Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Health Care, Not Wealth Care

The New York City Police Department has just issued an urgent bulletin, warning corporate CEOs that "kill lists" bearing their names and other information have begun appearing online.

This is an outrage, given that everybody should know that only presidents are permitted to possess kill lists for the extrajudicial assassination of alleged terrorists with remote control Predator drones. Mere citizen  Luigi Mangione sure had some nerve summoning up his inner Barack Obama and devising his own "disposition matrix" to rationalize the killing of United HealthCare executive Brian Thompson last week.

So understandably, these CEOS are scrambling to beef up their own private security details. When even the NYPD - the de facto seventh largest army in the world -  is not sufficient to protect the ruling class racketeers, it's time to admit that yes, Virgnia, there really is a class war. And contrary to billionaire Warren Buffett's smug claim that "my class is winning," the tables have abruptly turned.

No longer are Americans being gaslit into believing that if they go bankrupt when they get sick, it must be their own damn fault for trying to game the "health care" system by having the nerve to seek precious treatment when they so irresponsibly get sick or hurt.

The powers-that-be are in a real tizzy, doing their utmost to proclaim that the vast majority of US citizens are terrorists for not feeling properly sympathetic  that an insurance predator was gunned down in cold blood. That whole "but he was a family man" excuse is falling on deaf ears, when it does not evoke howls of contemptuous laughter.

A couple of senators have finally "broken their silence" on the killing. If you thought they would be running scared of their own constituents, or hurriedly reintroducing Meducare For All legislation, you'd best hink again.

Instead, Elizabeth "I'm a capitalist to my bones" Warren is reintroducing a bill called "Make Capitalism Accountable." The very title is a prima facie oxymoron, given that capitalism by its very nature exists only to lie, cheat, steal, plunder and grow without limit until it destroys itself and the planet. The title is just another stale campaign slogan, even evoking the right wing's "Make America Great Again" propaganda.

For his own part, Bernie Sanders repeated his M4A stump speech in the same breath that he condemned the "vile" killing of the CEO, lest he lose his standing invite to appear regularly on the "health care" industry-sponsored Sunday talk shows to give them a patina of fairness and responsibility.

They should actually introduce a bill that changes the name of United Health Care and the other organized crime cartels that are sickening and killing thousands of people every single day. How about "Entitled Wealth Care?" Because that is exactly what it is.

And I really wish that the mealy-mouthed pundits and polticians would stop complaining that the the "health care" system is broken, when everybody knows it's fixed.

And for all those establishment critics bemoaning the elevation of Luigi Mangione into folk hero or Robin Hood status, just take a look at Andrew Witty, the CEO of Entitled Wealth Care's parent company. This is the guy who was caught on video trying to justify his cartel's denial of about a third of all claims by claiming that one out of every three people accessing medical care do so fraudulently. Besides being a nation of unsympathetic terrorists, we apparently have nothing better to do with our lives than to waste time getting unnecessary treatment for, say, stage four cancer.

Before devising his own kill lists, this native Briton got a lot of practice as Robin Hood's nemesis, thesheriff of Nottingham, working in Big Pharma and advising such right-wing pols as David Cameron and Boris Johnson on various witty ways to privatize the National Health Service. Oh, and he also served a stint as the real-life chancellor of Nottingham University.

Monday, December 2, 2024

The Pardoner's Tale

That a ruler or priest can be both a hypocrite and moralizer has been true throughout human history.  

Thus has Joe Biden embraced his inner Chaucerian Pardoner in issuing his son Hunter a full pardon for any crime he may or may not have committed in the past decade. No matter that Hunter was never charged in direct co connection with his work for a gas company in Ukraine. where his then-vice president daddy was de facto viceroy, ordering that poor country to raise its retirement age, discontinue energy subsidies for its citizens, and otherwise impose austerity measures while Hunter raked in millions.

Some liberals are upset  mainly because Hunter got a pass on his federal gun possession conviction, a pass which may put a dent in future gun control legislation. These are the same liberals, mind you, who have no qualms sending arms to Israel for its ongoing genocide.

And as for the Republicans, their own hypocrisy in going after the Bidens is demonstrated on a daily basis by shielding the rank criminality of not a few of Donald Trump's capitalist cronies and even Donald Trump himself.

As far as elite malefactors are concerned, it is hard not to notice that the prosecutors and the pardoners end up just canceling each other out.  After a lot of moralizing and manufactured outrage theater, of course. 

So when Trump vows that hewill pardon a whole ton of people in revenge for Hunter, it will not be the tens or even hundreds of thousands of mainly black men who Biden has helped imprison for minor drug offenses by virtue of his  racist 1990s crime bill.

The hypocrisy continues as Biden made an official trip to Angola in West Africa, ostensibly to pledge the building of a rail route from the interior for the easy transport of precious minterals that US firms need for electronics and, of course, weaponry. While there, Biden will ostentatiously tour the country's slavery museum. This feeble, hypocritical gesture is a poor substitute for any actual monetary reparations for the descendants of African slaves, who for generations since the Civil War have suffered disproportionately as a direct result of slavery and Jim Crow... and Biden's crime legislation.

So while Joe Biden's pardon of his son might be nauseating, it should not be surprising. By pardoning his son, he was also shielding himself from any future chargesrelating to influence-peddling or even worse.

If, by any chance that he is also accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, there's already a US law on the books that will send in the military to rescue any US official held in The Hague for war crimes.

As Chaucer's Pardoner protested back in that 14th century chronicle: "What? Think you that because I'm good at preaching/And win me gold and silver by my teaching/I'll live of my own free will in poverty?/No, no that's never been my policy!"