Friday, June 15, 2018

Pre-Existing Conditions

As pathological as it is, the current Trump administration is not operating in a vacuum. Its policies on war, institutional racism, and robbing the poor to reward the rich are part of the grand old capitalistic traditions of slavery, neocolonialism, neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

As I've written many times before, Trump and his cronies are just more upfront about braying out the hatred that the ruling class harbors against the rest of us. They take bad pre-existing things and they make them much, more worse.

Take their latest stunt of ripping immigrant children away from their parents at the border and incarcerating them in an abandoned South Texas Walmart warehouse. Since this facility is already overcrowded to bursting thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions's unilateral decision that domestic and gang violence are no longer grounds for getting refugee status, the Trumpies are busily planning tent cities to house the children as they await their unilateral deportation orders from overworked immigration rubber-stampers judges.

Don't get me wrong. It's great that liberals and even conservatives from both corporate parties are raising a ruckus about this cruelty. But where were they a couple of years ago when the Obama administration threatened to seize the children incarcerated at the Berks (Pennsylvania) Family Detention Center because their mothers were staging a hunger strike to protest the abysmal living conditions and the lack of due process? Either the women ate or they would lose their kids. So they chose to eat. Thus was the last ounce of personal agency they possessed to fight the system taken away from them. The system crushed them.

The White House press corps certainly did not appeal to Obama flack Josh Earnest's parental status to express their outrage over that particular atrocity.  Then again, Earnest didn't pull a grotesque Sarah Sanders and fall back on the Bible to explain how any cruelty can be legalized. (see: torture, capital punishment, forced feeding and solitary confinement.)

Now, to be fair, it's not that the public or the press never cared about the plight of "illegal" immigrants in this country. As recently as Memorial Day 2014, the residents of Murrieta, California turned out en mass to protest the housing of refugees in a warehouse. But there was a catch: they weren't angry because the newcomers were about to be locked up in a pre-deportation "processing center". The townsfolk were mad because they didn't want the immigrants in their town, period. They forced the Homeland Security buses filled with refugees to turn back at the town line.

Plus, in that particular well-publicized incident, the ensuing national liberal backlash was aimed not so much at Obama's cruel immigration policies, but against the conservative residents of Murrieta -- who, Trump-like, distastefully wore their xenophobia right on their sleeves.

To their credit, the corporate media are now in the forefront of protesting the Trump version of cruelty toward immigrants and refugees. The New York Times published a righteous editorial instructing readers how to "fight back" -- by calling their congress critters and joining protest marches and writing a check. Oh, and by the way, be sure to vote in those righteous Democrats in November. Because unlike the Republicans, they suddenly care so very, very deeply about refugees and immigrants. 

Meanwhile, the editorial offered absolutely no exploration of the root causes of this exodus from Central America: the poverty engendered by NAFTA; the predatory loans from Wall Street banks and the IMF to corrupt governments, often installed after CIA coups against democratic ones; the DEA-ATF-assisted drug and gang wars.

Still, the coverage is a refreshing departure from a 2012 puff piece about Obama's public relations initiative to make jails for migrants charged with minor civil offenses, like traffic tickets, resemble Holiday Inn Expresses. It was a gesture of his punitive good will. Immigration officials gave the media a guided tour of a prototypical complex in South Texas:
 Detainees will be free to move through much of the center 24 hours a day. Unarmed staff members, dressed in blue polo shirts and khaki trousers, are known as “resident advisers,” not guards....

 The 608-bed center, in Karnes County, Tex., will house male detainees who present minimal safety concerns or flight risk, officials said. The first detainees are expected to arrive in about three weeks.
Spread across 29 acres, the center is designed according to the Obama administration’s new mandates calling for greater unescorted movement and recreational opportunities in a less penal setting.
The gentler approach is immediately evident in the center’s modernist facade, which is painted in bright primary colors — a far cry from the dreary bunkerlike structures that have characterized the system.
This article is a prime example of how even a cruel policy can be effectively masked with just the right amount of pretty liberal window-dressing and sugar-coating. It also helps the cause of making punishment look benign when Republicans then turn around and complain that immigrants imprisoned for jaywalking or speeding are just getting it too good. “The administration goes beyond common sense to accommodate illegal immigrants and treats them better than citizens in federal custody,” Sen. Lamar Alexander fumed at the time.

***

Speaking of pre-existing conditions, Republicans are again making the Affordable Care Act look better than it is by threatening to remove the requirement that private insurers give coverage to chronically sick paying customers as well as healthy subscribers.

It's another made-to-order campaign talking point for corporate Democrats desperately seeking midterm votes. So naturally, neoliberal Times pundit Paul Krugman is happy to carry their outraged water for them. He fumes: 
What may seem puzzling about all this is the cruelty. O.K., Donald Trump is obviously a man utterly lacking in empathy. But don’t other Republicans feel a bit bad about the prospect of taking health care away from millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong besides having past medical problems?
Actually, no. Consider Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (and current Senate candidate), whose attorney general has joined the lawsuit to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions. While refusing to say whether he supports the suit, Scott declared, “We’ve got to reward people for caring for themselves.” Right, because if you get cancer, or arthritis, or multiple sclerosis — all among the pre-existing conditions for which people used to be denied coverage — it must be your own fault.
It's all according to how the cruelty is marketed. Republicans sell it to their base in the form of resentment against both internal interlopers and enemies at the gate, while Democrats market it as the lesser evil. Things are of necessity unpleasant now, but be patient and all will miraculously morph into the Greater Good at some fuzzy unspecified time but certainly not right this very minute. At least 30 million Americans will have to remain grossly underinsured or completely uninsured, while nearly half the population who literally can't afford to live should write a check to candidates and tide themselves over by hating Russia.

 To expect timely change or relief is to be unhealthily fixated on puppies and unicorns. So give Dems your vote!

But unhealthy obsessive ingrate that I am, I published this response to Krugman:  
The trouble with the GOP opposition to the inaptly named "Affordable" Care Act is that they're opposing a plan originally devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation. In order to distance themselves from anything with the word "Obama" in it, therefore, they have to distance themselves from themselves and move ever farther to the right.

It's the Democratic Party that is now the party of the center-right. The wealthy donors funding it wouldn't have it any other way. With more than half of the US population now favoring single payer health care, what does the DCCC do? They direct midterm candidates to refrain from using the term "single payer" in their campaign ads. They are instead tiptoeing around bait-and-switches, like Medicare buy-ins for a chosen lucky few, or a public "option" - just more opportunity for the GOP to punish the sickest and for private insurers to rake it in.

With friends like the predatory insurance cartel, who needs the GOP? Maybe that's why Nancy "Pay-Go" Pelosi posed with a Blue Cross executive this week, tweeting out: "We're fighting for you!"


Yes, the GOP is every Dickens villain rolled into one. But cathartic as it may feel to rail against the Blob from hell, doing so absent a new New Deal will not win liberals many majorities. I'm even starting to wonder if the corporate Dems are having too much fun being virtue-signaling neoliberal #Resistance fighters to care.

So I'll say it loud, say it proud, say it often: Single Payer Or Bust.

4 comments:

Anna Radicalova said...

Speaking of pre-existing conditions, did those illegals abandon homes to come here? In other words, have they voluntarily made themselves homeless or is their pre-existing homelessness the real reason they are here, not jobs? Many of them are not captured per se, they simply submit themselves for arrest after crossing. I've seen and read that for years. That makes me wonder.

We have a massive homelessness problem in this country. If you've never seen the incredible video of the encampments along the Santa Ana River Trail in Anaheim, which goes on for mile after mile, check it out (the guy who narrated said he regrets his comments). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF7hWzqdPDk

Much of the homelessness problem in this country is due to lack of affordable housing. As I watch the news coverage of the newly renovated Wal-Mart for the boys separated from their families who get clothed and fed, it strikes me that they've actually got it better than our own homeless population who are not humanely sheltered.

Where are all these lawyers (and DEMOCRATS!) when it comes to humanely sheltering our vastly greater number of homeless citizens? Don't legal citizens have rights too? We need a Constitutional amendment, a Right to Shelter - provided by the Gov't if need be-, then at least legal citizens will have the same rights as those who violate the law and aren't even citizens of this country.

Where will these illegal immigrants live if their cases are adjudicated, families re-united, and they're legally allowed to stay?

Karen Garcia said...

Right-wing populism (in the service of the elites, (not the people, of course!) is working. Donald Trump is winning, bigly. Everything has to be turned into an "either-or" situation, or more aptly, a fight of All Against All. Yes, there are homeless "native" Americans out on the streets while the refugees are least granted a roof over their heads.

So, why can't the richest country on earth take care of everybody? There can actually be a good immigration rights agenda at the same time that there can be a guaranteed housing policy. "We" can afford it, but our political leaders realize that "let them eat resentment" works almost as well as ensuring that everybody enjoys their basic human rights.

What a country.

Jay–Ottawa said...

Dilemmas from Ethics 101 often back me into a corner with their lifeboat cases and Sophie-like choices.

Try this: You come across Mother Theresa (pick another "good person" if you have problems with her) and Joseph Stalin (ditto on the "bad" side), who are starving. You give food to both in equal measure and in sufficient amounts. Which deed has more merit: feeding Mother Theresa or Stalin? Or should you have withheld food from one or the other, or at least given one preference?

Instead of Mother Theresa and Stalin, substitute a nobody citizen of your own country and a nobody illegal immigrant. To make it a tougher case, say you only have food for one of those nobodies. What do you do, in the box or out of the box?

If you play those games with consistency, one kind of answer might drag you unwillingly closer to understanding the dictum, professed by a few and practiced by virtually nobody: "Love your enemy." Or bring you closer to a similar dictum from Exodus: "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt."

Anna Radicalova said...

"Let them eat resentment." Good one.

I believe cheap labor is bottom line. Politicians don't really care about human rights.

Politicians have a mess of the immigration system, just as they've done to the tax system, creating special exceptions for people with money, special skills, from special countries, or with special relatives. The tech industry gets cheap immigrant labor under special visas, and the super-rich get in under other golden visas, but the construction and service industries have to rely on hit or miss illegal immigration. In the meantime, ordinary people abroad wait years if not decades, to finally gain citizenship after jumping through all the hoops, while those who live on the borders walk in and then demand citizenship and receive services. The system is obviously unfair and there's more than enough resentment to go around and the political parties blame each other but it's just Capitalism wreaking it's usual havoc.

Let's face it. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore" is just an advertising slogan. With Capitalism as the national religion if not sole political party as well as it's sacred cow, it's pure bull. Politicians should control the dis-ease of Capitalism to manage some of the more debilitating symptoms resulting from greed, such as widespread homelessness created by unaffordable housing. If they don't, we'll likely end up with Capitalists solving the problem with company towns, plantations, and indentured servants.

Trump does have a big heart - for cheap labor. Being a rabid Capitalist more than a politician, I believe he really does want to allow those immigrants in and become citizens as long as they provide something needed. That need list is long, ranging from military recruits to cheap menial labor, to women willing to have babies which Americans are less willing to do, and everyone in between. There's room for everyone - except in actual affordable rooms.

As far as separating families goes, that fits in with Trump's typical strong-arm tactic to force negotiations as well as to discourage other immigrants. He quickly pushes hard against his opposition to gain the upper hand so he can negotiate from a position of strength. Trump is quite good at the Capitalism game despite what Democrats say. His multiple bankruptcies are tools of the trade, wiping out debt by dumping it on the little guys. Trump is just taking advantage of every tool that his rich predecessors paid Congress to write into law. That doesn't make him a failure in business. Anyway, since most of politics is actually business, he's in his element. I believe he'll get his Wall and a new immigration policy, not for the benefit of the people but for the Capitalist imperialist machine he leads.

We need to start talking turkey, with turkey meaning Capitalism and the Big Turkey being Trump, especially regarding affordable housing in the context of the illegal immigration problem. If we let this opportunity go to waste, we'll have another, bigger crisis of homelessness down the road.