MAGA: Make American Unions Great Again?

Listening to Mary Kay Henry, the head of the service workers union, this morning brought back a flood of memories. 

Mary Kay Henry

1. Ozzie and Harriet/Leave It to Beaver America:  The 1950's is the touchstone for Donald Trump's white base. Those were the good old days; the nostalgia crowd always talks about the time when a man could go off to the factory with his lunch pail, his wife at home raising the kids and he could take 2 weeks vacation in August, drive his car up to the lake, where he had his boat with its outboard motor and drag the kids water skiing behind. Shangrala. 

This, too, was the 50's 

Of course, the 50's were also a time of whites only water fountains in the South, a time when sex was dirty, forbidden and not to be mentioned, a time when everyone smoked, doctors, too and when the family had only one car because the wife was a home waiting for Daddy to come home and take her shopping, the house was small, women could not get credit cards without their husbands' permission and a lot of bored, lonely housewives became drunks.
Fact is, those halcyon times, especially in the Rust Belt, were created by unions. Before unions, factory workers were impoverished. 

Bill Gates did not build America

2. A surgeon complaining about the hospital "housekeeping" staff, men who cleaned operating rooms between surgeries who cleaned the OR's in 15 minutes, effectively, but whose union contracts said they got 45 minutes to do it, so between every case, there was a 30 minute idle time and multiplied out through the course of 20 operating rooms, through the course of the day, that 30 wasted minutes translated into a $20 million dollar loss for the hospital which could have gone to paying the rest of the staff more, the nurses, the cafeteria workers, all because the housekeeping staff was riddled with "slackers."

3. The news that when Volkswagen said it would be happy to have its factories in Tennessee  unionized, as they were in Germany, both  United States Senators, the governor blocked that idea. Unions were the modern equivalent of freeing the slaves: what would happen if all those low life's got more power?

4. Reading a contract from Hospital Corporation of America, which said:
A. The employee was forbidden from discussing his salary with other employees.
B. If the employee left the employ of HCA he could not work within 20 miles of any other HCA hospital or facility; i.e., leave HCA and you have to leave town.
C. If the employee is a physician, he is not allowed to contact any patient to inform that patient of where he is relocating, or having any contact with former patients. The patients, in essence, "belonged" to HCA, not the doctor. The patients, doubtless, would have been surprised to learn they belong to the corporation. 

Beyond these memories are the realities of today's work environment.
The complexities of the current labor environment are complex:
1. McDonald's store (franchise) owners do not own the land on which their stores are owned, so McDonald's in Chicago can always pull the rug out from under them. McDonald's central does not set wages. The local store owner does, so there is no way to negotiate nation wide wages for McDonald's workers.

2. The gig economy: Uber does not have the same responsibility to Uber drivers the old corporations did. Uber drivers are not "employees" only contractors. So wages, cuts of ride payments, work safety, health insurance or retirement benefits are not in play.

3. The Supreme Court, as much as the President or Congress has been a problem for workers. 

4. The Republicans, who really represent the entrenched corporate executives, are so much better than Democrats, at marketing, at the name game. They want to pass "Right To Work" laws everywhere. Well, who would be against a right to work? 
Of course, what these laws really are are laws against unions. Unions cannot extract dues from workers for whom they negotiate. Kill a union's cash flow and you kill the union. 

Somehow, if we are ever to address income inequality, where the CEO makes $10,000 an hour when the line worker makes $10 an hour, the only foreseeable way would be to get a government in which promotes unions. 

Sackler Family A New Dreyfuss Affair?

Mad Dog has not investigated the role the Sackler family played in marketing Oxycontin as a safe, non addicting opioid, which clearly, as time made clear, it was not.

But there is a reason Mad Dog has not bothered reading the court transcripts or much of the available content in the New York Times or elsewhere: Mad Dog is intimately and extensively familiar with drug marketing.

What is nowhere mentioned in any report about Oxycontin that Mad Dog has seen is the fact that most drugs are approved by the FDA and sent to market with precious little really known about their eventual risks.  Eighteen month studies of eighteen hundred patients is not unusual. 

Every practicing physician knows, or should know, there is a reason why drug companies are required to provide post release approval data on the safety and efficacy of the drugs they market: everyone in the game--apart from the patients--knows how little we know about any drug until 500,000 patients have taken it for at least 10 years.

In the case of DES (diethyl stilbesterol) a hormone used to prevent pregnancy loss, it wasn't until the daughters of the mothers taking it reached age 15 that the high incidence of vaginal carcinoma in the offspring, in the females who were receiving the medication in utero, became evident. 

I remember, twenty years ago, when a physician, a family friend, employed by a drug company, told us over dinner how excited he was about this new drug the company he was working on. It was Oxycontin. He was working with a neurologist I knew well and respected immensely, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, and she was thrilled with this drug. She headed the pain center at MSK and she was happy to have that drug, he said.

I never called her to ask. Pain medicine was not much on my radar then.

But what this memory suggests is that at some point, at least early on, the people working with Oxycontin were true believers. What they knew later is another matter.

Of course, the whole structure of science and medicine is designed to test the hypothesis--and eventually, with enough data and study, the addictive potential of Oxycontin became evident.

Now enter the worlds of journalism, politically viable prosecutors, tort law, money and politics and the Sackler family becomes the prototype of the evil family making billions enslaving an unwitting population on this opioid.

You've got David Simon, (of all people!) tweeting the Sacklers should be brought to a public square and guillotined! 

And this is the guy who brought you "The Wire"! The Wire, that wonderful, detailed exploration of the effects of drug addiction, the "drug fiends" of Baltimore. The Wire, which was unblinking in its portrayal of people Simon knew when he was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. 

The addicts themselves, blame nobody but themselves. They do not vilify the drug pushers, the touts, the corner boys or the drug lords. They know the problem is within themselves, to some extent, and their struggle is to face up to that. Temptation will always be out there in some form, whether it's heroin, alcohol or Oxycontin or Fentanyl.

Of course, David Simon, wonderful as "The Wire" and "Homicide" and "The Corner" were, is not the man I imagined, as is evident on his Twitter feed. But I expected better with respect to this story.

In the case of most drugs, big pharma is faceless, just corporate headquarters and coroporate boards--there is no one image to focus upon.

But America needs villains, scape goats and the rich, Jewish Sacklers fill that role admirably. We can hate them for their wealth, for their Jewish origins. Oh, they fill the bill.

Nowhere in here is any effort to examine the way Big Pharma advertises to the American public, i.e. "markets" its  drugs, or the profits to TV stations from all that marketing. 

In a corrupt society, there is no such thing as "clean money." The very media networks which are thundering on self righteously about the hideous, predatory Sacklers are themselves raking in millions from the Big Pharma accounts running drug ads on every network from Fox to CNN to CBS.

It's just so much easier to make this into a reality TV show with great villains and not think about it.

Speed Dating Democrats in Manchester, New Hampshire

From 9 to 5, yesterday, Mad Dog joined a crowd which did not fill the arena in Manchester, NH, to hear each of the 19 remaining candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

The morning after, this is what Mad Dog can recall from the blur:

The WTF group:
1. Admiral Joe Sestak:  who somehow seemed to think his daughter's brain tumor, treated by Navy medicine, was an argument for his becoming President.
2. Tom Steyer: who seemed to think that having been born poor and becoming a billionaire was an argument for his becoming President. 

The Likeable Group, for whom being a decent person and having the right values was an argument:
1. Julian Castro: who is smart, and who delivered the best final sentence of any candidate, wherein he described his fantasy about having won the election and walking Trump to the helicopter on the White House lawn and calling out to him: Adios!

2. Senator Michael Bennet: who was introduced by an 80 something Gary Hart, which got all the people around Mad Dog trying to remember what "Monkey Business" was all about and when that election was. Bennet is good man who made the very good point that Medicare for All should not mean people should be forced to give up their own union Cadillac health insurance plans.

3. Governor Steve Bullock (Montana): who thought that because he had won as a Democrat in a deeply red state won by Trump by 20 points meant that he could beat Trump anywhere in the US.  A good man, who should be in the cabinet, if the Democat wins.

4. John Delaney: another up from the bootstraps billionaire who seems like a nice guy nobody could remember ten minutes after he left the stage.

5. Amy Klobuchar: So far the most memorable thing about her is she declared her candidacy in a snowstorm. She is not Ann Richards, although she is working on those one liners. She has not come up with a classic, like "If Trump's  IQ got any lower, we'd have to water him twice a day." But she's working on it. 

6. Andrew Yang: Who is the most likeable of the likeables.  Could not find anything to disagree with as he spoke. But the question is: Why is he up there speaking? Donald Trump took decades to build his brand. Everyone knew Trump, even if they hated him. Yang is so obscure, he could walk down 5th Avenue and not be stopped for so much as a handshake. Trump could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose a vote. Yang could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and nobody would notice him. He'd have to jump up and down and scream, "Hey! It was me! I shot him!"

The What Are They Thinking Group:
1. Bill DeBlasio who has no apparent group who likes him, but is very tall and articulate, with smoothly honed completely unmemorable phrases.

2. Tulsi Gabbard: Who seems anatomically and constitutionally incapable of smiling or making others smile, who has a finely tuned sense of outrage, likely tempered by her experiences in war,  whose best argument seemed to be she will never be mistaken for Donald Trump.

3. Marianne Williamson:  who viewed 20 feet from the stage, where Mad Dog was sitting, looked as if she were performing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" but all that facial expression and body language was not adequately conveyed on the Megatron screens on either side of the stage. What Mad Dog remembers is her observation real change does not come from entrenched elected officials but from the people, which seemed to be her argument for making her an elected official.
Mad Dog could not help but think about Abraham Lincoln, who was elected and who achieved significant change.

The Also Rans: The folks who just don't have the speed, but if we still chose Presidents at Conventions in smoked filled rooms, each just might be a compromise candidate
1. Kamala Harris: who oozed emotion and a sense of knowing where she came from, with stories about her intimidating mother who told her not to see herself as others saw her. What Mad Dog saw was someone who internalized a sense of moral superiority.

2. Cory Booker: Who once again reminded everyone he was an all American tight end college football play and who somehow confused the convention with a revival meeting in which "Rise Up" is not a song from "Hamilton" but his very own theme song.

3. Pete Buttigieg: Who, if Mad Dog closed his eyes, sounded exactly like Obama. A white, gay Obama. He makes you forget he is only 37 and his highest achievement has been mayor of South Bend, Indiana.  If Mad Dog were really "voting my heart" he just might vote for him. Or, if Mad Dog decided to vote strategically, he might   on the assumption Pete might win the Rust Belt, but then Mad Dog thinks, if you are trying to predict how Rust Belters think, you might expect they would recoil from the sight of Mayor Pete kissing his husband on stage. 

The Aged Triad:
1. Joe Biden skipped briskly on stage, as the first speaker, which Mad Dog suspected was a good thing because they might not have been able to wake him up if he had to hang around backstage for more than an hour. Joe probably belongs in the "likeable" group, but he's better known than any of those guys. He's the Eisenhower candidate, but Ike was on a farm in Gettysburg by the time he was 78, and clearly Biden would do less harm on that farm.

2. Bernie Sanders:  Ever the same. Energetic, bombastic, fighting the fight for all of us. Sly, funny, exciting. But his shtick grows a bit old and he's a one trick pony. Every problem can be solved by a big government program to stick it to the avaricious corporations who own this country. He may be right, but he is not getting any younger. His crowd looked to Mad Dog like a throng of recycled 60's hippies, Yippies and Make Love Not War folks who voted for Magovern and shrugged off the results as just another reason to think there's nothing you can do about America anyway, so we'll just go smoke pot.

3. Elizabeth Warren: Who has finally got her message simplified to the point voters can actually understand it. The problem is CORRUPTION. Corruption so thoroughgoing we don't even see it as corruption any more, where the super rich pay next to nothing for all the stuff we do for them and everything, from despoiling the environment, climate change, health care, gun violence can be tied to the big money boys who will not allow the people what they need and desire. 

She has finally learned she needs a very amplified mike because her voice is as soft as a high school librarian's.  

On the other hand, in that setting at least, the fervor for her outstripped an Alabama tent revival. 

Did anything in that arena matter?
We had a primary election in the New Hampshire 1st, Sept 11, 2018. There were scores of house parties, debates, rallies. Issues were discussed passionately. People stayed late into the night to pummel candidates with questions.

In the end, the guy who had no presence, no energy won: Chris Pappas with 20,000 votes. A close second was a woman who moved to New Hampshire the month before, backed by dark money, Maura Sullivan. She had melted down in debate, provided platitudes which bored even her young campaign workers but she got 19,000 votes. 
The rest of the pack struggled to get to 4 figures. 

Those Sullivan votes were "bought" votes. But how did they "buy" votes? Was this simply a reflection of the effectiveness of TV ads. Most people Mad Dog knows go to the bathroom or the kitchen during campaign ads. Are people really absorbing these things, subliminally?

Pappas had been around New Hampshire for a decade, serving on the Executive Council, a government panel fewer than 1 in 10 Granite Staters could identify, much less than explain, but he, at least, was a sort of old pol. He had cultivated friends in high places.  But that cannot explain how Sullivan, a vapid, content challenged Stepford wife, made  it a close contest. 

Mad Dog's  assessment of Sullivan may be unfair, he knows. Maybe Mad Dog just could not respond to her charms for obscure psychological reasons. 

But it does make you wonder what does matter in politics. 

For another take on what matters, I've discovered Noam Chomsky, a man I will learn more about, but he makes more sense to me than most:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/04/01/noam_chomsky_trump-russia_collusion_claims_a_joke.html

From Whence We Came: George Washington and Our Sordid Past

Nathaniel Philbrick, in his excellent history of the final campaign of the American Revolution which ended at Yorktown tells some grisly tales about what the British troops under Cornwallis did in the Virginia countryside.

Cornwallis

A pregnant American woman, an American patriot, her abdomen sliced open, her breasts sliced open, her baby butchered and decapitated heads lined up along her pottery shelves where pottery had been, with "Breed No Rebels" painted in her blood on the wall. 

These British soldiers were not the benign Redcoats depicted in our American history books, who were simply trying to protect the king's tea from being dumped in Boston harbor.

The level of butchery wrought upon the natives rivaled what we later saw in movies like "Platoon" about American soldiers in Vietnam.

But what was just as appalling was the story of the treatment of Black slaves, who the British commander, Cornwallis, had taken from surrounding Virginia plantations, promising them freedom if they would help build fortifications at his redoubt at Yorktown: When Washington and Lafayette finally surrounded him and their usefulness was spent, Cornwallis ejected the slaves into the no man's land between his fort and the American lines, where, once the slaves walked across, they were once again enslaved.  George Washington appointed a slave procurer to take custody of these unfortunates and to return them to "their rightful owners."

Slaver

After the British commander surrendered, Washington hosted a surreal dinner for the French officers who had fought alongside the Americans and for British officers.
Having read through 200 pages of the fierce and ruthless fighting, of the bombardment and saber slashing, it strikes one as almost incomprehensible that these soldiers could sit down to a catered dinner together. 

But what is really interesting, is that the British and French officers got on wonderfully well. Neither liked the Americans much.  The French had fought long and hard side by side with the Americans, but the French officers were from the upper classes and considered the Americans ill mannered and not of their station. The British officers were, of course, gentlemen and it was the class bond which mattered.

Lafayette

Of course, there were exceptions: Lafayette was well loved by Washington and Hamilton and returned their affection, but on the whole, the gentlemen of the upper classes found affinity.

As Philbrick notes,  among the best American soldiers who lined the road out of Yorktown as the beaten British troops marched by, were the Black soldiers from Rhode Island, who had been steadfast and reliable and effective but now they watched as lines of hundreds of slaves marched by them, on their way back to "their rightful owners." What they were thinking, Philbrick notes, one can only imagine.

This is not the story portrayed in high school history books in Texas, or in any of America, one can imagine. Those grisly, grimy, ghoulish parts get scrubbed clean.

But it's where we come from, and that may explain some of where we are today.

The Creed of the Democrat

As a score of Democrats vie for advantage Mad Dog has stumbled across Thomas Paine, the 18th century thinker whose ideas now find a new life in the 21st century moment of Trump.

These words flitted across my Twitter screen and Mr. Paine spoke to me from the 1770's as if a fresh voice reached across time to find me, from the big bang of American thinking:

"When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government."

Mad Dog can think of no more concise enunciation of what the Democratic Party of 2019 should stand for, and what separates us from the snarling dogs of the Republican Party and Fox News.

1. Neither ignorance nor distress:  Are you listening Betsy DeVos, and all those who sail with you, intent on traveling back to the time before public education?

2. Jails are empty of prisoners:  When America incarcerates more citizens than any other nation, and for crimes of drug possession and use, which result in one of four Black males spending time in jail.

3. My streets of beggars: And we have homeless from LA to Seattle and in every city, and we have no clear thinking about the causes of this blight or any real idea about how to ameliorate it?

4. The aged are not in want: Thank Democrats for Society Security and Medicare, which the Republicans, though they claim to only want to improve these systems, take every action to kill.

5. The rational world is my friend: When we have our President saying he's the best thing to every happen to the community of color, while he decries brown immigrants as criminals and rapists but yearns for more immigrants from Norway?

We do not need another Democrat in the ring: We need some Democrat who can think and write and speak with the clarity of Mr. Paine.