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.)

Only the Sisterhood of Motherhood Can Save Us Now

Long ago I tried to make a poem about what fall feels like deep in the back country of the northernmost county in western Washington state. But I soon doubted any words of mine could ever convey the quietly poignant resonance of a land where the Goddess remains so untrammeled and powerful even skeptics find it difficult to deny her presence. For despite the encroachments of patriarchy, here she yet reigns supreme, and whatever you might call her – Gaea, Mother Nature, Rhiannon, the Morrigan, Lada or any of the countless other names by which she has been invoked since the advent of our species (or whether you dismiss her as nothing more than delusion) – she is what she has always been, the cosmos and all its Yin and Yang potential, which in the Pacific Northwest is most often taken as synonymous with the natural environment: the densely forested mountains that run down to the emerald ocean; the ocean itself and the inland waters whether vast or small; the stately evergreens that sometimes, as if to challenge our notions of reality, inexplicably shimmer into ultraviolet; the long slow blue midsummer dusk that is the color of sensuality and revelation; the yellow moon of late spring and early autumn, pumpkin round and indescribably pregnant, humming softly as she rises above the jagged horizon; the northern lights that crackle and hiss like radio static, writhing like ghostly serpents or flaring across the heavens, ephemeral tapestries unfurled as if by some phantom weaver; the lethal magnificence of storms; the deadly energies of earthquake and volcano; that which we most love and that which we most fear. She is all this and more, every creature living or dead; all things inanimate; macrocosm and microcosm; matter and nothingness. To me the writer, she is the Pale Dancer whose flesh is lunar mist and whose anthems are the sound of wind on harp strings or of wind chimes when the air is without motion. To me the photographer, she is the ever-changing light and all its choreographies of shadow. But most of all and even in the spiritual dead-zones of the cities, she is the season of the turning leaves, vine-maple red and big-leaf-maple yellow and cottonwood orange ironically bright against the midnight-graveyard green of the conifers, and each year I cannot but wonder if sometime in the future she will kill me with her dark and dreadful loveliness. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Sigma 35-70mm f/4 at 70mm, exposure f/5.6 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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MOTHERHOOD IS THE one human quality that knows no borders. It has neither racial nor political identity. Its language is so wordlessly transcendent it is truly universal – which gives a new and profoundly deeper meaning to the notion of an original human Mother Tongue. Indeed, if matriarchy was the first and most enduring social construct of our species – and I can no longer doubt it – surely in the common exaltation of motherhood (and ultimately therefore the honoring of femaleness whether fecund or not), was the original solidarity that enabled our species' survival.

I write these words astounded it has taken me nearly 74 years of life to learn this lesson that is daily taught us by women everywhere. It is a lesson that now, after I have finally learned it, seems so utterly obvious I can only rail at my apparent stupidity. Observe any gathering of women with children – especially one in which the women are of diverse nationalities or castes or races – and almost invariably you will witness how the common processes of motherhood quickly, often literally within minutes, overcome all those barriers the males of our species find insurmountable. It is as obvious as sunrise: for women with children – and I have seen it more times than I can count – there is almost invariably an organic unity of purpose so powerful its participants need not consciously acknowledge it, a momentary state of harmony and peace so deeply instinctive it seemingly has no peer in human experience.

Oddly enough, I am not sure when I first began observing this phenomenon. Probably it was during my childhood, no doubt after the savage dysfunction that shattered my family during my fifth year prompted me to begin watchfully comparing my own notably abnormal circumstances as an unwanted child to the seemingly normal circumstances of other obviously beloved children. But that seems almost too glib, for on a deeper level it often feels as if I have always recognized the solidarity of motherhood as the sole human constant, the very quality of soul my own birthmother so violently rejected, never mind that for nearly all other women it is everywhere and every-when an ultimate form of immediate sisterhood. 

Even so, for most of my life what I now think of as the Motherhood International was scarcely more than part of the background, something I noticed in the same way I might notice the advent of autumnal color or the sudden presence of a neighbor's handsome new dog, significant enough to prompt a momentary sharpening of focus but without any associated analysis. But then a couple of years ago, as part of my ongoing effort to find logical support for my growing conviction that patriarchy is a fatal mistake and confirmation for my near-lifetime suspicion that females are generally better people than males, I began closely observing women and how they interact with one another. Of course I have always observed women, but because I am a heterosexual male, most of my years of observation were beclouded by lust and lustful purpose, so it was not until I achieved the sexual neutrality of old age I was able to see beyond the (exquisitely beautiful) intellectual and physical sensualities of even the most allegedly “plain” women to the deeper implications of femaleness itself.

Here of course is one great advantage of the observational skills I acquired as a journalist and photographer. But the irony of those talents is the extent to which their application – mostly in official functions such as the enactment of legislation or the formal interviews essential to biographical reportage or investigative work – radically limited what I could watch and therefore might see. A woman in a forcefully patriarchal society – which the United States most assuredly is – must necessarily adopt the defining male qualities of aggression and ruthlessness if she is to achieve and maintain any sort of power or influence. Hence I spent most of my professional life observing women trying to function within the confines of a nation that is reduced to moral imbecility (if not manifest evil) by its commitment to capitalism – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – and to capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else. What I typically saw was therefore scarcely representative of womanhood per se.

My first clear look at what might obtain beyond the confines of patriarchy was in the context of the old Counterculture. Though mainstream-media employment severely limited my ability to give myself wholly over to la vie boheme, I nevertheless managed several sanity-preserving interludes away from the world of deadlines and tweed-sportcoat conformity. Typically but not always these de facto vacations were in association with the alternative press. Hence I was able to observe a goodly number of womens collectives, which were an organic and influential faction within the Countercultural rebellion, particularly in the rural Pacific Northwest. Those with which I came in more than merely superficial contact all seemed possessed of a unity far more resilient than anything men alone or even men and women together were able to achieve.

But the real eye-opener came after my downfall, when the 1983 housefire destroyed all my life's work and the definitively USian, no-jobs-for-crazies odium of the subsequent clinical depression banished me forever from any sort of journalism save part-time or freelance work. Thus reduced to inescapable poverty, I spent (and spend) a disproportionate amount of time in welfare offices and other such realms of ruined lives, impossibly straited circumstances and irremediable dispossession. And there for the first time I witnessed how the very realities that had us men sitting as far apart from one another as possible and invariably in sullenly silent, utterly alienated mortification seemed to somehow free the women from the societal restraints that might otherwise have kept them divided. I saw it repeatedly: how women of diverse races and nationalities and even castes (many of them by their clothing obviously the newly impoverished victims of capitalism's most recent savageries), somehow as if by magic set aside their differences enough to freely converse, often with obvious empathy for one another, as each woman awaited the elaboration of whatever bad news had summoned her to Misery Central, the harshly lit, heartlessly managed offices of the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. And whenever these women were accompanied by their children, the sisterhood of motherhood – race and caste and nationality be damned – became overwhelmingly apparent in mere minutes.

But that beautiful and compelling solidarity of mothers was not just a phenomenon of the welfare office. I witness it time and again on public transport. First and long ago and before I realized what I was watching, I had seen it on the Knoxville Transit Lines and Grand Rapids Coach Company buses of my 1950s youth, women helping other women with children regardless of race or apparent social status. I had seen it on the subways of Manhattan and Brooklyn and on the Hudson Tubes and other rail transport in New Jersey during the 1960s and again during the 1980s, and in all probability had seen it as a child on the trains and trolleys I rode with my parents in New York and lesser cities during the first years of this lifetime. Now I see it regularly on crowded Tacoma buses: women who are total strangers to one another, as in “here I can hold your baby while you fold up that stroller,” a well-dressed young black woman helping a shabbily dressed young white woman, the black woman cooing to the white child as the white woman fights the perambulator down and under the seat as required by transit regulations, then the black woman handing the white child back to the white mother and the two women now talking about babies and children as easily as if they were sisters. I have seen as many as four young women – all strangers to one another, two white, one Asian, one black, the Asian and one of the whites barely able to speak English – collaborate to hold a tiny baby and find a fallen-off perambulator part to solve a problem that became obvious when the big pram which was fully laden with groceries and baby gear collapsed just after the mother had lifted her baby out. The four women worked together as if they had been teammates all their lives and within minutes they had repaired the pram, and the Motherhood International had triumphed once again.

That I can tell this story is the beauty of regularly riding mass transit. It enables you to witness every extreme of human behavior, from criminal selfishness to selfless humanitarianism. In this sense it's the same in Manhattan, where public transport is a civil right, as it is in Tacoma, where the Ayn-Rand-minded electorate publicly denounces transit users as parasites, damns mass transit itself as welfare and is maliciously downsizing an already inadequate bus system in the hope of socioeconomically cleansing the area of all the lower-income peoples who make up more than half of its population but vote in disproportionately small numbers because they believe, mostly correctly, that USian elections will make no meaningful differences in their lives. Local politics aside, there is probably no better or more thought-provoking sociological vantage point than a city bus, trolley or subway car, especially for a journalist whose inclinations run toward social commentary. And it was on a Tacoma bus just yesterday again watching with awe the international sisterhood of motherhood it came to me: first that motherhood has no borders, next that only the solidarity of motherhood is powerful enough to save our species from self-extermination. 

LB/17 November 2013

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