me with their dogmatic diatribes – who falsely denounce acknowledgment of despair as aid and comfort to the subjugators of our nation and the rapists of our land. The mere fact I can make such a photograph proves the PollyAnnas of both genders are idiots or hypocrites or pathological deniers and are in every instance beneath contempt because they, like the propagandists of the One Percent, would blind us to our true circumstances. Yet until we understand just how hopeless those circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to transcend our hopelessness.

Despite how children such as the rain dancer bear witness to the necessity of hope, in this time and place I have every right and reason to despair. I watch the relentless imposition of fascism and fascist governance that characterizes modern U.S. history, definitively since 22 November 1963  and arguably since 12 April 1945.  I threw away the New York Times potential of my journalism career when I went to jail for the Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Yet now 51 years later I witness the widespread re-emergence of the same racial bigotry I had foolishly believed might be permanently exorcised from U.S. society. My willing sacrifice – which later denied me my life's most promising job with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and therefore an opportunity for Canadian citizenship as well – was utterly pointless. Bigots, I know now, are truly ineducable; they cannot be reformed; yet their bigotry must somehow be culled from our species' mentality lest it embroil us in ever-more-suicidal extremes.  

But the deepest most wrenching source of my despair is the U.S. emergence of a new, carefully manufactured, neo-Nazi-intense hatred of lower income people. It is literally as if we the elderly and disabled and chronically unemployed and yes too all our children and grandchildren are being pre-positioned to be, in this beastly Fourth Reich that now slouches toward its official birth, the methodically scapegoated victims the Jews were in the Third Reich. Ayn Rand, who gave capitalism its modern equivalent of Mein Kampf, called openly for our extermination, and because death camps are not yet again fashionable, her genocidal policies are everywhere imposed as “austerity” and already whole families go hungry as a result.

So of course I despair. No knowledgeable person, no sane person, could possibly do otherwise.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it is despair that denies me the ability to surrender. 

And it is my inability to surrender that prompts me to make photographs like the one above.

I have reached a point wherein I would rather write of almost anything but politics. Sometimes I think I would even go back to the stultifying boredom of covering sporting events as I did in my youth to earn my passage into real journalism. I would especially prefer to write of the startling and sometimes poignant humanity I so often witness while riding mass transit, or to share the many inspiring dog stories I learned in my years as a reporter and collect even now in the company of other dog lovers.

Most of all I would rather say fuck it and go fishing, spend the best hours of my final years losing my self in the back-country satori of clear and troutly water and the Zen of working the slow green depths of some wild river with a seven-foot ultra-light-action rod and a Number 1 Mepps spinner and that uniquely wordless anticipation that wells up like invisible mist from the recognizable habitats of big cutthroats and lunker-size native rainbows.

But even in the wilderness, despair invariably intervenes like a sudden invasion of a dozen cast-off beer cans borne into a supposedly pristine canyon by a swift and allegedly unspoiled current. Damnit, I love this nation for its former potential and I love this land for the exquisiteness that is being ripped and gouged away in the name of profit and – fool that I am – some small part of me believes both the nation and the land can yet be restored. My despair is therefore the despair of an exile or a refugee, and it compels me to fight on in the only ways I can: by writing about the very politics I have come to deplore; by occasionally making icons of hope such as the photograph above, by serving such causes – for example the quest for a $15 minimum wage – as my geriatric disabilities yet allow, and most of all by acknowledging that in such times as these, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.

And if neither nation nor land can be restored, at least the future – if indeed our species has any future at all – may know a few of us in this o-so-stealthily inflicted miasma of Moron Nation remained conscious of what was being done and how we were being methodically disempowered and enslaved.

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In Case You Missed It, the fact there is no breaking news this week from Ukraine is good news, perhaps the best news of all. Recommended (the first report is from Reader Supported News, the others from Consortium News), are the following: “Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country,” here; “How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” here;  “Cold Water on the Neo-Cold War Hysteria,” here; “Ethnic Russians Are People Too,” here. and “Ukraine's Dueling Elections,” here.

Vital backgrounders on how the U.S. finances global re-Nazification – as relevant to the Ukraine Crisis as it is to present-day Latin American politics – are “How Wall Street Bailed Out the Nazis,” here; “Hitler's Shadow Reaches toward Today,” here; and a der Spiegel exclusive, “Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army,” here. 

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Again this month President Obama has shown his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) colors, this time by nominating Michael Boggs, a self-described “conservative Christian” who is notably anti-woman and anti-gay, for a lifetime federal judgeship.

The White House announcement immediately generated on-line opposition including a petition  by the usually staunchly pro-Obama People for the American Way. Then Ian Millhiser's ThinkProgress exposé, “Obama Judicial Nominee Ran Anti-Gay Political Campaign Touting His 'Conservative Christian Values,'” revealed additional details of Boggs' politics, provoking no reaction at all from the ever-more-defiantly Republican Obama but doubtlessly evoking cheers and klapping maybe even a celebratory kross-burning or two from Ku Kluxers throughout Georgia and elsewhere in the former Klanfederacy.

An outraged poster on the Millhiser comment-thread bitterly noted Senate Democrats now must either vote against a Democratic president's judicial choice  or approve a nominee “who might as well have been chosen by the Tea Party.”

“How,” the poster asked, “did we get to this pathetic point?”

I answered with a burst of Outside Agitation:

(1)-The U.S. experiment in representative democracy ended 22 November 1963. Ever afterward, the nation is increasingly ruled by One Party of Two Names.

(2)-The collapse of the Soviet Union and the permanent co-optation of China remove all global restraints to capitalist savagery. Capitalism accelerates its inevitable transformation to fascism and thence to economic neo-Nazism (genocide against all “non-profitable” elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished people in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf).

(3)-The two pseudo-parties within the One (Ruling Class) Party of Two Names become distinguishable only by rhetoric. The Republicans are overtly fascist; the Democrats are equally fascist but hide their fascism behind Big Lies, e.g. “change we can believe in.”

(4)-Now, with the 99 percent ever more afflicted by capitalist predation and therefore ever more rebellious, the Ruling Class abandons bipartisanship and the slow-boiled-frog imposition of fascism and adopts ever-harsher measures, e.g., total surveillance, the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 and its nullification of the Bill of Rights.

(5)-Obama reveals his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) political identity: first the Rick Warren appointment, now Boggs, also killing net neutrality, single-payer/public option, Employee Free Choice, etc. ad nauseam.

In the context of all Barack the Betrayer's other about-faces and back-stabbings, the Boggs nomination should eliminate any lingering doubts the president was in fact a Manchurian candidate – the ultimate false-flag operative thoroughly trained in the arts of deception by his One Percent masters, then imposed on us via those Manchurias known as Wall Street and mainstream media.

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Photo data: The film is Kodak Professional BW400CN (black-and-white for development by C41 color processing machinery), its kill date 12/2010. This was the remnant of a much larger lot of film I used on a commissioned job c. 2006-2008, and I had kept the last two rolls in my refrigerator ever since. Kodak rated the film's SAE (ISO) at 400, which I found to be correct for indoor work, though its daylight speed is closer to 600. The camera was one of my ancient Pentax MXs, the lens an equally geriatric 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom at maximum (210mm) extension. Exposure was 1/250th of a second at f/5.6.

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Back to the beginning: do I really believe there is still any hope? Not so much. In fact what I believe is “the imbecility of hope,” which parodies the phrase coined by our false-flag president, who has intensified our hopelessness to infinity by proving himself to be the most brazen liar in U.S. political history. Hope seems imbecilic because I know the four historical prerequisites of change – none of which appear to be achievable in today's United States. Hope seems especially imbecilic when I think of someone like Cecily McMillan spending seven years in prison and know – because it is the dirty business of a journalist to know such things – it will destroy her no matter how strong and brave her resistance. But occasionally – as when I photographed that child dancing so joyfully in the rain – it seems to me we have no choice but to be hopeful...even if it's only the hope of learning to live well despite chronic hopelessness.

LB/18 May 2014

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