How the Pharmaceutical, Insurance and Private Hospital Industries Continue to Fleece Sick Americans

Big Pharma, along with the insurance industry and investor-owned hospitals, has kept Congress from doing anything to ease the burden most Americans incur when they get sick. David Sirota has published a good article on this outrageous conspiracy.

Self-defense?

Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people with an AK-47 he illegally carried to a demonstration, claiming he killed them in self-defense, has now become the darling of Fox pundit Tucker Carlson. They are both disgusting piles of excrement.

Thanksgiving

Enjoy the interesting story in Atlas Obscura of how Thanksgiving became a national holiday. 

Oddly, the post Civil War South regarded Thanksgiving as an evil northern plot and for many years a number of states below the Mason-Dixon Line refused to observe it.

Having just spent three nights in the hospital with GI problems, I am thankful that I will be fully able to enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner the family has planned for tomorrow.

Dreadful news about the supply chain.

 Read the following article and weep: 

I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End

We are screwed because corporations controlling each link of the supply chain have no incentive to change the current structure, and strong incentives to keep things as they are.

Puritan China

Wired Magazine ran an article today on the Chinese government’s crackdown on teenage celebrity-worship. To American eyes, the government and the Communist Party appear to be attempting to create their own version of John Calvin’s 16th Century Geneva on the Yongding. Puritan rulers are often successful for a time until the people tire of compelled righteousness and revert back to their old indulgent ways. It is unlikely that the current leadership will live to see China blackslide into a more liberal nation, but it will happen, provided that we do not blow ourselves up or allow global warming to do us in.

Food Waste and Global Warming

Many years ago, I read of a charity in the Washington, DC area that held a memorable fundraising banquet to which they invited some well-heeled donors. After everyone had finished, they were informed that restaurants and institutional food services had previously discarded everything they had just eaten. Some of the food came from (choke!) dumpsters. I don’t recall whether that experience had a significant effect on contributions, but it dramatically illustrated how much food is wasted in the course of ordinary business.

A recent issue of Bon Appétit Magazine carried a disturbing article about how food waste contributes significantly to global warming due to the amount of atmospheric carbon it generates. It also suggests some actions we can take to reduce the waste and redirect food otherwise destined for landfills to institutions and people in need.

Humans throw away about 1.3 billion tons of food every year. That’s one-third of all the food in the world. If you loaded that year’s worth of discarded food on trucks, they would stretch bumper to bumper around the globe seven times.

Adam Schiff’s new book reviewed

Today Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Adam Schiff’s new book, Midnight in Washington, recounting the terrible events of January 6, 2021 and how the nation came to such a posture. Required reading. As far as I can ascertain, Schiff is a good and honest person; we should take to heart what he has written.

What’s Happening to the US Postal Service?

Today, I received an email from my bank informing me that the USPO will start delivering first class mail to addresses more than 300 miles away as much as two days later than it does now. The email contained a link to the post office explaining what it is all about.

The Postal Service will increase time-in-transit standards by 1 or 2 days for certain mail that is traveling longer distances [>300 miles]. By doing so, the Postal Service can entrust its ground network to deliver more First-Class Mail …

USPS explains why it is doing this:

The service standard changes that we have determined to implement are a necessary step towards achieving our goal of consistently meeting 95 percent service performance.

In other words, since it can’t meet its current service standards it will relax the standards rather than bring its service up to par. The real reason for this downgrading is that

In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. Title VIII of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

It’s highly probable that the Republican majority in Congress intended to privatize the US Post Office, much like the United Kingdom privatized the Royal Mail Service. Instead of a public service, the Republicans in Congress anticipated that the USPS would ultimately to go bankrupt, to be sold to a profit-seeking corporation or financial institution. In the United Kingdom, the financial institutions that purchased the British post office saw a huge increase in its stock value in a single day: from 330p to 455p. In essence, the British government “effectively gave away £1 billion in public assets to those who already had money going spare.” I wonder how much money the future buyer of the USPS will net when when the buyer flips it the next day. Suppose a Chinese bank made the highest bid. What happens then?

Needless to say, the Royal Mail service is being cut back as this article is being written.

The cutback in service announced by the USPS is the direct (and predictable) result of the financial distress incurred by the post office in fulfilling requirements imposed by Congress that it fully fund employees’ pensions. Were the Postal Service required to fund pensions in accordance with commercially-accepted practices (pay as you go), it would have been making a profit instead of incurring the losses that it has been needlessly experiencing.

Under the current rules imposed by Congress, the postal service can only become worse and worse as it cuts back on services in order to make excessive payments to its pension fund. Unfortunately, the American public is uninformed of the change in the law, and even if it were informed, most persons would not understand its implications. All the public will know is that postal service is becoming less reliable and more expensive. The Murdoch media (Fox network and the WallStreet Journal) will blame this on the inherent “inefficiency“ of government services in general and will do their best to convince their readers and listeners that the only way it can be “saved” is to privatize it.

Only Congress can cancel these ill-advised plans and it will do so only if it feels public pressure to do so.

Buying the Government

Around March 23, 2017, one or both of the Koch brothers conveyed the word to congressional Republicans that they would discontinue the flow of campaign money until the Republican majority repealed Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) and gave the wealthy a tax break. They got the tax break but the ACA was too popular to be killed. See the CNN report.

That means that the Kochs own the Republican Party and thus direct its policy decisions. Their hostility to the public good is difficult to comprehend. I suppose they have talked themselves into believing (like Dickens’s wealthy characters) that destruction of the safety net established by The New Deal will instill virtue in the citizenry. In the event that citizens do not become more virtuous, perhaps they would welcome a reduction in the surplus population.

Great wealth has always given the possessor a disproportionate amount of political power. The predictable result has been a congress that favors the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle class and the poor. The rich have been buying elections for centuries, even millenniums, to serve their private purposes rather than for the common good. The Kochs are faithfully carrying on the plutocratic tradition.

The Roman Senate favored the wealthy, but they had an excuse: they were the wealthy, almost all having inherited large estates.

Extreme wealth has invariably bred in its owner an acquisitiveness far beyond ordinary greed. Scott Fitzgerald observed it around a hundred years ago. Scientific findings support the notion that the rich are different from the rest of us. They genuinely believe that they are exempt from the laws of the realm and even from the obligation to conduct their businesses fairly and honestly.

Psychopaths, it has been shown, actually have deficiencies in empathy, evidenced by lesions in the relevant parts of their brains. I do not know if this is the case with narcissists, who exhibit similar characteristics. Both should be made ineligible for either public office or any other positions of authority where they can (and usually do) cause severe damage.

The Bible has much to say about the rich: “It is easier for a camel [or rope] to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [1].

It is difficult for ordinary citizens to comprehend the vast mental gulf that separates them from the super-rich, who are not only unconcerned with the welfare of the rest of us but are barely aware of our existence, other than as “resources” to be exploited for their benefit.

Beyond simple greed, however, there seems to be a kind of madness that causes a billionaire, who can enjoy a life of comfort and luxury on interest alone, to grasp so fervently at something for which he has not the slightest need.

Past societies have enacted numerous laws and created numerous institutions to keep psychopaths and narcissists in check, but these devices have eventually failed, either from the decline of the institutions or conquest from outside. The same thing happens over and over again with minor variations, and no society has yet come up with a permanent solution.

It seems that the U.S. is traveling down the same path as its forerunners. The plutocracy, rule by the rich, is rapidly becoming a kleptocracy, rule by thieves. Inequality increases continually, despite feeble efforts to halt its rise. Our government is paralyzed because the kleptocracy wants to keep it that way. And because the masses are distracted by the media and given an inferior education, they consequently do not realize what is being done to them. They lack the knowledge and the will to work towards a more democratic and equal society.

It cannot end well.

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1. See, for instance, Matthew 19:24.. The Aramaic word for both “camel” and “rope” are similar. The thought is the same in either case.  ↩

Thumbnails 2021-07-11

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Why not state and municipal banks?

One of the most useful laws the Mississippi legislature could enact would be a statute authorizing municipalities to charter their own municipal banks. The legislature should also charter a state bank on the lines of the Bank of North Dakota. The article cited below discusses the efforts of the City of New York to persuade the state to enact legislation to allow municipalities to charter banks.

I previously wrote an article on this subject, but the following article from The Nation prompted me to mention this subject again.

Why Shouldn’t the People Own the Banks?

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Speculation: The following syllogism is key to the “logic” of fundamentalism:

1. The Bible, being the literal and inerrant Word of God, must be internally consistent because all true statements are consistent with one another.

2. The Bible contains the following statement: (Fill in the blank)

3. All the other statements in the Bible must be consistent with the statement in #2, above.

To accept #1, the general premise of this syllogism, requires considerable tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

Here’s the rub:

Even if one grants—for purposes of argument—that the general premise is true, it is universally agreed by scholars that the Bible was written by different people living in different times, under different circumstances, in widely different cultures, and in different languages. Accurate interpretation requires knowledge of and fluency with all these different contexts in which the Bible was written. No one will ever know all that is needed to be known about these contexts to ascertain with certainty what any passage of scripture was intended to mean by the author.

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Thoughts on Trump and the current political situation as of Friday, January 8, 2021.

1. The fall of Trump is not tragic: A clever fool cannot be a tragic person, especially one that is also a monster. Donald Trump is both.
2. The fall of Trump’s enablers will not be tragic when it happens. There is always a reckoning for toadies, scoundrels, and inciters. Dante put them in the 8th circle of Hell. Trump will throw them under the bus.
3. Trump’s enablers, still trying to “preserve his legacy,” remind me of the curse that Robert E. Lee laid on the south when he declared that in spite of the South losing the war its cause would go on. The cause was slavery, not southern manners. Lee was no hero.
4. A friend with experience in a nursing home informed me several years ago that Trump had dementia and it can only become worse.

The Republicans, standing in the midst of the wreckage of the Capitol from the insurrection Trump incited, are still hesitant to get rid of him. What comes next?

2021–07–11

We know what came next. The Republicans blocked Trump’s second impeachment and have doubled down on obeisance to Trump. They are echoing Trump’s utterly groundless allegations of election fraud and are presently engaged in an effort to erase the public’s memories of the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s rôle in inciting it.

Republican legislatures have taken up the myth of voter fraud, and under the guise of fraud prevention, are passing numerous voter suppression laws in their state. A supreme court packed with right-wing appointees has already ruled on the constitutionality of Nevada’s new voter suppression statutes and held that the new laws did not violate the Constitution[1].

The Republican Party has a demographic advantage in the Electoral College with sparsely-populated states having the same number of senators as the most populous state[2]. The Democrats have had a majority of the popular vote in most of the presidential elections since 1980 but have usually won a minority of electors. The founding fathers inserted this provision as the price of the slave states’ ratification.

A nation with a minority government is inherently unstable because the majority of the people lack the necessary power a majority should have in a democratic republic. More discussion of this later.

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1. Brnovich, Attorney General Of Arizona, et al. v. Democratic National Committee, et al. No. 19–1257 (July 1, 2021)  ↩

2. U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Sections 2 & 3; Amendment 17  ↩

I'm Back

 

To the few who have been following this blog but have almost given up, please know that I was diagnosed with a large sarcoma in my abdomen in February 2020. My oncologist at M. D. Anderson in Houston immediately put me on chemotherapy, which I received in Jackson from a local oncologist.

The first treatment consisted of GEMcitabine and DOCEtaxel. They corrupted my sense of taste and made nearly all food inedible, so I lost considerable weight. They also caused my hair to fall out, made me feel bad, and had no effect on the tumor.

In July, the doctors at M. D. Anderson switched me to DOXOrubicin, an older treatment with a reputation for making patients sick. They nicknamed it “Red Devil” after its red color. For me, it was an improvement. My hair came back, and I started to eat a wider variety of dishes. I also began to feel better. While the DOXOrubicin didn’t shrink the tumor, it stopped it from growing any further.

On March 9, I underwent abdominal surgery, which was a complete success. The tumor had attached itself to my body in only two places, and the surgeon removed it with little difficulty. The reconstruction surgeon took longer than the cancer surgeon to repair my abdominal wall.

To my surprise, the doctors discharged me the following Wednesday, the 17th. In my previous surgery (2013), I stayed in the hospital for nearly five weeks.

Because of the pandemic, the hospital forbade visitors, so my wife stayed in Jackson. Until this stay in Houston, I had not realized how much I needed companionship while staying in a hospital room. The nurses and doctors were in the room frequently, but they were no substitute for a friend or loved one. They were friendly, but they had their work to do and little time to socialize. I was lonely.

I’ve been recovering from the surgery, but until now, I haven’t felt like writing.

So much has happened since the presidential election that I haven’t mentioned. Catching up will be impossible. I have some comments concerning the insurrection on January 6 at the U. S. Capitol that will appear on this blog in a few days. The current amnesia now being exhibited by numerous Republicans attempting to downplay the seriousness of that attack will also be the subject of another article. Stay tuned.

Crazy, Stupid, or Just Plain Dishonest?

Ron Johnson, U. S. Senator from Wisconsin, has gone on national TV advancing the crackpot theory that the mob attacking the U. S. Capitol on January 6 was a false flag operation. The attackers, according to Johnson, were left-wing agitators impersonating Trump supporters. He spouted this idiocy in the full knowledge that the rioters had posted photos, selfies, and videos of themselves to social media accompanied by their boasting.

Even without the evidence just cited, why would left-wingers attempt to stop the inauguration of their chosen candidate, Joe Biden, who indisputably won the November election? The whole idea is preposterous.

 

Pence’s Faustian Bargain

I just finished reading a sympathetic article in The Guardian by Sydney Blumenthal on former vice president Mike Pence.

Rejected by the Trumpist part of the Republican party, with no political future, I suspect that Pence is finally being forced to deal with the Faustian bargain he entered into a little over four years ago. While I don’t expect him to have read Goethe’s Faust, I believe he may now be getting an inkling of what it means to make a deal with the Devil.

Pence, from his newsletters as US representative and his behavior as vice president, doesn’t seem to be a reflective person. In fact, he comes across as an inflexible religious fundamentalist, incapable of deep reflection. There is little room for reflection when you already know the absolute truth.

If I knew his mailing address, I would send him a copy of Faust as a gift, with the suggestion that he read Part 1 at a minimum, because it explores the meaning of a Faustian bargain and its usual infernal outcome. If he cannot see himself in light of Goethe’s hero, he is hopeless.

A Disheartening Process, Beginning With Ronald Reagan

Since 1981-01-20 when Ronald Reagan became president, subsequent administrations and legislatures have implemented neoliberal policies. In doing so, they have prepared the ground for Donald Trump to sow dragons’ teeth. All this time, the power elite has been promising the American people that their economic distress and the growth of inequality would eventually work for the benefit of everyone. They lied. Their promise of shared prosperity was a cynical ploy to persuade the average person to go along with policies that made wealth flow upward. Anyone who makes a cursory examination of the US Census  records will see inequality rising from Reagan’s first year in office.

Observing this process has been disheartening. It could only result in economic, social, environmental, and political disaster. The only surprise is that all four are happening simultaneously: recession, the disintegration of society, global warming, and a government captured by an irresponsible and short-sighted oligarchy.

I wager that President Joe Biden, an elderly politician with the best of intentions, will attempt to enact economic reforms, but because of his lack of insight, imagination, economic expertise, and political support, will fail to turn the ship of state out of its present course toward disaster.

The Dumbest Statement I’ve Seen Today

“Weather forecasters tell us that the temperature [in Georgia] will be right around 32 degrees Fahrenheit when polls open at 7 a.m. Tuesday for a final day of voting in two U.S. Senate runoffs. Even so, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wants you to know that anyone who offers a cup of hot chocolate to any voter standing in line – and any voter who partakes of said cup of warmth – could be guilty of a felony under Georgia law.”

—From Pressing Issues 12/31/2020

Suppose somebody sets up a stand outside the “forbidden” perimeter with hot coffee & hot chocolate and a sign reading “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO STEAL THIS COFFEE OR HOT CHOCOLATE” 

Felony?

An essay by David Graber in Harper's Magazine suitable for Thanksgiving reading

 I came across this essay on the way to something else:

Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good.

The essay originally appeared in the January 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Thoughts on Biden, now that he has been elected president

Joe Biden has won the election for president. It will be a narrower margin, however, than the polls originally predicted, to the embarrassment of the pollsters. I lay much of Biden’s underperformance at the feet of the Democratic Party leadership, but that is a subject for another time.

Beyond advanced age, however, Biden has several weaknesses. But as things now stand, there was simply no choice for the knowledgeable and intelligent voter. Another four years of Trump would have brought about the end of the American experiment. Throughout our history, powerful plutocratic forces have attacked our democratic-republican political system over and over. Fortunately, this nation has proved time and again that it can meet the challenges with courage, determination, and luck.

The elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency was only the latest of these attempts by those same forces to turn a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, ruled by the wealthy and powerful.

Joe Biden poses a danger to the republic of a more subtle nature. He is unquestionably a good man, but like all humankind, he is flawed. Some colossal errors of judgment have marked his political career. These errors are a clue to help us predict how President Biden will run his presidency.

When Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act[1], a corrupt and injurious law that benefitted the credit card industry and creditors in general, I vowed never to vote for him under any circumstances. Then I turned around and voted for the Obama/Biden ticket twice. I voted for him again this year, a textbook example of being forced to choose a lesser evil. It is an excellent practice to refrain from making rash vows. Who can foretell the future?[2]

But I digress.

How to win over rural voters and save the environment

1.  Enact programs that enable them to survive economically;

2.  Let them know what you are doing;

3. Invite them to participate in planning the transition.

3.  Factors, Considerations, and Obstacles. If the people of the World are to survive and live decent lives, there is no way we can continue to live the way we presently live. An important step to stave off an ecological catastrophe and possible extinction involves agriculture and ranching:Our nation/world must change some of its eating habits, particularly with respect to our consumption of dairy products, meat, poultry, fish, and other animal products. In addition to their environmental danger they are detrimental to human health;

1. Dairy consumption is declining and will continue to decline. The imperative is to soften the transition to either farming or another environment-friendly employment;
2. These changes, supra, are necessary for health, environment and climate. Dairy farming must be cut back and made more humane. The government must aid dairy farmers and point them to several viable alternatives. The costs of changing from dairy farming to almost any other kind of agriculture are high. Dairy farming equipment has little in common with, for example, the equipment used in horticulture. That’s how it appears to me, although I am neither dairy farmer nor horticulturist;;
3. Government must aid rural areas by supplying financial aid to avoid hardship during the transition;
4. The use of fuel and fertilizer made from petroleum and natural gas, requirements of industrial farming, must be drastically reduced. There is no way to avoid this if we are to stabilize or reduce greenhouse gases;
5. Government must provide research to aid rural areas with knowledge and technology to make the transition away from environmentally destructive activities. The transition will render many businesses unprofitable, and their owners and employees must be aided, as I stated above;
6. A partial transition to animal powered agriculture will not only be possible, but it might be necessary;
7. In the long run (which is becoming shorter), the mass production of beef is not sustainable,¹ but world demand for beef is rising. Unfortunately, the beef industry has usually been  profitable, so widespread resistance to any moves to change its business model is likely. Much research will be necessary to determine the appropriate strategy to change minds, and much of that research must involve sociology and psychology. A ranchers' mindset is a universe away from a farmer’s mindset. The one thing we must avoid is for climate change itself to destroy the cattle business through destruction of either grazing lands or feed crops. The irony of the beef industry destroying itself by irresponsibly contributing to climate change is an irony too awful to contemplate.
8. A similar analysis applies to the poultry industry.²

Endnotes

1. Much of the cost of raising beef cattle is subsidized or externalized through depletion of aquifers, lack of safe disposal of animal waste, and the raising of feed grains, especially corn. Ranching is partly subsidized by the use of public lands at below-market rents. Corn is subsidized by requiring gasoline to include 10% alcohol. Antibiotics, used by ranchers and feedlots to stimulate growth, promotes bacterial resistance and thus constitutes a public health hazard.

2. Producers of industrial chicken give their chickens growth hormones and antibiotics to fatten and protect them from disease caused by the crowded and unsanitary conditions in which they are raised. Today mature chickens must be sold in 15–30 days or they will die from the effects of these substances. There is a growing recognition that these practices constitute a health hazard to consumers and there is supposedly work in progress to develop more benign substitutes.

The CDC, Trump, and the Coronavirus

The Trump administration’s handling of the Coronavirus was criminally negligent, and Trump, along with many of his appointed sycophants in the White House, should go to jail.

After reading Inside the Fall of the CDC on the ProPublica website, I am so enraged that I can barely type. The evidence in the article confirms that many—perhaps even a majority—of the 210,000 deaths from the virus were the direct outcome of actions (and failures to act) by the president, enabled by the pusillanimity of the CDC leadership.

If you voted for Trump, you voted for a pathological narcissist, unprepared and unfit for the office of president or any other office of trust.

You voted for a grifter, a compulsive liar, an authoritarian, and an aspiring dictator, devoid of respect for the American people, the U.S. Constitution, or our laws.

You voted for death.

I'm Getting Tired of Meltdowns

Every time I peruse the media, I see a story about a very important person in the national government having a meltdown.

Just what in the hell is a meltdown and why is it important?[1] The US is not ancient Rome or Babylon. Meltdowns by absolute sovereigns are serious stuff; heads roll. Here, people are not punished (at least in theory) without due process, which usually requires the decision of a jury. Citizens are mostly immune to the megalomania of powerful persons.

So why is it newsworthy that Trump or McConnell or Pelosi or Schumer throw what we southerners call a “hissy fit”?

It matters just as much as the color of their underwear. In other words, it doesn’t matter at all. It only matters what these public servants do or don’t do. The rest is puff.

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1. Meltdowns are nuclear reactor accidents, like Chernobyl and Fukushima, not displays of presidential displeasure.  ↩