Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

THIS DUDE is mad as hell:

Dr. Paul Hochfeld: This is a government giveaway to the insurance industry, with or without the public plan option.

This public plan option, at least as it’s written in HR 3200, is a lame, failed, designed-to-fail public plan option. It’s not available until 2013. When it’s available, it’s not available to people who get insurance from their employers. Those are healthy people. It’s not available to people who are upper middle class or wealthier. Those are healthy people. So the public plan option is designed to attract the sickest, most expensive people. And when it fails in 2017 or 2018, by design, the insurance industry is going to point at it and say, “See, the government can’t do healthcare.” And it’ll be the wrong lesson. And I just–this whole thing is being manipulated by the industry with our legislators being complicit in this process. [Democracy Now!]

He goes on to say that health care is a right. I’m not so sure. But aside from that, good stuff, Dr. Hochfeld.

While health care probably isn’t a right, it is, however, a moral imperative. Especially in a society that places the utmost importance on individuals’ right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, (assuming we still do.) “Life” depending on “survival” as much as it does, and “happiness” being as affected by “good health” as it is.

One way to persuade someone on this point would be to ask them, “If someone in your church were ill, and unable to afford treatment, and you could afford to do so, would you feel obligated to contribute to a fund to help pay their expenses?”

And, “Furthermore, knowing that your church provided this kind of help, would you feel that such a contribution was a wise investment if you knew the same would be done for you in a time of need?”

This is just an example, replace “church” with just about anything: neighborhood, family, union, club, circle of friends, motorcycle gang, maybe even town. It seems more likely that people would answer the two questions in the affirmative when conceptualizing about an affinity group they belong to. Puts the issue on a scale where it becomes tangible, where folks start thinking about it in terms of the people they see in their daily lives.

For some reason, or some combination of reasons, this feeling of solidarity toward an affinity group doesn’t translate to the nation as a whole. A Mainer might bristle at the idea of their money going to pay for some fast-driving flatlander’s or, worse, some Yankees fan’s medical bill. The rich man wonders why the fruits of his entrepreneurial expertise should benefit the health of some grunt can’t rub two quarters together. The worker doesn’t see why the cubicle denizens should get healthy off the labor of their strong back. Regional differences, religious beliefs, race, economic disparities, the urban/rural divide: all of these divisions play their part.

Living in a culture that obsesses over such divisions, there will always be a loud subset of Americans who can be relied upon to angrily resist solidarity on health care at the national level, and the media can always be counted on to amplify that dissent.

This is how politicians are able to say socialized health care, or single payer insurance, or price controls on medical services just aren’t ‘politically feasible,’ and instead reel off legislation that amounts to a bonanza for health insurance companies.

While the ideal solution I would conjure up in the anarchist utopia in my brain isn’t the single payer insurance this guy advocates, his defeatist approach toward the current health insurance legislation, with or without a so-called public option, is admirable:

Kevin Zeese: My preference would be to see this bill defeated. It does more harm than good. It empowers these corrupt corporations in ways that we don’t need. So let’s see this bill defeated and start over and make the next election about a national healthcare plan. [Democracy Now!]

Faith in the electoral system notwithstanding.

(more…)

Don’t know what happened, but somehow a setting got changed in WordPress and commenting was only being allowed for registered users. That shouldn’t have been so. You should again be able to comment without registering. We apologize for the inconvenience.

IT TURNS OUT that even in these unforgiving economic times, cuts in executive pay still aren’t as bad as outright unemployment, (and let’s not ignore the downward pressure on wages that comes with high unemployment rates.) This fact is illustrated by the still increasing disparity in earnings between the richest and poorest Americans:

“No one should be surprised at the increased disparity,” said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University. “Unemployment hurts normal workers who do not have the golden parachutes the folks at the top have.” [Associated Press]

I doubt anyone is particularly surprised by this.

Theoretically, these golden parachute guys shouldn’t be able to tune people out the way the G20 leaders do. Their companies would be nothing without normal workers engaged in the day-to-day. That they can and do belies the perverted essence of our economy America.

Perhaps there will be time to elaborate later (but don’t count on it.) For now, here is some stuff from the past:

• Disestablishmentarian Economics (Rejecting state established religion.)
• A Capitalist, Consumer Based Economy: to Build, Market and Sell Commodities We Don’t Need (Questioning America’s business plan.)
• The Nihilists are Revolting (Vs. Bobo.)
• The Middle Class of Whatever (My “contribution to the conversation” during election season.)
• Craven Spelt Backwards is Maverick (Yes, that Maverick.)
• I’m the King of the World! (For the illustration.)
• And this one written by a younger me, who was of a differnt mind about a lot of things but was nonetheless onto something with the parts about “invented needs.”

HAVE I MENTIONED that the United States electoral system is a sham? I believe I may have.

Bob Edgar of Common Cause emails to champion the cause of safeguarding our elections:

In a case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the highest court in the land could overturn more than a century of law and pave the way for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on direct campaigns to elect or defeat federal candidates.

Such an earth-shattering decision — which many court observers believe we are about to see issued — wouldn’t just change the character of our elections. It would fundamentally undermine the strength of our democracy.

The “strength” of our “democracy” is that the elite can predetermine the outcome without holding guns to people’s heads and looking illegitimate to the international community. Otherwise, the ostensibly democratic election process would have been put out of its misery long ago.

What conceivable difference will it make, to the average person watching the TV, if campaign billions continue to be funneled through 527 group’s and PAC’s rather than through the candidate committees themselves?

HERE WE GO again:

…the [Obama!] administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. [New York Times]

But why can’t we bring them to trial?

[Emphasis added.] The legal interpretation applies to detainees whom the government concludes should be held because they are a continuing danger to national security but who cannot be brought to trial for various reasons, like evidence tainted by harsh interrogations. [NYT]

Hard evidence is not “tainted” by what goes on in the interrogation room. Evidence can be corroborated, clarified, knitted together, by a good interrogator, but the physical evidence itself is not changed.

What is being alluded to here is that the information itself, obtained through harsh interrogations, is tainted. Let me reiterate what was said in this space just the other day: Our harsh interrogation torture methods are not designed to elicit reliable information. It is not right to call what comes from these interrogations “evidence,” tainted or otherwise.

To rephrase: The Obama! administration will continue to hold detainees who have been tortured, without bringing them to trial, because the evidence against them was gathered by torturing them.

Impeach Obama.

Via: IOZ

Celebrity bashing website, What Would Tyler Durden Do? takes a moment away from bashing celebrities to bring us the latest news in police taser use:

FUN WITH TAZERS – Police in Merced, CA. used a stun gun on a man with no legs in a wheelchair. Twice. Then his pants fell down as they handcuffed him on the ground, and they left him that way in broad daylight. Then he sat in jail for 6 days, then was released for lack of evidence. Why would they do all this? Probably because the guy was an asshole. … (ap) — [WWTDD]

Also, have some Wednesday morning defeatism with your coffee:

Cracker, Teen Angst

SURE IT’S TORTURE, BUT IS IT EFFECTIVE? The headline on this Associated Press article makes no sense. It declares, “CIA interrogations informed by bad science.”

…Shane O’Mara, a professor at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, wrote that the severe interrogation techniques appear based on “folk psychology” — a layman’s idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function.

The list of techniques the CIA used included prolonged sleep deprivation — six days in at least one instance — being chained in painful positions, exploiting prisoners’ phobias, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that President Barack Obama has called torture. Three CIA prisoners were waterboarded, two of them extensively. [Associated Press]

Amid the rampant paranoia that obtained among our political decision makers during the Cold War, US methods of psychological torture, such as sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, were developed as means of mind control.

Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War On Terror:

From it’s founding in 1947, the CIA was disturbed by the Soviet ability to extract public confessions in ways that hinted at secret mind-control methods. … At recent show trials for “many different personalities” … Communist police had shown “consistent success” in extracting “false confessions” making it probable … that “some special psychological technique is being used.” …the Soviets … may have discovered techniques “to induce a somnambulistic trance … in perhaps 90 percent or more of all defendants from whom they might wish to elicit a public confession.” [McCoy, p22]

So the CIA started shelling out dollars for research in behavioral science, and undertook years of experimentation and implementation. This was scientific! Not exactly the “folk psychology,” alluded to in the AP article. But it was research into making subjects suggestible. “The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the fundamentals of personal identity.” [McCoy, p8]

The techniques mentioned in the AP article were not developed for gathering reliable information.

Those methods cause the brain to release stress hormones that, if their release is repeated and prolonged, may result in compromised brain function and even tissue loss, O’Mara wrote.

He warned that this could lead to brain lobe disorders, making the prisoners vulnerable to confabulation — the pathological production of false memories based on suggestions from an interrogator. Those false memories mix with true information in the interrogation, making it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated. [AP]

These methods are effective.

Engaging in this debate, not by arguing whether torture is wrong or right, but by conceding the ethical/moral ground to argue instead about whether or not it is effective, is to move into the abstract, and to ask the wrong question!

It is pure folly to assume the question is, “Is this an effective way of getting true information?” The question here is, “Is this an effective torture?” And the answer to that question depends on what the torturer’s purpose is. Hence the post title.

“[L]et’s face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude.” [Obama, on every Sunday political talk show not on FOX.]

This approach hasn’t been working for me at all! In reality, the easiest way to get on television, at least in this context, is to be a powerful member of the political elite. As for those having attained the requisite status: being rude is is the least of their shortcomings.

“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” –President Obama

Ever played Risk? This is the board. You are the gray player. This turn you fortify your armies in Afghanistan, (the one with the bold border.) What’s your next move?

WE SPEND a lot of money:

Among industrialized countries, the United States spends the most on health care, both in terms of per-person costs and as a share of the economy.

Other countries such Germany, France, Switzerland and Japan have private providers and hospitals similar to the United States, but their insurance plans don’t make a profit.

In Japan, per capita costs are estimated at $2,249, half of what we spend in the United States. France, ranked in 2000 by the World Health Organization as the country with the world’s best performing healthcare system, spends $3,048 per person.

The U.S. ranked 37th in that study just above Slovenia and below Costa Rica. [Oliphant & Geiger]

Meh.

Here are the numbers. The dollar amounts are health expenditures per person (from the OECD figures for year 2007.) The numerals in parenthesis are the rankings of overall health system performance from the year 2000 WHO report mentioned above, (this was the last year WHO compiled such rankings.)

First, by expenditures:

• United States: $7290 (37)
• Norway: $4763 (11)
• Canada: $3895 (30)
• Belgium: $3462 (21)
• France: $3601 (1)
• Japan: $2581 (10)
• Finland: $2840 (31)
• United Kingdom: $2292 (18)
• Mexico: $823 (61)

And the same list again by overall performance:

• France: $3601 (1)
• Japan: $2581 (10)
• Norway: $4763 (11)
• United Kingdom: $2292 (18)
• Belgium: $3462 (21)
• Canada: $3895 (30)
• Finland: $2840 (31)
• United States: $7290 (37)
• Mexico: $823 (61)

Reader, draw your own conclusions. But consider this: If the best performing health care system in the world cost less than half of what we pay, ($3689 less per person,) and even the second biggest spender still only paid 65% of what we do, ($2527 less per person); then where is that more than $2500 extra per person going?

My mind jumps first to insurance companies’ profits. Now, here’s a business where the profit motive is to decline, as often as possible, to pay for the very services their customers are paying them to cover.

It’s the profits, stupid! And no, Obama doesn’t have the fucking answer. I’ve said it before in this space and the other, and I’ll say it again right here: What is on the table is not ‘comprehensive health care reform.’ It’s mandatory health insurance. That fucking guy wants to force you to buy health insurance, from companies whose profit motive is to decline, as often as possible, to pay for what you’re paying them for!

The above listed figures and rankings obviously notwithstanding, here’s what Obama said in his health care speech the other night:

…if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of 1 percent each year — one-tenth of 1 percent — it will actually reduce the deficit…[Obama]

Slow the growth? By just one-tenth of 1 percent? Fuck that shit. Ought to decrease spending (not growth!) by 25% (not 0.1%!)

Hat tip to Somerby for pointing out, well, almost everything referenced here.

Man, FUCK the Beatles.

Yoko Ono is a fucking hero.

Play Revolver the new Beatles, first person shooter video game! Now in stores!

Or listen to Revolver by Rage Against the Machine:

LENIN WRITES in the UK, but with the US unemployment rate at 9.7%, safe to say this holds true here also?

… There is a staggering amount of spare capacity in the economy. Existing productive resources lie unused, while social needs are unmet, because there is no profitable means by which such resources might be used. Companies are not investing, and are not hiring. The banks are still not lending, preferring to hoard funds against future shocks, because their managers do not believe there are sufficient profitable investment opportunities in the economy. This situation is actually absurd. We have, collectively, all the means we require to house, feed, educate and employ the population, but we may not dispose of those means because there is no profit in doing so. [LENIN'S TOMB]

But there’s good news out there in the economy, too. Productivity is up. It seems our “spare capacity” is on the rise. The question that occurs to me again and again, especially over long Labor Day weekends is this: Why doesn’t my productivity belong to me? See here. What gives? I’m onto you, Capitalists! You owe us. What’s it gonna be? Time? Money? Health care?

Who’s accusing who of class warfare now, you fucks?

* Might Al Schumann have a solution for the problem Lenin describes? Yes.