Showing posts with label deportations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deportations. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Exceptional USA: So Special, So Sick

The New York Times finally discovers what thinking people living in the real world have known all long: that Obamacare is not only not all it's cracked up to be, it's a disease unto itself. Insured Americans are still going bankrupt, getting sicker, and dying younger. (Hillary Clinton, for her part, has cold-bloodedly called such atrocities mere "glitches.")

The Times is even openly soliciting testimony about medical insurance nightmares from its readers.The lede of the front-page article is reminiscent of Rep. Alan Grayson's legendary 2009 rant on the House floor:
Here is the surest way to enjoy the peace of mind that comes with having health insurance: Don’t get sick.
The number of uninsured Americans has fallen by an estimated 15 million since 2013, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act. But a new survey, the first detailed study of Americans struggling with medical bills, shows that insurance often fails as a safety net. Health plans often require hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket payments — sums that can create a cascade of financial troubles for the many households living paycheck to paycheck. 
In the new poll, conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 20 percent of people under age 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison, 53 percent of people without insurance said the same.
These financial vulnerabilities reflect the high costs of health care in the United States, the most expensive place in the world to get sick. They also highlight a substantial shift in the nature of health insurance. Since the late 1990s, insurance plans have begun asking their customers to pay an increasingly greater share of their bills out of pocket though rising deductibles and co-payments. The Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in 2010, protected many Americans from very high health costs by requiring insurance plans to be more comprehensive, but at the same time it allowed or even encouraged increases in deductibles.
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Sick and Sicker:

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson came uncomfortably close to channeling Heinrich Himmler as he outlined his reasons for rounding up Central American refugee families for imprisonment and quick deportation back to the countries they had fled out of desperation for their very lives. Many of the deportees face almost certain death upon their return. Johnson's cold-blooded statement:
 The focus of this weekend’s operations were adults and their children who (i) were apprehended after May 1, 2014 crossing the southern border illegally, (ii) have been issued final orders of removal by an immigration court, and (iii) have exhausted appropriate legal remedies, and have no outstanding appeal or claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief under our laws. As part of these operations, 121 individuals were taken into custody, primarily from Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, and they are now in the process of being repatriated. To effect removal, most families are first being transported to one of ICE’s family residential centers for temporary processing before being issued travel documents and boarding a return flight to their home countries. 
Given the sensitive nature of taking into custody and removing families with children, a number of precautions were taken as part of this weekend’s operations. ICE deployed from around the country a number of female agents and medical personnel to take part in the operations, and, in the course of the operations, ICE exercised prosecutorial discretion in a number of cases for health or other personal reasons.
.... I know there are many who loudly condemn our enforcement efforts as far too harsh, while there will be others who say these actions don’t go far enough. I also recognize the reality of the pain that deportations do in fact cause. But, we must enforce the law consistent with our priorities. At all times, we endeavor to do this consistent with American values, and basic principles of decency, fairness, and humanity.
Contrast this to Reichsfuhrer Himmler's cold-blooded rationale for rounding up and deporting the Jews (and unlike Johnson's boasting, his speech was given in secret):
 I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over.
 As Ian Buruma writes in Theater of Cruelty, "Evil deeds are often committed by people who have convinced themselves that they are doing something good. When Heinrich Himmler told his audience of SS officers in Posen in 1943 that 'exterminating' the Jews was a necessary duty carried out 'for the love of our people,' he was most probably sincere. No doubt he reveled in his own power, but I don't think he was evil for the sake of being evil. Himmler was not Satan, but a repellent human being with the means to put mad and murderous fantasies into practice."

Likewise, Jeh Johnson can ease his alleged conscience by adding social workers and medical personnel to his own de facto extermination squads. He sends "illegal" people to their deaths in the sincere belief that he is acting purely from decent and humane principles, for the love of Exceptional America.

Likewise, if millions of the beloved American people who are allowed to remain in the Homeland by virtue of their birth on American soil go broke, suffer and die prematurely through a lack of basic medical care, then the architects and defenders of the Affordable Care Act are smug in the knowledge that at least they are giving mercy to a chosen, select few. The unlucky others have been simply designated as necessary internal deportees. Despite Obamacare, as many as 17,000 legal Americans are still dying unnecessarily every single year. That is a feature, not a bug.

  Internal and external deportees are what the neoliberal thought-collective, the cold-blooded cullers of the herd, euphemize as the collateral damage of their "hard choices."

Sick, sicker, sickest.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Playlists and Slayrides

I realized that the holiday news hole was a great big gaping maw when President Obama's release of his playlist of Christmas tunes stopped the presses right in their tracks. The cool president is into cool jazz! Who knew?

White House Christmas playlists: Did Obama and Biden choose ...

Christian Science Monitor-Dec 24, 2015
President Obama's playlist confirms that he 'is the only American president you could reliably trust to DJ a party.' Joe Biden's list is, well, just so ...
Listen on Spotify: The Obamas' and Bidens' Holiday Playlists
Highly Cited-The White House (blog)-Dec 23, 2015
With These Spotify Playlists, the Obamas and Bidens Have ...
Blog-Wall Street Journal (blog)-Dec 23, 2015
Explore in depth (289 more articles)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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So while I was exploring the Obama Family's tunes in depth, there came with a clatter the much less cool news that his administration also chose Christmas Week to announce that hundreds of Central American refugee families are to be raided and deported within weeks or even days. As we speak, Homeland Security is out there in force, spotifying all those asylum-seekers and ruining their celebrations.

 Who would ever have guessed that Obama, right after enthusing that A Charlie Brown Christmas was his absolute fave, and right after announcing the deportations, could then be so utterly cynical as to utter these unctuous words during his annual Yuletide greeting?
Today, like millions of Americans and Christians around the world, our family celebrates the birth of Jesus and the values He lived in his own life. Treating one another with love and compassion. Caring for those on society’s margins: the sick and the hungry, the poor and the persecuted, the stranger in need of shelter – or simply an act of kindness.
That’s the spirit that binds us together – not just as Christians, but as Americans of all faiths. It’s what the holidays are about: coming together as one American family to celebrate our blessings and the values we hold dear.
Talk about pulling away the Charlie Brown football! It seems that Obama and his team don't view families fleeing drug and gang violence in organized crime/CIA/DEA-destabilized countries (just like Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus fleeing Herod) as victims deserving of shelter. Ditto for Hillary Clinton, fresh off her own truncated tour as Everybody's Abuela (Mexican grandma.) The audiences laughed her right off the figurative stage, because they don't care for being "Hispandered" to. Plus, the campaign publicity shot of "Abuela Hillary" reading to children looks more like a torture chamber than a cozy grandmotherly bonding session. She seems incapable of making eye contact with her bored little subjects-in-bondage, even for crass propaganda purposes.


She reads to you before bedtime … 


20151221_blog_abuelareading
Hasta La Vista, Baby!
 
 At least Obama has the sense not to call himself Tío Bendito as he rounds them up and kicks them all out while the tinsel is still fresh on the tree. He's always been more godfatherly than avuncular that way. As he schmoozed to Katie Couric during his first campaign, the sexy Marlon Brando-ish combination of "gentility and savagery" is what really turns him on, is what he really strives to emulate. He comes right out and admits that his idea of a cool family is the Mafia. This clip should help you understand what he means, exactly, when he talks about Family Values:




.
Although Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have both immediately condemned Obama's mass rub-outs deportations, Hillary has stayed mum.... grandly mum. But like Boss Obama, she has always been savagely critical of "irresponsible" desperate parents who've chosen to send their kids to El Norte in lieu of them getting raped or killed by gangs and paramilitary thugs. Those moms and dads and abuelas have to be sent a sternly worded message. Hillary even championed the imprisonment of women and children in Homeland Security "family detention centers" until Bernie Sanders  introduced a bill last summer to close them, and she was forced to don her flip-flops once again. Even then, it wasn't the refugees' freedom that she was espousing. It was their expulsion
 Now I think we have a different problem,” she said. “Because the emergency is over, we need to be moving to try to get people out of these detention centers, particularly the women and children. I think we need more resources to process them, to listen to their stories, to find out if they have family in this country, if they have a legitimate reason for staying. So I would be putting a lot of resources into doing that, but my position has been and remains the same.”  (send them all back.)
As a matter of fact, it was the judicially-ordered release of the detainees from these gulags earlier this year that convinced Obama that if he can't lock them up, he'll just have to kick them out. Even the ankle bracelets he fitted them out with (at their own expense, with jewelry rentals payable to the private prison industry) didn't give him the peace of mind that he so obviously craves. Aiding the poor and the persecuted apparently has limits, even for him. Especially during an election year, when corporate Democrats think they have to act as tough and monstrous as the Republicans in order to get angry white people to the polls.

 Heaven forbid that Donald Trump should steal the genteel, savagely responsible scapegoat vote away from Hillary Clinton.


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