Krugman: You Can Have Single Payer Health Care When You're Dead

Despite the palpable spike in my blood pressure whenever I read something by Paul Krugman, nevertheless I persisted.  And the ensuing pounding sensation in my ears this morning did not disappoint.

In a piece ironically titled "What's Next For Progressives?" the star New York Times pundit suggests that we stop being so damned unicorny and fight for universal pre-K as a worthy substitute for the impossible dream of maintaining our lives and livelihoods when we get sick or hurt.

Not that he personally has anything against a single payer health insurance system, of course. It's just that such a program would be too hard to sell to anti-government Deplorables.  It's just that a public program would put all those private insurance executives and claims adjusters and rent-seeking lobbyists out on the street. Or should I say, out on The Street?

No, it's simply that the desperate people insanely clamoring for a single payer program are unreasonably forcing Democratic politicians to take a litmus test for purity. Making candidates promise Medicare for All would essentially be inviting them to lie, and goodness knows, they don't want to also be faced with a lie detector test should they have the amazing good luck to win any more elections on their feeble incremental platforms.

On behalf of the Clinton-Obama wing of the party, Krugman chides:

So it’s time for a little pushback. A commitment to universal health coverage — bringing in the people currently falling through Obamacare’s cracks — should definitely be a litmus test. But single-payer, while it has many virtues, isn’t the only way to get there; it would be much harder politically than its advocates acknowledge; and there are more important priorities.

What could possibly be more important than life and good health, you may ask?

Why, saving the predatory insurance cartel which helped save Obamacare by altruistically pushing back against Republican repeal, of course! Blue Cross/Blue Shield saved the day for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Let's give three cheers for the oligarchy.

Also more important than the lives and well-being of 330 million American citizens is the convenience of those who currently obtain their insurance through their employers. No matter that a program like HR 676 would require no effort, automatically enrolling everybody, Krugman claims to be worried that transitioning from private to public would cause a massive outbreak of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among the current beneficiaries of for-profit coverage.

Moving to single-payer would mean taking away this coverage and imposing new taxes; to make it fly politically you’d have to convince most of these people both that they would save more in premiums than they pay in additional taxes, and that their new coverage would be just as good as the old.

This might in fact be true, but it would be one heck of a hard sell. Is this really where progressives want to spend their political capital?

As economist Robert Frank and others have demonstrated, this premiums vs. taxes argument doesn't hold water. But Krugman not only refuses outright to discuss the specifics, he dismisses them out of hand. He doesn't tell his readers that for one thing, administrative costs for a government run insurance program would only be two percent of the total budget, as opposed to the six percent costs of running a for-profit system. Further reducing costs would be the government's ability to negotiate lower prices for drugs and other services. And most important, a Medicare for All plan would be virtually repeal-proof. If everybody enjoyed the same benefits, the divide and conquer politics of resentment would be a thing of the past.

So Krugman pulls the old bait and switcheroo. If centrist Democrats (he calls them  "progressives" solely for purposes of propaganda) can't deliver on single payer health care, perhaps they'll get some political mileage from pretending to care about Our Children. Krugman has suddenly discovered that "we" neglect the nation's children. But rather than suggesting a living wage and/or guaranteed income for their parents, an increase in food assistance, a federal jobs program and subsidized housing, he tosses out the crumbs of pre-K and paid parental leave.

My published response:

Health care is either a basic human right, or it isn't.

Incremental improvements to, and more public funding of, our for-profit predatory health care delivery system are not going to cut it. A system in which some lucky people are insured and some are not is, in fact, the very antithesis of social and economic justice. It's health care apartheid.

Whatever happened to "justice delayed is justice denied?"

Krugman maintains that it would be "too hard" to educate people that paying premiums, via taxes, to a centralized government-run Medicare for All-type system is fairer and cheaper than paying premiums to private corporations whose CEOs make obscene salaries and whose wealthy investors suck profits from the pain of ordinary people.

Krugman is squandering an enormous opportunity from his popular perch in the op-ed pages to do some of this educating himself. Of course, his claim of "impossibility" is not true at all. According to most polls, between half and two-thirds of the American populace already support a single payer system.

So he should have titled this piece "What's Next For the Plutocrats Running the Place?" As established by Gilens and Page in their Princeton study, it's the rich donor class which despises the idea of true universal health care.

The only "progress" the billionaires care about is the progress of their own wealth and their own dynasties as the chasm between rich and poor grows wider by the day.

The rest of us can't wait. Single Payer or bust.

Ruling Class Worrywarts

When Larry Summers says he's worried about Donald Trump, you can bet the banks he helped deregulate back in the 90s that his concern has nothing to do with how regular people will fare under the plutocrat-heavy Trump administration.

On the contrary. Larry Summers is scared that Trump will destroy capitalism itself. That much-ballyhooed Carrier deal brokered by the president-elect, which will save about 700 Indiana factory jobs from being outsourced to Mexico, is a slap in the face to the economy as rich people have known it, loved it, and profited by it.

Without a hint of irony, Summers writes in a Washington Post op-ed:

I have always thought of American capitalism as dominantly rule and law based. Courts enforce contracts and property rights in ways that are largely independent of just who it is who is before them. Taxes are calculable on the basis of an arithmetic algorithm. Companies and governments buy from the cheapest bidder. Regulation follows previously promulgated rules. In the economic arena, the state’s monopoly on the use of force is used to enforce contract and property rights and to enforce previously promulgated laws.

Never mind that the laws of capitalism were written for the sole benefit of corporations and CEOs and trust fund kids. Never mind that no-bid contracts have been an operating principle of unaccountable government spending for decades, if not centuries. Never mind that the repeal of the Depression-era  Glass-Steagall Act, which Summers helped orchestrate during the Clinton administration, was in essence itself a repudiation of the controlled capitalism which Summers now purports to adore. Summers also worked with Citigroup's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan to deregulate the derivatives market. Later, he successfully thwarted an adequate stimulus package during his stint in the Obama administration.

Summers has never in his life fought for American workers or against the offshoring of jobs by multinational corporations searching for ever cheaper and exploitable human labor. It's no surprise, therefore, that the Carrier deal would give him agita. It would give him agita even if it were not steeped in crony capitalist motivations.

Summers' beef is that Trump aims to turn the "lawful" plunder and privatization model right on its ear and make us into a full-fledged Banana Republic, just like in (gasp!) Putin's Russia.

And since the Democrats are still blaming everyone but Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump's victory, Summers also takes the obligatory dig at Bernie Sanders, whom Summers claims "misses the point" by complaining that not all the Carrier jobs were saved from Mexico outsourcing.

And now comes the coup de grâce. Summers blames Democracy itself:

 Some of the worst abuses of power are not those that leaders inflict on their people. They are the acts that the people demand from their leaders. I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism. I hope I am wrong, but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.

Translation: with Trump around, the rich may end up being unable to loot from the poor as legally and responsibly as they always have in the past. And it's all the fault of those poor people, who turn out to be not only stupid, but abusive and power-mad. Didn't they ever learn that consumerism is their only responsibility? Didn't they ever learn that "democracy" and voting rights are only the bait and switch tactics designed to disguise the awful truth that Capitalism rules?

The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who has been on his own interminable roll of blaming everything from white racists and the FBI and Wikileaks to Putin and "fake news" sites for Hillary's defeat, thinks his colleague Larry is really on to something. Krugman is so upset about the positive media coverage of the Carrier deal that he even seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama is not only still the president, but that Obama has assured the nation that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. 

Krugman writes:

It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.

Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent — although tiny — is not good: it’s not just crony capitalism, it’s government as protection racket, where companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes. That is, we’re looking at what may well be the beginning of a descent into banana republic governance.

This is, as Larry says, bad both for the economic (sic) and for freedom.

The most pressing concern he has is for the freedoms of the law-abiding robber barons. It seems as though the petty sniping by Wall Street Democrats at the HRC sniper-haters will go on for the foreseeable future. Party elites and pundits are throwing the same kind of temper tantrum that they accuse Trump of indulging in.

My published response to Krugman: 

So, Larry Summers is more worried about Trump ruining capitalism than he is about unfettered capitalism destroying the lives and livelihoods of working people.

Trump is performing the con abnormally. Therefore, grouses Summers (one of the three guys who "saved the world" by destroying it through deregulation), we have a fatal inversion. Instead of politicians passing laws to appease the corporations, we now have corporations appeasing a grossly incompetent anti-politician interested only in his own fortunes.

The Precursors and Enablers of Donald J. Trump

Trump is only a symptom - really, the excrescence - of the neoliberalism and resulting record wealth inequality which has been spawning right-wing populism all over the world.

Summers is worried that Trumpian crony capitalism is bad for the economy. But whose economy? It seems to me that he is really talking about the plutonomy: ownership of a financialized system which mainly benefits the 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population. Trump wants to be a member of that Club.

The working class - white, brown and black - doesn't factor in to the equation, other than elite worry-warts blaming them for not voting for the right candidate.

The bright spot is that even before he's sworn in (assuming he doesn't forget to show up to deliver a bizarre stream-of-consciousness inaugural riff) Trump voters are already expressing buyers' remorse. Apparently, some thought that their giant middle finger to the establishment was only symbolic.

Speaking of buyers' remorse, there's a neologism that should join "post-truth" in that annual list of verbal novelties put out by Lake Superior University. And that is "Trumpgrets."

Raw Story has the scoop on the whole gamut of raw emotions emanating from desperate people who couldn't care less if the plutocrats robbing them blind do it based on an Ivy League education and corner office, or if they do it out of unabashed ignorance and greed while wearing a red baseball cap.

But be warned: you have to be willing to laugh at and feel superior to all the remorseful Trump voters out there. In other words, you have to be a clueless liberal for whom the word "solidarity" is still missing from your intolerant vocabulary.

Proud To Be a Moral Anti-Deplorable

 I finally figured out why I've been so bothered by Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables" speech last week. I also figured out why her cavalier lumping of non-deplorable Trump supporters into their separate category of neediness deserves its own special basket of cloying Clintonoid condescension.

What bothered me perhaps more than her words was the braying, approving reaction to them from the crowd of celebrities and plutocrats who'd paid thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to gain admission to her event. In deploring the Trumpenproletariat, Clinton also effectively absolved her wealthy liberal donors of their own latent racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, ignorance, neediness... you name it.

They were implicitly dubbed the virtuous anti-deplorable moral majority of the moneyed minority. (Say three times fast.)

Whether you despise Trump or only pretend to loathe him in order to fit in with the in-crowd, then it naturally follows that you are a good liberal. You try to keep your classism to yourself. Ditto for your colorblind racism. After all, if you voted for Barack Obama, you are absolved of racism, then and now and forever. A whole country full of deplorables might not be smart and post-racial, but you most certainly are. After all, you just gave the black maid a quarter an hour raise to help pay for her hour-long subway or bus ride to your Manhattan high-rise.

 You're all for immigration reform, too. As Obama himself said in a recent anti-Trump address to his upper middle class base, we must always welcome new "talent" to our shores, regardless of their ethnicity.

 Because it’s our diversity, our welcoming of all talent, our treating of everybody fairly—no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, or faith—that’s part of what makes our country great. It’s what makes us resilient. And if we stay true to those values, we’ll uphold the legacy of those we’ve lost, and keep our nation strong and free. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

 As long as refugees have a skill-set, they can come right on in. Tired, poor and huddled no longer cuts it. But hey, this is the "real world" we're living in. Medical benefits and social services only go so far when funds are limited. They're deliberately and artificially limited by spending an estimated $5 trillion on wars of aggression in the last 15 years. And who needs a stupid Trump wall when Homeland Security and ICE have already deported more people under Obama than they did under any previous administration? Why wear your xenophobia on your sleeve when you can imprison hundreds of Central American refugee mothers and children in substandard privatized prisons before you send them back to certain death in their CIA-destabilized home countries?

If you are a moral anti-deplorable who hates Trump's hateful rhetoric and loves Hillary's identity politics, there is no need to worry your expensively coiffed heads over the institutional racism being conducted in your names every single day of every single year, both here and abroad.

Since you elected and you love Barack Obama, you can scoff with utter impunity at the Black Lives Matter movement. After all, Obama himself has regularly lectured young black activists with his own brand of "respectability politics" and chided them for their rudeness to powerful politicians at rallies and fund-raisers.

If you are a proud anti-deplorable, you can ignore the global racist imperialism exported by the United States and propagandized as liberal democracy-sharing or defense of our national security. No need to worry and wonder that the millions of innocents displaced, maimed and killed by our CIA coups and our wars and our drone strikes have mostly been of the darker-skinned variety.

 No need to ask yourselves why American Muslims have been burdened with a special duty to "disown" terrorism, while white Christians are given immunity from responsibility for homegrown terror attacks.

After all, you don't wear any incipient Trumpism you might possess right on your sleeve. That would be illiberal.

  Hillary's grating mixture of disdain and condescension was rendered all the more hypocritical by where it occurred: the Cipriani Club, Wall Street, USA.

It was from the balcony of that bastion of plutocratic excess that young Champagne-sipping financiers yelled their epithets down to the Zuccotti Park Occupy campers in 2011, as raucously as they yelled their contempt at the Trumpenproletariat five years later. They see no difference between bottom-up, left wing democratic socialism and elite co-opted right wing populism. Both types threaten their bottom lines.

As I wrote way back when,

The Cipriani Club, for those of you not in the know (and I was among the unknowing myself until earlier today) was constructed during the Gilded Age of  Wall Street's glorious heyday  and comprises an entire city block. (the better to view the hoi polloi).  It now houses restaurants, condos selling in the mid to high seven figures, spas, bars. The restaurant has the dubious distinction of being home to a $32 hamburger. It's gotten many a lousy review in the New York Times, for its terrible food, tiny chairs and conspicuous consumption.  As far as I know, the Cipriani is not among the financial district eateries donating food to the Zuccotti Park campers.  But we can always call and ask!  Here is their number: 212-699-4096.
And speaking of reviews: Ginia Bellafante, the Times columnist who made fun of the Wall Street protesters and their regalia last weekend, should have gone into Cipriani instead.  According to the Indagare travel site, the uber-wealthy Cipriani crowd " truly verges on Fellini-esque with extreme hairdos, face-lifts and implants on parade."  And all Bellafante could come up with was a topless dancer and some cheap masks?  What has journalism come to? 

"What has journalism come to?" is now the ironic and constant refrain of liberal pundits bemoaning a mass outbreak of unfairness and "false equivalency" regarding the allegedly disparate coverage of the ruling class racketeers named Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Paul Krugman, who contributes to the mass hysteria over Neoliberal Death Match 2016 by pronouncing his own elite self terrified by the smears and innuendoes against Clinton, apparently forgets that he himself once led the fear-mongering pack with his own smears against Bernie Sanders and his progressive supporters.

It's unfair, Krugman says without one smidgen of hard evidence, that the pristine Clinton Foundation is getting trashed while Trump's bogus charity is not: 

And I don’t see how the huffing and puffing about the foundation — which “raised questions”, but where the media were completely unwilling to accept the answers they found — fits into this at all.

No, it’s something special about Clinton Rules. I don’t really understand it. But it has the feeling of a high school clique bullying a nerdy classmate because it’s the cool thing to do.

And as I feared, it looks as if people who cried wolf about non-scandals are now engaged in an all-out effort to dig up or invent dirt to justify their previous Clinton hostility.

Hard to believe that such pettiness could have horrifying consequences. But I am very scared.

My suggestion to Petrified Paul would be that he construct a panic room in his fortified $2 million Manhattan condo if he has not already done so. Maybe such a safe space would protect him against the journalistic micro-aggressions of his own employer, and who knows, maybe even allow the irony of his own Berniebro bullying to sink into his steel-reinforced mind. That bullying had the distinct feel of a high school clique, given that Krugman enlisted the aid of a clique of neoliberal establishment economists-for-hire to make his case against single payer health care.

Here's my published comment to his latest deplorable disingenuousness:

The reason the Clintons are held to a higher standard is because they were lifetime putative public servants who then proceeded to cash in, big-time, on that public service.

Trump, never having been a public servant, is given a comparative free pass for a whole lifetime of private chicanery. He's also a fixture on the social scene in New York, the media capital of the world. He schmoozes with such media stars as Matt Lauer and Maureen Dowd and media mogul Barry Diller, who also hangs out with BFFs Chelsea and Ivanka.

So why the sudden shock that media stars and media conglomerates don't act like old-school muckrakers and hold Donald Trump's feet to the fire? A presidential candidate he may be, but he is still a private citizen of the all-American huckster type. In our culture, we tend to grudgingly admire these types for their amorality and outsize egos. Trump is lovable the way Tony Soprano was lovable. Because he gets away with stuff. If we lived in a society where criminal justice rules applied to the wealthy, he would have been moldering in prison with Bernie Madoff by now.

Read David Cay Johnston's book on how Trump came to be, and you'll see that there's plenty of blame to go around for his perfidious rise. He knows how to co-opt fellow greedsters and needy sycophants.

And speaking of the Bushies, the fact that they were never prosecuted themselves speaks even more ugly volumes about America the Exceptional.

Only the poor get punished. It's pretty deplorable.

Advice to Needy Neoliberals

The kludge known as Obamacare is trying desperately to slide down the tubes, but it's too dense with defenders to simply go gently and smoothly into that good night. It's moldering in a limbo between the toilet and the sewer, while its subscribers and rejects are trapped in either purgatory or hell, depending upon the health of their bodies, their faith in politicians, and the size of their dwindling bank accounts.

It seems that the predatory insurance companies, which literally wrote the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, just aren't getting enough bang for our bucks, even though executives and Wall Street investors are still getting fantastically rich off the pain and toil of others. Aetna might have just pulled out from 11 states over an alleged lack of a pool of healthy but broke customers to suck dry, but that didn't stop its CEO from entering the Rapture and pocketing $27.9 million in compensation last year. A guy's got to eat, especially a guy with such a ravenous appetite.

Obamacare's defenders, getting worried that their product is increasingly seen as a scam of historic proportions (in an election year, no less) are thus in high concern-trolling gear. They're even daring to utter the previously forbidden "public option" phrase to placate the masses and fool them into thinking that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats can be counted on to help save Obamacare from itself, if not counted on to save any actual lives and livelihoods. (save those of millionaires and billionaires.)

And since the Neoliberal Thought Collective running the public-private partnership known as Government persists in treating medical care as a corporate endeavor rather than as a natural human right, the New York Times published its own advice column of possible fixes in the Business Section rather than the health or science sections.

 The headline itself wastes no time in framing the crisis of American health care as strictly a business problem: Obamacare Marketplaces in Trouble: What Can Be Done? 

It's been a hard couple of decades, even generations, for the tens of millions of unemployed or underemployed people lacking basic medical care. But you wouldn't know it from reading the Times lede (the standard Neoliberal buzzwords are in my bold)

It has been a hard couple of weeks for Obamacare. The law’s online marketplaces — where people were supposed to be able to easily shop for health insurance — have been suffering from high-profile defections and double-digit premium increases.

Critics of Obamacare have pointed to the recent problems as proof the market is not working, while even the law’s staunchest defenders are arguing that the marketplaces need some fixes.

In other words, the vaunted free market needs a lot more public assistance and corporate welfare in order to ensure that profits over people may continue to grow. And those damned shoppers searching for health insurance product won't be satisfied until they can be offered the illusion of choice, which fools them into thinking they actually have a say in their fates, as they struggle through the kludge.

Since the illusion of choice is disappearing from the flawed equation, the Times wants to know: What can be done to help the marketplace?

If the market looks as if it’s growing and stable, some insurers might come back. Both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have also revived the idea of the so-called public option, which would be a government-run plan that would either compete with or be a substitute for a plan offered by a private insurer. It’s politically controversial and hard to make work in practice.

The Times tells us that although Barack and Hillary really, really want to help, those nasty Republicans will do their useful idiotic best to thwart all good Democratic intentions. But keep your hopes alive anyway, the subliminal message goes, and vote for the Clinton Restoration. Never mind that the "public option" is in itself a useful idiot, since it displaces true single payer, or Medicare for All. But if the Times calls even a scammy proposal "controversial and hard to enact," then we might as well not even talk about genuine universal coverage. Because it's impossible. Because they say so. And Hillary is a progressive who likes to get things done. Because she says so.

Meanwhile,"we" have to get those outrageous health care and drug costs down - not by implementing cost-effective single payer, of course, but by making it even harder for us to access actual medical care with our pricey Obamacare plans:

 Bring down costs instead of raising prices. More and more insurers are choosing to limit the number of doctors and hospitals they will cover in their plans. A lot of the reason that health insurance is so expensive in the United States is that doctors and hospitals charge more here than their counterparts in other countries. So the narrow network strategy may be a smart way to start getting different groups to negotiate down on their prices.

One of the biggest impediments to capitalist predators profiting from people is that healthy - but increasingly debt-crushed and precariously employed - young Americans are averse to shelling out their meager food and rent money for a Bronze plan. So the answer is not free health care or student loan forgiveness - it's smarter, more effective punishments for irresponsible consumers:

 Change the incentives, so more people who are currently uninsured buy health insurance. Hillary Clinton has talked about giving out more generous subsidies, so insurance costs less and more people can afford to buy it. Many Republican politicians suggest another way to lower prices: eliminating current requirements that insurance cover a wide array of services. Some policy experts, including Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton health economist, in a recent Vox.com interview, have suggested tightening up the penalties for remaining uninsured, so people can’t wait and buy insurance only after they get sick.

So maybe if the Neoliberal Thought Collective can make Obamacare even crappier than it already is and cover only a few arcane diseases, then the Kludge can still be saved. And if that doesn't work, perhaps Obamacare refusenicks can be tried as political dissidents and sentenced to a long term at a for-profit private prison until they scream: "I love Big Insurance! Where do I sign up?"

 Uwe Reinhardt, who is not to be confused with Carmen Reinhart, the economist  so soundly discredited several years ago for falsely claiming that austerity spurs economic growth, is an opponent of single payer insurance because, he claims, the government is too corrupt. Congress might end up appointing a payment board with prices dictated by the same private insurance vultures now crying poverty, he said. There's always an expert to stop a program for the greater good right in its tracks. Always.

And speaking of austerity, neoliberals don't actually use that word any more, especially during an election year. They must reckon that "tightening up the penalties"  gives a more humanistic ring to Social Darwinism. Plus, if there is anything that neoliberalism prides itself on, it's the ability to grow and change its Orwellian language to keep fooling ("empowering") some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time.

The Obama administration has already made a few changes, including making it a little harder for people to sign up for insurance in the middle of the year. It has also signaled to Congress and state legislatures that a “reinsurance” program, which would pay insurers back for the sickest of their patients, would be a good idea.

There is little consensus among experts and advocates about what fixes would have the biggest impact when it comes to stabilizing the markets. The divides are not just partisan, but reflect persistent uncertainty about the most important things going wrong, and the most effective solutions to fix them.

Obama is already responsibly and expertly punishing people for trying to game the predatory insurance market. They have the unmitigated gall to seek medical care only when they get hurt or sick. The exasperated big insurance predators are simply running out of options for punishing these miscreants. Therefore, Americans might be forced to bail out the private insurance and drug cartels the same way they bailed out the Wall Street banksters and General Motors.

Here's my published response to the Times advice column to the vampires who are so worried about their dwindling blood supply:

The problem with the health insurance market is that it is even a market in the first place.

Forget the public option.That's a cop-out. We need true single-payer health care, a/k/a Medicare for All. Financed through a progressive tax, no co-pays or deductibles, universal coverage from cradle to grave, none of those opt-outs allowed in Red States where hatred of the poor is both a managerial strategy and a cultish dogma.

Obamacare is all about protecting big business and fostering competition for profit and making a handful of insurance and pharmaceutical moguls even more obscenely rich. Some 30 million people are still uninsured, while millions more are under-insured. Even those lucky enough to have insurance constantly have to shop around, prove their incomes, their addresses, their existence - and who still can't afford to visit a doctor or hospital when they get sick.

The idea is you shouldn't and/or mustn't use your plan, and that way the neoliberal bean counters can brag about medical costs going down. It's "best practices" and efficiency and the bottom line over the actual health and the actual care of people.

 It's a big, fat scam and a monumental rip-off.

So enough of making our human rights and our well-being subservient to endless economic growth. It's time to join the rest of the civilized world.

If we can afford trillion-dollar wars and negative effective tax rates for predatory oligarchs like Donald Trump, we can certainly afford universal health care.

Physicians for a National Health Plan, the group which was barred from the original Obamacare negotiations and even threatened with arrest, has the lowdown on why the "public option" isn't at all the progressive rescue it's cracked up to be. It would be an effective bailout of the insurance cartel because it would allow the predators to cherry-pick their subscribers and foist them off on the government, should they actually become sick and need care. It would allow investors to grow richer, because there would be fewer payouts required by the private insurers.

Additionally, a public option plan would not reduce costs, as would a genuine single payer scheme. It would keep intact private, investor-owned hospitals and clinics and end up delivering deficient care to the poor. It would be ripe for constant de-funding, especially if its control is exported to individual states.

Speaking of states, staunchly habitual Obamacare defender Paul Krugman chose to devote his own latest Times column to the evils of Texas - specifically, linking the doubling of that state's maternal death rate to the closing of its Planned Parenthood clinics. Although he feebly admits that correlation doesn't translate to actual causation, that remains his premise. As always, Krugman's approach to our great humanitarian crises is to blame them solely on those nasty old Republicans in Congress and Red States. Plus, it's all totally based on Trump-style racism. And Texas is just like misogynistic Russia, which is supposedly backing Trump and fooling with our free and fair elections.

And echoing his newspaper's neoliberal advice column, Parochial Paul concurrently toasts the "cost-effectiveness" of the Obamacare Market in California.

 Because if there's one thing that neoliberalism is extremely good at, it's creating competition where it shouldn't even exist: 

 California — where Democrats are firmly in control, thanks to the GOP’s alienation of minority voters — shows how it’s supposed to work: The state established its own health exchange, carefully promoting and regulating competition, and engaged in outreach to inform the public and encourage enrollment. The result has been dramatic success in holding down costs and reducing the number of uninsured.

Why are states like Texas so cruel, wonders Krugman, after he blames the cruelty solely upon racism and ignores the actual class war (which, by the way, disproportionately punishes women and minorities.)

My published response, along much the same lines as my previous Times comment:

 The solution is simple: centralize the medical care payment and delivery system. removing the profit motive from health insurance completely. Join the rest of the civilized world. No deductibles, no co-pays. Everybody gets covered, cradle to grave, no matter where you live. Take the power away from all these sadistic state governments and implement Medicare for All.

Texas is the extreme case, but the maternal death in the US overall is up by 27% - at the same time it has fallen sharply in other countries. It's not only that women in some states don't have access to prenatal care or Planned Parenthood. It's that they have little to no access to any kind of medical care at all, all across this country. According to the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, the major cause of the maternal death rate increase is the rise in such preventable chronic diseases as diabetes and obesity.

Black women are two to three times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth as white women. According to a 2014 U.N. study, the maternal mortality rate in one Mississippi county surpassed that of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It's a racist war and a class war of the richest elites in the richest country on the planet against the rest of us. Lowered life expectancy is just one glaring symptom of a sick society that puts profits for the few above the well-being of the many.

If we can afford trillion-dollar wars and Wall Street bailouts, we can afford universal health care.

Little Mary Sunshine vs. Donnie Darko

The poor corporate Democrats are not only stuck between a rock and a hard place, they're mired in the swamp, they're swirling in the maelstrom, they're choking on their own happy-talk effluvia.

They proclaim themselves utterly dismayed by the dark, dismal, depressing acceptance speech of Donald Trump the other night. Sunshine Superman he definitely is not. And that he didn't make God a centerpiece of his diatribe is only more proof of how un-American he truly is. Failure of a politician to constantly mention a supernatural character is a direct slap in the face to our official national motto: In God We Trust.

Trump only mentioned God once in his speech, and that was in the final sentence. Even then, he committed the ultimate faux pas, uttering "God bless you" rather than "God bless America." Kate Smith must be rolling in her grave.

Superstition has been the glue holding the bipartisan military-industrial complex together since the dawn of the Empire, and Trump threatens to turn that neocon propaganda of exceptionalism right on its overstuffed puritanical head. He wears his xenophobia on his sleeve, willfully ignoring the code of etiquette which holds that politicians' foul cores must always be masked by pretty, soothing, humanitarian words.  

  In the annals of presidential politics, the Trump horror show is making Dick Cheney look about as anodyne as folksy misanthrope Mike Pence.

Rather than agree with Trump that most people are more down and out than ever, the Democratic Party is choosing instead to shoot the messenger. They're blasting away at Donnie, that nasty brutish short-fingered authoritarian messenger of gloom and doom. Because to acknowledge the terrible reality of Dystopian America would be to unconscionably betray the last seven and half years of the Obama presidency itself.

The premature and perpetual burnishing of Obama's legacy - and the party's retention of political power - seem more important to Democratic elders than addressing such inconvenient social ills as poverty and homelessness and drug addiction and suicide and premature death rates, and past, present and future corporate malfeasance and war crimes.

 In the view of elite eyes peering out from behind their rose-colored glasses, killing the messenger certainly trumps (sorry!) killing the legacy of Barack Obama in particular, and the Neoliberal Project in general. The Democratic Party cannot possibly admit that the wealth gap has increased under Obama, that the poverty rate has increased under Obama, that the jobs created under Obama have mostly been of the low wage, service sector, temporary and precarious variety.

So instead of espousing a new New Deal and a government-sponsored jobs program for every citizen wanting employment, they're holding their ears and insisting that the kids are all right - even in lead-poisoned Flint, Michigan. They gave out free plastic filters to everybody, didn't they? So they won't even bother to sing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow at their convention this week. As far as they're concerned, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and for that matter, in every other corner of its inclusive, diverse Big Tent of the Free. 

Sure, they grudgingly allow,"there's still work to be done." Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight (against her own neoliberal policies?) from Day One, ensuring that every last shlub will get the chance to live up to his or her "God-given potential."

Just like Little Mary Sunshine, the Clinton party is a subversive parody of the Pollyanna genre, though unfortunately not in a feel-good, funny way.

You're Either With Her, Or You're Secretly With Donnie

You gotta believe... in incrementalism. Hope is so yesterday, and so Berniebro-ish. (just look at the DNC's leaked Sanders-trashing emails in case you still had any doubts. These flacks sound just as depraved as the "Sunny in Philly" cast. Is it too late for Bernie to still take the fight all the way to the convention?)

Donald Trump might be a fascistic strongman and a false idol, but the Sunshine Love Party of Hillary isn't exactly winning friends either, what with trying to convince us that everything is hunky-dory, and that the hunky-doryness will continue into the foreseeable future. The only influencers they seek to impress are their donors and the comfortable believers of the professional class. And that includes Republicans who are just as horrified at Trump's dark material as the establishment Dems.

 The Clintonites aren't interested in wooing hippies and lefties and poor people, and they never have been. Why else select Wall Street and TPP-friendly Tim Kaine as Clinton's running mate, and then add insult to injury by colluding with the New York Times to cynically cast him as a "progressive?"

(Now, to  be perfectly catty about the whole thing, I think that one reason she picked him is because he makes her look ten years younger.) 

 Slim,Trim,Grim, and Brim-full of Vim With Tim

New York Times columnist and Democratic factotum Paul Krugman, long a Panglossian defender of the neoliberal Obama regime, wrote a hilarious blog-post the other day, assuring his readers that because New York City's tony Upper West Side (where he owns a fortified $1.7 million co-op) is safe and secure, fear-mongering Donnie Darko has no idea what he's talking about, claiming that America is not strong or great.

If you listen to Trump, shames Krugman, it probably means that you're paranoid and delusional and perhaps even just as racist and misogynistic as he is.

Krugman writes,

If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere is friendly – New Yorkers tend to be rushed, but they’re not nasty – and, well, nice.

Yes, the Upper West Side is affluent. But still, I’ve seen New York over the decades, and it has never been as pleasant, as safe in feel, as it is now. And this is the big bad city!

The point is that lived experience confirms what the statistics say: crime hasn’t been lower, society hasn’t been safer, in generations. Which, of course, leads us to the Trump gambit from last night. Can he raise 1968-type fears in a country that looks, feels, and is nothing like it was back then?

Krugman is an intelligent guy, so it's painfully, transparently obvious that his piece is simply a desperate liberal counter-gambit as well as an ode to the wellness regimes of the wealthy.

My published response:

Well, if all is right in Krugman's privileged world, then it naturally follows that all should revel in his self-satisfaction.

This post creepily (and hilariously) reminded me of a Patricia ("Strangers on a Train") Highsmith novel called "A Dog's Ransom." An upper middle class guy goes for an innocent stroll in Riverside Park - and everything is, well, nice. It's so perfect, in fact, that there isn't one homeless person around to blot the landscape. There are even some frisbee-throwing black and brown people on hand to lull the open-minded passer-by into thinking that bad things can never happen to good and well-off people.

But Highsmith being her usual misanthropic self, we soon learn there's a dark side to that walk in the park. She's about to do a real satiric number on affluence, the class war, and consumerism.

Little does her open-minded professional dude know that there's an urban (white) psychopath lurking nearby, and that his whole privileged world is about to crumble.. In the process, he discovers there's a world beyond the Upper West Side.

It's dawned on me that Krugman is addressing the top 10 percent of the readership as well as his own professional cohort. Little does he seem to realize, or care, that the more he contributes to the class-blind liberal classism genre, the more that right-wing populists will gleefully and correctly pounce on the elitism of the media in general and the Clinton Dems in particular.

Brace yourselves for the Talented Mr. Trump.

I didn't have room to add the text of a letter from the disaffected guy in the Highsmith novel to his particular Upper West Side target. But since it's apropos of Krugman's own clueless mind-set juxtaposed with seething working class resentments, I'll include it here, minus the annoying ALL CAPS beloved by the various and sundry angry people you meet on Yahoo comment boards, at Trump rallies, in Highsmith books, and in your own neighborhood: 

Dear Sir or "Gentleman"

I suppose you are pretty pleased with yourself? People like you disgust me and not only me but a hell of a lot of other people in this world. You are smug, you are self-suficiant (sic) you think superior to everyone else. You think. A fancy apartment and a snob dog. You are a disgusting little machine, nothing else. Your days are numbered. What right have you got to be 'superior'?

Anon (as in see you anon - HA!)                                                                           

I don't want to be a spoiler, but I do want to reassure readers that the rich assholes in the novel do survive, despite being ripped a new one or two. Evil usually triumphs in the realistic dark world of Patricia Highsmith. But it never triumphs unscathed.

This novel and others in the Highsmith oeuvre were long out of print, but are again popular thanks in large part to the film adaptation (Carol) of her early novel, "The Price of Salt."

One of them, a collection of short stories called "Little Tales of Misogyny" is especially apt in this Age of Trump. I recommend all her books, especially "The Talented Mr. Ripley," which was also made into a well-received film.

Tom Ripley was actually a more perfect psychopath than Donald Trump, who is also a clinical narcissist with a monstrous id competing with an equally monstrous ego. He is neither charming, nor literate, nor polite, nor classy.

To be a true member of the tribe of refined psychopathy, one must be the opposite of Trump, capable of oozing empathy in public and acting callously in private.

And that brings me back to (at least) one of the other major characters in this blog-post, who's managed to fool enough of the people enough of the time to earn public approval ratings above 50 percent.

But sometimes even the best of them slip up, including the law enforcement officials in the audience who laugh along appreciatively and ghoulishly:

 
If you prefer more unabashed ghoulishness:

As far as garden variety mendacity goes, Hillary still needs a lot - a whole, whole, whole lot - more practice in fooling at least some of the people some of the time:

But look over there! It's Trump, baring his bottom teeth.

Commentariat Central

Readers, while I struggle to get my columnizing act together for the week, I thought I'd share a few of my recent New York Times missives with you. As always, you are invited to contribute your own comments in the usual space below. No topic is off-limits. Vent, grouse, and be merry.

***

Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Forgetting, 6/20

I'm starting out with one of those insightful op-eds that still get published by the Gray Lady from time to time. Actually, the entire "Stone" philosophy series stands head and shoulders above the punditory likes of David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman. They're essays written in conversational form, with a new guest philosopher or academic featured every week.

In the latest edition, Evans interviews Henry Giroux, who writes:

What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. At a time in which figures like Donald Trump are able to gain a platform by promoting values of “greatness” that serve to cleanse the memory of social and political progress achieved in the name of equality and basic human decency, history and thought itself are under attack.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability. The mass shooting in Orlando is yet another example of an emerging global political and cultural climate of violence fed by hate and mass hysteria. Such violence legitimates not only a kind of inflammatory rhetoric and ideological fundamentalism that views violence as the only solution to addressing social issues, it also provokes further irrational acts of violence against others. Spurrned on by a complete disrespect for those who affirm different ways of living, this massacre points to a growing climate of hate and bigotry that is unapologetic in its political nihilism.

My published comment:

 If only every opinion piece in the Times were of this high calibre, what a wonderful world it would be. What hope there might still be for democracy.

Henry Giroux is right that the crux of the matter is education (or lack thereof.) No matter that Donald Trump can't read or speak, when most of his audience, on average, only reads one book per year. (And that book was probably "written" by Trump.)

To the extent that our neoliberal political system is still investing in public schools, it is concentrating on the STEM curricula in order to prepare the wage slaves of the future. History, philosophy and literature are going by the wayside, because the last thing the oligarchy wants is citizens who can actually think. As Henry Giroux says, everything is regimented for optimal human control. It's brutal, and it's violent. And Trump is only the latest symptom of the fascism (or corporatism) that has been an integral part of this country for a very long time.

 Even though it's gotten almost to the point of environmental annihilation, capitalism is incapable of knowing or caring that as an obscene cancerous growth, it too is doomed to die, right along with its host: the body politic.

America is in dire need of a huge -- y-u-u-uge! - dose of intellectual and moral therapy.

Thanks again for a stimulating discussion. It should be part of the American curriculum, the Congressional Record and maybe even stealthily inserted into the telepromptered speeches of Trump and Clinton.

***

Trigger warning: it's mostly downhill from here. So let's get the most odious entry out of the way first: 

Paul Krugman, Is Our Economists Learning? (6/18)

The Conscience of a Liberal starts off with a whimper:

 Bernie is doing his long — very, very, very long — goodbye; Trump appears to be flaming out. So, time to revisit some macroeconomics.

And then Krugman returns to doing what he does best: denouncing those god-awful, dishonest, paid-for austerian economists from the GOP side of the duopoly. Without a hint of self-reflection as he comes off his own marathon of hippie-punching at the Bernie Sanders threat to the Clintonian succession, Krugman bemoans

"...the bad behavior of quite a few professional economists, who invented new doctrines on the fly to justify their opposition to stimulus and desire for austerity even in the face of a depression and zero interest rates."

This, from the same eminence grise who slammed Bernie's ideas for single payer health care and free public college tuition, because he deemed them to be unrealistic pipe dreams in the current austerian political climate, and also because numbers adding up and crunching are more stimulating to experts like him than the idea of bettering people's lives.

My response:

It must be such a relief to revisit one's area of expertise after having spent the last many months leading the elite charge against Sanders and his progressive supporters, those annoying Bernie Bros. The creation of straw men out of thin air must have been absolutely exhausting.

Now it's time to pretend that the orchestrated smear job against people who support progressive ideas like Medicare for All never even happened. Let Bernie tilt at his windmills -- he's no longer a danger to the established order of things. Hillary "clinched" it, we can finally relax.

It's time for "unity", which in corporate Dem-land includes tearing down the usual suspects of supply-side economics and "expansionary" austerity. This is as easy as pie, compared to the difficulty of tearing down Bernie's New Dealish pie-in-the-sky ideas -- like massive government stimulus spending.

I wouldn't even have bothered commenting on this piece, were it not for Krugman's lingering and petulant penchant for leading off with a gratuitous Bernie Sanders dig (his "long - very,very, very long - goodbye") even when the man is already down, out, and squashed flat by the neoliberal bus.

"The Long Goodbye" is also the title of a Raymond Chandler novel, described as "a study of a moral and decent man cast adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away without a backward glance."

So whether he meant to or not, Krugman has basically reminded us that Bernie Sanders is a mensch for the ages.

***

Maureen Dowd, Trump in the Dumps, 6/18.

After months of just letting Trump be Trump in a series of columns in the fun, "style-section" genre, Dowd is finally distancing herself from the GOP presumptive nominee, even going so far as to muse that "now, Trump's own behavior is casting serious doubt on whether he's qualified to be president."

Ya think?

Dowd admits that knowing Trump for 20 years might have blinded her to the danger. You see, she writes, 

Trump told me he could act like the toniest member of high society when he wanted, and he would as soon as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals. He said his narcissism would not hinder him as he morphed into a leader. But he can’t stop lashing out and doesn’t get why that turns people against him. Everything is filtered through his ego. He reacted to Orlando not as a tragedy so much as a chance to brag about “the congrats” he got for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

My published response:

 So, you've finally seen the Trumpian light. Or should I say darkness.

Better late than never, escaping right in the nick of time from the slimy clutches of a man who deigned to absolve you from his misogyny, at least to your face. That glow from all those exclusive interviews and intimate dinners at Trump Towers in full view of hundreds of envious gawkers has paled, apparently. Was it the 70% public disapproval rating that finally got to you, or did your moral compass finally stop spinning in besotted confusion? Was it the gut-wrenching televised spectacle of Donald's rapprochement with Megyn Kelly that caused the epiphany? Or, maybe the last straw was when he banned the elite Washington Post from his entourage.

That must have been too close for comfort.

 Better to be the instigator of the big breakup than find yourself on the receiving end of it, right?

Besides, it has become a "thing" with the recovering elite press corps to see who can blast Donald with the cleverest Tweeted Trump putdowns in any news cycle.

It's telling that you were even momentarily swayed by Trump's bland assurances that he really didn't mean it when he demonized Muslims, Mexicans and disabled people. The pseudo-populism was like the bouquet of roses all abusers give their victims. As long as he's against NAFTA and GOP corruption, he can't be a total psychopath, right?

 And now that he's gone from cool billionaire to the Biggest Loser, Ms. Dowd bolts.

Cue Amy Poehler: Really, Maureen? Really?

***

Maureen Dowd, Girl Squad, 6/11.

I actually thought that this column, published the week before, was pretty damned funny. Dowd imagines the recent creepy veepy-vetting visit paid by Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton. Bitchiness and hilarity ensue. A sample:

Warren sighs. “True, my faithful are peeved at me for not running and for endorsing you instead of Bernie.”

Hillary pours herself some coffee. “I know you’re intrigued by the idea of being my vice president,” she says. “I heard you tell our gal Rachel Maddow that you’re prepared to be commander in chief. But you know I can’t put you on the ticket, don’t you?”

"Because the country isn’t ready for two wonky women for the price of one?” Warren asks dryly.

“No,” Hillary says, biting her biscotti, “I’m not ready. You, the so-called Sheriff of Wall Street, attacked me as the Shill of Wall Street. Why should you get the glass slipper when you were foot-dragging on my glass-shattering moment?”

My response:

Good one, Maureen. But I doubt that the Empress-in-Waiting would actually have poured her own cup of coffee. She has "people" to do that for her.

I was a bit taken aback when Liz gushed that she'd fight her heart out to elect Hillary. Because in her memoir "A Fighting Chance" she was pretty adamant about fighting her heart out for the little guy. So maybe she's as terrified of the Trump monster as everybody else. Or maybe she just took the advice of economic adviser Larry Summers, who once warned her over dinner that if she wanted to be a Washington insider, the cardinal rule is that you never, ever criticize other insiders.

Maybe she's been overcome and assimilated by the Beltway Borg. It happens.

But being an optimist, I like to imagine that the meeting with Madame Secretary went something like this:

"You want me to keep Tweeting The Donald for you, Hillary? Then you swear on a stack of Bibles that you'll loudly condemn corporate trade deals during every public appearance, even when Obama is standing right next to you. You'll shriek out support of my bill restoring Glass-Steagall. You'll completely shut down your 'charity.' Bill will not, I repeat not, be in charge of revitalizing the economy or anything else, and he'll stop giving paid speeches. You won't stuff your cabinet with neocons and plutocrats. And take the vice gig and stuff it. And those are only my opening offers."

I like to imagine that Hillary then kowtowed to Elizabeth, instead of the other way around.

***

Nicholas Kristof, Why I Was Wrong About Welfare Reform, 6/18.

This was an apology for so ignorantly supporting the Clintons' wanton destruction of the cash aid safety net for poor mothers back in those bubble-icious deregulated Roaring 90s:

I was sympathetic to that goal at the time, but I’ve decided that I was wrong. What I’ve found in my reporting over the years is that welfare “reform” is a misnomer and that cash welfare is essentially dead, leaving some families with children utterly destitute.

He sets the empathetic but still tacitly judgmental tone in a profile of a Tulsa grandmother raising her drug-addicted daughter's toddler even as she herself recovers from drug addiction and a criminal history.  Fortunate enough to live in a home she inherited from her own grandmother, she survives on food stamps and church donations of clothing.

So, Kristof unctuously declares, the last thing Grandma needs is some actual cash in her pocket. What she needs is some good old-fashioned Clintonian neoliberalism:

So here’s where I come down. Welfare reform has failed, but the solution is not a reversion to the old program. Rather, let’s build new programs targeting children in particular and drawing from the growing base of evidence of what works.

That starts with free long-acting birth control for young women who want it (70 percent of pregnancies among young single women are unplanned). Follow that with high-quality early-childhood programs and prekindergarten, drug treatment, parenting coaching and financial literacy training, and a much greater emphasis on jobs programs to usher the poor into the labor force and bring them income.

My comment:

 Kristof describes the plight of the poor most eloquently. And then he offers feeble solutions to what can only be described as a humanitarian catastrophe in the most unequal country on earth.

Funny that he never mentions that it was the Clintons who spearheaded "ending welfare as we know it," and that his band-aids for the resulting doubling of the extreme poverty rate come straight from Hillary's campaign playbook.

What's wrong, exactly, with direct cash aid to the poor? Do Kristof and Clinton have that much mistrust in poor mothers' and grandmothers' ability to handle money? Why further demean them by denying them agency and control?

 Hillary's program has Jeremy Bentham-like "control of the poor" written all over it. Instead of getting even an extra $2 a day to spend as they see fit, poor mothers are instead offered parenting skills lessons under the elitist notion that poverty equals ignorance.

And when mothers of infants are forced to go from welfare to low-wage work under threat of losing benefits, Hillary's solution to the psychic damage from lack of maternal bonding in the home is to offer "empathy curricula" in schools.

Women are cut off from aid, such as rental assistance, for failure to appear at any given state-mandated appointment. If they didn't get the notice in the mail because of homelessness, too bad.

Put the coddled rich under the microscope for a change. Stop their direct cash aid from taxpayers. Usher them into a brave, new, humane world.

And a follow-up comment in response to a reader who took umbrage at my critique of the Clintons:

 Kristof passive-aggressively glosses over the bit where President Clinton signed the bill. I used the word "spearheaded" to convey the fact that both Clintons actively lobbied to kick millions of poor people, mainly women, off the welfare rolls. It was on their neoliberal agenda from Day One. It was not something that they did under GOP duress. As a matter of fact, condemning millions of people to lifelong poverty never could have been accomplished by Republicans alone. Clintonian complicity was very much the main ingredient.

 This column smells like another concern-trolling whitewash to me. Ironically, although the bill was euphemized as the "Welfare Reform and Personal Responsibility Act," Hillary herself takes no personal  responsibility for it now that she is running for president as an alleged champion of women and children. In her second memoir, though, she actually boasted that by the time she and Bill left office, the welfare rolls had been trimmed by 60%.

No apologies, no regrets, no reform of the reform to reverse the sadism and to make things right for poor moms and kids, the main victims of the man-made economic "recession."

I'll be writing more about Hillary's moralistic 21st century ideas for poor people in future posts. They deserve more scrutiny.

 There's more than one way to control, even dispose of, excess humanity, just as there are infinite ways to euphemize the policies that bring about the results most beneficial to the plutocrats, for whom too much is just never quite enough.