Adapted from the Twitter feed, Thursday evening, November 16, 2017. Posted Friday morning, November 17.
From the Hill:
President Trump told House Republicans that he wants Congress to tackle welfare reform after it finishes work on a sweeping tax bill that would slash the corporate rate…
Ticking through a number of upcoming legislative priorities, Trump briefly mentioned welfare reform, sources in the room said.
“We need to do that. I want to do that,” Trump told rank-and-file lawmakers in a conference room in the basement of the Capitol.
The welfare line got a big applause, with one lawmaker describing it as an “off-the-charts” reception.
We don’t have a welfare system. It was “reformed” out of existence twenty years ago. What we have left is a patchwork that includes Medicaid, food stamps, some subsidized public housing, and Medicare, Social Security, and Obamacare. What the Republicans were cheering about was the prospect of “reforming” them out of existence. The goal is to impoverish us so we’re so desperate for work that will do any job for peanuts.
This is being done at the behest of the corporate rich and the rich greedy bastards who own and operate the Party and want to own and run the whole country. They need cheap and cheaper labor and they justify what they’re doing to us in order to get it by holding us in contempt. If we were worth anything, we’d be worth a lot. We’d be among the makers, not the takers.
They are actually mad at us. It’s as if they’ve assumed a terrible burden by being rich, and they’ve done it as a favor to the rest of us for which we’ve proven insufficiently grateful.
Some of the coverage of the House’s passing of their version of the Cut Taxes on the Rich, Screw the Middle Class While Playing Trump Voters for Chumps Bill has been a little breathless. Take this bit from the New York Times this morning:
WASHINGTON — With 227 Republican votes, the House passed the most sweeping tax overhaul in three decades on Thursday, taking a significant leap forward as lawmakers seek to enact $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for businesses and individuals and deliver the first major legislative achievement of President Trump’s tenure.
This is hardly news: Republicans agreeing to cut taxes for the rich, but you might think from reading this that Trump, in a triumph of leadership, had got the bill passed all by himself and secured his place in history among the great Presidents. Always keep in mind: it’s not Trump. It’s the Republicans. He’s just their front man. “Reforming” “welfare” out of existence has been the goal for decades. It was Paul Ryan’s college dream.
Meanwhile, now middle class Trump voters won’t care when they’re eating cat food in their old age as long as they can comfort themselves with the knowledge that “those people” aren’t buying steak and crab legs with their food stamps.
The country is in the hands of stupid, selfish, greedy, and spiteful people.
November 2018 can’t come soon enough.
_____________________________________________________________________________
The passage I quoted from the New York Times article is the lede and isn’t indicative of the rest of the article, which is more sober and casts a more skeptical eye on Trump and the Republicans, and as you always should, you should read the whole story. Follow the link to House Passes Tax Bill, as Does Senate Panel by Thomas Kaplan and Alan Rappeport at the New York Times.
Posted Thursday morning, November 16, 2017.
He likes to lecture poor people on how they can get rich or at least how they can stop being poor.
He tells them they have to work harder.
He wrote a book about it.
Paul Ryan fancies himself an Ayn Randian-hero.
Since he graduated from college, he’s worked only one full-time job in the private sector: as a marketing “consultant” for the the road construction company his great-grandfather founded and his cousins now run, a company that has prospered since its beginning through government contracts. He worked there for a year. That was back in 1997. Then he got elected to Congress. He’s been on the government’s payroll ever since.
U.S. Congressmen aren’t paid all that well: $174,000 a year. As Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan is allotted close to an extra fifty grand. That may sound like a lot to most people, but when you have to maintain two places of residence and one of those is in Washington D.C., $223,500 doesn’t stretch as far as you might think.
Fortunately for his family, Paul Ryan can count on additional income from stock portfolios set up with money he and some relatives inherited, money made by the road construction company founded by their great-grandfather. Essentially, he benefits from a trust fund.
Even more fortunate for his family, Paul Ryan is married to an heiress.
She’s also an attorney.
A tax attorney.
Together they’re piling up the dough. His kids stand to inherit gobs of it.
The House version of the Republican Tax Cuts for the Poor Beleaguered Greedy Rich Bill eliminates the estate tax, starting in 2024. The Senate version doesn’t eliminate it but raises the threshold: the tax doesn’t kick in unless the estate is worth more than $11 million. The Ryans are rich, but not that rich. So whichever makes it into the final bill, Paul Ryan’s kids are off the hook. Which means:
Paul Ryan’s kids will never have to work a day in their lives.
Which leads me to this column by Paul Krugman:
Both the Senate proposal and the similar proposal from House Republicans offer huge tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, then try to limit the impacts of these tax cuts on the budget deficit by clawing back tax credits and exemptions that mainly benefit the middle class. Of course many in the middle class would see their taxes go up.
But focusing on how many would face tax increases gets at only a small part of what’s going on here.
Top-down class warfare, coupled with false claims to be cutting taxes on the middle class, has been standard G.O.P. operating procedure for a long time...[But] this isn’t just ordinary class warfare; it’s class warfare aimed at perpetuating inequality into the next generation. Taken together, the elements of both the House and the Senate bills amount to a more or less systematic attempt to lavish benefits on the children of the ultra-wealthy while making it harder for less fortunate young people to achieve upward social mobility.
Or to put it differently, the tax legislation Republicans are trying to ram through Congress with indecent haste, without hearings or time for any kind of serious study, looks an awful lot like an attempt not simply to reinforce plutocracy, but to entrench a hereditary plutocracy.
To read Krugman’s whole column, follow the link to Republican Class Warfare: The Next Generation at the New York Times.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Sources:
GOP tax plans: 7 big differences between the House and Senate by Heather Long at the Washington Post.
The Ryan Family’s History of Fakery by Charles Pierce at Esquire.
Paul Ryan’s memoir preaches to the choir, Matt Miller's review of Ryan's book The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea at the Washington Post.
Paul Ryan Would Like to Share With You the Most Amazing Book by Michelle Cottle at the Atlantic.
Paul Ryan's Bogus Soup Kitchen Photo Op by Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone.
“Paul Ryan” at Wikipedia.
Posted Monday morning, October 2, 2017.
Here I thought we're living in one of the richest nations in history but, turns out, it's a post-apocalyptic dystopia and the ravening masses are gathering outside the gates.
At least to hear Senator Ron Johnson tell it.
When asked by a high school student in Wisconsin whether he considered health care a right or a privilege, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) compared access to health care to access to food and shelter, arguing that all three should be considered “privileges” for those who can afford them.
“I think it’s probably more of a privilege,” Johnson said in response to the question. “Do you consider food a right? Do you consider clothing a right? Do you consider shelter a right? What we have as rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the right to freedom. Past that point, everything else is a limited resource that we have to use our opportunities given to us so that we can afford those things.”
Everything else is a "limited resource"? Everything?
Johnson's is the fundamental Republican position: if you can't pay for it, you don't get to have it. That includes life, liberty, and happiness, since you can't enjoy any of those rights, particularly life, if you starve, freeze, or go without the medicine or operations you need to survive a traumatic injury or treatable disease.
Makes me want to ask Johnson some questions. Actually, I already did. On Twitter. Not that I expected him to answer. Sometimes I like to amuse myself by carrying on pretend conversations with politicians and public figures who annoy me. In my Twitter life, Donald Trump and I are bowling buddies.
Never mind me seeing someone. You worry about you. I'm fine.
At any rate, here's what I would---did---ask Johnson.
Have you ever taken part in a clothing drive, Senator? We have more cargo pants and hooded sweatshirts than we know what to do with.
Or check out what goes into the trash at a McDonalds? All those untouched Big Macs, what happens to them? Your Wikipedia biography says you once worked at a restaurant as a dishwasher, so you know firsthand how much food just gets thrown out. We waste food by the ton every day. We pay farmers not to grow as much as they could.
Know what is a limited resource? Fossil fuels. You're all for using those up in a hurry. That will accelerate climate change which is already making water and food limited resources in parts of the earth.
You won't be surprised that Johnson denies that the climate is changing in any way that poses a problem for human beings or that he's not just against doing anything about it that doesn't make money for the oil industry---it's almost seems to think Wisconsin is America's Petroleumland not its Dairyland or maybe he thinks cows run on gasoline---but he advocates for it. That is, he's for gutting EPA regulations on carbon emissions which amounts to the same thing.
Rights aren't all endowed by the creator. Many are granted by the state as part of the contract it has with its citizens. Conservatives accept this. They're often the first to point out that certain rights are American rights, that is, only American citizens are entitled to them. But the three Johnson seems to think are the only ones there are (He actually lists four, but I'd like to hear him explain the difference between liberty and freedom. I suppose political philosophers and constitutional scholars can do it. I'd lay odds Johnson can't.), aren't in the Constitution. They're listed in the Declaration of Independence where it says they are among the certain inalienable rights the Creator endows us with and governments are instituted to secure. Clearly, the founders thought there were more.
And the Bill of Rights very specifically states that there are more than the ones enumerated in the first eight amendments. That's the what it says in the Ninth Amendment.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
“Just because we didn't bring it up, that doesn't mean it's not a right, folks.”
The founders left a lot of things unsaid, unexplained, and undefined. They expected it would get sorted out by future generations. In fact, they very purposelessly went out of their way not to obligate their own grandchildren let alone their great great great great however many more times great we are grandchildren to live by the rules they set. They'd be shocked, maybe even appalled that 230 years later we're still governing ourselves by what they wrote in a spirit of less than congenial compromise. They couldn't even agree with each other how to manage the next ten years of their own lives. They'd hardly expect us to agree with them about how to manage things in our lifetime.
But to get back to my imaginary conversation with Johnson...
It's not simply that people have a right to basic necessities, Senator. It's that we all have an obligation not to let others starve, freeze, or die of treatable diseases. You just happen to be in the be pocket of a class of moral monsters who think they have no obligations but to make money for themselves.
If there is a right to clothing, does that mean I can come into your clothing store, take a shirt off the shelf, and leave without paying? If there’s a right to food, can I stroll into your barn and milk your cows when I’m hungry? If there’s a right to shelter, is it fine if I barge into your house and take up residence on your couch? If there’s a right to health care, does that mean if you’re a doctor you have to treat me for free, if you’re a pharmacist you have to fill my prescriptions for free?
No, because I’d be trespassing on your right to earn a living by getting paid for your services. But no one’s asking you not to get paid. The question is who does the paying. When the government pays, we are all splitting the bill. It’s a way of sharing the benefits of living in one of the richest nations in history.
We have an abundance of riches, we can afford to share. Just some people don't want to. They tend to vote for heartless bastards like you.
___________________________________________________________________________
Read Natasha Geiling’s whole story Republican Senator calls health care, food, and shelter a “privilege” at ThinkProgress.
Posted Thursday night, August 31, 2017.
For some reason this struck me as relevant. Can’t imagine why.
Toward the end of 1872, Congress began to investigate the construction practices and financing of the transcontinental railroad. The Union Pacific’s directors, it turned out, awarded construction contracts to a company that they had formed themselves, which they called the Crédit Mobilier. Flush with cash from bonds that Congress authorized the UP to issue, the railroad could accept bids from Crédit Mobilier that were far higher than its actual costs. As railroad executives siphoned away millions of dollars of construction profits right off the top, they decided to share the wealth with their many allies in Congress, giving them stock in Crédit Mobilier. Yet by the time 1872 turned to 1873, corrupting the political process was the least of the railroad’s wrongs. If the railroad titans---Stanford of the Central Pacific, Collis Huntington of the Union Pacific---became some of the richest people in the world, the railroads themselves were piling debt upon debt to construct tens of thousands of miles of track with no prospect of any return on the investment. By September 1873, banking institutions had loaned so much money to ever-riskier railroad ventures that they could not cover seasonal withdrawals to finance the fall harvest. Jay Cooke & Co., the biggest investment bank in the United States, collapsed, and the economy collapsed with it. In the year that followed, dozens of railroads defaulted on their loans. Hundreds of banks suffered runs on deposits and failed. Property values plummeted. Foundries and factories closed, and unemployment reached 25 percent in big cities. Tramps became a common sight even in remote rural areas, and all over the country workers demonstrated for public employment. By January 1874, police were fighting pitched battles with seven thousand unemployed rioters in Tompkins Square Park in New York.
---from Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein.
Posted Tuesday evening, July 25, 2017.
I’ve said this God knows how many times, but I hope you won’t mind if I say it again. The goal of the rich greedy bastards of the corporatist Right who own and run the Republican Party is to create a workforce of desperate, depressed, demoralized and obedient wage slaves who will take whatever job they can get for whatever pay the owners deign to pay them under whatever conditions the owners think will best serve the bottom line. Repealing Obamacare is just the first step.
Next comes the total elimination of Medicaid. Private-employer provided health insurance is next. Social Security and Medicare go after that. And at that point all of us who aren’t among the corporate elite will have no choice but to work until we drop. And if we don’t drop dead, then it will be up to our families to take us in and take care of us at their own expense and if we don’t have families who can afford us then it’s off to the almshouse.
You know, the way it worked in the Middle Ages. And wasn’t life back then just grand?
I wonder if the palaces will be as nice.
Posted Friday afternoon, July 14, 2017.
With their bid to roll back the Affordable Care Act only a vote away from collapse, Republican leaders scrambled Thursday to rally GOP senators behind revised healthcare legislation in hopes of passing it next week.
The new version — which represents Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s latest bid to unite his fractious caucus — would still enact historic cuts in federal healthcare assistance to low- and moderate-income Americans and fundamentally scale back Medicaid’s half-century-old guarantee of health coverage for the poor.
I like that phrase in there, about McConnell’s “fractious caucus.” It’s a near tautology. Caucus’ are by nature fractious. But the headline on the story, as headlines unfortunately often have to do, reduces something amusing to the banal:
Divided Senate Republicans unveil new version of Obamacare repeal bill
Divided Senate Republicans just doesn’t cover it the way fractious caucus does.
They’re certainly fractious. But divided. How are they divided? They’re all in agreement. They’re all Republicans, and the Republican position on health care is the same as it is on every other proposition that the government should do things to take care of our weakest and most unfortunate fellow Americans---Too bad for THEM!
They’re not divided. They’re just having disagreements about how many people they can get away with letting die.
On the one hand you have the likes of Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz---who, by the way, is the Devil or at least one of his demons. Their position is “All of them! Let them all die! That’ll teach them for having had the temerity to make demands on our consciences and wallets when we’re so busy looking out for Number One!”
On the other you have the likes of Dean Heller, Lisa Murkowski, and Shelly Moore Capito, whose position is “Well, I’d rather none but if they have to do, as long as few of them are my voters, I can deal with it.”
In between are the majority of them whose position is, “Whatever. What do I care? It’s not my lookout. Just as long as my donors get their tax cuts.”
All on her lonesome is Susan Collins, the only Republican who seems the least bit bothered by the idea of millions of people being left to suffer and die and their families go bankrupt just to give Donald Trump some unearned bragging rights. And her commitment to basic decency doesn’t seem all that firm, probably because she is all on her own.
As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not optimistic that Mitch McConnell will fail to get Affordable Care Act repealed. I think that if there was a real chance it would be defeated, it would already be defeated, in fact if not act---there’d be five Republican senators who’d already loudly and emphatically made clear that for reasons of common decency and pragmatism they would be voting No, no matter what. Whatever they might believe as good Republicans about government aid of any kind, they’d be pointing out that repealing Obamacare in order to replace it with empty promises that don’t mask the gratuitous cruelty would throw the entire health care system into chaos and cost everybody, including the short-sighted greedy rich bastards demanding their tax cuts, far more money than is already being spent.
But as it stands, there aren’t even the three it would take to defeat the bill or at least make Mitch McConnell pull it again.
Besides Collins, who as I said is shaky, the only principled NO is coming from Rand Paul, and his principles are evil-minded. He is the most passionate and committed disciple of selfishness and greed in his caucus. If in the forced march through a life full of suffering and sorrow we all take, the Democratic ideal is “Nobody gets left behind,” while the Republican is “You’re on your own and too bad for you if you can’t keep up,” Rand Paul is for going back and shooting those who are too weak and fall behind.
At Slate, Jim Newell doubts there’ll be the one more.
In one reality, all of the remaining holdout senators come out together to announce that they can’t support the motion to proceed, and the effort dies. Safety in numbers.
In another, no additional senator comes out to announce that he or she can’t support the motion to proceed. Portman, Capito, and Hoeven are convinced well enough that all of that loose money in the bill can be collected to ensure that low-income people have some sort of quasi-private options for obtaining medical care. Murkowski, who got a carve-out in the bill released Thursday, accepts it. McConnell assures Heller that he’ll make all the necessary phone calls on his behalf to help him find good-paying private-sector work come January. The Congressional Budget Office score comes out, and it’s not great, but since President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Department will be scoring the Cruz amendment instead of CBO, the worst of the bill’s effects on those with pre-existing conditions will be masked. The bill proceeds to the floor, a vote-o-rama of amendments occurs, McConnell cleans the bill up at the end, and the bill passes.
Any third Republican senator could have given a press conference Thursday afternoon and killed the bill. But it didn’t happen. Instead of finding their exit ramp off the bill, they’re trying to find their way to yes.
I like the way Newell slyly implies Heller’s headed for defeat in November and that he’s a craven enough opportunist that he’ll vote to screw his voters on the way out the Senate door if he’s sure it’ll bet him a cushy job as a lobbyist or corporate board member.
The bill has been tweaked to make it less obviously mean and less immediately rewarding to the rich greedy bastards demanding their tax cuts, but it's still the same in effect and intent, punishing the poor and the sick, reopening the market to fly by night companies selling worthless policies to th naive and desperate, giving all insurance companies permission to screw all their policy holders even those who think their employer provided insurance keeps them safe, and furthering the realization of Paul Ryan's drunken frat boy dream of ending Medicaid on the way to ending Medicare and Social Security as well, and fifty Republican senators are apparently fine with that, and that's what makes them Republicans.
One of the reasons the political press corps were too slow to take Trump seriously is that they didn’t take Republican voters seriously---that is, they didn’t see them for what they are or listen to what they said they wanted. For decades they’ve been covering “conservatives” as jess plain folks who were naturally suspicious of Big Government and the East and West Coast elites presuming to tell them how to run their lives and their political leaders in Washington as a mix of moderates and even a few liberals of the type who’d held no sway in the party since at least 1994. The GOP has been moved radically to the right by Right Wing corporatists who made common cause with Right Wing Christians and gathered in the white small town and suburban middle class by exploiting its fears, hatreds, bigotry, racism, and greed, promising them a share of the plunder, and training them to blame it on THEM, those others when the money didn’t come through. The fractious national coalition has been united in its insistence that “It’s all for us. There’s none for you. And any attempt on your part to make us share marks you as parasites and thieves.”
That’s today’s GOP, and, with the exception of Collins, all the Republicans in the Senate are comfortably at home within it. Which is why I’m not optimistic that third Senator will turn up. The ACA is based on the proposition that there are things we all ought to share.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
I’m not optimistic, but I’m not defeatist. Call your senators. And your Representative in case they talk to their colleagues in the upper chamber and because if the repeal passes he/she will have to vote on it again. I’ve made my calls. I’ll make them again. I’ve also called the White House. What the hell? He did promise not to cut Medicaid and he’s called the AHCA mean. Worth reminding him. And at least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’s thrown another tantrum when he’s handed the message slips when he gets home from France and sees more proof he’s not universally loved.
I’m waxing poetical there, but you get the point. Don’t take me literally, but take me seriously and call.
The White House phone number is 202.456.1414.
The Senate’s switchboard number is 202.224.4124.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Related posts from the back issues of the Mannionville Daily Gazette:
Where Trumps come from, once more with feeling.
Posted Thursday morning, July 13, 2017.
There's all kinds of evil at work behind the Republican plans to repeal Obamacare. Thousands of people will die and that is by design. The masses have to be taught a lesson. They must be reminded of their place in the grand scheme of things. Near the bottom. They must learn who they can turn to when they're hurting, sick, or in trouble. No one.
Not the government, at any rate.
The determined drive to repeal Obamacare and “replace” it with empty promises and needless cruelties all in the cause of saving a few rich people some money on their tax bills is a perfect expression of the Right Wing corporatism of the rich greedy bastards who own the Republican Party and who are the force driving the effort to repeal.
You're on your own. Your welfare is your own lookout. You are responsible for no one but yourself, and no one is responsible for you, and if you can't take care of your own needs, you have no one to blame but yourself, and you might as well crawl off into a corner and die.
It’s Social Darwinism and the crassest materialism. Survival of the fittest and fitness is determined by wealth. The more money and property you have, the fitter you are and the more deserving of survival. Your worth as a human being is determined by your worth as a line on the national balance sheet.
Mostly, though, what’s at work is selfishness and greed.
The donors want their tax cuts now!
Not quite right to say most Republicans are fine with this. Mostly they just accept it as the way things have to be. If they think about it. Mostly they don't. They don't let themselves. They deny that the dire things that are going to happen are going to happen. Miracles will save us. God or the marketplace will provide. For many Republicans those are the same entities.
God works in monetary ways his wonders to perform and he expects to make a profit while he's at and expects you to make one too.
The market will provide either by making available cheap health insurance policies that cover barely more than a flu shot or through all those malingerers and cheats leeching off Medicaid getting off their butts and finding well-paying jobs at companies that offer gold-plated insurance benefits.
God provides through the charity of the faithful and by performing the odd, capricious miracle. That dollar you put in the jar on the counter at the convenience store or donate to her desperate parents’ GoFundMe page for little Susie's open heart surgery will multiply like the loaves and fishes into whatever the surgery and the follow up treatments cost.
Posted Sunday morning, July 9, 2017.
Moreover, the use of horses in logging increases human employment. One person operating a skidder may replace three teamsters. We are taught to see that as an advantage, and it is, but only to the company that makes skidders, and to the suppliers of fuel. The advantages of horse logging, much to the contrary, accrue to the forest and the human community. The Amish horseman we talked with earn a good living, working as "independent contractors." in a time obsessed with "job creation," perhaps we need to argue about the worth of three people in effect self-employed as opposed to one employee driving somebody else's machine.
--- from "A Forest Conversation" in Our Only World: Ten Essays by Wendell Berry.
Posted Monday morning, June 26, 2017.
Our Mr President Trump thinks the American Health Care Act which his fellow Republicans in Congress are ramming into law with as much speed, secrecy, obfuscation, deception, and arrogant disregard for democracy, the will of the American people, and human decency as they think they can get away with is mean.
At any rate, he told some Republican senators a couple weeks ago that the AHCA is “mean.”
“Mean, mean, mean.”
That’s the report anyway.
It would be odd of him to have said that, considering how happy he appeared when the bill passed the House. Why was he celebrating the passage of a bill he thinks is mean? This seeming change of heart or mind has caused some people to wonder if what happened is he finally got around to reading the bill or had it explained to him with pictures and maps. He likes pictures and maps. Who doesn’t? But the pictures and maps were available before the House voted the first time. And he was mad then when it failed. As mad as he was happy when it passed the second time through.
But Trump himself seems to have confirmed it.
President Obama called the bill mean and Trump got mad at him…for copying him. Mean, Trump said, is his word.
Still, it's odd he'd disparage the so-far only significant legislation he's backed like that. This has cynics to speculate that when he said the bill was mean he was praising what he considers its strong points.
Supposedly he went on to say the Senate version of the bill should be more generous.
Maybe, as some other cynics have suggested, he meant the Senators need to be more generous to the rich people getting their taxes cut via the repeal and cut their taxes even more.
But I can't help wondering.
Think about it.
"Mean, mean, mean!"
Who talks like that?
What kind of person? What kind of grown-up?
Does that even sound like a grown-up to you? To me it sounds like the way a good-hearted eleven year old might describe a law that would take away health care from other kids who are sick and dying.
In folk tales, the king always has three sons. The elder two are cruel and stupid. The youngest is good and pure of heart.
Trump is said to be easily swayed in his thinking by the last person he talked to and he just moved into the White House.
I know. Isn't he pretty to think so?
The probability is that "mean" is Trump's word and he used it as a slogan. He was doing what he does best. Making another sales pitch for his main brand name product, Donald Trump.
"Buy more Donald Trump! He cares!"
Voice-over hurriedly delivered at very low volume: "Offer not available in all areas."
Now, we hear, he has a new slogan.
"Heart!"
He “hopes” the Senate version will have more “heart."
("Void where prohibited by law.")
It won’t have heart. It doesn't. It can’t. Heart is what's wrong with government aid programs. Heart is what makes them sinful. Heart leads to compassion. Compassion leads to concern. Concern leads to an urge to help. Helping costs money. Their money. But besides that, helping leads to people expecting to be helped. And that leads to sloth, dependency, laziness, and irresponsibility. We’ll have a nation of idlers, leeches, and cheats. Nobody is good except under threat.
As Orrin Hatch put it, spitting on the grave of his late friend Ted Kennedy, once people are on the dole, they'll take every dime they can..
The central evil of Republicanism is that these Republicans have themselves convinced they’re doing good.
They're forcing people to take responsibility for themselves. It’s up to you and not up to anyone else to see that you have what you need to get by. It’s up to you to take care of your children, your sick spouse, your aging parents. Beyond that, while it’s nice of you to pitch in when your friends or neighbors need a helping hand, you aren’t obligated except to the degree you choose to be. Just don’t expect me to feel the same obligation. They aren’t my friends. They aren’t my neighbors. I have enough troubles of my own. If I as a stranger take on your troubles too, I’m doing you no favors. I’m contributing to your moral degradation. And I’m not putting all my time and trouble into taking care of me and my own.
Add to this their belief that anyone who accepts government assistance is committing a form of theft. In their minds, they're preventing a robbery. Saving both the money of the taxpayers and the souls of the would-be thieves.
But of course that’s all cover for selfishness and greed. It serves the interests of the rich and greedy bastards who own the Republican Party and think they own the country, and why should they have to pay rent in thevform of taxes to themselves? Repealing Obamacare, gutting Medicaid, throwing millions of sick and the old and the poor and unfortunate to the wolves adds to owners' wealth and helps create a cowed and obedient workforce of people desperate to keep whatever jobs they can get for whatever paltry wages their bosses deign to pay them. The point is to scare us into working ourselves till we drop without ever challenging the bosses or the system.
So the object of the AHCA is for people to die.
It's not that the Republicans as a group want people to die, although plenty of individual Republicans do.
It's just necessary that they die to teach the rest of us important lessons.
Don't be poor…
Don't lose your job...
Don't look to the government for help with anything…
You are on your own.
If you can't afford to pay the going rate, you don't get to have it---it being not just basic health care but a family, food, shelter, even life itself.
So, yeah. Mean, mean, mean.
Posted Friday morning, June 16, 2017.
You know, I think I'm finally developing sympathy for some Trump voters.
Not all Trump voters. The vast majority of Trump voters were middle class suburbanites---they just happen to live in developments that are far enough removed from big blue cities that ingenuous journalists can call them small town and rural---who voted for Trump for the same reasons they would have voted for Jeb, or Kasich, or Ted Cruz, the same reasons they voted for Mitt, the same reasons they voted for whoever were the Republicans running for Congress and in the state and local elections in their areas, the same reasons they've always voted Republican and always will---to keep their taxes low and to keep those people in their place. In other words, they were typical Republicans. Hard to feel sorry for them.
But it's hard not to feel sorry for people in trouble like this:
From Sarah Kliff at Vox:
CORBIN, Kentucky — There have been no marches against the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare here. No raucous town halls. There was only one protest rally anywhere in the region. Photographs captured a solitary woman holding a sign.
In an area that stands to lose a lot of health coverage under the GOP’s American Health Care Act, the silence does not equal endorsement. It is a sign, instead, of disappointment setting in among a group of conservative voters who only months ago were bubbling with hope for Donald Trump’s health care plan...
“You know, thinking about it, I’m not even sure what I expected. I just thought it would miraculously work out wonderful for everybody,” Bobbi Smith, a 62-year-old Obamacare enrollee who voted for Trump, says. “So I guess maybe I didn’t put enough thought into what I would expect from a health care act.”
...Smith hadn’t followed the health care debate as closely. She pays $330 each month for her Obamacare plan and gets a $447 subsidy from the government. She’s happy with her insurance, which worked well when she was diagnosed with breast cancer last January.
Smith didn’t like the idea that AHCA could raise her premiums just because she’s older. “The higher premium for older people is generally a gripe,” she says. “And for people with preexisting conditions, that’s terrible. [It would] be really hard for them.”
After reading the article, you might be tempted like I was to think, "Serves you right for voting for the guy! Trump's only doing to you what you wanted him to do to those people", especially when you realize that, disappointed as they are with Trump, few of them are mad at their Republican Congressman who not only voted for the AHCA but voted to repeal Obamacare every time he had the chance, which unless he missed a roll call here and there, would be more than fifty times. They still think he has their best interests at heart and seem to be planning to re-elect him in 2018.
But then you reach the part where Smith is rationalizing her own future denial of coverage, comparing herself as a cancer patient to the driver of a wrecked car. Actually, she practically equates herself with the car.
They are sick. They are poor. They are going to suffer in ways nobody deserves to suffer.
And they got conned.
Again, it's tempting to think, “Serves you right.”
In fiction, television, and movies, con artists are usually portrayed as, if not heroes, at least on the side of the angels. Their marks are greedy and venal and deserve to be bilked out of every last dime, and the con artists use their greed and venality against them.
Trump promised he'd be greedy for America and his voters cheered because that's what they are, greedy for what America offers. They want all the benefits of living here but don't want to share.
But Trump wasn't the man who corrupted Hadleyburg, entirely. Most con artists are like most other career criminals, lazy and mean. They prey on the naive, the gullible, the ignorant, the addled, the foolish, and not very bright---that is they prey on the innocent, weak, and too trusting---and rely on the fact that such people generally don't have the knowledge, power, or wherewithal to get their own back. That’s Donald Trump’s M.O. The thing is, he wasn’t in on the con alone.
He was in cahoots with a fawning, sycophantic, celebrity and money obsessed media that eagerly helped him create the disguise that he wore to attract the suckers and reel them in: “Donald Trump, Billionaire,” the great negotiator, the artist of the deal with the golden touch.
The uninsured rate here in this rural swath of southeastern Kentucky has plummeted faster under the Affordable Care Act than any other area in the country. I visited the area last winter and talked to Obamacare enrollees who voted for Trump. They expected the president to repeal the law and replace it with something much better. “That man has a head for business,” one enrollee told me. “He will absolutely do his best to change things.”
First, this idea that someone with a head for business is the kind of person we need in government, I've written about where I think that comes from. It starts from thinking, not unreasonably, that to be successful in business you have to be smart and capable, and isn't that what we want politicians to be, smart and capable?
But Hillary Clinton is smart and capable, and has shown she knows how to put her intelligence and capabilities to work in the work of actually governing.
Yes, but...
A politician like Hillary---and especially Hillary herself---is smart and capable in ways that makes insecure people feel incapable and dumb. She has the same effect on the vain and self-important---which goes a ways toward explaining why so many journalists and pundits hate her.
But people don't feel that way about a smart businessman because they think, given the chance, they would prove to be smart and capable in the same way.
Most people on the outside don't know how politics or business works. They think they do. They know what they see and as far as they can see, both are matters of managing money and bossing people around. All you need to be to succeed at either is a shrewd operator, a tough boss, and the kind of person who gets things done. The difference is, as far as people can see, that if you run a business you have to actually get things done and you have to really be good at managing the money, otherwise you go bust. In politics, you can keep getting re-elected even if you get nothing done and piss away money, and what the hell do you care? It's not your money and if you screw up and don't get anything done or anything useful done, you don't suffer. Your cronies and well-connected friends will protect you and the stupid people who vote for you---you know, those people---will vote for you anyway.
You're in business, you got to care or you're fucked.
That's what people are saying when they say government should be run like a business. They mean they want people in charge who act as if it's their own money they're managing and their own livelihoods that are at stake.
Which is exactly why they shouldn't have voted for Donald Trump.
Trump has a head for business, all right. As long as by business you mean wheeling and dealing with your eye always on the lookout for the main chance.
What Donald Trump really has a head for is making a fast buck while doing business with people who don't know to keep their hands tight on their wallets when he's in the room.
No question he's been a shrewd operator, if far from a smooth one, and he's gotten things done, never mind that most of those things came undone, some in a hurry, others at a more leisurely pace, none of them to his lasting shame or apparent cost. Other people have always paid for his mistakes. He hasn't even run his own business like a business.
He's a cheat and a fraud. Always has been. And he's never cared about anything or anybody except in how he could make money off of it or out of them, and that includes his own family. Even his favorite child he treats as brand merchandise. When he says Ivanka's name you can almost hear the little TM after it. He's probably lost more money for people than he's made them, and that includes the entire population of Atlantic City, New Jersey. And if he hasn't lost more money than he's made for himself, it's only because it's come in too fast for him to squander it all or his accountants are very, very good. We'll know which, if we ever see the tax returns. Eventually, he made one artful deal too many. Nobody honest and nobody smart, with their own good heads for business, would do business with him anymore. Which is how the Russians got their hooks into him.
Why didn't these voters know all this about him?
It's how he showed up in the news for over twenty years. And not just in Doonesbury. It was the story about him. It's the character he played on The Howard Stern Show, a more true to life character than the one he played on The Apprentice.
Because outside of New York and New Jersey he wasn't all that important. For most of the 1980s, his early glory days, I lived in Iowa and Indiana, and he seemed important to me, but that's because I stubbornly remained an East Coast snob and kept homesick track of what was happening back in my native state. I read the New York Times. I read the New Yorker. I read the Village Voice. When the blonde and I lived in Fort Wayne, our old pal Nancy Nall subscribed to Spy and when we were over at her place our gang read that together and laughed our heads off at the follies and depredations of the of the man the editors stuck with the nickname “the Short-Fingered Vulgarian.” And of course I read Doonesbury. I didn't need the internet or hashtags to know what was trending in the Big Apple, and Donald Trump was trending.
In 1991, Mrs M and I moved to Syracuse, and spent the next twelve years there. Trump was still trending but he was trending down. All his wheeling and dealing was mostly a matter of bailing water. The news about him was all about failures, bankruptcies, and lawsuits. The gossip about him lost its glamour and its thrill. As people became bored with him, their disgust came to the surface and instead of their interest being tinged with envy and prurience, it was more and more filled with Schadenfreude. He himself was looking jaded and clownish and grotesque.
But people not paying close attention to the gossip and news out of New York in the those years only heard of him in passing as a rich handsome playboy who was putting up big buildings and opening casinos and living the kind of life they wouldn't mind living themselves. Basically what they heard were stories about a wildly successful guy making gobs of money and having lots of fun while doing it. The way they knew him---or "him"---was through his books. Then came that damn TV show. So the "person" they thought they knew was a character created for him by his ghostwriters and the producers of The Apprentice. And that's the "person" they saw running for President.
Who was to tell them otherwise?
Not the political media. They were too busy covering "Donald Trump" because he was fun and good for quotes, ratings, advertising, and clicks. Besides, they didn't believe he'd win so what was the point of doing the hard and unpopular work of exposing him?
It was left to Hillary but the media made sure people understood she was not to be trusted.
So of course people didn't know.
Maybe now that they're seeing him act out on a national stage a condensed version of his own history in the 80s and 90s, they're beginning to. It's just happening so fast it's no wonder people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around it.
You’re probably as sick and tired of these kinds of stories as I am. All campaign long, story after story, online and on TV, about the hard-pressed, economically anxious (white) working stiffs voting for Trump, and then for months after the election about how Hillary and the Democrats sank themselves by ignoring the hard-pressed economically anxious (white) working stiffs and they’d better not make that mistake again, as if the sixty-five million people who voted for Hillary didn’t exist and the only people who voted for Donald Trump were people who, on the whole, actually didn’t. Now we’re getting story after story about how those voters are sticking with Trump. Where are the stories about the rest of us, the majority of the American people?
Well, here’s the thing.
There's no news in the news that people who never liked Donald Trump and didn't want him to be president still don't like him and don't want him to be president. There is news of the “Can you believe these people?” sort in the news that despite all Trump's done to show himself up for the incompetent and possibly deranged dope he is, his base is sticking with him. It's not really surprising. His voters are still hearing that question as "Are you ready to admit you made a dumb mistake, voting for this guy?" Nobody is ever ready to admit they made a dumb mistake. "Give him a chance," even after five months of his bumbling and lunacy is their way of saying, "You'll see. I wasn't so dumb after all." There will be news when they finally change their minds, at least according to the conventional wisdom. When that happens, the pundits are convinced, the Republicans in Congress will finally be forced to do something about him. So these stories are really all saying "Nope, not yet. But we're going to keep checking so we'll be the first to report it when it finally happens.
And maybe it finally is. Maybe they’re onto something at Vox:
You could see how all these changes would play out with someone like 62-year-old Clifford Hoskins. He’s retired and was recently diagnosed with black lung disease, the product of a three-decade career in the coal mines.
Hoskins signed up for Medicaid in early 2016 but recently transitioned to marketplace coverage when disability checks bumped up his income. He pays a $232 monthly premium for his plan, and receives a subsidy of about $700 from the federal government to cover the rest of the cost.
Hoskins liked his Medicaid plan, which paid for an ankle surgery last year. He likes his new marketplace coverage too. He takes at least four medications regularly to treat his black lung disease, some kidney issues, and depression. He describes his Medicaid plan as “the best insurance I ever had in my life.”
Obamacare’s essential health benefits package, allowing insurers to cover fewer benefits. This would only lower premiums slightly, analysts say, and could be risky for someone like Hoskins. An insurance plan, for example, may decide to stop some of his prescription medications.
Hoskins had been reading a lot about the bill the House passed. He mostly reads things on the internet, starting at the AOL homepage, ever since he canceled his cable service a few months ago to save money. He doesn’t like what he’s seen.
“From what I’ve read on it, it’s not going to be good for anybody,” he says.
This all got him frustrated. He didn’t vote in the 2016 election — he was still in the hospital recovering from ankle surgery. There were certainly parts of the Trump agenda he liked, such as the president’s immigration policy. “I've not got anything again the wall,” Hoskins says. “I've got nothing against protecting our borders.”
But he says he’d be a one-issue voter when the next election rolls around if Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act. “If they do away with this, there are going to be a lot of changes to my voting,” he says. “This is my biggest issue right now.”
On the other hand:
To Hoskins, this was common sense: Of course votes would shift if Congress voted to end health insurance for millions of Americans. He predicted that Rogers’s vote to repeal Obamacare “probably changed every working person’s opinion [who is] on the Affordable Care Act.”
Actually, it didn’t. Most Obamacare enrollees I talked to didn’t like the Republican bill, but they didn’t think it would change their votes either.
Still, it’s worth reading the whole of Sarah Kliff’s story. Follow the link to They're on Obamacare, they voted for Trump, and they're already disappointed at vox.com.
______________________________________________________________________________
Recommended reading from back issues of the Mannionville Daily Gazette:
Mined from the notebooks. Saturday, May 13, 2017. Posted Tuesday, May 16.
I know, there are more imperative things to be mad about right now, but I have to get my venting about this out of the way before I can write about those other things…however! Even if we’re in the final days of President Trump (which I’ll believe it when I see it), the Republicans are going to still control Congress for the next two years and they don’t intend to give up their goal of making life miserable for as many of the not-rich as they can.
You probably should read the Washington Post’s story first.
This is why I don’t have much hope that the Senate will kill the AHCA or even make it less horrible.
Which hardliners are we talking about?
As far as I can tell, there are virtually nothing but hardliners in the Senate Republican caucus. What there are are three sects of hardliners. Corporatists. Populist Reactionaries, formerly known as the Tea Party types, whom, to be more accurate, we should now be calling white nationalists. And Right Wing Christians. They differ on minor matters of tradition, rituals, preferred hymns, and avowed saints and recognized prophets, but they share a basic tenet: "This is our country, we get to run it our way, and the rest of you can either go along or get out!"
There may be a few Republicans left who are temperamentally more moderate, even somewhat liberal, and in another day and age they might have acted and voted accordingly. But in our godforsaken time, for one craven or cynical reason or another, they are cowed by the hardliners and generally go along, meek and contrite.
The Christianists believe they are God's chosen. The white nationalists see themselves as the only true Americans. The corporatists think they own the place and if, by mistake or through an oversight, there are any parts of it left they don't own, well, that's easily corrected. But again, they're all in agreement on that one article of faith: This is their country.
And that belief is at the center of their plans for the future of health care.
"We get to have it and you don't."
There are three things the Republicans want to do immediately regarding health care. Cut taxes on the very rich, help insurance companies maximize profits, and screw the poor into the ground. And keep in mind, to the corporatists the poor are everybody who is not rich, to the white nationalists the poor are, you know, THOSE people, and to the Christianists the poor are sinners who have lost God's favor through their own fault and have therefore earned their just punishment of being screwed into the ground, which is to say, anybody who has ever had the bad luck to get sick or lose their job or been hit with any sort of calamity, economic, personal, or act of nature. This boils down to pretty much everybody but (they think or rather hope and pray) themselves.
In short, in one form or another, to the Republicans, just about all of us are a THEM.
And the ultimate goal of their health care plan is the same as their plan for Social Security and Medicare.
Make sure we know we are a THEM.
The main focus of anger and outrage and disbelief---How, people with good hearts wonder, can the Republicans be so cruel?---has been the Republicans’ plan to throw people with pre-existing conditions---that is anybody who has ever had the temerity to get sick or injured to a degree that cost their insurance companies real money---to the wolves. The AHCA says you can be covered. It doesn't say insurance companies have to cover you. In fact, what with the opt-outs and the waivers and the high-risk pools, it gives them implicit permission not to or to effectively not to by pricing those who need it out of the market. All insurance companies have to do is move their base of operation to a state that doesn’t require them to cover every illness and condition. Any state can opt out or ask for waivers from what essential health benefits insurance companies doing business there have to cover. States run by hard-line Republicans are going to ask for the most waivers because that will attract insurance companies to locate there and because those hard-line Republicans are Republicans---corporatists, white nationalists, and Right Wing Christians. And the corporatists, white nationalists, and Christianists agree on something else beside this being their country and we are THEM to their US.
If you can’t pay for it out of your own pocket, you shouldn’t have it, even if it is the survival of your sick child.
Few of them pass the Jimmy Kimmel test or want to.
The corporatists say, Life has winners and losers, and if you’re a loser, it’s your fault and your lookout. The white nationalists in their Tea Party mode say, Not with my tax money, you don’t! And the Christianists say, If God wanted your child to live, your child would live.
But the same thinking undergirds every aspect of their plan, for instance: their infatuation with individual health savings accounts.
Republicans talk those up like they're good for consumers. Freedom of choice. Individual responsibility. You know the routine. As if they care about consumers. Individual health savings accounts are good for banks and Wall Street investors who like to play with other people's money with no consequence when they fritter it away. What they are for consumers is a paltry rainy day fund they'll probably have to raid too often to save anything like the money they'll need to pay the premiums on anything but the crappiest policies. And really by touting them the Republicans are making the point that we're each in this alone---it's up to us to come up with the cash for whatever we need at the moment we need it, and if we can't, well, that's just too bad. We should have thought of that when we decided not to be rich and then get sick or grow old.
As things stand, Medicaid recipients are going to be screwed first and hardest. Then it’s the sick and the aging and the old. But wait until the young and healthy and temporarily childless find out they’ve fallen into a trap, that the lower-premium policies that have been sold to them across state lines cover barely more than a flu shot and that when they get sick or are injured, as will inevitably happen, or if they decide to start families, or when age starts catching up with them, they’ll be lucky to find a company that wants to sell them insurance at any price. The wolves are going to eat their arms and legs. But it won’t end there.
The AHCA contains a loophole that, if taken advantage of, will allow companies providing it to treat people with employer-based insurance like people in the individual market, and there will go automatic coverage for pre-existing conditions and coverage for most sorts of essential health care for anyone working for a company or business with a sharp-eye on the bottom line and the usual corporate contempt for employees.
Maybe---maybe---the Senate’s alternative to the AHCA as is will be less deliberately and egregiously cruel. Maybe. More likely it will just be better worded to disguise its cruelties and include provisions that seem to mitigate the most egregious cruelties, until you read the fine print or, as it will more likely happen, the rep from your insurance company reads it to you when explaining why the treatment or test or medicine you need isn’t covered under the terms of your policy. But whatever they come up with, it’s going to be as big a step down the road to the serfdom as the Republican senators think they can get away with politically right now.
By now all liberals should have given up on the notion that Obamacare is a ‘conservative” plan and therefore a Republican plan. Anyone who still thinks of it as such should read Scott Lemieux on the subject. But even if it is a plan conservatives should like, it's not a plan Republicans were ever going to like because it is a plan. If it wasn't clear before, they've made it clear in the last couple months. The ideal Republican plan is no plan. The Republican plan is to leave us to all to fend for ourselves. The Republican plan is to make us all terrified of losing our jobs, to make us afraid to stand up to the boss, to make us know who is the boss, to make us feel the boss’ power and superiority, to make us know our place and believe that we belong there. The goal is to make us see ourselves as THEM and accept that we deserve to be screwed into the ground.
It is their country, after all.
Posted Tuesday morning, May 9, 2017.
This article by Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times, A Republican Principle Is Shed in the Fight on Health Care, lays out in detail what I was trying to get at the other day when I wrote that one of the forces driving the Republicans to repeal Obamacare is religious fervor.
Many Republicans believe that any government program that aims to make life better for the not rich is wrong. Morally wrong. Doesn't matter if it works. Doesn't matter if it does good. Doesn't matter what it costs, billions, millions, or even a few hundred thousand. Doesn't matter if the People want it and need it. They shouldn't want it or need it and shouldn't have it. It's wrong. It goes against the will of God or the laws of nature. All things are commodities and meant to be bought and sold at a profit to someone. People exist to make and spend money. How much money you make and what you can afford to spend determines your worth, moral and material, the two being one and the same. Anything that disrupts this divinely and naturally ordained order by giving people what could and should be bought in the “free” market is an abomination.
Everything is for sale. Everything is to be bought. Freedom is to be bought. “Principled” conservatives like to talk about freedom…
“The debate over power and authority here is really a slugfest over who makes key decisions,” said Robert E. Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, “and whether the key decisions in health care ultimately should end up in the hands of a government office or in the hands of individuals who are exercising free choice.”
But the only individuals who have that freedom of choice are those with enough money to buy it. Absent government support, aid, oversight and regulation, if you’re not rich, all your health insurance decisions are made for you by the insurance company. They decide which doctors you can see. They decide which treatments and medicines and tests and procedures you can have. Oh, they give you “options” but the less money you have the fewer the options. It’s absurd as well as cruel to tell people who can’t afford essential health care that it’s for the best because you have the freedom of choice. Only the rich have that freedom. But then only the rich count in their eyes.
God and nature favor the rich. This is the way it is meant to be.
They believe this the way Catholics believe in transubstantiation and Hindus believe in reincarnation.
It’s true because it’s true.
Of course what it really is is justification for their greed. They've made a religion of their greed.
They've given themselves permission to make as much money as they want, whatever way they want, to take whatever catches their eye, and to keep all of what they take, and it’s all for the good because that’s how God and Nature intended it.
It’s also a justification for their self-regard.
If material worth decides moral worth, then, ipso facto, those with the most material worth must be the most morally worthy. They, then, are the saints of their religion and as saints they deserve veneration.
Their religion is a form of self-worship.
You should read the whole article. But boiled down, “principled’ conservatives don’t like the House Republicans’ health care bill because it doesn’t take government funded health insurance away from everybody who has it right away and so continues to let people think of health care as something they’re entitled to rather than something they have to buy. Every time a Republican Congressman tells the lies that of course the AHCA guarantees coverage for pre-existing conditions, of course it doesn’t take away anyone’s health insurance, of course no one will die because of this bill, “principled” conservatives want to scream, because even though those are lies and pre-existing conditions are only covered if you can afford to pay the extortionate premiums the insurance companies are sure to charge and they decide it’s not going to cut too deeply into their profits to cover your condition, and millions of people are going to lose their coverage, the lies perpetuate people’s expectation that health care is an entitlement the government should help them obtain.
Making things worse from the “principled” conservative point of view,, is that the AHCA will be a policy disaster, which will lead to voters demanding it be replaced and the replacement will probably be some form of Single Payer or Medicare for All and then there’ll be no convincing people they should go without health insurance if they can’t afford it. At which point the rich won’t have this thing the poor and not rich don’t and how will we all know they’re our moral superiors then?
You should read Peter Suderman’s op-ed, The House Health Care Disaster Is Really About Taxes, too.
And, in case you missed it, here’s the link to my post The Republicans take us another mile down the road to serfdom.
Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday, April 29, 2017. Posted Tuesday night, May 2.
Try to pretend for a minute that you don’t recognize the tall galoot with the kids in this photo.
Nice enough picture. Nothing special though. Typical photo op of a Congressman in a routine greet and meet with constituents. The Congressman in the picture posted it as one of a series on Twitter. Him with the Wisconsin Teacher of the Year. Him with some home state representatives. Him with the executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life. Him with the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and other Big 10 university presidents. Him with students from his hometown on a field trip to D.C.
“Thanks to the many Wisconsinites who shared their stories with me while visiting the Capitol,” he tweeted.
The kids in this picture aren’t there as part of the group of students from Ryan’s hometown. From Ryan’s House webpage:
I’m guessing that while the kids shared their stories with him Ryan didn’t interrupt to explain to them how under the AHCA if their cancer recurs their insurance company doesn't have to cover them, even if they have employer-based insurance?
Or warn them to resign themselves to bankruptcy before finally running out of money and having to just give in and die?
Or call the repeal of Obamacare a “mercy”.
Maybe he did. Maybe he thought it would be a comfort to them to know that the insurance premiums of currently healthy people won't go up thanks to their sacrifice.
It's possible President Trump doesn't know just how cruel the AHCA is since who knows if he knows anything? But Ryan knows.
Ryan knows exactly how cruel it is. Cruelty is what the gods and his corporate paymasters demand.
Posted Friday morning, April 28, 2017.
The GOP is owned and operated by rich greedy bastards who are driven mad by the idea that they don’t own the whole country outright, they can’t do whatever they want to make themselves richer, they have to pay for anything, and they are beholden to anybody or constrained by anything like laws, regulations, and common decency. They resent and despise anybody who costs them not just money but thought, which is to say everybody but themselves. They especially hate the poor, but they hate their own employees almost as much. They hate their customers too, because customers don’t just hand over money for nothing, they expect something, a good or a service, in return. If you get in the way of their making all the money they want, by, say, wanting to be paid for the work you do, you’re a cost and therefore their mortal enemy. And God forbid, you need help in any form from the government because that’s their tax money paying for it, you parasite! They want the rest of us punished for existing and taking their money to pay for our existence.
The politicians who work for them are a mixed bag of dupes, stooges, cynics on the make, wannabes---small scale business types who think their trucking business, insurance agency, dental practice, car dealership, or waste collection company makes them them kings and queens of the free marketplace or would if the damn government would just get out of their way---and true believers.
The true believers go the rich greedy bastards they work for one better in thinking the purpose of life is to make money and the measure of human worth is material success. For them it's practically people’s sacred duty to---never mind what Jesus said---store up treasure on earth and a sin to fail to do so for any reason, including misfortune and illness, and they are happy to act as God’s instruments in seeing that the sinners are punished. At the very least, they see to it that the poor and the sick are publicly shamed. That’s when they’re feeling merciful, and when they are they’re the first to compliment themselves for it while in the same breath letting us know they regret their weakness.
All of them, the dupes, the stooges, the cynics, and wannabes are some combination of the others, but all share in the faith that the point of everything is money and it’s God’s will that those who don’t make it are to be punished with pain, shame, and suffering. The true believers lead the processions but the others enthusiastically join the crowd harrying the sinners to the pillory, scaffold, and stake.
This is why I’ve said cruelty is the defining trait of the Republican Party.
Assuming they’re not just born sadists, one of the reasons for their cruelty is their superstitious approach to life. They refuse to admit that most of life is a matter of chance. Never mind that they seem to think people pick when, where, and into what family they’re born. They don’t want to face that fact that success is life is usually due to your having turned left one morning instead of right and so avoided getting creamed by a bus on your way to the interview that got you the great job that has resulted in all your material happiness since while the other candidate for the job, who was better qualified, more deserving, and usually so much more charming and personable, woke up with a killer cold and dragged herself to her interview red-nosed, irritable, and brain-fogged, and made a terrible impression, which the interviewer was still brooding about when you showed up whistling a happy tune that happened to be the one his mother used to whistle to herself while packing his lunch for school.
Good things come to the deserving and from deserving. Whatever good fortune you’ve enjoyed you’ve earned by doing the right things. So it you do the right things you will continue to earn and deserve good fortune---this is essentially living to placate the gods.
Many people don’t know how insurance work. Oh, they “know” but they don’t know in the sense that that’s how they think of it working. They think of it as a special sort of bank from which they can draw on their savings when they need it or take out a loan (Where the loan money comes from they don’t ask, but who asks where the money for their mortgage or car loan comes from?) that they’re confident they’ll pay back. Either way the money’s there when they need it and will always be there because of course they’re always going to have insurance. They’re always going to be able to pay their premiums. They’re always going to have a job.
It’s human nature. We assume things work the way we need them to. We expect circumstances to continue as they are. It’s also human nature to be superstitious. We do things that we irrationally believe will make things work the way we need them and make circumstances continue as they are, if we are happy with the way they are, or make them change for the better if they’re not. We should know better. Most of us do know better. We cross our fingers, wish upon stars, wear our lucky socks, and say our prayers anyway.
And when see people like us for whom crossed fingers, wished upon stars, lucky socks, and praying didn’t help, we look for ways they weren’t really like us---our situations aren’t really the same, their circumstances are particular to them, they made mistakes we wouldn’t have made, they didn’t have our advantages, they courted disaster, they went looking for trouble, they didn’t keep their fingers crossed, they didn’t pray hard enough, they sacrificed the wrong animals, they brought it on themselves, they deserved it, it’s their own fault, serves them right, what were they thinking, anyway?
And instinctively, reflexively, we shy away from people who come to us looking for help with their troubles. Not just from the homeless person begging for a buck on the street or from the frightened and hungry children with pleading eyes staring out from posters on the bus. From the friend at work going through yet another breakup. From the neighbor whose kid has had another run-in with the cops. From the relative who’s been diagnosed with cancer or who needs a loan. Often this recoiling isn’t due to lack of compassion but to a sense of helplessness. There isn’t really anything we can do at the moment to solve their problems for them except offer advice they’ve probably already heard or express sympathy that embarrasses both us and them.
But as often---maybe more often---it’s fear of contagion. We’re afraid their bad luck will rub off on us.
There’s a whole strain of Christianity that actually preaches this, that your good or ill fortune is your own doing, you earned it or brought it on yourself by pleasing or displeasing God, and He can change his mind about you and withdraw his favor in an instant and you won’t really know what you did wrong to deserve your punishment. Your only hope for salvation is to stick strictly to the rules, make a big show and a lot of noise about how fervently and abjectly you love and serve the Lord---as if he won’t know if you don’t keep reminding him---and offer up regular human sacrifices in the form of people clearly not enjoying his favor at the moment left to suffer whatever misfortune God in his wisdom and mercy has decided to clobber them with. Not surprisingly its most faithful adherents are conservatives.
When you get down to it, it's as I said, superstitious belief like this is at the core of every conservative's thinking. "It's your fault! Now go away before your bad luck rubs off on me!" and, what love of money doesn’t explain, isuch superstition explains about Republican policies regarding the social safety net in general and health care in particular.
Paul Ryan is as superstitious as the next Republican. Maybe more so.
It’s not that he doesn’t know how insurance works. He knows. He just doesn’t like it. He believes it shouldn’t work that way. But it’s not the way insurance itself works he doesn’t like. It’s what the way insurance works says about the way life works that bothers him. It’s the way life works he doesn’t like.
When he says healthy people shouldn’t have to pay for sick people’s medical care, he talks about “healthy” and “sick” as if they’re more or less fixed categories and not transient conditions we all pass in and out of until permanent injury or intractable illness or age traps us or death relieves us from whichever condition we’re in at the moment.
And he talks about them as if there’s more to them than the mere physical. There’s a moral element to them, as if “healthy” connoted good and deserving and “sick” implied some sort of failure of character as well as body---as if failure of the body was due to failure of character. He talks about them the way he talks about having money. You’ve either earned it or you’ve failed to earn it because you worked hard or you didn’t, you showed good character or you didn’t.
In Ryan’s mind, bad things happen only to the weak and the morally degraded. Bad things happen to those who deserve it.
I’m writing fiction here, but it’s based on a real life event that I think turned him superstitious and therefore into a certain kind of conservative---his father dying when Ryan was in high school.
Now, it could have had the opposite effect. It could have taught him that life is random and unfair, that bad things happen to good people no matter how good and careful they’ve been, and that God might have his reasons but whatever they are they don’t include making us happy or life easy and if he is just and merciful it’s not in any way we understand either word. The lesson from this, you would think, is that since we can’t rely on God to take care of us, we have to look to each other and look out for each other.
But what many people learn from life's unfairness is that we have only ourselves to rely on and we have to look out for our self first. And maybe that’s what Ryan learned or told himself. He had to be strong. He had to be tough. He had to go it all alone. His only other choice might have seemed to be to collapse and give up on life. And from that he developed a personal philosophy of self-reliance that quickly turned into a code of selfishness. From here on, I look out for Number One. That would account for his attraction to Ayn Rand and why his “bible” is Atlas Shrugged. It would explain why he doesn’t feel any shame about lecturing poor people on how to be successful, despite his having become successful through family connections and marrying into money. He survived and got through the most terrible thing that could happen to a young person through force of will and strength of purpose, and if he could do that, you can do whatever you need to do the same way. You don’t need the government’s help. You just need to have and demonstrate character.
That would mean that the GOP’s health care plan is a product of an adolescent’s self-infatuation.
But I’m writing fiction with that too. I don’t know what Ryan thinks he’s doing. I only know what he is doing. But if I’m going to tell a story about it, I prefer the story about a sixteen year old who decided he was never going to let another bad thing happen to him again and who has lived his life ever since keeping his fingers crossed, wishing upon stars, wearing his lucky socks, saying his prayers, and steering clear of his fellow human beings’ pain and suffering so that their bad luck won’t rub off on him.
In short, Ryan's political philosophy is based on teenager's superstitious belief he can cheat death and ill fortune, and if he can do it, you can too.
Posted Saturday morning, April 22, 2017.
I might have been a little intemperate in my post the other day regarding the political media and their coverage of the 2016 election and to make amends I should maybe start a hashtag. #NotAllPundts. There were plenty of political journalists, including some who didn’t particularly like Hillary, who saw Trump for what he was from the start and tried to warn us. Business Insider’s Josh Barro was one, as he reminded readers in a column Thursday, A quote from 'The Art of the Deal' perfectly explains Trump's presidency.
Barro:
I wrote two columns about the book for The New York Times back in 2015, and I highlighted one quote from the book that keeps haunting me during Trump's presidency.
"What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn’t important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it."
Trump was talking about a stunt he pulled in 1982, when he owned a piece of land along the Atlantic City boardwalk and wanted Holiday Inn to partner with him on the construction of a casino.
Contrary to his representations to Holiday Inn, hardly any construction had taken place on the site, and he was concerned the company would decline to invest once they saw what was basically a plot of empty land.
So in advance of a site visit by Holiday Inn executives, he directed his construction manager to hire dozens of pieces of heavy equipment to move dirt around on the site, digging holes and filling them back up if necessary.
We see this strategy repeated over and over in Trump's presidency. Trump signs executive orders to great fanfare, even if they have no effect beyond instructing his cabinet secretaries to prepare reports months from now. He demands that Congress pass a healthcare bill, with no particular concern for what's actually in the bill.
Trump aims to generate the appearance of activity, to do noisy things that demonstrate that he is a do-something president.
From the New York Times this morning, Trump Vows to Unveil Tax-Cut Plan Next Week, Surprising Staff:
WASHINGTON — President Trump promised on Friday that he would unveil a “massive” tax cut for Americans next week, vowing a “big announcement on Wednesday,” but he revealed no details about what is certain to be an enormously complicated effort to overhaul the nation’s tax code.
Mr. Trump offered his tax tease in an interview and again during remarks at the Treasury Department on Friday afternoon as he raced to stack up legislative accomplishments before his 100th day in office at the end of next week.
His announcement surprised Capitol Hill and left Mr. Trump’s own Treasury officials speechless as he arrived at the Treasury offices to sign directives to roll back Obama-era tax rules and financial regulations. Earlier in the day, when reporters asked Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, how far away a tax overhaul proposal was, he said he could not give an answer. “Tax reform is way too complicated,” he said.
Mr. Trump told The Associated Press in the interview that his tax reductions would be “bigger, I believe, than any tax cut ever.” But he faces an enormous fight among clashing vested interests as Congress tries to rewrite the tax code….
The details of Mr. Trump’s tax plans remain the subject of intense speculation, with stock markets regularly gyrating when White House officials discuss the subject. Since taking office, the president has suggested that he wants to enact the deepest cuts to individual and corporate tax rates in history.
But despite Mr. Trump’s statement on Friday that his tax overhaul “really formally begins on Wednesday,” White House officials quickly cautioned against high expectations that Mr. Trump would provide the legislative text of a detailed tax plan next week.
Instead, a senior administration official said the president would release only the “parameters” that Mr. Trump expected a tax plan to follow in the long congressional debate that would surely follow. Another official said the information released next week would be more like a “broad” outline….
In other words, come Wednesday, the bulldozers and power shovels arrive and start digging holes and filling them in again in an attempt to fool the media, Congress, Wall Street, and voters into thinking real work is being done so Trump can keep his presidency, which has become his business, going and making money for another month.
But as Barro says, “In the long run, it matters what the bulldozers and the dump trucks do.”
In business, Trump's strategy for when his counterparties figured out he was screwing them was to tie them up in litigation, get paid to go away, and then find new marks. He could find somebody else to fool with a bunch of useless bulldozers: new investors, new lenders, new customers.
In politics, as he is learning, there is no new set of marks. He has to face the same Congress and the same voters over and over.
You don’t need me or Barro to remind you, but Trump Plaza went bankrupt. The hotel and casino have been shuttered since fall of 2014 and now there’s talk of tearing the whole thing down. Not fun to think about that news as a metaphor.
Mined from the notebooks. Thursday, March 23, 2017. Posted Tuesday, April 18.
In what’s become a Thursday morning routine for us, on the way to dropping Mrs M off at the bus depot to catch her bus to work in the Big City this morning, we stopped at an internationally famous pancake house for a quick breakfast. To those of you concerned about how I’m handling my diabetes (and who’ve been policing my sugar intake. Busy bodies.), relax. I didn’t have one of those candy drinks. I had a regular cup of coffee with Splenda and milk. (Yes. I know. I should drink it black. Again. Busy bodies.) For breakfast I ordered two eggs over easy and sausage (Yes, You’re right. Too much fat and salt. See previous parenthetical asides.) and two pancakes over which I waved the little pitcher of the concoction of maple-flavored high fructose corn syrup and food coloring they call Old-Fashioned Syrup to taunt them and myself with the with day-dreams of sweetness withheld. I’d have loved to drown my pancakes in ersatz syrup but I was feeling guilty about the slice of berry pie I’d had last night at a nearby diner while waiting to pick up Mrs M at the depot.
Playing personal Uber driver for Mrs M is turning out to be bad for my health.
That slice of pie is the point of this post. I’m writing to apologize to you for having it.
And for the cookie I had at Barnes & Noble the other day. And the candy bar I bought reflexively when I was at the convenience mart picking up a gallon of milk And the cheese and crackers and chips and salsa I’ve been snacking on during the basketball games---not direct violations of the diabetes rules I’ve set for myself but, you know, still too much carbs, salt, and fat. I’m sorry for all of it.
There’s a new Dunkin on the route to Oliver’s college that’s turning out not to be as easy to resist as I’d thought. I’ve been good. Pretty good, anyway. But I’ve succumbed a couple times and I apologize for that too.
I need to get back on track towards keeping my blood sugar level down. I’ve been backsliding. I apologize for that.
Basically, I apologize for having diabetes.
And for my high blood pressure.
And for my back problems and the surgery that I’m still recovering from.
And for Mrs M’s various health problems and her trip in the ambulance to the emergency room at Christmas. And for Ken’s ADD and anxiety and Asperger’s and the medications he takes to help him cope and the monthly visits to the counselor to help him maintain and cope. And for Oliver’s eye exam next month.
I’m sorry and I’m grateful to all of you for helping us pay for it.
We have insurance. Private insurance. A good policy. But there’s no way our premiums plus our co-pays are covering the whole cost of it all.
You know where this is going, right?
Paul Ryan is an idiot.
The question is whether he’s an idiot because he’s just not very bright or if he’s being an idiot because he lets his ideology and politics do his thinking for him, as usual.
Republicans say ridiculous things whenever they try to defend the indefensible. Which is most of the time since their fundamental guiding principles are indefensible: Making money is the purpose of life. Rich people and corporations should be able to do whatever they want to make as much money as they want. Government’s only job is to see to it that the rich stay rich and grow richer, and if people who aren’t rich have to die so that can happen, then let them die.
Doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
Now, it may well be that Ryan doesn’t know how insurance works. He hasn’t had to think about it in a while. He’s been on the government payroll since 1999 and his insurance decisions have been taken care of for him. Republicans politicians tout it as a good idea that people should do more comparative shopping when making decisions about their health care---as if a heart operation is like buying a new car---but most of them don’t have to worry about it themselves. But then neither do most Americans who get their insurance through their employers who do the shopping for them.
Brendan Buck, Ryan’s counselor (legal, not spiritual or psychological, and he’s counselor to the Speaker of the House not Paul Ryan the private citizen), says Ryan’s remarks were misconstrued. Of course Ryan knows how insurance works. What he was saying was that it’s not working the way it’s supposed to within the circle of people insured through Obamacare. Not enough young, healthy people are paying into the kitty to cover the health care costs of the older, sick people drawing out. And that is a problem. The goal is to persuade more young, healthy people to buy insurance and the obvious way to do that is by offering them good insurance at lower premiums. It’s the way to do that that’s the sticking point.
The Republican solution is basically to throw the older, sick people to the wolves.
Or maybe it’s to set them adrift on ice flows.
Choose your own metaphor.
Basically, it’s to take away their insurance.
In case you think that’s just cruel, don’t worry. Ryan has a magic plan to save them. Some of them, at any rate.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if most people don’t truly understand how their health insurance works Wouldn’t surprise me if most people don’t truly understand how their insurance plans work---because they don’t have to think about it. HR does the thinking for them---and take it for granted that they’re paying for their insurance straight out of their pockets, that the money taken out of their paychecks for their premiums plus their co-pays are somehow covering whatever medical expenses they rack up. This is what seems to happen. And if you go long enough without needing a major treatment of any kind, you’re not wholly wrong to think the money you’ve paid in is sitting somewhere waiting for you for when you need it, as if it’s in a bank account with your name on it. This is one of the reasons Republicans are enamored of individual health savings accounts. They think of them as just a version of the way things work for them, so why shouldn’t it work for others?
Of course, this overlooks the difference between banks and insurance companies. Banks make their money off your money by investing it. Insurance companies make their money by keeping as much of your money as they can. It’s in their interest not to ever give you back any of the money you’ve paid in. This leads to the fundamental evil of the American system. People earn their Christmas bonuses by saving the insurance company they work for money, and they do that by denying claims and those denials often lead to other people going bankrupt or going without the treatment they need, which is to say, they suffer and die. Happy Holidays!
But on a simple practical level of just doing business, insurance companies, like all other big businesses, have to meet their expenses every day, have to show a profit quarterly, have to attract and keep investors, which means keeping the price of their stock not just up but rising. The money you pay them is going right out the door. They can’t pay you back what you’ve paid in right away unless they have the money on hand, which they only do---or rather seem to do---because they happen to be holding onto all this money paid in by other customers who don’t need their money back at the moment.
I know you know all this stuff, but bear with me. This isn’t a post about how insurance works. It’s about how Republicans think and what’s morally wrong with it.
I’ve seen arguments that the insurance industry is a giant Ponzi scheme, but that’s generally how capitalism works. You rob Peter---or borrow from him---to pay Paul, with the expectation that you will pay Peter back with interest later.
Now, here’s one of the points where it gets complicated. (Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know health care was complicated. Neither did the President.) Very few people stay with the same insurance company their whole working lives.
I’ve roughly calculated that my back surgery last summer, adding up the costs of the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the four-day hospital stay, the tests leading up to the operation, including three MRIs, the follow-up check-ups, and the physical therapy, cost our insurance company over $150,000. Over the course of thirty odd years of paying health insurance premiums, we’ve handed over much more than that to the insurance companies, even accounting for all the other times we’ve needed to draw money from our “account”, including several trips to the emergency room, a couple of less major operations---Ken’s appendectomy, for one---two births, one with complications, and countless trips to the doctors for check-ups and minor illnesses. Notice, though, I said insurance companies.
I’ve lost track of how many different insurance companies have covered us over the years. It seems we’ve had to put new cards in our wallets every two or three years. Several of these switches have been due to job changes. But most of them happened when the employer of the moment made a change in order to save itself money or get a better deal for its employees or, usually, both. We’d been with the company that covered my surgery for less than two years and in that time we didn’t come close to paying in $150,000 in premiums. And it’s not as though the insurance company had the money on hand because our previous company gave them all the money we’d paid them but hadn’t had to use.
We’d only been with that previous company a few years anyway, so they wouldn’t have had a lot of our money to transfer. And anyway it was long since spent, as was the money we’d paid the company we were with before that, and the one before that, and little of it was spent by us on us.
It was spent on other customers who needed back surgery or cancer treatment or bones set or maternity care.
Which is just fine with us.
Because that’s how it works.
The way things are, that’s the only way it can work.
I helped pay their medical bills knowing that when the time came they would help pay for mine.
And that’s what I’m getting at, the moral failure in the thinking behind “Why should healthy people pay the medical bills for sick people?” which should be read as “Why should I pay for your medical care?”
Basically, this is a reiteration of the Republican creed: I got mine. You get yours.
The health care debate isn’t a debate over money, except that money is the be-all and end-all for many Republicans. Nor is it a debate over what is the purpose of the federal government, which, according to Republicans is to protect wealth and property and see to it the wealthy and the propertied get to have things their own way, particularly when it comes to increasing their own wealth and acquiring more property, so it does come back down to money, at least for them.
It’s a debate about what people are for. Why are we here? Why are any of us here?
Always a good time to quote Dr Vonnegut, the novelist’s son. “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
For the most part, Democrats think along those lines. We’re here to look out for each other, and take care of each other, and help each other out in times of trouble and distress---which is to say, at all times---and that’s why we have government, because it’s easier, more efficient, and more effective to do all that as a nation than as individuals. We’re stronger together, as some woman who ran for President liked to say.
Democrats see us as a WE, as in WE the People, and government as the expression of Our need and desire to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
And for the most part, Republicans see as us as multitude of isolates pursuing their own individual and selfish ends whose self-interests happen to coincide from time to time, that is, as 300 million mutually suspicious me’s and mines who don’t do anything without getting a convincingly specific and immediately materially rewarding answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?”
Nothing works if that’s the only question that matters. Not health insurance. Not government. Not friendship. Not family. Not communities. Not civil society.
Recent Comments