Picking At the Trump Pimple

Depending on whether you're a fan or a critic, Donald Trump in Europe was either too sexy for his shirt or too big for his britches. Or maybe his tailor quit in the middle of the job because Trump's deposit check had bounced. This is the picture that all the fashionista pundits couldn't stop talking about this week:

The next-most earth-shattering thing they're talking about, now that Trump's insults to Meghan Markle and the mayor of London are disappearing into the ether to keep the Trump Baby Balloon company, is that Trump threatened to single-handedly destroy Britain's beloved National Health Service!  Its demise will be the offer the Brits will be unable to refuse if they have any hope of a post-Brexit trade deal with Trump's United States.

"Mar-a-Lago Comes For British Health!" is the dire warning of the New York Times's Paul Krugman.

That would be the same Paul Krugman who warned only three years ago that the nefarious Bernie Sanders was coming for Obamacare, and who continues to speciously argue that single payer health care espoused by Sanders and other progressives is next to impossible "in the current climate.

Krugman writes,

As it happens, the British and American health systems lie at opposite ends of a spectrum defined by the relative roles of the private and public sectors.

 Although the Affordable Care Act expanded health coverage and increased the role of Medicaid, most Americans still get their insurance (if they get it at all) from private companies and get treated at for-profit hospitals and clinics. In other countries, like Canada, the government pays the bills, but health providers are private. Britain, however, has true socialized medicine: The government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors.

That skirts the truth, to put it politely. As I responded to Krugman in my published comment: 

The NHS is already opened up to private US companies and it has been at least since 2006. That was when the Hospital Corporation of America partnered with British medical facilities that serve only private patients.

 Other US-based corporations have followed suit, with the stated anodyne objective along the lines of "improving efficiencies" and other neoliberal buzz-phrases to mask creeping privatization.

Optum, a division of UnitedHealth, works with the NHS in contract negotiations and medications management. Kaiser Permanente also "advises" the NHS, and IBM provides it with electronic records services.

 This has mostly been under the radar, until Donald Trump came along and did his usual oafish thing. No wonder that the discreet wing of the ruling class can't stand him. He rips the mask right off all the plunder and the greed. He bellows that he wants to destroy the social contract wherever it exists in the world, from a platform where everybody can hear him, thus endangering the whole late-capitalistic plan.

A Henry Kissinger he definitely is not. It wasn't until years after the fact that the Kissinger-Nixon plot to "make Chile's economy scream" by overthrowing the socialist government with a CIA coup became widely known. Then it was too late.

 It's not too late in Britain. And hopefully, it's not even too late in the United States

Why do we keep hearing that Medicare for All is "impossible?"

 For one reason: It'd put a dent in the profits of the voracious oligarchy.

The most radical shift in the stealthy undoing of the NHS came in 2012, with the passage of Britain's Health and Social Care Act. This law specifically enforces a restructuring of the system based upon the advice of McKinsey, the US-based global consulting firm which has come in for some well-deserved criticism lately. As the public advocacy group Patients4NHS explains:

The Act ordered the NHS to use the private sector: it made it compulsory for those services that potentially could be provided by non-NHS organisations to be put out to competitive tender. Private companies are now involved in a wide range of NHS services, from GP or out-of-hours care to diagnostic services (such as scans or blood tests), elective (or routine) surgery and ambulance services. In addition, private, multinational consultancy firms are being paid considerable amounts of taxpayers’ money for advising NHS providers, such as hospital Trusts, on managing their service.

The NHS was already on the chopping block in the Obama era's secretive trade deals, such as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), which not only would give private US-based corporations the right to destroy Britain's socialized medical care system, but would prevent any future governments from ever reversing the privatization!

So perhaps we should thank Donald Trump's freely oozing mouth for warning us about the systemic cancer which lurks beneath. He is putting his unwitting squeeze right on the corporate propaganda campaign which continues to vociferously deny that Britain's health care system is on the chopping block in trade extortion schemes that long preceded, and go far beyond, Donald Trump's clumsy unfiltered threats.

Ominously, the private companies already infiltrating the NHS are still permitted to use the NHS logo, thus further deliberately hiding their for-profit agenda from the British public. 

So Krugman and other critics who pile on Trump to the exclusion of critiquing the entire transnational anti-democratic corrupt system that created him in the first place are themselves doing harm by picking on just one particularly annoying unsightly zit while ignoring a whole body full of chronic deep-tissue lesions.

This is what critics who are not Trump, from both the right and the left, mean when they accuse the mainstream corporate media of purveying "fake news," both by commission and by omission. Krugman is no dummy. He knows, or should know, that the danger to the NHS preceded Trump by decades, and that the plunder of social welfare programs around the world will long outlast Trump - unless, of course, capitalism eats itself into extinction first.

Trump is simply the most glaring contemporary symbol, and symptom, of malignant terminal capitalism. Getting rid of him might feel good in the short term, but it's no cure for what deeply ails the sick and decaying body politic.

There's plenty more where he came from, within the highly weaponized Defense of Wealth industry.

Privatizing the Kill List

Facing a shortage in credentialed military personnel, the Obama administration is outsourcing part of its drone assassination program to unaccountable corporations. What could possibly go wrong?

According to the government, nothing much. You see, the private contractors operating the drones aren't actually allowed to pull the trigger on the "militants" (defined by the CIA as all males in "tribal areas" in the primes of their lives) whom they are tasked with suspecting and surveilling and identifying as bad guys.

From the New York Times:

 But there is no limit on the type of reconnaissance they can perform, and they are providing live video feeds of battles and special operations.

As the Obama administration has accelerated its campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the past 10 months, the Pentagon has added four drones flown by contractors to the roughly 60 that are typically flown every day by uniformed Air Force personnel.

This is adding mission creep to the mission creep. Today it's four, tomorrow it's eight. Because drones gotta fly and military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon gotta profit.

For purposes of absolving politicians and Pentagon officials of any personal accountability for their extra-judicial killing sprees,

 The number and identities of contractors working on the drone flights are considered classified information, the Air Force said. But Pentagon officials said there are at least several hundred contractors, many of them former drone or fighter pilots who are making double or triple their military salaries.

Where, they must be asking themselves, do I sign up for this gig at triple my lousy grunt salary? Why risk my life flying an airplane when I can retire early and make big bucks operating a joystick out of an air-conditioned trailer?

All of a sudden, within the same New York Times article, there are hundreds of eager beavers vying for only a handful of official drone control jobs. So here's the implicit message: let's artificially improve the United States employment rate by creating hundreds of new jobs building and operating a drone fleet on steroids. It gives a whole new meaning to trickle-down economics. Instead of trickling down, though, the benefits buzz around in the sky for a bit before zooming straight to the ground. Ka-ching and ka-boom! 

But in 2014, President Obama ordered a stepped-up military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Later that year, Mr. Obama, who had said that a small number of troops remaining behind in Afghanistan would have no combat role, decided to authorize a more expansive mission for them.

The Air Force was not prepared for this increased demand. Finding pilots was difficult. They typically work long hours in windowless rooms staring at computer monitors and do not get many days off. Many of those who fly armed drones have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder because they have witnessed so many airstrikes. There is also a powerful perception in the Air Force that drone jobs are less prestigious and glamorous than flying more traditional military aircraft, and recruitment has been hard.

OK, so the solution is to give these poor stressed-out drone pilots a break by bringing in constant new recruits for PTSD. This is called instilling some basic human decency into the Kill List. The war-mongers want us to believe that, despite the fact that new hires will be making as much as triple their military pay, it's hard to find recruits. The office ambience is a bit below-par. There's not as much glitter and glamour to long-distance murder as there is in making direct eye contact with your human targets before blasting them to bits. Maybe they can quadruple the pay and tack on an extra week of paid vacation. More likely, they will lower the professional standards. Since our politicians keep harping on a "skills gap" among jobless and underemployed graduates, perhaps our for-profit colleges can add a few Internet courses in drone operation. The market possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, the Times piece gets even more Orwellian:

Operating drones requires an extensive support network. One pilot and a camera operator typically control a drone, and since a drone is expected to be constantly in the air, each one must have several crews. The analysis of the footage taken in by the drones is even more labor intensive. For every drone, there is a need for up to four dozen analysts who can look at the many hours of footage to assess the targets and other intelligence.

With little alternative, the Air Force initiated a “get-well plan” in January 2015 that included several measures — among them an increase in pay — to try to alleviate the significant “stress on the force” that had developed.

How sweet. The Pentagon is having a Hallmark moment over its Hellfire missiles. Hitmen (and women) for hire in the private sector must be coddled and even sent get-well cards for all that incipient PTSD and eye-strain and aching backs. Forget about the innocent people on the ground getting killed or maimed by Predator and Reaper drones. They rarely get a mention, let alone an apology or compensation. It's not a part of the Drone Playbook. If they were expecting a sympathy card from America, they can think again.

Air Force officials said there are many safeguards in place to train and monitor contractors. But the officials declined to provide many details about the flights, such as where the contractors are deployed and which companies are operating the flights.

The officials also declined to address the role that contractors play in a select group of highly classified drone flights that the Air Force conducts daily for the C.I.A. Air Force pilots, who are essentially on loan to the C.I.A., fly those drones while the agency does its own preflight target planning and post-mission analysis.

We're the American Deep State. Just trust us. If you were expecting transparency over which private corporations are receiving lucrative contracts on your dime for purposes of killing people in your name, you can think again. But, they grudgingly admit,

 Contractors are typically compensated far more than service members, and some current and former senior Air Force officials said their use could actually exacerbate the shortage in military drone pilots because the pay of the private sector might lure them away.

Ya think? So pretty soon, we won't need a regular military at all. It's the capitalism, stupid. And privateers are under no obligation to disclose anything to the public. They only demand that the public pay for everything.

To its credit, the Times does give us a hint on one corporation that is profiting from privatized drone kills, without admitting outright that it is a direct beneficiary of the outsourcing.  In true Orwellian spirit, it is called Resilient Solutions Ltd. Its motto is Your Mission First.

According to its webpage, it was awarded an Air Force contract in May to provide

Advisory and Assistance Services to the Air Force Safety Center (AFSEC), Aviation Safety Division, Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Branch. The RSL Team supports AFSEC's RPA safety programs, involving studies, analysis, evaluation, engineering and technical services to the combatant commanders and major commands (MAJCOMs). The AFSEC Remotely Piloted Aircraft Mishap Prevention program utilizes the RSL team to support Safety Investigation Boards, investigate RPA mishaps, and facilitate the safe integration of RPA operations within the National Airspace Program. Services provided by Resilient Solutions include Safety System Engineering, MQ 1/9 operational expertise, Airspace/Air Traffic Control subject matter experts, RPA Human Factors subject matter experts, RPA maintenance subject matter experts, and Research Analysis.

I could be wrong, but I think that this is Newspeak for "We help you kill people efficiently and responsibly and then help you shove it all under the rug."

Among Resilient Solutions' other listed clients is the New York Times, a factoid which the Paper of Record chose not to disclose.