Think Tanks = the people paid to think by the makers of tanks
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Excellent "Lenin" post on the Iranian elections and the protests
It's even-handed and thoughtful, which is not something I can say about almost everything else I've read recently on the topic. The most helpful point that he makes is to emphatically say that the demands of the protesters are not identical to those of Mousavi, on the contrary, they are more ambitious and radically democratic. Of course, although the post doesn't explicitly say much about this, some Leftists have taken the barrage of hysterical press in the big Western consensus media and merely negated it (i.e. they defend Ahmedinejad as an anti-imperialist). The result is every bit as vulgar (and, dare I say, worse) as the histrionics and facile analysis one finds in corporate news outlets. "Lenin's" post is refreshing.
Read it here.
Also there is a Zizek piece circulating on Iran, which you can read here. Again, it also makes the (poignant, in my view) point that anyone who fails to grasp the emancipatory potential of the present Iranian protest movement, whatever its limitations, is politically bankrupt. (Also -Zizek calls Ahmedinejad the "Iranian Berlusconi" which strikes me as probably true).
Monday, June 22, 2009
Max Baucus recieved most $$ from health insurance lobby of any member of Congress
(Via Democracy Now):
"Montana Senator Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the Senate’s point man on healthcare reform. A new article in the Montana Standard finds that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress."
Watch more here.
Hmmmm. Whoever argued that public-financing of elections is a necessary precursor to having single-payer in this country was probably correct.
But seriously... why isn't this grounds for discrediting him and removing him from his post as chairman? If this isn't a conflict of interest, what is?
Friday, June 19, 2009
Some Marxist-Feminist Theorizing: Consumerism, Patriarchy, and The "Target Market"
In the Marxist-Feminist dialogue I've only been introduced to in the past year or so of my life, one of the chief questions to be answered is "What is the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy?"
Scholars have taken many approaches to this question, usually ending up talking about the division of labor. Sex difference and inequality had to be enforced so women would raise a work force for us and not ask for any pay. And her children would be good workers, because she did "woman" right and taught them right. In other words, so that they would provide the domestic labor necessary to continue the cycle of labor in the public sphere (see Angela Davis). The capitalist needed domestic servants so they created good man and good woman by promoting the bourgeois morality.
This is an answer which has always made sense to me, but I've never seen it as a complete explanation of patriarchy as we see it today, since it doesn't even begin to capture capitalism as we know it today. So many women work outside the home now, for instance, and capitalism relies on that public labor. And in my life, patriarchy has been less about telling me where to work (or not to work), than about telling me what to buy.
Anyone who has taken a marketing class, or worked in marketing, or watched Mad Men (I've done all three) has heard the phrase: Who is your target market? The identification of your market is more than just an identification of a demographic. It's what tells you how to sell your product. If your target market is boys between 12 and 18, you're going to make this edgy, you'll use black and green colors, and you'll play some rock music in the background, and you'll portray the use of your product as an act of rebellion. Yeah, those boys will eat that up. But where did all this knowledge about which group likes what comes from? I argue that advertising itself created it. Sure. certain demographics may have leaned certain ways to begin with, but adveritising made them lean harder in the old categories and made them start to lean in categories of difference that never existed before.
Advertisements are my daily lesson in how to be a woman. Most feminists have known that advertisements are a significant medium for gendering and outright sexism, and criticism of representation is incredibly easy to find on feminist blogs and in feminist books today (see Sarah Haskins' "Target Women," which is really the best of the best of this criticism).
The theory behind this type of criticism is that advertisements take lazy routes and rely on offensive stereotypes to sell their products and boycotts and letter writing can show the companies in question that is not a successful way to sell. What I haven't heard, however, is the argument that not only does consumer culture rely on sexist stereotypes to reproduce itself, but that in fact, it creates the illusions of gender and sex difference so that it can create its own target markets. If it weren't for collective identity, marketers wouldn't know what to do. Marketing isn't a reliance on old stereotypes, but the creation of target markets.
I also contend that this is probably a fairly new phenomenon. In the 1800s, people knew they needed textiles and knew they needed any number of other products that could be produced en masse because of the industrial revolution. Marketing was as simple as making the product known, having a good price, and making that product easily accessible. In fact, this held true for the most part up until the 20th century. Technology and competition within that beautiful "free market" made products that were less obviously necessary or not at all necessary. Marketing became an effort to convince someone that he/she, in particular, needed this product.
Think of how many types of woman were created in advertisements. Even if you look at the division of labor that Davis and other radical feminists point at as the link between capitalism and patriarchy, you see what advertising has done to that. Being a good mother and housewife is a hell of a lot more complicated than it was in the 1800s. It involves owning all the best housekeeping tools, all the Baby Einstein tapes, all the most nutritious food for your family, it involves object after object that is supposed to save you time so you can dedicate more time to being a perfect caregiver. But the real change is that it's not just domestic woman who has been developed by adveritising. This goes far beyond the division of labor. She's a sexual woman. She needs clothes. She needs to groom herself regularly. She needs makeup and razors and exfoliants.
I could make a similar argument for all the modern men that have been created by advertising (the guy who needs his man cave, the guy who just wants to drink beer and not listen, the guy who would rather eat a cheeseburger from Carl's Jr. than take his wife out somewhere nice). The collective identity formation through advertising occurs on both sides, but of course, the different collective identities being shaped by advertising leave men with more power than women.
Then it's that reliance on the shame on not doing woman right that originated in the division of labor that makes these proposed identities stick. Someone said that's what woman does. Everyone saw it. I must do it now. And I'll need money to do it. And I'll need to spend money to do it.
On the flip side, this consumer culture means gender guilt becomes class guilt. I'm not only poor but I can't do woman right. Or, because I'm poor, I can't do woman right.
The bottom line here is that the late capitalist system of consumerism has created the need for more complex and detailed gender differences than a simple division of labor requires. And marketing is the actual creation of those differences. It's not only promoting stereotypes, but creating new binaries that never existed before. Advertising, that need for one person to sell another person something so that person can survive, divides us not just into domestic servants and public-sphere workers, to men and women, but into so many other things we didn't even know we could be. We're fit women or we're unfit women. We're yogurt eating women or we're not yogurt eating women. We're coutour or we're not coutour. We're Jackies or we're Marilyns. These aren't naturally occuring categories and they aren't categories that were created by a mere division of labor. They're categories created by the needs of a modern capitalism, and our success in aspiring to the right category has a direct impact on our amount of power in the capitalist system.
I'll take this argument to its next step and talk about what this realization means for resistance in the next few days...
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
"Gummint-run health care is a disaster"
As if these sorts of folks needed any help looking ridiculous, try substituting "Fire Department" in for "Health Care" every time you see/hear some blathering screed against "universal health care". The result is that what they say should even make them look ridiculous by their own lights.
For instance: "If the government runs the [Fire Department], I hope you're prepared to see massive administrative bloat, huge bureaucracies, and ungodly amounts of paperwork. Moreover, all of the loafers and invalids will be capitalizing on the hard work of others. We can't just give away [Fire Protection Services] to everyone! Just ask yourself this, do you want BUREAUCRATS [putting out fires] or do you want a free-enterprise system?"
If this argument is correct, why not launch a huge campaign to privatize Fire Departments in order to have a free-market Fire Protection system? Why not introduce a system where individuals purchase their own fire-protection policy on a market where policies are sold by various for-profit companies? If your house catches on fire and you happen not to have the proper insurance policy against fires, well, too fucking bad. Burn baby burn. Sounds great, right?
(for even more absurd consequences of this argument, try and imagine a fully privatized police force, or better yet, a fully private market-based set of military institutions, who only protect those who have the money to purchase an 'anti-coercion insurance policy' on a market...)
These people's (those who huff and puff about 'socialized medicine') obsession with 'bureaucrats' is incredible. Don't they realize that (1) bureaucracies are an intractable feature of complex contemporary capitalists societies, which obviously includes institutions run by capitalists (tell me CIGNA isn't a huge bureaucracy!) and (2) there are already massive amounts of 'bureaucrats', or desk-top murderers if you like, who decide whether or not you get the care you need? They work for the current private, for-profit insurers and their positions would no longer exist under a single-payer system (i.e. you nix advertising and marketing, 'patient eligibility' claims officers, debt. collection agents, etc.). What's worse, these capitalist-driven bureaucrats ration the public's access to health care, only their metric for rationing isn't whether we can grant access to the largest possible number of people, but rather how best the company can maximize profits for its ownership.
Geez, can't these people be bothered to read some Weber? 'Bureaucrats' of some sort or other are involved in just about every major social institution that people rely upon on a daily basis, most of which are all private, for-profit enterprises.
"Lenin" on the situation in Iran
Monday, June 15, 2009
Situation in Iran Becomes More and More Infuriating
As if the notion that a politician may have stolen an election with the guise that he was elected by a legitimate democratic process weren't one of the most infuriating scenarios I can imagine, the escalating civil rights abuses there are taking me to a boiling point, even as I follow this from the safety of the U.S.
Today major outlets report that in addition to frequent and violent disruptions of assemblies/protests by Mousavi supporters, the internet, mobile calls, and text messaging have been shut down by the government in order to prevent the opposition from continuing to organize and communicate.
I fear this is going to get uglier and more violent before it gets better, and not in the direction of a revolution against corrupt democracy, but of constant stifling of the speech of mostly young people in violent and shocking ways.
"For years Iranian TV has shown Israeli forces attacking innocent people in Palestine," said student Shervin Elahverdi, 21. "But these riot police are more brutal than them."On Saturday night, at nearby Parkway, petrol bombs were thrown at police. Plastic bullets were returned. Unrest fizzed and spluttered all day in squares and at big junctions. Many were guarded by groups of basij (militia) volunteers, licensed thugs carrying wooden sticks. In mid-afternoon the Guardian watched one basiji chase a man into the middle of a traffic jam and beat him repeatedly with an iron bar.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Hoover-Obama
Another short excerpt from the Kevin Baker piece in Harper's:
"Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideasYeah, check older posts on this blog about Obama, unions and EFCA. He said to sold-out crowds that he would "stand up and fight for EFCA, rather than just waiting for it to arrive at his desk". This shouldn't really be surprising. But its still disappointing to think about how many people in the union movement mobilized to help get Obama elected, just to seem him prove what they should have realized would happen all along: He'd do what Democrats do best, and bow to Capital when push comes to shove.
together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions
live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol
Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that
would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he
would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in
NAFTA. He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and
never even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule
portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated to
mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a major
component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his ap-
pointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his
transportation secretary.
Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the financial
world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both of whom
played such a major role in deregulating Wall Street and bringing on the
disaster in the fi rst place. It’s as if, after winning election in 1932, FDR had
brought Andrew Mellon back to the Treasury. Just as Herbert Hoover
could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the
1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s."
Telling us what's off the table
From Kevin Baker's generally excellent "Barack Hoover Obama" in the most recent Harper's:
"When it came to the opposition, Franklin Roosevelt reaped the creative support of any number of progressive Republicans throughout his twelve years in offi ce, ranging from New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Nebraska Senator George Norris to key cabinet members such as Henry A. Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox. Obama, by contrast, has had to contend with a knee-jerk rejectionist Republican Party. More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama’s fellow Democrats. One might have assumed that the adrenaline rush of regaining power after decades of conservative hegemony, not to mention relief at surviving the depredations of the Bush years, or losing the vestigial tail of the white Southern branch of the party, would have liberated congressional Democrats to loose a burst of pent-up, imaginative liberal initiatives.
Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget defi cit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are."
Yeah, and who the fuck is Max Baucus anyway?
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Private interests masquerading as universal interests
Imagine if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had said the following about why they uncompromisingly opposed the EFCA ("the card check"):
"We the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represent the interests of a small group of financial and business elites who own large capitalist enterprises. We care, first and foremost, that we are earning as much money as possible. Take note of the "we" in the last sentence, for if someone else were to reap the returns of the institutions we own and control, this would be unacceptable.If they had said this, most people likely would have said: "Shove it, you rich assholes."
Now it seems to us that if the EFCA passes Congress there is a very good chance that more workers will form unions, which means that we will have to cede some of our profits because unions will require that we pay better wages, benefits, pensions and so forth. Moreover, they will curtail our ability to most efficiently manipulate workers (e.g. arbitrarily terminate employees or downsize to maintain profit margins) in our quest to maximize our profits.
At the end of the day, we as extremely wealthy and powerful capitalists will lose measures of our wealth and power if this bill passes. Hence our uncompromising hatred for the bill."
So of course, they cannot simply assert their narrow interests as capitalists in making a public argument about policy. To be heard, they have to make up some story about how their interests are in fact not really their interests, per se, but universal interests. That is, generalizable interests that at least appear to have some relevance to the lives of the 99% majority of the population who aren't part of the ownership of a massive private corporation. Hence all of the endless drivel about 'secret ballots' and so on.
Now fast-forward to the "health care debate" that's ensuing over the so-called "public option".
Anyone familiar with the AMA's history, recalls that they pulled every stop out in the late 1940s and early 1960s when health care reform was on the table. That is, they went apeshit and started babbling about 'totalitarianism' and employed Ronald Reagan to do commercials claiming that Stalin was coming to eat America's babies. This is what they said about Harry Truman's post-WWII plan to institute single-payer:
"all forms of security, compulsory security, even against old age and unemployment, represent a beginning invasion by the state into the personal life of the individual, represent a taking away of individual responsibility, a weakening of national caliber, a definite step toward either communism or totalitarianism"Who is the AMA? They are a large, influential political organization who represents the interests of the most powerful, wealthy and politically-connected doctors in America. They do not represent all doctors. See, for example Physicians for a National Health Program, who see the interests of the private insurance industry as fundamentally opposed to the role doctors ought to serve in a just society. They are staunch supporters of Single-Payer.
Now its not hard to see what the AMA wants. This organization, as the representatives of the most powerful and wealthy doctors, exists primarily to defend the power and high earnings of those whom it represents. So, its not difficult to take them seriously when they come out and say that they don't like paying Medicare rates (they can exploit markets to get even higher rates, so why should they settle for such lackluster earnings?).
But we would be making a seriously obtuse mistake if we thought that the AMA sincerely cared about things like:
-Whether our health-care system is well-ordered and just
-Whether profiteers run insurance institutions and routinely deny claims
-Whether everyone is getting the care they need
-Whether access is universal or guaranteed
-Whether everyone can afford healthcare
-etc.
We have no reason to think that they care for anything of these things in themselves. And, as Ezra Klein points out, we have very strong reasons to think that they would oppose any of these considerations if they conflicted with the material interests of wealthy and powerful doctors. The class dynamics underwriting their Association notwithstanding, the history of the AMA's political interventions speaks for itself.
So what role does the AMA play in public debates? Of course they can't make public interventions that lay bare their narrow, strategic interest in manipulating discourse so that they can maximize their earnings. So they have to say stuff like this:
“The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”Interestingly, they opened this statement by saying that care ought only to be "provided through private markets, as it is currently." Can anyone say 'dogmatic'? If they really cared about "the best way to expand health insurance coverage" why all the whining about the need to have "private markets" and "private insurers" front and center?
My, these business types are so big on the rhetoric of "choice". You can choose to be either insured by some moronic for-profit institution, or you can choose some other such firm of the same ilk. Or you can fucking wither and die. You pick!
To bring this post to a close, I want to tie this thought about narrow, stategic private interests into recent discussions of the 'power plays' being made in the debate over the "public option" bill in Congress. I sometimes hear, as on this Ezra Klein vs. Libertarian 'blogging heads' thing, that "the Democrats really want single payer, but..." or that "liberals really want SP but...". Nevermind the question of who these 'liberals' are and where one finds them. But if the Democrats, i.e. the party who has control of both chambers of Congress and the White House and has trounced the opposition party in the last two elections, want single-payer I find it hard to see what's stopping them.
But let's entertain the fantasy of liberal bloggers about how our government works for a moment. Let's say that the Democrats really do, deep down, get all warm and fuzzy when they think about single-payer. Why can't they just get it done? The answer can't be that the Republicans will oppose it. They already oppose the current reform. They opposed Obama in the last major election. They suck, that's why they keep getting hammered at the ballot box. So the answer can't be that the Democrats just don't have the votes.
What, then, is the holdup? Well it can't be, as Ezra Klein claims it is, that the problem is just that there is "status-quo bias" and "people don't want to lose the health insurance plan they have". That may be some small part of it. But this ignores the 50 million Americans without any insurance; surely they aren't biased towards the current situation. Moreover, this 'status quo bias' hypothesis contradicts Klein's frequently-made (and correct, in my view) point that "health insurance corporations are among the most hated institutions in America".
The pink elephant in the room here has got to be the entrenched, extremely profitable, powerful private health insurance industry who would cease to exist under a single-payer plan. The powerful class in charge of (and profiting from) these massive institutions are the biggest reason why reform would be so difficult to achieve. They aren't going to go down without a fight. They aren't ever going to play nice without being forced to. And we know they aren't going to put their eggs all in one electoral basket; they're going to hedge their bets. That's why the give millions to Democratic members of congress.
In short, we can't ever forget that these industrial giants uncompromisingly hate single payer, since they wouldn't be industrial giants any longer if the plan were adopted.
So why isn't this obvious fact ever discussed in the 'public debate'? Why is it so hard to believe that if the narrow interests of those who profit from the status-quo were nakedly asserted in the public sphere, most people would balk? Why not simply discuss, incessantly, the amount of money these assholes make a year? Why not place our moronic system in a global context and rank our performance against virtually every other major industrial capitalist country in the world (all of whom do not have profit-driven commodified insurance the way we do)? Why not ask why it is that people in those countries would NEVER accept the insecurity, uncertainty, and inhumanity of the sort of system we have?
On Job Creation and the Midwest
Check out this post by Austin Thompson and learn a thing or two about job creation and true economic growth.
Intuitively, the more labor intensive the industry, the more jobs created. But there are profitable reasons in the short-term for why Fortune 500 companies would choose to invest in a more capital intensive industry. Less workers mean fewer costs, and labor replacing technologies won't demand a living wage, a pension, or healthcare insurance for a family of four---a human being will.The post details some important ideas to keep in mind during this whole 600,000 jobs in 100 days push.
The strategy of many Fortune 500 companies is to increase the ratio of capital to labor, thereby avoiding the burden of paying labor costs. Policy-makers who care anything about creating pathways out of poverty for the poor and decent work for middle-class families should be doing the exact opposite, increase the ratio of labor to capital. The increasingly narrow bottom-lines of Fortune 500 companies, are not the same as those of public servants---or at least they shouldn't be.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Violent Right Wing Backlash '09 Continues
Following the cold-blooded murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, an 89-year-0ld White Supremacist has opened fire in the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum, shooting a security guard, before being shot by another guard.
The condition of the guard is not known, but the shooter is said to be "clinging to life." MSNBC has been reading some hate-filled screed from the shooter's, anti-Semitic, anti-black website.
Will right-wing Americans demand the terrorists involved in these crimes be put in Gitmo?
Update: Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard, has passed away.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Healthcare not warfare: they chant this at rallies for a reason.
According to this New York Times editorial, if the United States elects to pursue universal health care, costs to be the public could rise above $1 trillion over ten years. That's a lot of money, yes. But I don't hear any balanced-budget hand-wringing about the war in Iraq, which will have cost taxpayers $694 billion dollars since its launch in late 2001.
No one starts talking about politically unpalatable tax hikes to pay for our extremely expensive, unpopular military projects. Should we tax soda to pay for the war? Do we really have to roll back those tax cuts for the rich? Will the Republicans get cranky?
Nope. No one in the mainstream media is balking at the high financial cost of war. It's the status quo -- the cost of doing business in this time and place. Yet universal health care, which ought to be one of the first expenses accounted for in a national budget, is treated like a newfangled burden on our nation. An endless political headache.
War funding is often rammed through by a prevailing sense of fear for our national security. Sadly enough, given how many people have died or had their lives destroyed by the private insurance system, health care funding could sail through on a tide of similar feelings. But few people seem ready to acknowledge just how horrible the private system has become. I wonder why.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Fire engines and emergency rooms
If your house is on fire in the United States, firefighters come to put it out and save your life.
You don't receive any bills. You don't have to purchase a monthly fire protection service whose prices fluctuate according to market conditions and the demands of profitability.
You just get the service you need, when you need it. No red tape. No fees. No needless bureaucracy. Things are simple.
That's what happens if your house is on fire. But if you have a medical emergency, its a completely different story.
This is how things might go assuming you are not one of the 50 million Americans who has no health insurance at all. Imagine you break your arm and go to the emergency room. You get the immediate care you need and get released the next day. On your way out, you stop by a department of the hospital where you're to pay and fill out the appropriate insurance information (in the U.K., for example, such departments do not exist).
That wasn't so bad, right? I mean, even though you may be paying costly premiums, deductibles and co-pays, at least you're covered, right?
Until 5 months later you get a call from the hospital (or a debt collection agency paid by the hospital) demanding that you pay for your visit. You owe some ridiculous sum of money, they claim. Say, $10,000. "But I'm insured" you say to yourself. You check into things and find out that your insurance company doesn't want to cover the treatment because it was 'experimental' or because it derived from a 'pre-existing condition'. So they claim that they aren't going to pay. You press them, and they claim that they aren't going to budge.
Somehow, things get straightened out and it appears that the insurance company is going to pay for some of it. Whew. Glad that's over.
Until a year later you get a bill from the hospital demanding some smaller sum of cash that you still 'owe' them. It turns out, that the insurance company has refused to pay for 2 bandaids and a cotton swab totalling $100. The hospital, it seems, didn't send the bill in the correct format in the correct time window to the insurance company, so the insurnace company said they refuse to pay it. Since the insurance company is a huge, powerful, and attorney-fortified institution, the hospital has decided to pass the buck along to you. If the big insurance giant wont pay or will force a trial in order to cough up the cash for your bandaids, the hospital figures they might as well harass you to pay it. After all, you're not very scary and you aren't so likely to have a team of corporate atorneys at your disposal to dispatch such requests.
So the hopsital takes this outstanding balance that they're owed and sells it to a debt-collection shark. They sell it to the shark for 75% of what its 'worth', so the hospital recoups some of the cash they're owed and is absolved of having to deal with getting the money. So now you get calls from some shark demanding that you pay for the cotton swabs that your insurance company has refused to pay.
You complain to your insurance company that they should just pay this thing, but they don't listen. After persistent calling, faxing, letter-mailing, and emailing, they explain to you that they aren't paying because of 'company policy'. The company policy, after all, was drawn up in the interests of making the company maximally profitable. If you were to aggregate the amount of 'small sums' of this nature that they refuse to pay in a single year alone, it adds up to a decent chunk of money. This is how capitalist entreprises function: the bottom line is that they try to minimize costs and maximize returns.
Meanwhile you've got some jerk-off claiming that you haven't paid for cotton swabs used at a visit to the doctor that occured 3 years ago at a time when you were fully covered by what most people would consider "really good health coverage".
Invovled in this tragic comedy, are: two different health care providers (the hopsital and the contractors) who each have their own bone to pick with you, a massive insurance institution that is not 'on your side' but rather on the side of the investors who own the company, and a handful of seperate institutions that make their money by collecting debts and harassing people. If things get really bad, you can also throw your attorney and any other legal counsels fighting against you in a legal battle that might subsequently ensue, not to mention the court system, judges, etc.
Now in the United Kingdom health care works like fire departments work here.
When you get sick, you go to a hospital. You get the care you need. You leave feeling better. 3 years later you do not receive 5 different bills from 6 different bureaucracies. In fact, you never receive any goddamn bills. As a citizen and a taxpayer of the United Kingdom, you've already paid your dues. And what's more, whatever dues you did pay were proportional to how much money you made: the amount you pay for your health care isn't a 'one size fits all affair', but takes into account your ability to pay. It doesn't much matter whether you have a job when you go to the hospital, whether you're old and frequently ill, whether you are poor. You can come and get the health care you need all the same.
The United States Congress has been holding 'health care forums' recently in which they are claiming to be putting 'all options on the table' in considering ways to reform the unbelievably moronic health insurance system that the US currently has. But nothing remotely approximating the example above is being mentioned, let alone seriously considered.
The problem, after all, isn't that we have twelve different bloated bureacracies doing sixteen different tasks that have nothing to do with insuring people, but rather firguring out how not to insure the people that already paid for their insurance. The problem isn't that our system is inefficient and has too many different institutions doing the same thing poorly. The problem isnt that profiteers are in firm control of all the relevant institutions and run them according to the criteria of "let's make me as rich as possible". The problem isn't that these assholes made billions in profits last year while millions more Americans lost their insurnace coverage.
The problem, says Obama et. al, is just that 'health care costs are too high'. Right.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Change we won't get from the Obama Administration:
...anything worthy of the name 'universal health care'.
The discourse of 'lowering health care costs' is preposterous. The question is whether we should have commodified insurance policies sold primarily for profit, or universally-guaranteed insurance based on citizenship. As many have argued, while the existence of nearly 50 million uninsured Americans is a travesty, this shouldn't obscure the fact that the moral bankruptcy of our profit-driven health insurance industry extends to those who currently have insurance as well. As long as health insurance is a multi-billion dollar industry where denied claims mean higher profits, we can expect that 'pre-existing conditions', 'experimental treatments' and other loop-holes will be continually exploited by insurance firms with the result that no one can rest assured that they really will have access to health care in their moment of need.
This is what universal health care looks like:
"The National Health Service Act of 1946 provides a complete medical service free of charge at the time it is required for every citizen. It will provide you with all your medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone rich or poor, man, woman or child can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items; there are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a charity. You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness."
excerpted from the Introduction to the NHS Act 1946"
Monday, May 25, 2009
More hackery on the NYTimes OpEd page
I suppose it wouldn't be a Roger Cohen column if it wasn't hackery, but his most recent effort is especially bad.
First of all, 'peaceful evolution' as such, doesn't necessarily mean 'peace' or 'puppy dogs and ice cream' is at the end of the rainbow. Imagine a tyrannical regime coming to power peacefully. Or, to take a leaf from Cohen's neocon red-baiting book, surely he can conjure up a (nightmare) scenario in which the US 'peacefully evolves' into a socialist society. Isn't that supposed to be the reason, according to the American Right, that we should 'oppose Big Government' in the meantime? So that we can halt the 'peaceful slide toward socialism' or whatever cynical bullshit these people tell themselves?
So much for the rhetorical bite of 'peaceful evolution'.
Someone should pinch ol' Roge and tell him its not 1991 anymore. Nobody's reading Francis Fukuyama these days. All that 'triumphalist' bullshit went out of style long before the 'triumphant' neoliberalism of the Washington Consensus hit the fan recently causing the biggest financial downturn since the Great Depression.
Here's a gem from the column:
"For a brief moment, after the Berlin Wall fell, free-market, multiparty liberal systems seemed set to sweep everything in their triumphant path. But from Moscow to Beijing to Hanoi, reaction came. Markets and nationalism trumped freedom and the vote; the noble spirit of Tienanmen and Berlin faded...America, born as a liberating idea, must be true to that and promote its values. But, sobered and broke, it must be patient."Excuse me while I puke. The "noble spirit of Tienanmen"? Way to co-opt a social movement into a perverse narrative about the singular march of the "free market" and all its history-ending glories. (Btw: this blog had a nice recent post on the topic of Tienanmen recently).
I don't know enough about Hanoi to say whether Cohen's tendency to paint the regime there with the same brush as Beijing is precise. But in Moscow, "reaction came"? Um, if he knew shit about recent history Cohen should have said that the "triumphant path" of "free markets" in Russia caused widespread social upheaval, economic turmoil, poverty, sharp decreases in standards of living, and the rise of a new oligarchy emerging from the 'sale' (read 'give-away') of a host of public institutions and enterprises. Even the neoliberal zealots had the honesty to call their program 'shock therapy'. Now I don't want to say that the current regime in Moscow isn't a kind of reaction, but let's be clear on what kind of reaction it is. When you have people's lives being shattered by instability and economic calamity created by a clique of neoliberal zealots touting 'free market' fundamentalism with religious fervor, its unsurprising that a nationalist regime took up shop and decided to stand firm against the opportunism of Washington neoliberals.
And about the fact of China's vibrant capitalism in the absence of democracy or a system of rights... what does Cohen add to this 'surprising anomaly' except some vague teleological faith that soon enough consumer capitalism truly will "create consumers who want democracy" as well? It seems that all Cohen is upset about is a few words written on paper. He would be happy, no doubt, if the Chinese had certain rights on some paper constitution somewhere, even if the citizens nonetheless lacked the ability to surmount institutional obstacles to actually realizing those rights. Why, then, is he so upset about capitalist China? It's clear that he certainly can't stand democracy when it bucks capitalism and the "free market" (see: everything he's ever written on Latin America).
Doesn't Roger Cohen ever bother to ask himself if it would even be worth coming up with his own triumphalist tripe, rather than just recycling and regurgitating? I can't think of anyone who adds less to existing discourse, bringing no nuanced or critical thought to bear on anything he writes about. Repetition is not thinking. Thinking has something to do with being able to imagine otherwise.
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