Impeachment In a Can

For one brief shining moment on Saturday, the Trump show trial actually threatened to turn into the real deal, with testimony from real human witnesses to enhance the speeches. The disturbing film footage of the Capitol riot, complemented by Trump's own spittle-inflected incitement voiceover, should have been a prima facie case for unanimous conviction. But that would have meant that the acquitting GOP senators' own lust for power and fear of Trump took second place to meting out justice.

Then, just as suddenly as the Democratic impeachment managers moved to extend Impeachment 2.0 into a case that even the most hardened Republican would be forced to squirm through, they folded. It seems that the Senators of both sides of the Duopoly have so much love in their hearts that they simply could not bear to miss Valentine's Day at home. Also, with such a prolonged exercise in justice that human witnesses and other supplementary evidence would entail, Joe Biden would be thwarted from his sublime reaching across the aisle and making friendly deals with some of the same 47 GOP senators who had just voted to acquit Donald Trump, giving their tacit stamp of approval to an attempted coup.

Now, to be fair, an extension of the trial would also have opened the door for Republicans to call their own witnesses. Nancy Pelosi, for example, would have been raked over the coals, forced to answer why she didn't request beefed up police protection for her members on that fateful day, despite plenty of warnings of mob violence. It also would have opened up the dreaded Hunter Biden can of worms.

Therefore, the public is being asked to empathize with the Democrats' political dilemma and to actually believe that justice will eventually prevail once the Dems get around to congressional investigations into the insurrection - after of course, they pass Covid relief, accomplish immigration reform, address the climate catastrophe and "do" health care.

In other words, politicians on both sides of the aisle will give each other cover as they try keep their respective rancid cans of worms glued firmly shut until they finally rust and crumble into the memory hole of nothingness.

 And meanwhile, the media will do its own part of making the story about all the "breakout stars" of Impeachment Theater, and how the show trial was, at its very essence, their audition for higher office.

"Though impeachment is an inherently political process," as Politico dishes in a piece about the latest manufactured group of rising stars to entertain and seduce and distract the viewing public,"elected officials typically don't like to admit that working as a manager can come with electoral benefits. They were required to walk a careful line when making the case that Trump incited a mob at the U.S. Capitol. Still, strategists from both sides of the aisle acknowledged their roles likely furthered their careers."

Not that the legacy stars didn't also have their moment in the sun. Nancy Pelosi theatrically "crashed" the post-acquittal press conference of Democratic impeachment managers to deliver yet another bravura performance of a "scathing" indictment of Republican cowards, while demurring that "it had not been my intention to come for this press availability."

Since the show must always go on, the national corporate media are either already camped out at Mar-a-Lago or en route in order to cover the widely anticipated opening act of Donald Trump's Revenge Tour  Refusing to cover him is not an option for the press, because their clicks and ratings have dropped so precipitously since he left office. Film of an empty podium at his gilded Florida palace is bound to attract more eyeballs than the latest White House press briefing, Since Biden Spin Doctor Jen Psaki has asked that reporters submit their questions in advance, the better for her to answer them truthily and transparently, there is no longer even that element of unscripted surprise and comedic improv so essential for the maintenance of good ratings.

While the corporate media performers are attempting to stave off the boredom and tedium of not having Trump fill their empty spaces, they're promoting daughter in law Lara Trump's quest for a North Carolina senate seat and drumming up publicity for daughter Ivanka's own moves to oust Marco Rubio in the Florida senatorial primary. Because no matter how tainted, political dynasties must never be allowed to die. 

In other news, a study by the esteemed British journal Lancet reveals that fully 40 percent of all Covid deaths in the US could have been prevented. These deaths are not only attributable to the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration, they are the direct result of the free-market neoliberalism of the last 40 years, not to mention the colonial and imperialistic roots of American society itself.

One of the Lancet group's prescriptions, sensibly enough, is the implementation of single payer health care in the United States. But it can't even get a theatrical floor vote in the Democratic-controlled House. And Biden has infamously vowed to veto such a measure, commonly known as Medicare For All, should it ever reach his desk.

There are too many rusted cans in the landfill known as American democracy to count. And don't even get me started on the worms.

Democratic Health Care Plan Is a Gift to Predatory Insurers

There's an old saying in vampire lore that if you don't want to get bitten, then don't let the bloodsuckers in.

The Democrats just invited another vampire in.

 The "task force" created by presumptive nominee Joe Biden and his good friend Bernie Sanders in order to coat the party's corporate agenda with that all-important "unity gloss" has just released its aspirational agenda to much media fanfare.

"It's the clearest sign yet that the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party are trying to unite far more than they did in 2016," gushed the New York Times article lauding the "six takeaways" that prove beyond any doubt that progressives are the big winners of some very tasty crumbs and should be properly bedazzled by comity in high places.

This narrative is being spun despite the fact that Medicare For All has officially been declared D.O.A. right in the middle of the pandemic.  Even if the Democrats achieve another super-majority in 2021, the best of all possible worlds will stop at a public option, lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, and maybe throwing in some dental and hearing aid coverage for the lucky winners.

The Task Force's answer to the abjectly failed United States policy of tying people's health insurance to their employment is to raise US health care costs to astronomical new levels by subsidizing the private insurance policies of the tens of millions of workers thrown out of their jobs by Covid-19. The insurance companies, which have already posted record profits this year because people are too afraid of catching the virus to seek medical care, and because hospitals have cancelled elective surgeries and other costly procedures, stand to become even richer during a Biden administration.

Now, about the Dems inviting the vampire in. Covered by the usual dark cloak of subterfuge, the blood-sucking anti-Single Payer insurance lobby managed to get its own seat at the Task Force's health policy table - which, just like a spider, is comprised of eight members.

The invitee was one Chris Jennings, a fellow of the corporate think tank ominously known as the Bipartisan Policy Center.  BPP's current head honcho and co-founder is notorious insurance industry lobbyist Tom Daschle. Jennings, a veteran of the both the Clinton and Obama administrations, also runs his own boutique consulting firm which advises for-profit health care systems and their various "stakeholders."

If the Dems have anything to say about it, these ravenous profiteers will never actually see the sharp end of the stake themselves.

Jennings' website brags that "he has consistently worked to develop administrative, legislative, and private sector policies/interventions to ensure better stewardship of and a greater return on investment on the nation’s nearly $3 trillion investment in health care."

It's therefore perfectly natural that the health care section of the Biden-Sanders Task Force would precede its prescriptions with showering praise on the Affordable Care Act. If it were not for Trump and those nasty old Republicans, we would be even closer to the ultimate goal of affordable, for-profit health care for everybody!

"Democrats will always fight to save Americans’ lives by making it easier and more affordable to go to the doctor, get prescription medicines, and access preventive testing and treatments. Our policy agenda is designed to produce real results for the American people—not hollow platitudes," the eight members in thrall to the Bipartisan Policy Lobby assure us in platitudes that are not hollow at all, but filled to the absolute brim with wads and gobs of the usual neoliberal stuffing.

How do you substitute "access" for guaranteed care that is free at the point of entry? Let us count the ways. The apparent task of the Task Force is to use the word Access over and over again in hopes of numbing us to the word's nothingness as effectively as the Trump administration is openly striving to numb us to the daily nightmare of millions of people succumbing to Covid-19.

For people who risk losing their insurance coverage if they lose their jobs in this pandemic, Democrats believe the federal government should pick up 100 percent of the tab for COBRA insurance, which keeps people on their employer-sponsored plans. For those who are still unemployed or do not have access to employer-sponsored health care when their COBRA eligibility period expires and are eligible for premium-free coverage, we will take action to automatically roll them over to other coverage options, so they do not experience any gap in health care. We will also re-open the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, even outside of the normal open enrollment season, and expand subsidies to make it easier for people to buy coverage.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, we must never lose our status as consumers of health care product. Even on our death-beds and even to our dying breaths, we must never forget the neoliberal mantra of "but how am I going to pay for that?"

Democrats will also make available on the marketplace a platinum-level, federally administered health insurance option with low fees and no deductibles, so that everyone will have access to this high-quality, low-cost plan. Low-income Americans will be automatically enrolled in this federally-administered option at zero cost to them. We will keep these emergency measures in place until the pandemic ends and unemployment falls significantly. And should the United States find itself in another pandemic or severe economic downturn in the future, these protections will again be made automatically available, so Americans are never again left to fend for themselves in times of crisis.

So  even if you manage to recover from Covid-19 but later come down with cancer or another life-endangering disease, you will immediately revert back to desperate "but how am I going to pay for that!" mode. Platinum is expensive and insurance executives and private equity moguls have to profit so as to afford their yachts and jets.

As if to bipartisanly prove that Republicans have no corner on the prevarication market, the Democratic Task Masters of the Universe proffer this nonsense:

Democrats believe we need to protect, strengthen, and build upon our bedrock health care programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Affairs system. Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. 

 Notwithstanding that the public option, rather than advocacy for Single Payer, is negotiating from a starting point of weakness, such a plan would in no way give private insurers the incentive to do right by Americans. Just the opposite, in fact : a public option would absolve private insurers from paying for coverage for the sickest among us. This might reduce premiums for a time, but it would do nothing to drive down costs. The public option would be just one more subsidy for Aetna, Blue Cross and United Health, given that the bulk of their paying customers would now be in the healthy, low-risk pool.

To be fair, there are indeed faint echoes of Bernie Sanders's voice here and there within the Task Force report. An example that might have come straight out of his campaign stump speech:

Too many Americans struggle to afford the prescription drugs they need to get or stay healthy. No American should find themselves foregoing or rationing medications because they can’t afford to pay—especially when taxpayers’ money underwrites the research and development of many prescription drugs in the first place. Democrats will take aggressive action to ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people in other advanced economies. We will empower Medicare to at last be able to negotiate prescription drug prices for all public and private purchasers—for families and businesses, as well as older Americans—no matter where they get their coverage. We will also ensure and enforce that the price of brand-name and outlier generic drugs cannot rise faster than the inflation rate. We will cap out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors, and ensure that effective treatments for chronic health conditions are available at little or no cost. 

But again, the emphasis is on purchasing power, not on the right to receive health care. We'll still pay through the nose, but the rate at which we pay through the nose will be slowed down a tad under Democrats. Freedom's just another word for capitalism having nothing left to lose, what with a whole dying world to keep on exploiting. 

It's a good thing that copyright laws do not apply to book titles. Mary Trump's ballyhooed "Too Much Is Never Enough" takedown of her Uncle Donald is already the veritable motto of bloodsucking capitalism itself.

Trump is just the symptom. Cutting him out in November might ease the pain for a minute, but the cure for what ails us will never come from a neoliberal restoration of corporate Democrats.

Bernie Sanders claiming that Joe Biden "wants to be the most progressive president ince FDR" is like the Nobel Committee giving Droner-in-Chief Barack Obama its Peace Prize. It's not only purely aspirational, it's downright delusional.

$ound and Fury At the Democratic Debate

On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control warned that the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) will inevitably hit the US with an historic vengeance, both the inept CBS moderators and the "moderate" candidates on Tuesday night's stage nevertheless persisted in castigating Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All campaign platform.

Maybe once people start dying in the street by the thousands because they can't afford a doctor visit or a day off from work when symptoms hit or they've become exposed, maybe once our consolidated for-profit "health care systems" (hospitals) become unable to cope with a possible epidemic, maybe once children can no longer attend school, the neoliberal Ruling Class Racketeers will finally stop asking "But how you gonna pay for it!?!" 

Maybe once the lords and ladies of capitalism themselves become inconvenienced, they might belatedly realize that their selfishness comes with a high price. Guaranteed universal health care would not only help the sick, it would also trickle up to maintain the fortunes and health of the wealthy.

All the boutique hospitals and all the concierge healh care in the world will not shield the rich from being infected by the hoi polloi or even by the private medical personnel they pay so handsomely to attend exclusively to their needs and to their needs only.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lloyd Blankfein could go down gasping that he'll vote for Trump in the next life, and smarmy Pete Buttigieg will be doing his Obama impersonation and "turning the page" in that great McKinsey consulting corner office in the sky, and Chris Matthews' nightmares of Bernie Central Park executions will follow him right into the corporate media bardo green room.

But back to Tuesday night's South Carolina debate, of which I do have one nice thing to say. And that one nice thing is that CBS made it readily available for viewing on YouTube. Unlike in last week's NBC/Comcast spectacular, I didn't even have to download a special app so that they could send me ads to enhance my experience. I was able to cast the show right to my cable-free TV instead of peering at it on my cheap smartphone. The train-wreck became almost life-size. And sound-wise, it was even screechingly larger than life.

Michael Bloomberg, whose $60 billion fortune will immunize him from neither infectious disease nor from the epidemic viral video clips covering his entire predatory career, had the best revelatory line not only in the debate but possibly also in his whole predatory career. Scoffing at Joe Biden's boast that he'd helped turn the House of Representatives blue in 2018, Bloomberg drawled in that trademark nasal monotone of his:

"Let's go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats - 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the Democrats that came in put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave Congress the ability to control the president. I bough - I got them."

It might appear at first glance that Bloomberg spent his millions in bribes unwisely, given that not only have his handpicked political servants failed utterly to "control" Trump, they have given him most of what he wants, from his anti-immigrant militarized border, to his pro-corporate reworking of NAFTA, to his grotesque Space Force, and $700 billion for his expanded war machine, to even most of his right-wing judicial nominations. In other words, they gave Bloomberg everything he wanted.

If you think Bloomberg is in the race primarily to defeat Trump, think again. He's here to defeat Bernie the nominee. Failing that, he'll try to defeat Bernie the president.

In case you were confused when the audience erupted in cheers upon Bloomberg's Freudian slip acknowledging that he is one of the country's leading oligarchs in full control of the corrupt American duopoly,rest assured that the audience was largely comprised of his fellow oligarchs, as well as the various lackeys, consultants and others he had paid handsomely to be there for him. They, in turn, had paid the Democratic Party the hefty exclusive price of admission to the extravaganza. Tickets ranged from $1,750 to $3,200.

Since the manufactured outrage over Bernie's past praise of Cuba's literacy rate under Fidel Castro nearly caused the debate stage to spontaneously combust, there was sadly not enough time to discuss the climate catastrophe that is rapidly combusting the actual world. 

The inept CBS "journalists" who failed so miserably to moderate the immoderate flamed-out centrists sucking up all the oxygen on the stage also failed miserably to bring up the name of journalist Julian Assange, whose treatment as a joint US-UK political prisoner has more than a passing resemblance to the show trials common in 1930s Stalinist Russia. 

Only hours before the debate aired, news emerged that on the first day (Monday) of his extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder had been handcuffed, stripped naked and had his case records confiscated in order to prevent him from appearing and taking part in his own trial.

Because Assange exposed US war crimes, and because the CIA had him under surveillance while he was living in exile at the Ecuador embassy, and because the CIA is also actively interfering in the current presidential election by linking both Trump and Sanders to "Russian interference," and because both the Democratic Party and the corporate media airing the debates have an intimate working relationship with this unaccountable fourth branch of government, it was probably deemed much safer to let the red-baiting of Bernie proceed as scheduled.

And since the"Intelligence Community" has, as Senate Minority Chuck Schumer acknowledged in an epic Freudian slip worthy of Bloomberg, "six ways from Sunday to get back at him (Trump)" if he doesn't kowtow to the CIA, Bernie himself is taking no unnecessary chances. He already has been "briefed." And he appears to have received the message loud and clear that he'd best go along to get along with the contrived and diversionary Russiagate Narrative by issuing the required obligatory denunciations of Vladimir Putin.

Bernie could well win the nomination and then beat Trump. But the Surveillance State, birthed some 70 years ago by the very plutocratic establishment  ("The Georgteown Set") whose ideological heirs he so vociferously campaigns against, will still be calling most of the shots.

When Concern-Trolling Oligarchs Attack

One way that hospital CEOs justify their increasingly obscene pay packages is to market the hospitals they run as "health systems" instead of hospitals. This is especially true when a private corporation (Continuum Health Partners) buys up several struggling charity hospitals at bargain basement prices and then merges them all into one behemoth.
They justify enriching themselves and their shareholders off the backs of the poor and the sick by occasionally voicing great concern for their treat-and-dump clientele. They run expensive ad campaigns, including videos which aired during the televised Academy Awards show.

One of the easier and more cost-effective ways to accomplish this onerous marketing task, though, is to publish an ad disguised as an op-ed in the New York Times.

And lest the wealthy Wall Street investors in Kenneth L. Davis's Mount Sinai Health System conglomerate of providers become unduly concerned about his concern for the poor, he enlisted as his Times co-author one of the best friends that Wall Street ever had: former Treasury Secretary and Citibank CEO Robert Rubin. There hasn't been this much deference to the sensitivities of the rich since 2015, when Mount Sinai officially dropped the Roosevelt name from the Roosevelt Hospital it subsumed in the interests of cost-cutting.

The gist of their concern-trolling Times piece is this: If only the poor and the sick didn't live in such crappy housing situations and had more to eat, then the poor and the sick wouldn't be straining our country's precious for-profit Health Systems to the absolute breaking point!

Now, why didn't we think of that before Rubin and Davis deigned to enlighten us about their awesome discovery, which seemingly ranks right up there with the unearthing of King Tut's Tomb? And to get us properly prepped for the absolute genius of their Eureka moment, the Times even cooperatively headlines the piece: "A Secret to Better Health Care."

D'oh!

Rubin and Davis start out by honestly admitting that American Health Systems are indeed a complete mess. But that mess is really the fault of other systems, such as the food stamp system and the housing system.

If our spending on social programs were (sic) more in line with other developed countries, our health care costs would fall. That means that as policymakers evaluate a social program, they should weigh not only its direct and second-order benefits — from reducing crime and recidivism to increasing productivity — but also its effect on lowering federal health care costs.

This demonizes the poor and the sick by conflating poverty and illness with crime. We must spend more on social programs, not because it is the right and the humane thing to do,  but because a little extra spending on poor people is better for the bottom line of both the System and the investor class. The goal is to get the laggards producing.

The impetus, or hook, for this op-ed appears to be the case of a recently-released Mount Sinai System patient who became trapped in his New York high-rise apartment when the elevator broke down. A System social worker prevailed upon management to make repairs, because the patient otherwise would have been unable to score his heart failure medication and (if he survived) then put an even greater strain on The System with a premature readmission and even possible denial of his untimely insurance claim.

If the System can suggest better nutrition and housing for its customers, it will also be less prone to lawsuits for releasing them too soon into horrible living conditions. It will help absolve them of responsibility when System management shows itself willing to suggest in the New York Times that mold be ameliorated and elevators repaired.

But no concern-trolling neoliberal manifesto could ever be complete without the oligarchs also insisting that the crime-prone lazy poor and sick also have some "skin in the game." Citing a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, Rubin and Davis continue:

And once in stable housing, beneficiaries can better pursue public benefits and job opportunities.The Los Angeles program showed even greater cost savings, according to a study by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation. After receiving housing assistance, beneficiaries’ costs to the public health system plummeted. Inpatient services fell by 75 percent. Over all, the study found that, even accounting for the increased housing costs, recipients’ total social service and health care costs fell by 20 percent. And beneficiaries showed signs of reduced involvement in crime and improved mental health.

Notice how smoothly they pivot from the trapped man with heart failure to the miracle of all those sick and poor people suddenly getting law-abiding and spry and enthused about finding a job, and without the government even having to implement a federal jobs system with a living wage!

It's just too bad that the Times's big reveal of The System's Secret to Health doesn't also clue us in about the location of all those wonderful job opportunities. But as long as the message is bipartisan or nonpartisan, it's just got to be good. For rich people, especially.

My published response to the New York Times:

This column is so rich.

Pssst... want to know the real secret? The US oligarchy doesn't want our market-based mess of a health care system to be replaced by guaranteed single payer insurance.

 But rather than come right out and admit it, Mr. Rubin recommends a little stitch here and a little stitch there to repair a tattered social safety net that, it just so happens, he had a large role in shredding back when he was one of Bill Clinton's main economic advisers.

It was Rubin who also urged Clinton to work with House Speaker Newt "Contract With America" Gingrich to dismantle welfare. It was Rubin who wanted Social Security privatized. Thank goodness that our great national heroine, Monica Lewinsky, came along when she did and ruined that scheme before tens of millions of precarious lives were further ruined in the selfish interests of Wall Street.

 Thanks to deficit hawks like Rubin and 40 years of neoliberal austerity, our average national life expectancy has plummeted for the third straight year. If our oligarchic "thought leaders" really cared, they'd also be espousing enhanced Social Security benefits and better legal protections for tenants against greedy landlords. Decent housing shouldn't be limited to fixing broken elevators and slapping bleach on moldy walls. The rents are too damned high!

  Mr. Davis,co-author of this piece, is among the highest paid hospital CEOs, his compensation having risen to $12 million in 2017. 

Wealth inequality is the real killer.

As Dean Baker points out, Robert Rubin also was behind the 1990s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act deregulating Wall Street, which led to the collapse of the housing market in 2008, and the subsequent evictions of 10 million people from their homes. Rubin made a personal fortune from the bursting of the housing bubble. Most people have never recovered.

Was the man trapped in his apartment and suffering heart failure also a victim of Rubin's policies? Was he living in substandard housing because Wall Street had forced him out of his original home when he lost his job and couldn't pay the rent or the mortgage?

The New York Times op-ed doesn't say. 

It's a secret.

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.

Commentariat Central: Red Scare, Healthscare

Facebook and its billionaire leaders are the latest casualties of the Russia Fake News scare campaign. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg now admits that a relatively small portion of the millions of political ads on his social media platform have been financed and placed by Russian operatives. Congress is investigating, and the corporate media is pearl-clutching. It's great distracting publicity to help hide the all-American stuff, like the enhanced military aggression and the domestic kleptomania (as in the epic Equifax breach) going on right under our noses.

The ever-reliable Washington Post is doing its part to ramp up Red Scare Redux by publishing a "scoop" which has Barack Obama trying to rehabilitate his erstwhile "soft on Russia" reputation. The planted narrative is that the former president secretly took Zuckerberg aside last year to sternly and explicitly warn him that the Kremlin was infecting the Silicon Valley Empire, and by extension, America itself. The Facebook wunderkind then stubbornly sat on his little techie hands for months before reluctantly coming clean and admitting that he and his band of geniuses had been asleep at the switch.

He's taking one for the Military/Industrial Complex team. He can afford to.

(An interesting aside: Craig Timberg, one of the three reporters who wrote this story, was also the conduit for the nasty and anonymous "PropOrNot" smear campaign which blacklisted several left-leaning websites last year.)

The same media which has long elevated Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg to godlike status because of their self-serving philanthrocapitalism and their awesome intellects and and their high-finance  political clout are ganging up and knocking them right back down again. Pundits acting in the interests of Russophobia have suddenly discovered that Facebook is pretty much a pyramid scheme whose shocking essential aim is to suck money from its billions of worldwide members as it callously monetizes social relationships. When you've been named as a Russian dupe, all bets are suddenly off, and the media/political Protection Racket is no longer willing to protect and celebrate your outsize capitalistic greed.

Overnight, you have become a dangerous secret agent, the latest scapegoat in the "Clinton Wuz Robbed" blame campaign.

Sheryl Sandberg, celebrated protegee of Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and reputedly Hillary's pick to lead the Treasury Department in the event of a Clinton Restoration, has agreed to keep a closer watch on things in the interests of the Democratic Party/Neocon Republican alliance. She has promised to guard the country from any further Putin damage, in the form of "divisive" racist and xenophobic ads aimed at the subset of racist and xenophobic Facebook clientele."It's on us," she said in yet another variation of the Mistakes Were Made Concerto in D Minor.

Mark Zuckerberg, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd warns, is a Dr. Frankenstein who has already created one Trump monster and who therefore must be stopped before he does even more damage:

 The idea of Mark Zuckerberg running for president was always sort of scary.

But now it’s really scary, given what we’ve discovered about the power of his little invention to warp democracy.

All these years, the 33-year-old founder of Facebook has been dismissive of the idea that social media and A.I. could be used for global domination — or even that they should be regulated....

 Days after Donald Trump pulled out his disorienting win, Zuckerberg told a tech conference that the contention that fake news had influenced the election was “a pretty crazy idea,” showing a “profound lack of empathy” toward Trump voters.

But all the while, the company was piling up the rubles and turning a blind eye as the Kremlin’s cyber hit men weaponized anti-Hillary bots on Facebook to sway the U.S. election. Russian agents also used Facebook and Twitter trolls, less successfully, to try to upend the French election.

Evidence? Who needs any stinkin' evidence to write a Russophobic newspaper column these days? French intelligence officials announced months ago that they found no evidence of Kremlin hacking in that country's recent election. Still, these corporate-sponsored legends always have a strange Goebbelsian way of infiltrating the great public hive-mind. The trick is in the relentless repetition.

Dowd's professed horror has not, however, gone so far as to remove her standard end-of-column blurb which urges readers to  "Join me on Facebook."

Now, with my recent sad history of getting my Times comments scrubbed on account of harshness, and because I am not a Facebook fan anyway, I was able to choose my words more carefully with the following published submission:

 I signed up for Facebook several years ago when the NYT made it a (wisely short-lived) requirement for verified commentary.

I gave FB the bare minimum personal info: my name and gender. And I never went back.

I know this might seem radical, but how about a mass FB boycott? Surely, there must be other ways to share gossip and baby photos. Since they're only interested in making money off us, and money is the only language that they seem to understand, maybe they'll really start perking up their cute little digital ears if their masses of human food suddenly disappear off their plates.

Quitting will be very hard, because FB (and Twitter) is a real physical addiction. Studies show that for every "like," or new follower, or re-tweet, your brain gets a nice little jolt of dopamine.

And besides the awful prospect of getting a President Zuckerberg, there's also the danger of the anti-fake news crusade careening off into some really reactionary Joe McCarthy territory. Google has already adjusted its search engine algorithm to suppress legitimate left-leaning sites as well as Nazi groups.

A shadowy group called "PropOrNot" lists some 200 purported Russia-influenced sites. Trouble is, along with the rabid hate blogs, they also included such well-regarded progressive sites as TruthOut and Truthdig as "possible" conduits of Kremlin agit-prop.

So just who gets to decide what's real, and what's fake?

We have to stay vigilant, against both fakery and against censorship.

***

Now, moving on from Russophobia to Single Payer Health Care phobia, a/k/a Healthscare.

Just as the Democrats and the "moderate" Republicans have joined forces to fight the TrumPutin Monster, so have they, in the interests of the Market God, colluded to do battle against both the Trumpcare and Berniecare health plans currently before Congress.

Just as the original Red Scare ostensibly aimed at Russia and the Communist Party of the USA really was a proxy fight against trade unionism and FDR's New Deal, so too is the current anti-Bernie "Socialist" Sanders campaign a fight against the popular resurgence of FDR's New Deal. No matter that Commie Pinkos no longer exist; because the right-wing oligarch Putin was an original KGB creation of the Commie Pinko system, American leaders must strive to co-opt manufactured Fear of the Other into a renewed public allegiance to American corporatism. Everybody has to be the bootstrapping entrepreneur of his or her own life. That's how it's supposed to work. No matter to them that it doesn't work at all, not for the vast majority of us.

So young fogey Times pundit Ross Douthat thinks, right along with his neoliberal colleague Paul Krugman, that we should just leave well enough (the profit-intensive Obamacare Kludge) alone: 

But sometimes, when a party has spent most of a year producing health care bills that excite almost nobody and that even the senators voting for them can’t effectively defend, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about our national priorities.

 This goes for both parties: not only the stepping-on-rakes Republicans, but the suddenly single-payer-dreaming Democrats. If Obamacare repeal is really dead for the year 2017, both left and right have a chance to shake their minds free of the health care debate and ask themselves: What are the biggest threats to the American Dream right now, to our unity and prosperity, our happiness and civic health?

While Krugman has lamely suggested that Congress pass a Universal Pre-K package as a worthy enough crumb to substitute for universal health coverage, Douthat is a lot bolder in his own smarminess:

There are better options for both parties. Republicans could get off the repeal-and-replace merry-go-round and actually try to govern on a version of the Trump agenda: With one hand, cut corporate taxes and slash regulations to spur growth; with the other, spend on infrastructure to boost blue-collar work, cut payroll taxes and increase the child tax credit, and push to reduce low-skilled immigration. Pay for some of it with caps on tax breaks, let paying for the rest wait for another day.

 Democrats, meanwhile, could let single-payer dreams wait (or just die) and think instead about spending that supports work and family directly. They could look at proposals for a larger earned-income tax credit, a family allowance, and let the “job guarantee” and “guaranteed basic income” factions fight things out. If they want to go big in 2020, they could run on wage subsidies and public works, not another disruptive health care vision.

   My published response:

Who woulda thunk it? Ross Douthat and Paul Krugman have essentially written the same column. To wit: "both sides" are just so annoyingly extreme. The Rabid Right wants poor people to just die quickly, while the Unicorny Left wants everybody to live to the ripest possible old age. Therefore, both sides are equally insane.

If 2020 does turn out to be a health care election, I say bring it on. Not that we have a true representative democracy or anything, but nearly 60 percent of us are totally on board with Medicare for All. That includes eight out of every 10 Democrats and four or five out of every 10 Republicans. So it's not only the D candidates who should worry about a dreaded "litmus test."

The ACA was originally a Republican plan, with the usual Republican ideology. It's not all-inclusive, and was never meant to be. It's based on competition, profit, shopping, and the demand that everybody have some "skin in the game." This comes in the form of outrageous premiums and co-pays, with the object being not to overuse one's insurance policy. The best thing about the ACA is its Medicaid expansion. 

 The Medicare for All plan just introduced in the Senate would even cover dentistry. Does Ross know that one reason poor young men can't get jobs is because of the poor state of their teeth? Just think what a great boost to the economy some basic preventive dental care would create.

If you want to have a healthy economy, the first thing you need is healthy people.

The Complexities of Cruelty

Now that nearly two-thirds of Americans declare themselves in favor of true universal health care, or Medicare for All, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts finally acknowledges that the time is ripe for the Democratic Party to follow suit. 

 President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “Now it’s time for the next step. And the next step is single payer.”

Tell that to the party leadership. The way a group of them showed their loathing for the now-delayed Better Call the Undertaker Act proffered by the Republicans was to literally sit down and "raucously" sulk for the cameras. 

“So John Lewis and I (Sen. Cory Booker) are going to sit down on the Capitol steps for a while to protest Senate Republican’s efforts to repeal health care and give voice to millions of Americans who believe that affordable health care is a human right,” Booker posted alongside the Facebook live stream. “Watch, share & join us.”

“By sitting in, by sitting down, you’re really standing up,” Lewis said. 

Ben Wikler, the Washington director of activist group Moveon.org, tweeted how he became part of the sit-in, describing the organic growth of the event as “kinda magical.”

Unlike the protesters who were cruelly yanked out of their wheelchairs last week and arrested for blocking Mitch McConnell's office, the supine and able-bodied establishment Democrats were deemed harmless enough by Capitol police to remain in place, despite blocking the entire building. It was really kinda magical. Who knew that some forms of protest are more equal and acceptable than others?

Nonetheless, Warren is gently and belatedly urging liberal lawmakers to get up off their slacktivist butts and take that next organic step and start running on single payer health care for human organisms living in the United States. She understands that Hillary Clinton's vow during her campaign that single payer "will never, ever come to pass" is probably not a winning strategy for her party. All it did was help stimulate those all-important collective passions right into the arms of Donald Trump - who, as a private citizen had himself voiced support for government-sponsored medical insurance as the sanest, most cost-effective solution.

Trump, who only a few weeks ago called the GOP reform plan "mean," put a noncommittal spin on his latest word salad:  “This will be great if we get it done. And if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like, and that’s O.K., and I understand that very well.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was forced to delay voting on the Better Care Reconciliation Act when a handful of GOP senators balked - either because the measure isn't sufficiently cruel, or because its draconian cruelty isn't sufficiently hidden from voters. Mainly, they were miffed that Mitch operated behind closed doors, without their own input. How can they sell a bill to their constituents when they're being kept as much in the dark as their constituents?

 The Congressional Budget Office scoring reveals that under the Bitterly Callous Retrogression Act, 22 million fewer Americans would be covered by insurance by the year 2026. It's so bad that even the arch-conservative American Medical Association, which has always lobbied heavily against any kind of government involvement in health care, calls BCRA  a clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath of "first, do no harm."

As Mitch cynically drawled to the TV cameras after temporarily yanking the bill, who could have guessed that big complicated cruelty could be so complex? Therefore, his most immediate challenge is to get enough of his cohort "comfortable" enough with the unprecedented cruelty for the oligarchic job to get done.

Senator John Tester cynically put in that all they really need is more flexibility to rescue the most vulnerable citizens from the pain of Medicaid covering all their health care needs. That way, the protesters in wheelchairs won't even have to travel to Washington and block Congressional offices. They'll be blissing out in a permanent state of health care Nirvana freedom.

These malevolent political clowns remind me of the feckless characters in Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky's scathing 1872 novel which critiques both nihilism and supine, often complicit, liberalism. The "debate" really is just about how much sadism that today's reactionaries think they can get away with.

One of the characters in the novel argues for "a final solution of the question, the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One tenth is granted freedom of person and unlimited rights over the remaining nine tenths. These must lose their person and turn into something like a herd, and in unlimited obedience, through a series of regenerations, attain to primeval innocence, something like the primeval paradise - though, by the way, they will have to work."

To which the other, more bloodthirsty nihilist counters, "I'd take these nine-tenths of mankind, since there's really nothing to do about them, and blow them sky-high, and leave just a bunch of learned people who would start living happily in an educated way.

American Tragedies

My thoughts go out today to wounded Majority Whip Steve Scalise.

The House leader's life was saved not only by his heavily armed security detail, who killed the alleged shooter, but by some of the physicians who have given up practicing medicine in order to practice nihilistic politics. Who knew that among the reactionaries who'd gathered to practice their baseball skills were medical doctors whose version of the Hippocratic Oath is first, do no harm by withholding medical care from as many poor people as possible?

As Donald Trump initially Tweeted in reaction, today's event was a true American tragedy, ostensibly because a manly GOP man was wounded right in the hip. In keeping with solemn presidential tradition, Trump added the obligatory prayers to what passes for his thoughts.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans, under cover of darkness, were busily trying to make life worse for ordinary Americans by throwing some 20 million of them off their market-based health care and plotting the morbidity and mortality of tens of millions more through the vicious gutting of Medicaid. The only point of contention among them is whether to kill poor and elderly people slowly and mercilessly, or quickly and mercilessly.

As Axios reports, they're refusing to release a draft of their death panel legislation because they're not stupid. It would be "premature" of them to warn people that they can now expect to die even more prematurely than they already are.

Meanwhile, Steve Scalise was said to be in "good spirits" as he prepared to undergo surgery. And why wouldn't he be? Not only was he blissing out on I.V. painkillers, he will likely never even have to look at a hospital bill.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still seem more interested in searching for the ephemeral "smoking gun" in #RussiaGate than they are in speaking up for some actual gun control and agitating for some actual single payer health insurance.

 But several of them did gather on their own baseball practice field to pray for the cameras.

We Are Not Amused

 In the spirit of the establishment sourness I wrote about the other day, the New York Times Division of Standards and Practices has seen fit to axe two of my published comments in the past week. Since I only submitted three comments during this time frame, this amounts to a record 66% rejection rate.

My first censored comment was in response to a very bland editorial chiding Barack Obama for his unseemly demand for $400,000 per speech. I pointed out that the much more popular Michelle is only getting $200,000 for her gigs, a dismal half of what her husband earns. "What ever happened to equal pay for equal work?" I asked rhetorically. "We should all be out marching in the streets to protest this terrible inequity!"

The Gray Lady apparently does not like sarcasm and snark. If one cannot in good conscience rush to the defense of the greedy and the powerful, then one must be careful to vent one's criticism sincerely, respectfully and responsibly.

My second censored comment (to a Maureen Dowd column about Trump being a threat to public health) was very censorious of Donald Trump and the House GOP's vote to gut health care coverage. Although I never thought it was possible to be too rude to Donald Trump, especially in the liberal New York Times, it turns out I was very wrong. Just because one is upset that the cartoonish Donald Trump was gleefully celebrating the premature deaths of tens of millions of Americans is no reason to compare the shape of Trump's head to that of a cartoon character.

Oddly enough, though, my comment was allowed to stand for a full 24 hours and glean more than 1,000 reader recommendations before it was disappeared. So in this case, the removal could either be the result of the first three shifts of censors being asleep at the moderating switch, or too many sensitive readers signaling their displeasure too many times over the course of the day.

Here's what was deemed so offensive. (I thought to make a copy of it) -

That photo of Sponge Don Squarehead saluting his orchestra of smirking white male supremacists speaks a thousand ugly words. But it's concert master Paul Ryan who really takes the cake for one of the most comprehensively deadly eugenics initiatives in modern history. That he had the nerve to preen and simper before the cameras is terrifying evidence of a truly depraved mind.

Second only to Trump and Ryan in horrible optics was Ivanka, smiling banally as she and Prince Jared watched the final House vote on TV. She should write a sequel to her book, about how working moms can creatively scrimp by forgoing health insurance. She could include tips on the best name brand pliers for self-help dentistry, maybe even start her own line of suture threads in the latest fashionable colors to avoid those unnecessary ER trips with the kiddies.

But even if the Senate refuses to rubber-stamp the AHCA, that still leaves 30 million people without health insurance and tens of millions more saddled with unconscionably high premiums and deductibles. And since Trump is only interested in winning at all costs, he should put his presidential mouth where his private citizen mouth used to be. He should demand Medicare for All. Everybody covered from cradle to grave. No predatory private insurance middle men. No pre-existing conditions. It's all paid for with a progressive income tax and a tax on high speed Wall Street trades. It will make Americans feel great again and add years to our lives.

On second thought, maybe the Times censored me because I just won't shut up about Single Payer health care, which has been officially censored from the agenda of the corporate Democratic Party.