Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2009
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More of the calculated deception implicit in the slogan “change we can believe in” is revealed by comparing two official statements -- one contradicting the other -- each from the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The first statement, prominently displayed on the CMS website for at least several weeks (and still there as of tonight, 18 November 2009), is entitled “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check” and is presented as a signed assertion from President Barack Obama: “Whether or not you have health insurance right now, the reforms we seek will bring security and stability that you don’t have today. This isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives. This is about people’s businesses. This is about our future.” (Boldface added for emphasis.)
http://www.healthreform.gov/
The second statement, still not available on the CMS site despite its release four days ago (and therefore obviously being suppressed by CMS and its parent organization, the Department of Health and Human Services), is contained in a 31-page CMS report entitled “Estimated Financial Effects of the ‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009’ (H.R. 3962) as Passed by the House on November 7, 2009.”
Authored by CMS Chief Actuary Richard S. Foster, the report states on Page 9 that H.R. 3962 “would reduce (Medicare Advantage) rebates to plans and thereby result in less generous benefit packages. We estimate that in 2014, when the MA provisions would be fully phased in, enrollment in MA plans would decrease by about 64 percent (from its projected level of 13.2 million under current law to 4.7 million under the proposal).” (Bf again added for emphasis.)
Foster calculates $201 billion would be slashed from Medicare Advantage -- nearly a third of the $570.6 billion by which the table on Page 2 indicates the entire Medicare program is to be reduced.
Thanks to The Hill, the full text of the Foster report is available here:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/67791-cms-house-health-bill-will-hike-costs-289b
The Hill's summary of the CMS findings is here:
http://thehill.com/images/stories/news/2009/november/weekend111309/cmsactuarynumbers.pdf
Beyond the political smokescreen of euphemisms, the siphoning of $570.6 billion from Medicare to finance health care “reform” is forcible redistribution of income. Typical of monopoly capitalism, it is redistribution of income from the poor to the rich -- the huge windfalls to Big Business and Wall Street guaranteed by mandatory insurance.
Worse, the proposed destruction of Medicare Advantage -- which provides 54 percent of us who are lower income ($30,000 annually or less) with our only way around the exclusionary co-pays and deductibles of un-supplemented Medicare -- is literally a death sentence.
So much for “security and stability.”
Page 8 of the Kaiser Foundation report linked below summarizes the demographics of MA:
http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/7801.pdf
I cannot tell you how much it pains me to say this, but in this instance the DemocRats are lying and the GOPorkers are speaking partial truth. Health care “reform” is indeed being financed at the expense of those of us -- elderly or disabled (and in my case both) -- who depend on Medicare to keep ourselves alive. And by denial of care, the proposed “reforms” will indeed kill some of us.
No wonder the public is so frightened. No wonder public anger is so easily misdirected by GOPig demagogues.
Thus the futility of “hope” -- utterly predictable once we awaken to the truth of class struggle, to its ultimate revelations of the United States as a single-party state with only one purpose: the expansion and protection of capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profits for the ruling class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.
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No I am not overlooking the fight against Stupak-Pitts. But Rep. Bart Stupak -- elevated to Monarch of Misogyny by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the cabal of Christian fanatics known as The Family -- has already declared that health care reform is dead without his nullification of Roe v. Wade for all but the nation’s wealthiest women. And Stupak, who represents rural Northern Michigan, a region of unique natural beauty where the inhabitants are obviously as theocratically vicious as they are in the Deep South, has enough support in both houses of Congress to have the last word.
Again reasoning objectively from the class-struggle premise of one party/one national purpose, my prediction is that Stupak will thus give the DemocRats the rationale they need to kill health reform -- so they can pretend to have served their constituents while in actuality they serve their Big Business masters.
You read it here first.
Stupak also radically advances the spread of Christian theocracy. Already proven in the South to be the ultimate barrier not only against unionism but humanitarian activism of any kind -- never forget the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan is “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class” -- Christian theocracy is now the slave-opiate with which the ruling class wants to brain-police the entire nation.
Meanwhile the best reporting on health care reform -- actually on the betrayal of health care reform -- has been by Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake.
Her site, with its unfolding analysis of the Senate measure just announced by Majority Leader Harry Reid, is here:
http://news.firedoglake.com/
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While I try to limit my weekly blog posts to approximately 1000 words -- the above runs about 830 words -- this has been an exceptionally busy week. The next two items originally appeared elsewhere, but I believe they belong here too. Therefore I beg your indulgence.
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It seems to me the most salient element of the Teabagger story has yet to be told.
This is the story of how the Democratic and Republican parties are seemingly collaborating to ensure "change we can believe in" never goes beyond the abject powerlessness implicitly affirmed by the adoption of "hope" as a viable political slogan.
The story begins with the fact today's U.S. working-class citizens have legitimate grievances that have worsened steadily since the untimely end of the Kennedy Administration 46 years ago.
These grievances include the ever-more-apparent extermination-by-neglect policies at the core of the U.S. health care system; the constant fear so generated amongst lower-income, elderly and disabled people (I am all three); the outsourcing and downsizing of our jobs; foreign wars that have no purpose beyond functioning as profit-centers for Big Business; and now the brazenly Antoinette savagery of bailing out the ruling class while abandoning all the rest of us to "jobless recovery" -- foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, sickness and thus ultimately forcible population-reduction by economically imposed death.
Adding real and potentially very explosive fuel to this metaphorical fire is the increasing recognition we are hopelessly imprisoned in a neo-manorial economy -- the reason that here below the salt only the most deluded PollyAnnas still believe there will ever be any meaningful recovery of lost jobs.
Normally -- as the Democrats did with the New Deal in 1932 and pretended to do again during the 2008 election campaign -- they would have ridden this groundswell of wretchedness and rational anxiety to huge electoral mandates for radical change.
Instead, the Democrats' expressed just enough generalized protest to win the vote but since then have worked relentlessly to limit if not obstruct the very change they seemed to promise.
The result is an unprecedented and growing backlash, the Teabagger phenomenon that for its demagogic figurehead should properly be re-labeled Palinism: hard-Right expression of working-class fears and anger that normally would have been voiced by the Left as condemnations of ruling-class greed and agitation for definitively humanitarian reforms.
No more. The remarkable silence of the Democrats has given the Right an opportunity unprecedented in U.S. history to seize the time and pervert it to anti-humanitarian purposes.
Cunningly -- and predictably -- the Palinoids are thus redirecting a huge measure of working-class rage from its proper target and hurling it against the only possible measures by which the causative problems might have been ameliorated if not resolved.
The immediate and obvious consequence is the revitalization of the Republican Party: the increasing probability the GOP will regain enough Congressional seats next year to end -- effectively forever -- any possibility of real health care reform (now hopelessly obstructed by the Democrats’ decision to combine the abortion and health-reform fights), or Employee Free Choice (the one measure that would have genuinely re-empowered the working class but has already been reduced to meaninglessness by behind-the-scenes betrayals).
Given these facts -- that is, given (A), the undeniable extent to which the Democrats are truly enabling their alleged opponents and (B), the extent to which this enablement serves Big Business and Wall Street at Main Street‘s expense -- what emerges into ever-clearer focus is a charade of bipartisanship that functions solely to advance the ultimate goal of monopoly capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the ruling class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.
Thus the Teabaggers are manipulated -- much as were the people of Weimar Germany -- to collaborate in their own further disempowerment by mobilizing in support of their oppressors.
While the implicit pattern is obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of labor relations or history -- and (precisely as the above demonstrates) is not all that difficult to explain -- the fact it remains an untold story is perhaps the most damning proof yet of the harlotry to which U.S. mass media has been reduced.
http://crosscut.com/2009/11/13/mossback/19363/
(Crosscut, which honored the above response as an “Editor’s Pick” -- many thanks -- is an online daily that serves the bourgeoning metropolis on the eastern shore of Puget Sound. The publication is nationally significant as a leading part of journalism’s nonprofit avante garde.)
***
And now for a bit of cultural revelation originally disseminated via my private mailing list as a commentary on an unusually well-done author-interview published in a rather surprising place:
I attended the University of Tennessee with Cormac McCarthy in 1959. Then and again after I finished the 17-month slog of Korean duty that completed the active-duty part of a six-year U.S. Army enlistment and I returned to Knoxville to work as reporter/photographer for a couple of daily newspapers c. 1962-1965, McCarthy and I ran in approximately the same crowd.
La vie bohéme was never without deadly risk in Tennessee, not just Ku Klux Klan country but the viciously racist Scopes Trial theocracy where Christians first made it a crime to teach evolution even at the college level -- ultimate proof of the ugly truth behind the label by which the Klan was known throughout the South: “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class.”
This omnipresent threat, hardly ever acknowledged aloud but always at the back one’s mind, is of course the reason why -- in all such realms (and invariably to the sneering disapproval of the pretentiously pacifist art/lit aristocracies of New York, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle) -- intimacy with the works of Lao Tzu, Diane di Prima, Dorothea Lange and Clyfford Still is typically accompanied (as McCarthy’s own work attests) by parallel intimacy with the works of Colt, Winchester, Remington and Smith&Wesson.
In the years I knew him, Cormac still went by the name of Charley, and all the rest of us -- at least all the males -- envied him the superb Irish tenor in which he sang not only a substantial repertoire of traditional British ballads but some very fine Appalachian-tragedy songs of his own making and in either case instantly aroused every heterosexual woman within earshot (and even a few lesbians) to such erotic readiness all he needed do had he chosen to commence consummation was gesture with his eyes toward bower or bedroom.
As a woman with whom I myself was very close once confessed, “every time I hear Charley sing it makes me want to tear off all my clothes and just fuck him senseless”: a true Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cocksman -- though as far as I know he was always faithfully monogamous.
But even after all his literary and film successes, the interview linked below is the only one I've ever seen that captures something of the real Cormac McCarthy, including the keenly observant, outrageously wry sensibility that fuels his genuinely Homeric skill as a storyteller.
While I am no fan of The Wall Street Journal -- even before Murdoch, its editorial page malevolence toward workers marked it as a ruling-class-only equivalent of der Voelkischer Beobachter -- this piece on McCarthy, though a bit stilted (no doubt due to the fact the reporter never quite got over being intimidated by the presence of The Great Writer), is nevertheless damn well worth reading:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html
(More thanks to Crosscut, which in a representative example of its editors’ cosmopolitan sense of relevance linked to this WSJ story last week.)
LB/18 November 2009
*Headline quote: I Ching -- “56th Hexagram, Six in the second place” (Wilhelm/Baynes translation; Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XIX: 1967)
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