It could not be clearer that the elites of the political-media-military nexus want us to forget about this horrific war crime perpetrated in all our names. As MSF (translated as Doctors Without Borders) has learned to its chagrin as its requests for investigatory help from 76 separate sovereign nations have gone coldly unheeded, the tentacles of Superpower encircle the globe in a literal stranglehold. Meanwhile, we can read the medical charity's own report of the carnage inside the hospital right as it happened.
Especially chilling is the revelation that an unnamed US official from Washington, D.C. called the medical staff the day before the attack and specifically demanded to know if Taliban fighters were "holed up" within the hospital before smarmily inquiring as to staff safety. The MSF responded that they were treating patients at full capacity, and yes, the patients included wounded Taliban members. This turned out to be the calm before the airstrike storm. There had been virtually no fighting in the area, as General Campbell had initially claimed. "MSF staff recall that the first room to be hit was the ICU, where MSF staff were caring for a number of immobile patients, some of whom were on ventilators," according to the report. Two children were among the victims burned alive in their beds. From the ICU ground zero, the Americans proceeded to methodically destroy the library, the emergency room, the laboratory, the mental health unit, the outpatient department, the physical therapy department and the operating suite. Doctors were killed as they performed surgery, as were two patients lying anesthetized on the tables. A nurse suffered a traumatic amputation, his arm hanging by a thread as he rushed,covered in blood, to an administration building to awaken and warn other sleeping staff members. Witnesses reported that airplane gunners seemed to be directly pursuing the medical personnel and patients fleeing the carnage to seek safety in other buildings. The open-air victims of the prolonged attack included a patient in a wheelchair.
The total number of known dead has increased from 22 to 30: 13 patients, 10 staff, and seven so badly burned as to be unidentifiable.
At the time of the attack, the hospital was well lit and easily identified by a large lettered flag on its rooftop, the report said. Christopher Stokes, general director of MSF. told a news conference in Kabul: "A mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage.From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war. You cannot do this. You cannot bomb a hospital.”
He suspects that somebody, somewhere, decided to relieve the hospital of its protected status under the Geneva Conventions. That icy phone call from Washington right before the attack lends credence to that suspicion. The bombing of the hospital was neither collateral damage nor was it a passive-aggressive mistake that was made. It was pure, brutal, cold-blooded murder. Unless the Obama administration indicts those responsible(the US has refused to be part of the International Criminal Court) his much-ballyhooed legacy will be even bloodier than it already is. The man is positively dripping with it, to complement the disdain for the rule of law and democracy that he and most other presidents have harbored with impunity. Meanwhile, MSF president Joanne Liu is right: "The silence (of the whole world) is embarrassing."
The only thing more surprising than a new study showing that middle-aged white people are dying in a virtual epidemic of suicide and substance abuse is that the experts are so shocked by this news. After all, the USA is the richest, most technologically advanced, most exceptional country in the history of history. Aren't minimum wage earners taking advantage of the Obamacare shopping network and champing at the bit to fork over $5,000 in deductibles every year before predatory insurance kicks in to treat their ingrown toenail? What gives?
The discovery by a pair of Princeton economists of the awful truth that tens of thousands of people in their forties and fifties are dying prematurely and unnecessarily was made purely by accident. Co-author Anne Case, herself suffering from a painful and inoperable back condition, was curious about the possible relationships among happiness, pain and suicide rankings in the various states. She and her husband, recent Nobel economics prize-winner Angus Deaton, were stunned to learn that the death rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a
high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from
1999 to 2014. The causes of these deaths are not diabetes, heart disease or hypertension: they are suicide, and the liver-damaging, life-shortening effects of alcohol, and accidental overdose from heroin and prescription opioids.
They write:
This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to
the United States; no
other rich country saw a similar
turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white
non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics
and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged
65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see
mortality rates fall.
This increase for whites was largely
accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol
poisonings, suicide, and
chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.
Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide
and poisonings,
and an overall increase in external cause
mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases.
Rising midlife
mortality rates of white non-Hispanics
were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported
declines in health,
mental health, and ability to conduct
activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability
to work, as
well as clinically measured deteriorations
in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population.
The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous
evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development
that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining
health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age,
they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death
rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and
Dr. Case found.
(snip)
“Wow,”
said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of
populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid
indication that something is awry in these American households.”
Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.
Wow? More like duh. Another economist, from Harvard, is quoted as sniffing that he'd always just assumed that these drug deaths were just "blips on the radar," and that "everyone's" health is improving, just as the "economy" is supposedly improving. Actually, the new study shows that by "everyone," the experts mean those of a higher educational and socioeconomic status, who can afford to see a doctor because they have actual jobs paying a living wage. The premature death effect was largely confined to people with a high school education
or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent, while they
actually fell for those with a college education.
It's the class war, stupid. It's the wealth inequality, geniuses. It's the corporate media propaganda telling us that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is a "moderate" who will join with Democrats to soberly, responsibly and wonkishly cut what remains of the social safety net out from under millions of struggling, suffering Americans. It's Social Darwinism newly illustrated on a spreadsheet. It's the continued, deliberate culling of the American herd.
This silent epidemic of sadism within the political class has been going on for decades now. That the new findings of premature death are about white people probably accounts for much of the elite shock, since the death rates among blacks and Latinos are still higher than those of even the poorest whites. They simply have reached something of a plateau of pain, while whites are rapidly playing catch-up in their trek to the misery mountaintop. It's telling that the Deaton-Case study didn't delve into the correlation between the higher death rates of poor whites with residence in states opting out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Liberal pundits are very fond of blaming higher mortality and morbidity among whites in red states on Republican governors and legislatures refusing to join in the expansion, even though it is initially being paid for by federal funds. Therefore, a Harvard study last year showing that as many as 17,000 people will needlessly die every year in states opting out of Medicaid expansion was met by a group shrug by liberal experts, who pointed to GOP nihilism rather than the despair and hardship of the individuals affected by the lousy economy as the cause. If only more people could access the rare doctor willing to accept those paltry Medicaid fees, the conventional wisdom went, people would be alive and well and happy. The new study turns that supposition right on its head. Poor people are dying way too young in all 50 states, Medicaid or no Medicaid, Obamacare or no Obamacare. While official Census Bureau figures show that one in six people exists below the official poverty threshold, the reality is much worse when you consider that more than half of us don't have enough savings to cover a $1,000 medical co-pay or a $500 car repair.
And we are all supposed to be surprised that a person would rather self-medicate with cheap heroin or a six-pack than log on to the Healthcare.gov website and be faced with rate hikes as high as 40 percent a year. Pay up, or else the IRS will charge you a penalty. Your pain is their gain. It is obvious is that more and more people have been forced to treat their pain with opioids and booze because they can't afford a surgeon or a dentist. The authors of the study are still unsure what came first: the pain, or the substance abuse. And they do not purport to find a link between the death rate and the financial crisis.
But an earlier study on the increasing fatal use of painkillers by white women squarely blames the plutocracy-spawned financial meltdown for premature deaths of poor and working class females:
Increases in midlife mortality are paralleled by increases in
self-reported midlife morbidity….The increase in reports of poor health
among those in midlife was matched by increased reports of pain. Rows
4–7 of Table 2 present the fraction reporting neck pain, facial pain,
chronic joint pain, and sciatica. One in three white non-Hispanics aged
45–54 reported chronic joint pain in the 2011–2013 period; one in five
reported neck pain; and one in seven reported sciatica. Reports of all
four types of pain increased significantly between 1997−1999 and
2011−2013…. The epidemic of pain which the opioids were designed to treat is real
enough, although the data here cannot establish whether the increase in
opioid use or the increase in pain came first. Both
increased rapidly after the mid-1990s. Pain prevalence might have been
even higher without the drugs, although long-term opioid use may
exacerbate pain for some (26), and consensus on the effectiveness and
risks of long-term opioid use has been hampered by lack of research
evidence (27). Pain is also a risk factor for suicide (28). Increased alcohol abuse and suicides are likely
symptoms of the same underlying epidemic (18, 19, 29), and have
increased alongside it, both temporally and spatially.
Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded
the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After
the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the
first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were
their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. However, the
productivity slowdown is common to many rich countries, some of which
have seen even slower growth in median earnings than the United States,
yet none have had the same mortality experience
(lanekenworthy.net/shared-prosperity and ref. 30). The United States has
moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated
stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are
still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US
workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than
earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to
defined-contribution plans (31).
Between 2007 and 2013, median wealth dropped a shocking 40 percent, leaving the poorest half with negative wealth (because of debt), and about 100 plutocratic families owning as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent of Americans combined. The wealth gap is now the highest ever recorded.
And the experts still have the chutzpah to call themselves "startled" that half a million desperate white people (a probably too-low figure, in my opinion) are killing themselves at rates comparable to those during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. Methinks they had better rethink their definitions of the American Empire, and American Exceptionalism.
We'd also be wise todefine Chronic Despair as a public health emergency. The pathology of the plutocrats is trickling down like a ton of Ebola and killing people right in their tracks.
It's not surprising that in its obituary of Sheldon Wolin, who died last week, the New York Times studiously avoided any mention of the term for which this political philosopher is most famous: inverted totalitarianism. Instead, the obit's headline misleadingly and somewhat crankily blared that Wolin was an expert on "the limits of popular democracy."
So it was all the more eerily prescient that in an interview with Chris Hedges last year, Wolin observed that it is essentially verboten for the media-political complex to openly declare that American democracy has been kicked upside the head, resulting in the creation of the Total Capitalistic State. Speaking such a truth might give the plutocratic ruling class a bad case of agita, even if it's mentioned in the obituary of the man who made educating the public about this inconvenient truth his life's work. Wolin was talking about the capture of private media and public institutions by unfettered capital long before Bernie Sanders started running for president, of course. And given that such plain-speaking from within the political establishment is as rare as a snowball in hell, whether Bernie does in fact have a chance in hell of winning the Democratic nomination has been rendered moot. He is changing the dialogue. He is mentioning the S word, (socialism) and the world has not come to an end. That is quite a revolutionary breakthrough in the historic scheme of things. The recent rise of Bernie Sanders is comparable to the rise of Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party in the early 20th century. TR failed to win the presidency under that populist banner, but the rhetoric still became part of the conversation. Wall Street was put on notice. And by the time the market crashed in 1929, the populist stage was set for Cousin Franklin's New Deal. What Sheldon Wolin has called the radical experiment, "an unprecedented expansion of state power during peacetime" of FDR's great social programs has been under reactionary attack ever since, with the Democrats wimping out to Republicans when they are not actually aiding and abetting them. The Cold War and the fight against Communism was the initial excuse for shredding the safety net, with that excuse now morphing into the perpetual War on Terror. Fear and want, they think, will keep people quiet.
That Sanders is even getting mainstream coverage on the proposed expansion of New Deal programs should at least put a temporary halt to their open evisceration by the GOP, and their piecemeal evisceration by Clintonian Third Way Democrats. To that extent, he is right about his campaign being tantamount to a revolution. It's the beginning of a counter-counterrevolution against the corporate capture of government."The ultimate merger would be between capitalism and democracy," Wolin wrote of the right-wing war against the New Deal in Democracy, Inc. "Once the identity and security of democracy were successfully identified with the Cold War, the stage was set for intimidation of most politics left of right." Unlike Nazism, Stalinism and fascism, inverted totalitarianism in the United States is "a system driven not by an individual ruler, but by abstract totalizing powers, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, that relies more on 'private' media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events." Here's looking at you, New York Times, from your boosting corporate political candidates, to your boosting preemptive wars of aggression, to bowdlerizing the message of one your harshest, most accurate critics in the obituary that you just deigned to write about him. "Managed democracy" is the definition of inverted totalitarianism. American democracy is largely contained within the now-permanent electoral process. We are invited to give our opinions on candidates and wedge issues rather than upon substantive issues. We're invited to rail against Ben Carson's snake oil and Marco Rubio's sordid finances instead of the things, like medical care and paychecks, that affect us personally. We're invited to equate voting for a pre-selected candidate with legitimating that candidate.
Wolin wrote, "The United States has become the showcase for how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed. This has come about, not through a Leader's imposing his will or the State's forcibly eliminating opposition, but through certain developments, notably in the economy, that promoted integration, rationalization, concentrated wealth, and a faith that virtually any problem -- from health care, to political crises, to faith itself -- could be managed, even subject to control, predictability and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of the product. Voters are made as predictable as consumers.... The regime ideology is capitalism, which is as virtually undisputed as Nazi doctrine in 1930s Germany."
Another word for this state of affairs is "neoliberalism," or as Margaret Thatcher charmingly defined it, "There is no alternative." (TINA.)
That is why, even though he might not have a chance of winning, Bernie Sanders is turning TINA right on its over-inflated head. He's chasing away the apathy that the oligarchs are counting on. He's afflicting the comfortable. And that includes Hillary Clinton. Even if she wins the presidency, she will lose political capital and public approval for every campaign promise that she decides to break.
Meanwhile, here is the complete 2014 Real News Network conversation between Sheldon Wolin and Chris Hedges. It's divided into eight 20-minute parts, so you can watch it at your leisure.
(Part of a continuing series of New York Times comments by yours truly, with some added commentary in this post to make the fun even funner.) Charles Blow, Hillary Clinton Wins Again Blow makes his centrist political preferences and Times group-think perfectly clear with his second column in a row canonizing Hillary Clinton. The fact that his other gig is on CNN (the Beltway group-think/ terror channel) explains it all. Here's a sample from his latest ode to the Empress-in-Waiting:
She
is far from flawless, but she is no slouch or dummy. She is sharp and
tough and resilient. She is a rock, and she is not to be trifled with.
The
Clintons as a couple, and individually, are battle-hardened. They are
not new to this. They are survivors. Even when they lose, they survive.
No upstart congressman or woman can do more damage than has already been
done and dealt with.
Toward the end of the 11-hour hearing, Cummings said to Clinton:
“You
have laid it out. I think — you’ve said — this has not been done
perfectly. You wish you could do it another way, and then the statement
you made a few minutes ago when you said, you know, I have given more
thought to this than all of you combined. So I don’t know what we want
from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get
tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he’s talking about?”
He continued:
“We’re
better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And
we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign.
That’s not what America is all about.
My response to Blow:
With all due respect to Elijah Cummings, Congress is not "better than
that." With its approval rating at 15%, Hillary Clinton went into that
hearing knowing full well that it would be a marathon campaign
commercial, the equivalent of five victorious prime-time debates between
a competent politician and a group of bumbling idiots and sadists that
made even Ben Carson and Donald Trump look reasonable and kind.
Her
composure and stamina were enormously boosted by her fellow Democrats.
who obligingly used their time to praise her to the heavens while
placing one figurative dunce cap after another upon rapidly deflating
Republican heads. There weren't any questions on reports that Benghazi
was the site of a secret CIA prison or its use as a hub for illegal arms
smuggling to Syrian rebels, for example. There were no questions about
her brokering a $20 billion arms sale to the Saudis, who then donated a
cheap $1 million to her family foundation. No Democrat questioned her
retention of Cheney neocon Victoria Nuland.
The over-the-top right-wing inquisition of Hillary Clinton has served to
temporarily defuse legitimate criticism of her actions and policies
from the left. Memories of the Clintons' betrayal of poor women through
the odious Welfare Reform Act of 1996 are forgotten as besotted pundits
praise her as a role model for beleaguered women everywhere.
Watch out for those falling shards as she breaks the glass ceiling, and Wall Street cries all the way to Wall Street.
No, he isn't being snarky or ironic. He thinks that Romney, in his heart of hearts, is a really cool technocrat who just doesn't get enough credit for inventing Obamacare. I haven't been keeping count, but this has got to be about the hundredth of all Krugman's blog-posts and columns over the past several years which have inordinately praised the Affordable Care Act.
Krugman is especially pleased that some rich people in his own social set are happy with the program, no doubt because they are able to afford the ridiculous premiums on the Gold Plan, or whatever they're calling health coverage for the pampered ruling class these days:
How good is the insurance thus obtained? Not perfect: despite subsidies,
policies are still hard for some to afford, and deductibles and co-pays
can be onerous. But most people enrolled under Obamacare report high satisfaction
with their coverage, which is hugely better than simply not being
uninsured. And may I inject a personal note? If truth be told, I live in
a pretty rarefied, upper-middle-class-and-above milieu — yet even so I
know several people for whom the Affordable Care Act has been more or
less literally a lifesaver. This is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a really big deal.
Well, unlike his Times colleagues, Krugman is rare in his honesty. He readily admits that he is a snob. My response to him:
Meanwhile, Mitt's running mate Paul Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, as
well as getting rid of Obamacare and tearing the rest of the social
safety net to shreds. But Joe Biden has just come to his defense, saying
that Ryan is "a good guy" with whom Democrats should be eager to
cooperate.
And therein lies the problem. The DNC leadership has
veered so far right that it is either reduced to shooting diseased GOP
fish in a barrel, or pretending that bipartisanship is still a good
thing. It's reduced to defending a clunky insurance program that
benefits only some of the people some of the time.
Yes, the
expansion of Medicaid to some of the working poor is to be applauded.
But the fact remains that at least 30 million of us remain uninsured or
underinsured. Thousands of people are still dying because they can't
afford to see a doctor. Medicare for All (John Conyers' HR 676) is getting well-deserved new
attention through the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Not only
would it cover everybody from cradle to grave with medical, dental,
mental health care and drug therapies, it would actually save as much as
a trillion dollars a year. From "consumers" who must now enter a
fraught health care lottery every year in order to enrich the
increasingly consolidated insurance industry, we'd be able join the rest
of the civilized world in defining health care as a basic human right.
Forget about freeing Romney. How about freeing 330 million Americans via Medicare for All?
***
As a further antidote to Times-think, here's Bernie Sanders tearing it up at last weekend's Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. (Yes, the Dems unfortunately still honor a slave-owner and an ethnic cleanser.)
I wrote about this planted column when it was published on Aug. 2. And presto change-o, months later, during the same week Biden decided not to run, he appeared on TV to huffily disown the whole bathetic story about Beau's death-wish. And now the New York Times is embroiled in yet another "scandal" of its own making. It seems that news reporter Amy Chozick extrapolated from Dowd's puff piece the image of Beau on his death-bed, a la The Gipper, when all Dowd had done was place him sitting up at the kitchen table. Seriously.That is how seriously these very important, shallow people take themselves. My comment:
It was so obvious that Joe Biden and/or his operatives used Maureen Dowd
and the Times as the vehicle to float his presidential trial balloon.
Whether Beau had the alleged conversation with his dad as he sat dying,
or whether he had the conversation as he lay dying, or whether the
conversation existed at all, is a moot point.
I remember that her
column appeared earlier than usual that weekend, and that moderators
immediately placed reader comments saying "Run Joe Run!" in the "Times
Pick" category, effectively sequestering those that were more skeptical.
The agenda was perfectly clear.
As others have noted, the
propaganda was mutually beneficial to both Dowd and Biden. If her column
did not suit his express purposes, don't you think he would have
immediately demanded retractions on both her column and Amy Chozick's
subsequent article?
Biden had come under renewed criticism in the past few weeks, when his
PAC ran a maudlin commercial which shamelessly used Beau Biden's death
as a vehicle to push his father's candidacy. The VP demanded that it be
taken down because it was that obvious and slimy and phony.
And
now that he is no longer running (or at least until Hillary Clinton
possibly implodes) he suddenly comes out and makes a stink about the
Beau column and the articles on "60 Minutes." It seems to me that
Regular Joe bears as much of the blame for this whole mini-scandal as
the sycophantic press corps.
Lesson to pundits and reporters: don't be shills for the powerful.
How can you tell that you live in an oligarchy, where money and profits trump human health and well-being? When the consolidated corporate media frames a new report showing that red and processed meats cause cancer around how mad and sad these findings make the meat industry feel. Not about how each 50-gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases your chance of colorectal cancer by 18%.
As far as they're concerned, this is not only about how eating certain foods might make you sick and dead, but about how shockingly un-American the report by the World Health Organization truly is. Hating hot dogs would be as unpatriotic as hating Exceptional USA, dontcha know.
Red and processed meats have the potential to cause cancer in humans, according to a report by a World Health Organization agency that is drawing ire from meat industry groups that argue the science is inadequate.
The report by the influential group stakes out one of the most
aggressive stances against meat yet taken by a major health
organization, and it is expected to face stiff criticism in the United
States.
Get ready for outraged The War Against Steak coverage to vie with The War Against Christmas on Fox. Get ready for the congressional sausage-makers to open up their gluttonous maws for millions of lobbyist dollars to help them bring home the bacon even as they continue to cut food stamp stipends for the working poor and retirees. According to the Post, it isn't the meat that's deadly: it's the international health group itself:
But the panel’s decision was not
unanimous, and by raising lethal concerns about a food that anchors
countless American meals, it will be controversial. The $95 billion U.S.
beef industry has been preparing for months to mount a response and
some scientists, including some unaffiliated with the meat industry,
have questioned whether the evidence is substantial enough to draw the
kinds of strong conclusions that the WHO panel did.
It looks as though carcinogenic meat will be the next big Climate Change Debate. Gluttony will be given equal time with moderation and abstention in order to make the coverage, as well as the meals, fair and balanced. The debate largely centers around semantics. Although red and processed meats have long been linked to cancer, this is the first time they have actually been said to cause cancer.
In recent years, meat consumption has been the target of
multi-faceted social criticism, with debates erupting not just over its
role on human health, but the impact of feedlots on the environment and
on animal welfare. The public debate over the WHO's findings will likely
play out with political lobbying, and in marketing messages for
consumers. But at its core, the dispute over meat and cancer
revolves around science, and in particular the difficulty that arises
whenever scientists try to link any food to a chronic disease.
In order for scientists to prove once and for all that red meat causes cancer, long-term studies of red meat consumers and non-red meat consumers would have to be conducted. And it would be so inhumane to force-feed tons of bacon to groups of hungry guinea pigs just to prove that they will develop cancer at higher rates than vegans and fish eaters. And goodness knows, the food industry only has our health and best interests at heart. Therefore, they suggest that we simply ignore the WHO report. The meat industry is already taking tips from Big Tobacco and getting their big lies ready. They will repeat the lies often enough and loudly enough to give them the patina of truth. The North American Meat Institute derides even less strident findings than those of WHO as "flawed and nonsensical," claiming that today's modern meat is less fatty and more nutritious than yesterday's meat, and that processed meat is more readily consumed than ordinary meat, and that it also makes you feel fuller faster because of its "nutrient density." If this sounds like bunk, it's because it is bunk. As if that were not enough, the Institute also claims that the excessive salt added to processed meat is good for you, too!
“As an ingredient in meat products, salt is used as a preservative, which is
one aspect of a multi-hurdle approach toward maintaining product safety,” AMI
said. “In the last 20 years, the meat and poultry industry has also learned
in more quantitative fashion the importance of sodium chloride in managing
pathogenic bacterial risks presented by L. monocytogenes, Salmonella, and
pathogenic E. coli in processed meat and poultry items.”
Who wouldn't pick a slow death from colorectal cancer or hypertension or heart disease over an instantaneous, nasty case of food poisoning? Or, as the Lesser Evil Caucus phrases it, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." And if you feel guilty about eating a formerly living animal, don't. Because slaughtering methods are so much more humane than they were when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. So says Big Meat. Most important, the meat industry is the biggest sector in the agriculture industry, which in turn is the biggest sector of the whole lousy US economy. Therefore, if you don't eat carcinogenic food, there will be no metastatic growth and progress. Forgoing bologna sandwiches would destroy thousands of low-wage jobs in charnel houses and meatpacking plants. Never mind that thanks to "free trade," American meat is now being shipped to such slave-wage countries as China for processing and shipping back to our dinner tables.
And did I mention that the North American Meat Institute is one of the secret negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Did I even have to? They truly put the mystery back into the Mystery Meat.
You've seen the already iconic images of Hillary Clinton at her Congressional hearing on Benghazi yesterday. The bored resting of the hand on the regal chin, the dismissive flicking of imaginary dirt off the regal shoulder, the barely contained smirk on the regal face as the good cop Dems squandered the opportunity to ask her substantive questions and instead used our time to pay her court.
It was eleven hours of kangaroo court testimony taking place at the eleventh hour of our moribund democracy. One set of plutocrats did battle with another set of plutocrats. And the Queen-in-waiting was, in the words of Democratic operative Donna Brazile, steely, stoic, and serene. It was an eleven-hour-long campaign commercial and fund-raising opportunity. Emails urging us to have Hillary's back arrived at regular intervals. We were urged to show our proletarian solidarity by sending a few bucks her way to supplement the hundreds of millions already supplied to her by Wall Street.
Hillary Clinton could never have offered such a bravura performance without such a strong supporting ensemble cast of comical Torquemadas, Macbethian shrews, fawning fan-waving Uriah Heeps, soldiers of fortune, and a whole Greek chorus full of wailing pundits. It helped her case enormously that Trey Gowdy, the guy touting himself as Best Actor in a Sadistic Series, seemed to be going for the Ed Grimley look.
Hillary Clinton ventured forth from her mobile Petit Trianon and donned shining designer armor for a one-day-only performance as Joan of Arc under siege. But instead of being tied to the stake, she was plopped up on an embroidered cushion atop expensive leather upholstery. The rest of us were glued to our seats as Hillary endured the third degree by a right-wing cabal of third rate actors. She came out of the whole Grand Guignol ordeal smiling, refreshed and smug.
And why shouldn't she be happy and relieved? She was never questioned on her real crimes and those of the Obama administration. To wit: The extent to which the non-Congressionally approved Libya adventure destabilized the country and led to the attack was left largely unexamined. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has previously revealed that Benghazi was the hub for an illegal gun-running operation to Syria. And then-CIA director David Petraeus's girlfriend, Paula Broadwell, has let slip that Benghazi was also the site of a secret, illegal black-ops prison.
Nor was Clinton confronted about the administration's role in the ongoing migrant and refugee crisis engendered by the Libya bombings and other wars of aggression, and her individual role in the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras, and the ensuing refugee crisis and imprisonment of Central American mothers and children in Homeland Security immigration prisons. Hillary Clinton has every reason to feel happy, relieved and triumphant. Her twin personality traits and political techniques -- victimization and survivalism -- remain intact.
When it comes to exploiting and extracting from poor people, one Alabama judge certainly knows how to put the blood back into Churchillian blood, toil, tears and sweat.
In the true spirit of Halloween and turbocharged capitalism, rural Circuit Court Judge Marvin Wiggins has devised a unique form of punishment for minor offenders. If you can't pay the fine, you don't necessarily have to do the time in debtors' prison. All you have to do is open up a vein and relinquish a pint of one of the last personal resources that you still have left. The New York Times has all the grisly details:
“Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen,” began Judge Wiggins, a circuit judge
here in rural Alabama since 1999. “For your consideration, there’s a
blood drive outside,” he continued, according to a recording of the
hearing. “If you don’t have any money, go out there and give blood and
bring in a receipt indicating you gave blood.”
For those who had no money or did not want to give blood, the judge concluded: “The sheriff has enough handcuffs.”
Forcing someone to undergo an invasive medical procedure in order to extract revenue for the state is unethical, if not downright illegal, posing as it does a public health danger from an unvetted blood donor population. According to the Times, dozens of "offenders" found guilty of everything from running a stop sign, to poaching, to drug use, dutifully lined up at a blood drive van in the courthouse parking lot. They were issued receipts, and were promised $100 off their fines, or old debts.
Who knows? Some of them perhaps were already employed in the gig economy as "plassers," entrepreneurs who supplement their meager incomes through regular hook-ups at their local blood banks. Even then, the plutocracy must take its cut, as donors are paid their $50-a-pop not by cash or check, but via plastic debit cards. So every time the plasser buys something in Walmart, a bank deducts a fee. That telltale pale bruised look that you see on struggling people is often a result of chronic anemia as well as malnourishment and the fatigue of working two or three minimum wage jobs.
Blood donations as a way of paying fines and bills were more common during wartime, but were largely abandoned by the justice system as outbreaks of hepatitis and H.I.V. scared government officials right out of their sadistic, bloodsucking greed. Ironically enough, the for-profit mobile blood bank operating from the Alabama courthouse parking lot was run by LifeSouth, which had recently lost a $4 million lawsuit over an H.I.V.-tainted blood transfusion. The thirst for money is like a vampire. It dies hard, if it ever dies at all. When LifeSouth couldn't contact all of Judge Wiggins' involuntary donors to ask some of the required medical questions ex post facto, the biological collection agency ended up discarding all the blood it had drawn. The Times article doesn't specify whether it disposed of the blood properly, or whether it simply dumped it into the nearest drinking water supply. And to add insult to injury, a spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center says Wiggins the Impaler even reneged on his promise to reduce the defendants' fines by $100. His victims may yet have to serve jail time for the crime of hunting for their own food after dark, and other offenses against the oligarchy. Meanwhile, blood is a very big business. Along with charter schools and EBT food stamp cards, it is just one of the myriad ways for the rich to profit from the poor. Even so, the onerous chore of sucking the lifeblood out of people makes the corporate vampires kvetch. So much of it ends up spoiling due to those dreaded market inefficiencies. Ben Bowman, the CEO of a private blood mill originally called "General Blood" told Forbes magazine that more than a million pints of the valuable red stuff get tossed every single year. His business plan is to undercut the Red Cross by operating a one-stop blood sales and distribution hub smack dab in the US Heartland.
Bowman, 33, can offer pints at an average price of $229. He’s
contracted with donation centers along the Interstate 35 corridor—from
Laredo, Tex. to Duluth, Minn.—to ship blood by FedEx
to hospitals that have agreements with General Blood. Bowman and
30-year-old cofounder David Mitchell guarantee delivery of the mix of
types (O+, AB and B–) that hospitals prefer for local populations; blood
types vary somewhat by ethnicity.
Bowman teamed up with a former investment banker from Wells Fargo (which also made a pile of dough off the poor via its subprime mortgages and foreclosures) to devise his business plan, which is predicated on an excess of the blood supply resulting from the financial collapse which Wells Fargo helped to cause in the first place. Fewer people can afford to have elective surgeries, even necessary surgeries, because of no jobs, no insurance, or junk insurance with sky-high co-pays and deductibles. Forbes reporter Erin Carlyle ghoulishly notes:
Critics say this gave General Blood an opening: soaking up the excess
and distributing pints where they were needed. But when the economy
eventually turns and more people have those operations, there will be
less need for a middleman.
“We’re projecting that as the boomers get into their 70s, you’re
going to see a lot more hip replacements, knee replacements,” says Jim
MacPherson, CEO of America’s Blood Centers, a network and trade
organization. “We project, over the next five to six years, that blood
demand will start increasing again and could increase rather
dramatically. At that point there’s no more surplus, [and] General Blood
probably goes away.”
But the upstart Lestats were not discouraged and soon expanded operations into an Internet blood exchange. It operates like E-bay: hospitals and blood entrepreneurs can compete and bid on batches of Type O-Positive. Goldman Sachs can even get into the act, drawing on its social impact betting formula to place odds on how long a given vat of Type B will stay fresh before it is lost, stolen, sold, transfused or otherwise imbibed.
And don't tell me about those medieval leechers, either, because General Blood was a recent, and proud, semifinalist in the Minnesota Cup contest for venture capitalists.
But after a few years in the biz, the CEOs realized that "General Blood" sounded a bit boring and macabre, so they renamed it Hema Vista. (translation: spectacle of blood). And to go with its brand new marketing image of a bright-red sunset, it is now also based in The Cloud!
Let's face it, folks. Judge Wiggins of Alabama is just a very small vampire in a very big castle.
