(Note: My primary blog-server's system for posting links as highlighted text
has inexplicably
failed,
a vexing
malfunction
that necessitated two hours of retyping and reformatting but will no doubt soon be corrected.
Meanwhile, because I do not want to retype everything once more, this time for Blogger, I'm retaining the old, awkward
method
of including
actual URLs in the text, the solution mandated by the techno-failure. My apology for the inconvenience.)
*
DESPITE
MY NEW recognition that writing political commentary is a waste of time
and energy, I can't promise to stop doing it. Old habits die hard –
never mind I now sadly acknowledge H.
sapiens sapiens
is so determined to fulfill the biblical prophecies of human
extinction, we are like some jumper who has leapt from a bridge,
ourselves on an irreversible plunge toward the bottomlessly toxic
waters of environmental suicide.
Nevertheless
the fact our species festers with such self-hatred it has destroyed
its own future does not seem to relieve me from the obligation to
produce new work. It is a paradox I cannot explain, a powerful
certainty that writing and photography remain rites of redemption
even amidst the ultimate holocaust inflicted by a failed species
intent on murdering its entire planet. Perhaps such certitude is only
stubborn egotism, a last spasm of (imbecilic) hope. But I believe it
is something more, the final riddle of the Muse, an ultimate mystery
into which death is the only initiation. Hence I'll soon be
publishing the long-promised photo essay on Occupy Tacoma plus new
and/or revised chapters of my memoir, all here in Outside
Agitator's Notebook.
Given
my age and uncertain health, I think it better to get those texts and
pictures into print as quickly as possible. After 2014, Obamacare
regulations force all lower-income Medicare recipients onto Medicaid,
which in turn mandates the post-mortem confiscation of one's entire
estate, for the details of which see the text and links in the
concluding section below. As a result, all my manuscripts and
photographs, which I long ago willed to a beneficiary able to archive
them in a significant library, could instead be seized by the state
and suppressed accordingly.
Immediate
publication
of the work in question will also ensure certain kinfolk
cannot squelch the darker details of why I regard “family” as a
synonym for pain, terror and betrayal. These include the circumstances
of my conception (not an expression of love but instead a
malicious act by my mother-to-be to ensnare a mate whose gender she
despised); her
attempts to murder my father and me five years later; my father's
immediate response (a judicially terminated effort to abandon me in an
orphanage); and of course the denouement, my
subsequent rejection by most relatives as an unwanted reminder of the
stigma that accompanies psychopathic violence and scandalous divorce.
Such were among the formative events of my childhood, a succession of
wounds from which the only possible recovery is
acceptance and accommodation.
No
doubt
there are a few relatives who would like to delete the brighter,
more optimistic parts of this memoir too. Included are expressions of
gratitude for a seeming miraculous psychic rescue by a maternal
aunt (the most decisive event of my life); for a series of healing
relationships with remarkable females who befriended me in
childhood or shared themselves as lovers during my adult years; and
finally for the confirmation provided by occasional encounters with the
resurrected Goddess – gifts of clarity that, given the expanded
perspective of my closing years, enable me
to redeem with newly discovered elements of structure, meaning and
apparent purpose what I had long belittled as a personal odyssey of
naught but ruin and despair. (I leave it to readers to decide
whether the Goddess is objectively real or merely an imaginary
character my psyche fabricated in compensation for my hateful
mother.) In any case I think it is a story worth telling, potentially
healing not just on abstract or theoretical levels but in everyday
life as well.
Meanwhile
I'll begin shifting OAN's
focus more toward providing practical information that's useful to
impoverished, elderly and disabled people like myself. This sort of
material was formerly covered by most newspapers, certainly by all
the better ones. But the definition of news – previously the duty
of seasoned editors – is now dictated by the One Percent, the
political and economic interests that own the nation's major media.
And news that's important to lower-income people – for example,
death-dealing changes in welfare regulations or instructions on how
to build backyard gardens that will help us survive the coming
famines – is now rejected either as dangerous or editorially
insignificant. It is also snootily shunned lest it detract from the
ever-more-deliberately elitist formats demanded by advertisers.
Breaking
the resultant embargo – applying my formerly award-winning
reportorial skills to light a few informational candles that might
momentarily ease the darkness beneath the Obama Bush – is the one
activity in which I may yet be of service. It is, admittedly,
resistance for its own sake – small acts of defiance – assertions
of existential freedom – that change nothing. But it's all I have
left to give.
***
One
of the most compelling reasons I am convinced we are a doomed species
is how we react to the approaching apocalypse in exactly the same way
an individual reacts to a diagnosis of terminal illness.
As
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
famously documented in her 1969 book On
Death and Dying,
such reactions have five stages. These are (with their
pre-apocalyptic equivalents in parentheses): denial (the response of
the vast majority, whether in the United States or elsewhere); anger
(the chaotic, avowedly disorganized and therefore ultimately
unsuccessful responses of political, socioeconomic and environmental
activists); bargaining (the openly conspiratorial response of the
Ruling Class, as in “if I steal all the wealth, maybe that will
ensure my survival”); depression (the soaring rates of mental
illness); acceptance (the point at which I seem to have arrived –
and where, much to my astonishment, I'm finding an entirely new kind
of empowerment).
That
said, what I'm offering here today is already more than the usual
recitation of atrocities and outrages. It is rather a carefully
selected octet of linked reports that define the breathtaking Big
Lies fostered by both the (genuine) Right and the (alleged) Left
wings of The One Party of Two Names – the vast political machine
that rules the United States, increasingly with zero-tolerance
tyranny, always and exclusively on behalf the capitalist aristocracy
aka the One Percent aka the Ruling Class – the robber barons who,
especially now in this time of increasing scarcity and ecological
desperation, are savaging the rest of us, the 99 Percent, at every
possible opportunity.
In
keeping with OAN's
new direction, today's essay is particularly relevant to Medicare
recipients and anyone (foolishly) hoping Obamacare will provide
financial relief from the omnipresent threat of bankruptcy and death
inflicted by capitalism and its Ayn Rand medicine – the system of
genocide-for-profit unique to the United States.
***
Though
it is something of an aside, I believe we should focus for a moment
on the fact the deception and brutality that perpetuates the USian
charade of freedom and democratic process has no precedent in
history. Certainly there have been other regimes that combined Big
Lies with police-state terror: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Pol
Pot's Cambodia, Pinochet's Chile all come quickly to mind. Moreover
there have been so many more such despotisms during the 40 or 50
centuries since the emergence of patriarchy, it is now taken as
axiomatic that liberty has never been more than an occasional spark
of hopefulness in a near-infinity of dungeon-dark despair. But never
before in our species' experience has a Ruling Class possessed such
malicious cunning – its falsehoods engineered by entire institutes
of scholars and psychologists – nor has such official deceitfulness
ever before been defended by such irresistible technologies of
surveillance and suppression of dissent.
Successful
rebellion or even reform is thus rendered impossible. The nihilism of
today's rebels – their rejection of ideology, their inability to
agree even on short-term goals, their penchant for self-destructive
acts – all these behaviors contradict any optimistic claims of
revolutionary or reformist expectations. Indeed they confirm the real
attitude of the USian 99 Percent is irremediable pessimism –
heartfelt recognition, whether articulated or not, that hope is no
more than imbecility.
Because
capitalist dogma forbids consideration of the obvious connection
between our collective hopelessness and the hitherto-unthinkable
crimes of school shootings and similar sorts of massacres, we are
denied the ability to understand these atrocities in their
socioeconomic contexts. Thus the ultimate nihilism of a
nothing-left-to-lose frenzy of murder and suicide is deceptively
portrayed as an isolated, lone-gunman event. Its cause is reduced to
an interaction of Second Amendment rights and the availability of
firearms with the biblical prejudice and Ayn Rand policies that have
eliminated mental health care or made it prohibitively expensive. But
Truthout
and
Harriet Fraad courageously break this taboo by publication of “Mass
Killings: Why American Men Are 'Going Postal'”:
“American
white men and Asian men have lost the family wage and with it their
hegemonic positions in what was once secure employment. The have
simultaneously lost their dominant positions in intimate and family
life...Mass killings became a new
phenomenon in the 1980s when Reagan's platform of disempowerment of
white, male workers, began.”
The implication – which even Fraad
dare not express – is the common denominator of hopelessness makes
the USian school-shooter and the Islamic suicide-bomber much closer
psychological kin than we are willing to admit.
Meanwhile
in “Lifting the Veil of Mirage Democracy in the United States,”
Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers MD trace
how
these circumstances were imposed, describe how they are maintained
and label them – correctly I believe – as “mirage democracy”:
“Elections
are tightly controlled, rigged for the two parties by restrictive
ballot access laws, a corporate-run debate commission that blocks
third parties, gerrymandered voting districts, unverifiable computer
vote counts and a mass media that does not cover alternatives to the
corporate duopoly. US voting systems are among the least democratic
in the world. They lack modern, more democratic approaches like
universal voter registration, proportional representation and ranked
choice or instant run-off voting. Only half the US public is
registered, and only half of registered voters vote, so these mirage
elections provide a less than legitimate government.”
While
“Mirage Democracy” is framed in the obligatory Polly Anna
optimism of USian activists, its stark conclusions actually confirm
the depth of our powerlessness:
“Following
a blueprint developed by Lewis Powell in his infamous memo to the US
Chamber of Commerce,
they
built institutions over the next 40 years, including think tanks,
lobbying firms and courts, to promote the market agenda and control
the media and universities to prevent another outbreak of
democracy...Those groups that directly challenge the system and
cannot be co-opted by money or access are
routinely
infiltrated
for the purpose of spying, dividing and destroying.”
In
this context, the Democrats' 2008 campaign slogan, “change we can
believe in,” may well be the most brazen example of Orwellian
doublespeak in U.S. electoral history. The post-electoral
transformation(s) of Obama the Orator into Barack the Betrayer not
only prove the slogan to have been the biggest of Big Lies; the
residual anger no doubt continues to fuel a lot of the non-racist
antagonism toward the president. Similar betrayals are
routinely inflicted on voters by the Republicans, for example Wisconsin Gov.
Scott Walker's carefully concealed plan to win election as a moderate
then – once in office – wage relentless war on unionized workers,
women, sexual minorities and the 99 Percent in general. Michigan's
Gov. Rick Snyder used the same maliciously dishonest strategy and
tactics of lies and ambushes. Such duplicity characterizes U.S.
governance at every level, especially during its last eight decades.
Hence
the bitter jest: “Question: how can you tell when a politician is
lying? Answer: his lips are moving.” The same is said of
bureaucrats and executives. But the reality is no joking matter. Our
national hopelessness is intensified by our reflexive fear and
loathing of government and our associated distrust of anyone so
employed – a mind set now shared by USian citizens whether their
politics are Left, Right or Centrist. As
I commented on a
Naomi Wolf report
entitled “Obama's Secret Assassins”:
Once
again – and more vividly than usual – we see the true function of
governance under capitalism is protection of the Ruling Class,
including serving as its death squad.
Indeed here is the one
place – totally rational absolute distrust of government – Left
and Right might unite...were it not for the insurmountable barriers
imposed by the self-destructive anti-intellectuality that now defines
Moron Nation.
Though
I intended it as nothing more than a snarky remark – I did not even
take the usual step of preserving it in my document file – it
nevertheless earned me 52 thumbs-up clicks from other readers.
But
it is not just our own USian local, state and federal governments we
distrust. It is all government everywhere that has betrayed us. In
every instance and in the name of every ideology, government
promises to help us do collectively that which we cannot do
individually. But then it invariably robs us, enslaves us and
all-too-often herds us to our graves via poverty and ghettos and
unjust imprisonment and unnecessary wars and genocide whether by
death camps or abandonment and neglect – or most likely some
carefully scripted combination of all these and every other
imaginable negation of human potential.
Note
in particular both the self-inflicted downfall of the historically
youthful American experiment in constitutional democracy and the
festering corruption within the Vatican, the oldest government on
earth.
Such
is the record, at least in the 3500 years since the fall of Knossos
and its global commonwealth, of government in action. Deny it
however vehemently you choose, the lesson is that not even the most
well-intentioned solidarity and collective determination can protect
us from the predatory greed of the individual.
Whether
this is the fault of patriarchy or symptomatic of some deeper
psychopathy, I know of no more damning evidence of our failure as a
species. With any notion of liberation via government so utterly and
permanently discredited, hope is not just imbecilic but insane. Add
to that our decisive loss of any prospects for a better future – an
irremediable loss we have inflicted on ourselves by our collective
failure to purge ourselves of serial predators or at least subdue
them with sustainable restraints – there cannot possibly have been
a psychologically worse epoch in our species' entire 200,000-year
history.
***
Beyond
the obvious ineffectiveness of efforts to topple or ameliorate the
oppressiveness of a state that has deteriorated to the point it
serves only the most predatory members of its Ruling Class – just
as history proves all states are destined to do – there are
certain episodes and events that define the new USian reality with
more clarity than usual.
One
such circumstance is the impenetrable smog of Big Lies that, from the
beginning, has obscured the truth about the (alleged) reform of the
murderous business of denying health care to those who cannot pay for
it and profiting obscenely from those who can. What facilitates these
lies is the unavailability of the Affordable Care Act, 383,086 words
of legalese and bureaucratic jargon in 1,990 pages – its form and
content a classic example of censorship by presentation and price: an
impossible $201.78, tax included, for the paper and ink (mostly the
latter) to print one copy from my desktop computer.
Democrats
and Republicans thus freed themselves to spew even the most brazen
deceptions with little concern they might be challenged. But
subsequent experience – including how my own health care costs
have soared since the advent of Obamacare (never mind my Medicare
provider is a non-profit cooperative) – has convinced me the
Democrats' lies are far more injurious.
From
the very beginning I understood “reform” as nothing more than an
unprecedented Democratic Party payoff to Big Business and Wall
Street, a bribery-rebate of inestimable profit for the
health-insurance barons and an absolute guarantee there will never be
an USian equivalent to the health-care-as-civil-right systems that
serve the people fortunate enough to live anywhere else in the
developed world. I saw too how its buy-it-or-be-punished mandate is
a new form of enslavement by the One Percent.
But
I did not anticipate how willingly the Democrats would participate in
the de
facto
genocide of “shared sacrifice,” the Reverse-Robin-Hood euphemism
by which we lower-income people are to be plunged deeper into poverty
as the Ruling Class reaps its inconceivably expanded profits. Such
is Obamacare: the means by which The One Party of Two Names ensures
we live the rest of our years in fear our life-sustaining stipends
can be slashed or eliminated at any moment.
Even
so – if only because of my predilection to lean Left – I remained
skeptical of most Republican anti-ACA claims until Truthout's
recent publication of a Workers Action analysis of the government's
own (mostly unpublicized) war against Medicare and those of us whose
lives depend on it. Entitled “Obama's Shakedown of Medicare,” it
confirms, with credible links as authoritative footnotes, the
long-standing Republican accusation the president and his henchmen
are robbing Medicare to finance ACA.
The
conservatives, of course, don't tell us where the money is actually
going – that the downsizing of Medicare is expanding the profits of
the health insurance cartels and of Wall Street in general. But apart
from that omission, the socialist and ultra-conservative indictments
of “health care reform” are virtually identical.
Here
is what the Workers Action report tells us:
“Obamacare’s
Medicare 'savings'... (singles) out the Medicare Advantage program
for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, while also reducing
payments to Medicare contractors by hundreds of millions of dollars
(hospitals, clinics, etc)...Of
course hospitals simply shift this cost burden onto the patients, who
receive less care, while giving doctors greater incentive not to
see Medicare patients. As Medicare is steadily defunded, a
two-tier healthcare system is created, where wealthier seniors will
opt for private insurance while the rest will get second rate
treatment, undermining the popularity and universality of
Medicare, and thus making it more vulnerable to further cuts.”
And here is what
The Weekly Standard
said last May in the report entitled “Obama's Senior Swindle”:
“The
most politically brazen feature of Obamacare has always been its
looting of Medicare. About half of Obamacare’s costs are to be
covered with money taken from an already nearly bankrupt program for
seniors. And the most politically perilous aspect of this ploy is
Obamacare’s cuts in Medicare Advantage funding, which would cause
many seniors to lose their preferred health plans.”
For those
unfamiliar with Medicare, the Medicare Advantage program, originally
named Medicare Plus, was set up by the Clinton Administration in
recognition of the fact the dying American-Dream economy was shoving
Medicare's 20-to-50-percent copayments far beyond the reach of
lower-income elderly and disabled people. Intended to provide folks
like myself with adequate yet affordable health care, it was a
life-saving boon, especially when administered by non-profits like
Group Health Cooperative, of which – disclosure – I am a voting
member.
Then the Bush
Administration expanded Medicare Plus into a windfall for insurance
profiteers and renamed it Medicare Advantage – the advantage, of
course, mostly going to the insurance barons and Wall Street. Rates
soared accordingly, with non-profits like Group Health struggling to
remain cost-competitive in a market now rigged to favor the
profiteers. Predictably, the Democrats – ever obedient to the
same dishonest imperatives that prompt the Republicans to reject
their own proposals whenever they are embraced by the Democrats –
instantly began denouncing Medicare Advantage as pampering seniors
and disabled people by providing the alleged “luxury” of a few
extra benefits like dental care and eyeglasses – a ripoff, the
Democrats claimed, at taxpayer expense.
The Democrats
thus target Medicare Advantage with the same sort of deliberately
invoked envy and greed the Republicans routinely muster against
unionized workers – never mind the Democratic attack was another
characteristic betrayal of the poor, tantamount to the party's sudden
backstabbing of welfare recipients in 1995.
(By the end of
the Clinton years, half the Medicare Plus enrollees were definitively
in the lower-income category, with incomes no greater than 200
percent of poverty. Medicare Advantage's beneficiaries were, by 43
percent in 2010, people with annual incomes below $20,000. See the
pdf, Lower Income and Minority
Beneficiaries in Medicare Advantage Plans, 2010.
Available by Googling its title, it is a report by America's Health
Insurance Plans, an industry group that therefore is not to be
trusted. I cite its figures only because they approximate Kaiser
Family Foundation data I saw in 2011 but could not find online even with
a four-hour search.)
Again quoting
“Shakedown,” which I urge all of you to read in full:
“In
a political era of corporate dominance it was inevitable that
doublespeak would become the official language of Washington,
D.C. Now 'cuts' to social programs are referred to as 'savings,'
while the destruction of these programs is 'reform'...The Medicare
cuts are part of a larger 'reform' of health care in the United
States, which ultimately serves to shift the cost of health care off
the corporations, placing the burden firmly on the shoulders of
working people.”
Or as “Senior
Swindle” put it:
“Roughly 12 million seniors have
chosen to carry Medicare Advantage. Most like it and want to keep it.
They surely don’t want the funding for their plan cut by an average
of $17,000 per senior over the rest of this decade, as would happen
under Obamacare. They similarly don’t want to see the Medicare
chief actuary’s prediction come true: that by 2017, enrollment in
Medicare Advantage will decrease by half from what it would have been
without Obamacare...But it’s not just Medicare Advantage
beneficiaries who have cause for concern. Under Obamacare, other
Medicare enrollees would struggle to find doctors, as (according to
the Medicare chief actuary) Medicare reimbursement rates would drop
below even Medicaid reimbursement rates by the end of this decade.
Also by the end of the decade, the (Congressional Budget Office)
suggests, Obamacare will cause 5 million people to lose their
employer-sponsored insurance—almost certainly a lowball estimate.”
Then there's the
in-depth analysis entitled “Obamacare: a Deception,” the history
of which may be as revealing as its contents. The poet Franetta
McMillian, to whom many thanks for sending me the
text of the report, also described its
rocketing ascent and meteoric plunge into darkness:
“This was up on
Truthdig's website for a hot minute, because the anonymous author of
the article was nominated as 'Truthdigger of the Week.' I PDF'd it to
read later, and now can't find it anywhere on the site. I know that
things barely last for a blink on the interwebs...but the article's
quick burial is almost enough to make me believe in a conspiracy of
censorship. Anyway: it confirms my fear about the Affordable
Health Care act. Like desegregation, it was set up to fail.”
(Well done, Franetta; good catch!)
Here is the most telling paragraph of
“Obamacare”:
“The
ACA was not selflessly designed with the intent of providing
affordable and equitable medical services to those in need, but
rather to acquire taxpayer money for the private insurance companies
under the seemingly helpful guise of health care and the ideological
excuse of personal responsibility. It takes money from ordinary
people and gives it to a medical insurance industry that profits
handsomely from this legally-enforced corporate welfare – all while
keeping Americans locked in the same broken system that puts profit
before patients. The law was essentially written by business
executives from the industry so that special interests would not be
upset and profits assured.”
And here is what, for lower-income
elderly and disabled people, are undoubtedly its most wrenching
disclosures:
“Obamacare not only rations health
care by what a person or family can afford, but also has implications
for Medicare patients. Hundreds of billions of dollars are siphoned
from Medicare to help pay the cost of Obamacare. The health care
provided to Medicare patients will decline with the reduced payments
to care providers. Health care seems destined to be rationed
according to the age and illnesses of Medicare patients. Those judged
too old and too ill could be denied expensive treatments or
procedures that would prolong their lives.”
This is even worse:
“(T)he ACA stipulates that the system
will ensure that if any individual applying to an Exchange is found
to be eligible for Medicaid or a state children’s health insurance
program (CHIP), the individual will be enrolled in such a
plan...Furthermore...states are advised to automate enrollment
whenever possible by using existing databases for social services
programs such as SNAP (food stamps) to enroll people who appear
eligible for Medicaid but are not currently enrolled. Therefore, you
could find yourself auto-enrolled in Medicaid against your
will...(And) the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1993 (OBRA 1993)...
requires all states that receive Medicaid funding to seek recovery
from the estates of deceased individuals who used Medicaid benefits
at age 55 or older. It allows recovery for any items or services
under the state Medicaid plan going beyond nursing homes and
other long-term care institutions. In fact, The Centers for Medicare
& Medicaid Services (CMS) site says that states have the option
of recovering payments for all Medicaid services provided.”
Medicaid is welfare, with all its
associated indignities. In other words, once enshackled by Medicaid,
we are scarcely different from prisoners on parole. Our rights are
radically curtailed; in some states we no longer have any rights
at all. Even the most minute details of our lives are now governed by
the whim of merciless, often sadistic welfare bureaucrats –
all-seeing, zero-tolerance bullies whose administrative brutality
makes fear the defining constant of our consciousness.
And not only are we to be flung onto
welfare; if the “Obamacare” analysis is correct (and I believe it
is), when we die the government is now able to seize the entire
contents of our estates – house, land, personal property, insurance
policies – literally everything we own at the times of our deaths.
Indeed we are to be reduced to the property-less condition that
defined medieval serfdom. For writers and artists like myself, this
virtually guarantees the permanent suppression of our unpublished or
unexhibited work. For all of us so indentured, its seizure of funds
could mean there will not even be any insurance money for funerals.
Like antebellum slaves, we are stripped of any pretense of postmortem
dignity. Our bodies could be buried in unmarked graves, our ashes
flung into Dumpsters, our relatives and friends denied the scant
comfort of ritual farewells.
Thus – even unto desecrating our
corpses and reaching beyond the tomb to afflict our survivors –
does capitalism persecute its victims, punishing us for the poverty
we could neither avoid nor escape.
LB/19-25 February 2012
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