It ain’t broke, but Mitt would fix VA health care

Posted on November 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

From ThinkProgress:

Mitt Romney floated the idea of partially privatizing the veterans health care system during a roundtable discussion with vets in South Carolina on Veterans Day, saying, “When you work in the private sector and you have a competitor, you know if I don’t treat this customer right, they’re going to leave me and go somewhere else, so I’d better treat them right…”

Reading the piece, I thought of what a disaster our private-sector health insurance system is — of how rarely customers are treated right, because all the “competitors” for our business cheat and overcharge. And of how the VA health care system is, by comparison, a model of efficiency. As the ThinkProgress writer noted:

… The fully integrated veterans’ health care structure of doctors and hospitals provides veterans with benefits that are the envy of the rest of the health care system. A study by the RAND Corporation found that “VA patients were more likely to receive recommended care” and “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow up. Rather than taking veterans out of a system that consistently delivers “higher quality of care,” Romney should expand its services and improve access.

And then I remembered who we’re dealing with here. Romney, the front-running Republican presidential candidate, became rich at the expense of people who worked for companies that were bought and sold by his private equity firm. He and his “deputies,” as the NYT called them, are directly responsible for the suffering of thousands of people who lost jobs or had their salaries and benefits cut.

Mitt thinks he did honorable work, that the companies he tore apart — the ones that survived — are healthier because they’re more efficient — i.e., more profitable for executives and shareholders. But some of us think Mitt is a pious marauder, a standout performer among those who have used downsizing, off-shoring, privatizing and other strategies to enrich themselves by drastically lower the quality of life for those of us who aren’t wealthy.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, health care, Mitt Romney, Politics, The New Depression, weasel | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The weasel David Brooks satirizes inequality

Posted on November 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

Never let it be said that NYT columnist David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, doesn’t have a sense of humor, even though his attempts at social satire are about as amusing as a buyout by Mitt Romney’s private equity firm. Here’s Brooks on Friday:

Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?” This is an excellent question. I will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map to help you avoid embarrassment.

Haha. I’ll bet no one approaches Brooks on the street. He probably spends about 10 minutes a month on the street. And if someone did approach him, the question would be much simpler, something like, “David, how come the gap between rich and poor is bigger in America than in any other advanced country?” Or maybe, “Hey weasel, can you spare a dollar?”

The income gap in America is exactly the issue that Brooks dodges at all costs, in all of his lame newspaper columns. In this one, he weasels away from it by invoking concepts such as “ancestor inequality” and “fitness inequality,” presumably to trivialize the very concept of inequality — to argue in an oblique way that inequality is in the eye of the beholder; that it is not something as clear and quantifiable as income distribution.

He writes that income inequality is socially acceptable — poor people don’t mind that baseball players and CEOs make multimillions — but “spending inequality” isn’t:

If you make $1 billion, it helps to go to work in jeans and black T-shirts. It helps to live in Omaha and eat in diners. If you make $200,000 a year, it is acceptable to spend money on any room previously used by servants, like the kitchen, but it is vulgar to spend on any adult toy that might give superficial pleasure, like a Maserati.

In other words, “inequality” is an abstraction, a rigid-sounding but flexible term that has more to do with personal needs and expectations, with notions of political correctness and even fashion, than with the material well-being of the general population.

We have to infer this because Brooks, being a weasel, is incapable of making the argument directly. He’s the same affluent Republican mouthpiece who, over the years, has shouted “Class warfare!” in response to anyone who, for instance, suggested that huge tax breaks for the rich have contributed to the growing inequality between rich and poor.

Brooks’ conclusion: “Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other. Have a nice stay.”

Nicely done, weasel, except that you very obviously forgot to add that the 99 percent of us who aren’t wealthy can’t climb out of the hole dug for all of us by the ultra-rich, not without a prolonged and very nasty fight.

Posted in David Brooks, economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, weasel | 1 Comment

We love you, Joe Pa

Posted on November 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here we are again, wondering where to draw the line between fans and fanatics, admirers and cultists, loyalty and blind obedience to the great leader. The issue came up after hundreds of students rioted to protest the firing of long-time Penn State football Joe Paterno in connection with the arrest of alleged pederast Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s former assistant coach. A sports fan reacted with a piece in Salon, from which this is taken:

A friend of mine once explained to me that [cult leaders] rely on people who are broken, in some way, for their support. That seems true, as [Charlie] Manson was surrounded by drifters seeking refuge from their lives and a place where they were accepted and loved. The same is true for cult leaders like [Jim] Jones, [David] Koresh, or Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall Applewhite, who also famously led a group to mass suicide while waiting for the arrival of the Hall-Bopp [sic] comet. While “broken” may be too strong a word, perhaps the words “impressionable” or “lost” are better. And students, especially impressionable teenagers away from home for the first time, can easily get drawn into a frenzy, protesting for a cause that they neither understand or have even tried to fully digest.

The writer wasn’t arguing that Joe Paterno was a cult leader, only that some people, especially young people, tend to react in a recklessly indignant way when people they look up to get in trouble.

In fact, Paterno was a cult leader, and much more. He lorded it over the young and old. Most of his followers weren’t broken, and not even impressionable, not in the way the writer meant the word. They were the sort of people who think of themselves as wholesome, God-fearing and freedom-loving. They filled a stadium that holds 100,000 on game days, wore and waved the blue-and-white, and came to believe the team, the town, and the emperor of Happy Valley were one and the same.

They are good people, most of them, for sure. They are also a horde of potential Nazis.

Posted in arts, mainstream media, Politics, pop music, sports | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Veterans Day Beefheart

Posted on November 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

I cry but I can’t buy
Your Veteran’s Day poppy
It don’t get me high
It can only make me cry
It can never grow another
Son like the one who warmed me my days
After rain and warmed my breast
My life’s blood

From Wikipedia:

The red remembrance poppy has become a familiar emblem of [Veterans] Day due to the poem “In Flanders Fields”. These poppies bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I, their brilliant red colour an appropriate symbol for the blood spilled in the war.

From Lester Bangs’ 1969 review of Trout Mask Replica, the album on which “Veterans Day Poppy” appeared:

… While many other groups have picked up on the trappings of the new jazz, [Captain Beefheart] and the Magic Band are into its essence, the white-hot stream of un-“cultured” energy, getting there with a minimum of strain to boot. This is the key to their whole instrumental approach, from the drummer’s whirling poly- and even a-rhythmic patterns (compare them to Sonny Murray’s on Ayler’s Spiritual Unity or Ed Blackwell’s on Don Cherry’s Symphony for Improvisers), to the explosive, diffuse guitar lines, which (like Lou Reed’s for the Velvet Underground or Gary Peacock’s bass playing on Spiritual Unity) stretch, tear, and distend the electric guitar’s usual vocabulary with the aim of extending that vocabulary past its present strictly patterned limitations…

Posted in arts, Politics, pop music | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Debunking Mitt’s most recent big lie

Posted on November 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s how the corporate media works: The well known double-talker Mitt Romney makes dubious statements meant to undermine another candidate. Reporters write stories that leave Mitt’s statements unchallenged. Readers are left with the impression that Mitt is stating facts.

It is often days before the dubious statements are challenged in the publication that ran them, usually in a “he said/she said” analysis piece or a blandly worded editorial that impresses no one.

Then, finally, the dubious statements — lies, that is — are totally refuted by a columnist. But it’s implicit that the columnist is only stating opinions, even when he or she is obviously debunking bald-faced lies.

Here’s Paul Krugman, The New York Times’ designated debunker, responding to lies by Mitt Romney that should have been corrected by reporters and editors:

…Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of taking his inspiration from European “socialist democrats” and asserted that “Europe isn’t working in Europe.” The idea, presumably, is that the crisis countries are in trouble because they’re groaning under the burden of high government spending. But the facts say otherwise.

It’s true that all European countries have more generous social benefits — including universal health care — and higher government spending than America does. But the nations now in crisis don’t have bigger welfare states than the nations doing well — if anything, the correlation runs the other way. Sweden, with its famously high benefits, is a star performer, one of the few countries whose G.D.P. is now higher than it was before the crisis. Meanwhile, before the crisis, “social expenditure” — spending on welfare-state programs — was lower, as a percentage of national income, in all of the nations now in trouble than in Germany, let alone Sweden.

It’s a hell of a way to run a news operation, isn’t it?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Federal judge to SEC: Do your job!

Posted on November 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

Maybe the SEC hasn’t done a better job of policing Wall Street and protecting investors from fraud because the SEC itself is a fraud:

A federal judge Wednesday challenged the SEC’s plan to settle a fraud case against Citigroup for $285 million, saying that the deal would recoup only a fraction of investors’ losses and would leave the firm free to proclaim its innocence in private lawsuits over the remaining damages.

The judge used the Citigroup case to mock the SEC’s traditional way of doing business — allowing defendants to settle without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

The unproven allegations, U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff said, “are no better than rumor or gossip.”

“Does not the SEC of all agencies have an interest in establishing what the truth is?” Rakoff asked.

It was the third case since the financial meltdown of 2008 in which Rakoff sharply questioned the value of enforcement actions brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is responsible for policing Wall Street and protecting investors.

Citigroup is accused of misleading investors about a 2007 transaction tied to the deteriorating housing market in which the firm bet against its customers and made profits of $160 million while the customers lost more than $700 million.

Matt Taibbi took a look at the numbers and came up with a fitting analogy:

Rakoff of course is right – the settlement is nuts. If you take Citi’s $160 million profit on the deal into consideration, what we’re talking about then is a $125 million fine for causing $700 million in damages. That, and no admission of wrongdoing.

Just imagine a mugger who steals $70 from some lady’s wallet being sentenced to walk free after paying back twelve bucks. Magritte himself could not devise a more surreal take on criminal justice.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, Obama, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Thanks for the memory, Rick

Posted on November 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

I hope this tough-talking, carefully coiffed hombre keeps better track of his guns and ammo than he does of his talking points during debates:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry says he will eliminate three federal agencies if elected president, but he just isn’t sure what they are. At Wednesday night’s CNBC Republican presidential debate, the candidate managed to remember the first two agencies but repeatedly failed to name the third.

Posted in enviromentalism, humor, mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A sick joke from Romney, ‘the serious one’

Posted on November 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, recently cited Mitt Romney’s plan to semi-privatize Social Security and Medicare and link these programs to Wall Street as proof that Romney is “the serious one” among Republican presidential candidates. Here’s Matt Taibbi on the audacity of these buttoned-down bozos:

Your typical Medicare/Social Security recipient might already have been ripped off three different ways in this era.

He might have been sold a crappy mortgage or a refi by a Countrywide-type firm (which often targeted the elderly). He might then also have unwittingly become an investor in such mortgages and seen the value of his retirement holdings devastated (many of the banks sold their crappy mortgage-backed securities to state pension funds). Lastly, if he paid taxes, he saw part of his tax money go to pay off the bets the banks made against these same mortgages.

So now that Wall Street has ripped off this segment of society three times, it makes all the sense in the world that Mitt Romney – a former Wall Street superstar who was a chief architect of the modern executive-compensation-driven corporation – is coming back and telling us that we need to cut their Medicare and Social Security benefits in order to defray the cost of the previous three scams…

If there wasn’t such a very real chance that this could happen, it would be worth laughing about, but unfortunately it’s no joke. It’s a testament to the tenacious idiocy of our national media that an idea like Social Security privatization could continue to be publicly contemplated, in the wake of a disaster on the scale we’ve just gone through.

Advocating the turning over of Social Security management to Wall Street after the 2008 crash is a little like asking Paris Hilton to pilot Air Force One, or tabbing Charlie Sheen to manage the inventory of a hospital pharmacy – completely nuts, but to David Brooks, that makes Mitt Romney the “serious” candidate.

Posted in David Brooks, economic collapse, Great Recession, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, New York Times, Politics, Wall Street, weasel | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Frazier dies. Fight of the century continues.

Posted on November 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

You had to be there, I guess, to appreciate the significance of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, on March 8, 1971. Not necessarily at ringside, but aware of the mood of the country. It was as if a civil war was being vicariously fought in Madison Square Garden, with each side represented by its champion.

In Ali’s corner were opponents of the Vietnam War, blacks fed up with second-class-citizen status, a large contingent of intellectuals and artists and college kids, affluent liberal types, and people who simply thought Ali was the coolest man on the planet.

Frazier appealed to the World War II generation of working-class whites and blacks who didn’t like Ali’s flamboyant outspokenness. Frazier was the real Rocky, a guy who became a great fighter through sheer force of will. He was also a strong black man who didn’t seem threatening to whites who already felt threatened by “uppity” blacks.

The backdrop, in a nutshell: I was a kid growing up in white working-class Philly and can’t remember a single adult in that little world ever calling Ali by any other name than Cassius Clay, even though he’d changed his name years earlier and everyone knew it.

The bout lived up to its billing as “the fight of the century.” The whole world watched two of the best heavyweights in boxing history slug it out for 15 rounds. Frazier won the decision because he flattened Ali with a vicious left hook in the last round.

Ali and Frazier half-killed each other — there were two more fights, both won by Ali — and their war of words, begun before the first fight and fueled partly by the social strife that defined the era in which they fought, persisted after they retired. Ali outlived Frazier but has suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a long time.

Stan Hochman, a long-time sportswriter for Philadelphia Daily News, neatly summed up their epic story the day after Frazier died:

They brought out the best in each other in the ring and the worst in each other outside the ring. And now Frazier is gone and Ali cannot put two sentences together to mourn our loss. And that is terribly sad.

It’s also sad that the societal divisions that helped make the Ali-Frazier rivalry so bitter and symbolically weighty have grown drastically worse in the 40 years since their first fight. The discontent of the poor and near-poor, dormant for decades, has been rekindled by the widespread realization that the rich have slyly encouraged these divisions — between poor and middle-class, black and white — in order to distract us from the fact that they’re robbing us all. (I’ve just described the genesis of the Occupy Wall Street movement.)

I don’t know if Frazier would see it that way, but one thing’s for sure — he didn’t tolerate anyone making a fool of him, in or out of the ring, and he never backed down from a fight.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, sports, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

More news pollution from the NYT

Posted on November 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

In a Sunday op-ed piece, Frank Bruni complained that Americans get worked up to no good end — headline: “The invention of outrage” — over what passes for news these days. Well, no shit. The odd thing about the piece was that Bruni didn’t bother to explain the difference between gossip and real news:

If ever you needed an example of how easily, spuriously or conveniently we gin up our outrage, last week was it. As we kept up with [Kim] Kardashian, kept tabs on a constipated Congress and beheld both the turmoil in Greece and the travails of Herman Cain, we summoned astonishment where there was questionable grounds for it and an ire sometimes out of proportion with the circumstances. So did the players in a few of these dramas and the parasites feeding off them. It was a mad, mad week.

My first thought was yo, Frank, if you want to hear less about bimbos such as Kardashian, don’t devote half of an article to her. Don’t mention her at all. My second thought was don’t equate coverage of vapid “personalities” with stories about our dysfunctional Congress, which is still hung up on reducing debt rather than creating jobs.

Bruni and many of his colleagues are like factory workers who dump toxins into a river and then complain about all the dead fish. What is this guy smoking?

Was he complaining about the general public’s tendency to become outraged over “news” that’s actually trivia, or the media’s purposeful reduction of all news to trivia? It’s not quite clear.

What Bruni should have written about is the remarkable absence of outrage in America over issues that directly effect our health and well-being. For decades most Americans were bamboozled into believing the increasingly wide income gap between the rich and poor was nothing more than a healthy result of the free market system at work.

The corporate media does everything it can to encourage belief in this lie. One of its tricks is to distract us from important issues by prominently running stories about bimbos and sideshow freaks while at the same time under-reporting the ways in which the rich and powerful have institutionalized inequality in our sick society.

My suggestion for Bruni, if he wants to write something substantive, would be to stop following the Kardashian news, ride the subway to Zuccotti Park and ask some of the protesters why they are there. It really is an outrage.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, environmentalism, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment