Nick Kristof Versus the Poor People

Barely two weeks after New York Times columnist and helicopter humanitarian Nicholas Kristof blasted the poor for smoking too much pot and having too many TVs, one of his targets had the gall to sneak into his unlocked Philadelphia hotel room on Saturday morning. Kristof had neglected to completely shut the door when he went down to the lobby to get some coffee.

But never fear. When Kristof returned and confronted the burglar holding the still-sleeping Mrs. Kristof's purse, he threatened to throw his hot coffee right at the culprit. When the man dropped the purse and fled the premises, our intrepid columnist immediately gave chase while his wife called security.

Kristof didn't even need to think twice. After all, he was in the City of Brotherly Love for a meeting of the American Philosophical Society.

I chase after him, hot on his heels.

“I’ll stab you with a knife if you keep coming,” he shouts at me. I don’t see a knife but I stay a couple of paces behind him just in case. At the second floor, he exits the stairwell. It’s the restaurant level, and he barrels through a screen into the restaurant, sending it crashing to the floor. I chase after him and shout at a horrified waitress to call security. We rush past her and now he takes the main grand staircase into the lobby. At this point, with other people nearby and not wanting him to escape out the main door, I jump him. There’s a tussle, and I pin him in a full nelson. (This is less heroic than it sounds, because he’s scrawny; I only tackle thieves who are smaller than me.)

It's the same way that he only tackles greedy TV owners who are poorer than he.

Last month, it wasn't a homeless man who threatened Kristof, but the stereotypical pit bull terrier in an unkempt front yard in Arkansas, where he had helicoptered down to take a concerned look at how deadbeat mothers neglect their children. Our intrepid columnist was absolutely aghast at the living conditions of Emanuel, the 13-year-old boy living there.

Emanuel has three televisions in his room, two of them gargantuan large-screen models. But there is no food in the house. As for the TVs, at least one doesn’t work, and the electricity was supposed to be cut off for nonpayment on the day I visited his house here in Pine Bluff: Emanuel’s mother deployed her pit bull terrier in the yard in hopes of deterring the utility man. (This seemed to work.)

The home, filthy and chaotic with a broken front door, reeks of marijuana. The televisions and Emanuel’s bed add an aspirational middle-class touch, but they were bought on credit and are at risk of being repossessed. The kitchen is stacked with dirty dishes, and not much else.

(snip)

 What many Americans don’t understand about poverty is that it’s perhaps less about a lack of money than about not seeing any path out. More than 80 percent of American households living below the poverty line have air-conditioning, so in material terms they’re incomparably better off than poor families in India or Congo. In other ways their lives can be worse.

And that was it for that column. Kristof offered no policy prescriptions for, say, an increase in the unconscionably paltry monthly food stamp stipends for poor families. The problem is that not enough of us understand the plight of poor Americans the same way that Helicopter Nick does. And why should we even bother? Kristof reassures his liberal readership that the lives of the poor could always be worse.

Now, back to his thrill-packed weekend hotel adventure. He breathlessly broadcast the details out to the world which he covers like a plastic garment bag -- before, apparently, he'd even had a chance to drink his weaponized coffee:

I’m shouting that he’s a thief, others are screaming, things are flying around, and the members of the American Philosophical Society step out in the lobby to see the fight and figure out what’s going on. A hotel bellman rushes over and assists, and then another, and we restrain him until the police show up. The man is furious and threatening me. Then we all go to the police station to make a statement; he turns out to be homeless and unarmed. I somehow messed up my thumb in the fight but am otherwise just fine; Sheryl and I are both relieved and thankful for the well wishes. Here’s a local news report on it.

Two main takeaways. First, thank goodness he didn’t have a gun. Second, always, always, always, lock your hotel room door, even if you’re only going to be gone a couple of minutes.

My published response: 

 This column reminded me of the slapstick hotel scene in Mel Brooks's "High Anxiety" -- right down to the ironic backdrop of the American Philosophical Society confab.

So, now that we know Nick is a super-hero who can tackle skinny, homeless purse-snatchers, maybe he can devote some future columns to the problem of homelessness itself. How about (despite the sudden elite need to make nice with Trumpy) advocating for a federal guaranteed housing policy? And I don't mean homeless shelters that are more dangerous than the streets, or temporary fleabag hotel rooms. I mean a clean, permanent apartment for anybody needing one. We could even start with Trump Tower, now that Trump has found himself some new digs.

Was the burglar lurking in Kristof's fashionable hotel because he was starving, having had his food stamp stipend cut off in that recent bipartisan move to help the poor get out of their lazy hammocks of luxury? Or was he in search of some quick cash for an opioid fix? Kristof apparently didn't ask, given his throbbing thumb trauma.

But thankfully he doesn't forget the obligatory media Takeaways. The lessons of this whole ordeal in the Age of Anxiety for Well-Off But Very, Very Nervous Philosophers is to be grateful that not all desperadoes have guns, and always lock your doors. You just never know when the collateral damage of our trickle-down society is lurking just outside to steal your money and knock your security as well as your thumbs right out of joint.

It could always have been worse. The columnist-philosopher could have asked the bellhop who'd helped him tackle the homeless guy to bring him up a copy of the Times.  And then, when Kristof was washing off that horrible homeless smell in a hot shower, the annoyed bellhop could have re-enacted the High Anxiety re-enactment of Psycho and attacked him with his own column. 

But thankfully for weekly global destinations and for helicopter journalism, Kristof is safe -- if not quite sound.

Because now that Trump is a done deal despite Nick Kristof's best scare-mongering efforts over the past year or so, our intrepid poor-fighter is now willing to admit that he actually might find common ground with the man he once found so abominable.

Only days before the hungry homeless guy wandered into his luxury hotel room and tried to steal some cash in lieu of the flat-screen TV or contents of the hospitality fridge, Kristof lectured his liberal readers,

When a former Ku Klux Klan leader like David Duke is giddily celebrating a political triumph for his values, how can we not ache for our own selves.Yet, like it or not, we  Americans have a new president-elect, and it’s time to buck up. I’ve seen past elections that were regarded as the end of the world — including, in many Democratic circles, the Reagan triumph of 1980 — and the republic survived. This time as well, our institutions are stronger than any one man. We are not Weimar Germany.

It was disgraceful that many Republicans eight years ago tried to make President Obama fail. That’s not the path to emulate. Today, having lost, we owe it to our nation to grit our teeth and give President-elect Trump a chance.

With any luck, Trump will sign all of Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan's anti-poor legislation and get those TVs and marijuana cigarettes out of the filthy homes of the impoverished right quick. Liberals will just have to philosophically buck up, if only for the sake of themselves. And I hear there's already a booming therapy market for those still achingly and frantically looking for scapegoats, such as working class whites.

Let the poor eat the leftovers, tastefully wrapped in the flaky crust of old Sunday New York Times luxury real estate sections, and sanitized for our protection.

Criminalizing the Sick

As Hillary Clinton cynically vows to incrementally build upon the "successes" of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration keeps chipping away at them.

The latest chip punishes people who desperately sign up for expensive private health insurance when they get sick or hurt. Such behavior is a rude slap in the face to the free market predators, who are then forced to dip into their obscene profits and pay a portion of your hospital and doctor bills. 

Of course, the way the insurance companies spin it, it's those conniving sick people who are to blame for driving up everybody else's premiums. It's the same old Divide and Conquer ploy that the ruling class has used since time immemorial in an attempt to hide their own greed and malfeasance.

As Barack Obama might explain it, if you "game the system" by waiting until you're at death's door to use your rent and grocery money to pay hefty insurance premiums, you're going to have to pay the piper. You'll have to wait until the next open enrollment period to have your bursting appendix removed.  You might even have to die as prematurely as you would have in those awful days before the health care sweepstakes were instituted. You can't buy a lottery ticket after the drawing, people! You can't put a flat screen TV on your credit card just to watch the Super Bowl, and then expect a full refund when you return it the next day, all full of smudges and fingermarks. 

As the New York Times explains it,

The administration, which had created more than 30 “special enrollment” periods, sent emails to millions of Americans last year urging them to see if they might be eligible to sign up after the annual open enrollment deadline. But, insurers and state officials said, the federal government did little to verify whether late arrivals were eligible.Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, said Tuesday that special enrollment periods “are not allowed for people who choose to remain uninsured and then decide they need health insurance when they get sick.”

Since the Neoliberal Project has deemed your body to be a commodity which you only partially own, you are expected to behave like a responsible consumer. If you seize up your engine because you didn't oil the capitalistic machinery as directed, don't come crying to Obama when you stall out. If you don't pay through the nose for the pricey undercoating deal, tough luck if your bod gets rusty. Keep yourself polished and gassed up, and pledge your financial allegiance to the underwriters instead of to the undertaker. Above all, keep up those monthly extortion payments, lest you get an unpleasant visit from the WellCare repo man. 

Mr. Counihan said the administration would eliminate six of the special enrollment periods, including two for certain lawfully present noncitizens who experienced “system errors” and “processing delays” when they used HealthCare.gov. In addition, he said the government would clarify eligibility standards and step up enforcement to prevent abuse of special enrollment periods.

The actions appeared to have several purposes: to motivate consumers to sign up by the Jan. 31 deadline; to prevent an influx of large numbers of sick people into the market in the middle of the year; to persuade insurers to enter or stay in the public insurance marketplace; and to minimize rate increases in 2017 and later.

Medical care cuts both ways, said Counihan. The right of protection racketeers to get rich hinges upon the fear cooperation of regular people, who must pay for Medical Care Product in advance. You see, in the most exceptional nation the world has ever known, health care is still not a basic human right. It is a privilege for only the select few with a high enough credit score and bank account balance to qualify for survival.

The new rules mean that not only will people have to go shopping every year for a new insurance plan, they will now have to prove they have a permanent address. People who temporarily move in with relatives (maybe because they lost their job when they got sick) won't qualify for coverage outside the narrow enrollment period. People who get sick or hurt outside their home states will have to jump through hoops to prove that they're not trying to cheat the system. All citizens shall be considered suspects until and unless they can prove their financial and medical innocence:

In a blog post on Tuesday, Mr. Counihan said, “Our program integrity team will pull samples of consumer records nationally and may request additional information from some consumers or take other steps to validate that consumers properly qualified for these special enrollment periods.”

In addition, he said, officials will emphasize to consumers that “they may be subject to penalties under federal law if they intentionally provide false or untrue information.

These are the same pathocratic clowns who profess to be so amazed that Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All campaign is so popular. They seem to be honestly baffled that people aren't in love with Obamacare. Who, except lefty unicorn believers, wouldn't rather pay high premiums and co-pays and deductibles to the for-profit insurance racket and then get treated like a criminal if they show up in the emergency room?

The architects of the Affordable Care Act and the private insurers they serve are now criminalizing and intimidating the sick. Before you know it, newspapers and websites will be adding photo galleries of Obamacare Cheats to supplement their regular poor-shaming features on Food Stamp Grifters and Welfare Queens.

So use your Obamacare card at your own risk. And keep up those monthly payments to Blue Cross. Stay close to the phone in case a government official, acting on behalf of United Healthcare, decides to call you in for an audit. A hospital-to-prison pipeline could be in your future if you don't get sick responsibly.