"The trouble with life is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt." --Bertrand Russell
“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”--Christopher Hitchens
The Washington Post decries Bernie as just another politician spinning fantasy. To wit, the editors of the Post believe to advocate a single payer system for medical insurance, or even the option for a government Medicare-for-anyone who wants it, is sheer fantasy in the America of 2016. Sanders's argument: "It works in Sweden and every other major industrialized country, why would it not work here?" is met with the argument of American exceptionalism by the Post. The editors argue that Medicare for all would not save all that much money and would result in diminished earnings for doctors and hospitals. This, actually, is the real fantasy. I once tried to calculate what the administrative costs mean for the American health care system. It's a tough estimate, because nobody really seems to know how many hangers on there are in the system, between the insurance agents who sell health insurance, the Human Resources people at every company, who spend most of their time negotiating with health insurance companies for good prices, the teams of "billers" in every doctor's office whose job is to spend all day every day fighting claims through insurance companies, the clerks on the other end, in the insurance companies who are busy denying claims, the marketing people for the insurance companies, but a conservative estimate of all these people involved in the financial and commercial side of American medicine is likely between 5 and 10 million people. If the average salary of all those hangers on is $50,000 (an estimate, I am told is very conservative) then there is $500 billion dollars in "waste" in our current system--"waste" in the sense of money spent which does not go to treating patients but only to financing the system. If you divided this by the 500,000 physicians in the country that comes to about a million dollars per doctor, which would not represent a loss of income for most of them, for 99% of them. Of course, not all of that would go to physicians, but the point is, there is way more money going to the financial part of our health care system than goes to the providers of health care, which is why our spending on "healthcare" dwarfs that of any other "advanced" country. We spend it on middlemen. They spend on the folks who actually provide the services. Cutting out the middlemen would mean displacement and unemployment for a lot of middelmen who currently are employed to do work which is superfluous and unnecessary to the real mission of the enterprise of American health care, which is, as I understand it, to provide health care for patients as opposed to salaries for clerks and salespeople. It would also mean that patients would likely be seen by physicians as opposed to nurse practitioners much more often, because the main reason nurse practitioners are seeing so many patients now is that it cost corporations and insurance companies about a quarter as much for a NP as for a MD. The Post says Americans would never stand for the "rationing" of medical care which the Brits and the Canadians and the Swedes all tolerate without a peep of protest. Of course, as anyone who watches Prime Minister's Questions knows, the Brits do no tolerate inadequacies in their health care system. But in Britain, if you have a beef with your provider, you can take it to the House of Commons where you will get a more sympathetic hearing than you are likely to ever get from Blue Cross. The fact is, the private insurance companies have been rationing care for years in the United States. We'll accept rationing from private commercial concerns but we go ballistic when it's the government saying no.
This is the reality. What the Post endorses is the fantasy.
"A new presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just eleven days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club."
--Elizabeth Warren
I would be delighted to have Hillary Clinton as my President. I would be even more delighted to have Bernie Sanders as my President, although I'd want Martin O'Malley to be Vice President because I don't know how many heart beats Bernie has left in him. But that is not my fantasy team. Can you imagine Elizabeth Warren President and Barney Frank VEEP? Just flipping on my computer every morning to the New York Times would be such joy. Well, we can always dream.
This morning, on CNN I watched a Brookings Institution talk by a Republican Congressman from Utah, Jason Chaffetz, who made the stunning claim that President Obama had released 66,000 illegal immigrant felons, men who were convicted of felonies, who President Obama freed to go back to raping and murdering in unsuspecting American communities. This was the Brookings Institution, so I expected one of the learned scholars in the audience would have challenged this number, if it were untrue, but nobody so much as peeped. Apparently, this is settled "fact."
Rep. Chaffetz (R-Utah)
Donald Trump tells the tale of a woman raped and murdered by an illegal alien, as if that one case is emblematic of the behavior of all illegal immigrants. Another case of an illegal immigrant who shot a woman in San Francisco keeps popping up whenever you Google "66,000 illegal felons." The accused says it was an accident. But the visuals are all most people are going to register: Pretty white woman; ugly Hispanic felon. I kept asking myself: "Why would President Obama" let loose all these rapists and murderers? Are all these felons rapists and murderers? So I Googled it, and it didn't take long to get a profile of these fearsome, depraved "felons."
If you examine this chart, it turns out by far the most "felons" are people stopped for traffic violations or because the police officer judged an illegal as appearing "threatening" to public tranquility. The number of rapists and murderers are down in the double and single digits. And, of course, as it turns out, President Obama heads the executive branch and it is the judicial branch, which defends its independence vigorously, which is releasing these immigrants, following laws enacted by the legislative branch. But, as we know, it is President Obama's fault, because, well, he is Barack Obama, the Other, born in Kenya, conceived on Mars, a secret Muslim who wishes the nation harm, and he is at fault--the toxic water in Flint Michigan is his fault, too: He's been diverting all the good water from the lake to Kenya and that left Flint with only the toxic sludge from the Flint River.
Hillary, Paul Krugman make sense. Look at history: Medicare, Social Security all started small and incrementally grew to be big, hugely successful government programs which we can now hardly imagine living without. Dreaming of a revolution is so Kumbaya and it's so 1960's, to drift off on a euphoric high, dreaming of what America could be like, if only it were not like it really is: filled with Trump-ies roaring their approval for expelling Mexicans and banning Muslims. America is not just the upper West Side of Manhattan; it is also the upper Mid West, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin.
But it is also true that Ronald Reagan was a longshot, unelectable, too extreme. And when he swept in things really did change, for a decade, maybe two. He cut taxes for the rich, ran up huge deficits and belittled government, if not actually making it littler. His insistence that government is the problem not the solution lives on today in the hearts and addled minds of 30-40% of America who now flock to Mr. Trump. Of course, his Republican revolution swept away a perceived failed Democratic presidency; now we are talking about a Democratic revolution to replace a stalled Democratic presidency.
But, if Hillary wins the nomination and then the election, she can only hope for a Democratic Senate, but she would be faced, ultimately, with the same intractable Congress which thwarted and frustrated President Obama. We might face, likely would face incremental change or no change, more gridlock. The question is this: is a slow creep forward worth it? If Trump is elected, or Ted Cruz, we'd march several steps backward--abortion rights crushed, rich getting richer, Planned Parenthood vanquished, teen pregnancies through the roof, unions only a memory. But this too will pass. But if Bernie were elected, he could only be elected with a massive liberal turn out and as he has said so often, it does no good to vote for Bernie if you don't send him a Democratic Congress. We would find out, in numbers, just how many Americans really are liberal. So the voters, if they choose Bernie, will have to vote in both Bernie and Congress. There can be no split tickets, no voting for Mitch McConnell and Bernie. Then we could get a single payer, government option, real restraint on Wall Street, free state universities, and a chance at real, substantive, lasting change. It's like those credit default swaps--if you lose, you don't lose all that much, but if you win, you change everything.
Just when I had all but forgotten Stephen Colbert, he springs forth doing his slam poetry, rap rendition of Sarah Palin's endorsement rap/slam/speech/harangue for the Donald. The only image which can Trump the Colbert is that of the Donald squirming behind Ms. Palin, trying to not look like he is in complete agony, the thoughts racing across his face as clearly as they raced through his mind: She was hot, once (in a trashy sort of way.) Now, she's just a raving lunatic, and I'm on the same stage with this maniac. Where is the Secret Service when you need them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LPR7DktumA
Thank you, Stephen. Oh, Hillary, you're looking better all the time.
Okay, I admit it, I'm a sap for Simon and Garfunkel. But this has got to be the greatest political ad ever. No words. It's one of those videos you see played before the candidate walks on the stage at a rally, but played as a political ad it is very effective: It says, okay, he's an old guy. But he's exciting people about the best things in America. It's completely positive. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/bernie-sanders-and-simon-and-garfunkel-put-focus-on-voters.html?_r=0
In the world of this video, Donald Trump and the haters are irrelevant. What matters is that kid carrying the calf. It makes you dream. It makes you think: if we are ever going to see the upper 1/10 of 1% pay their share, if we are ever going to have a rebalancing away from a country of super rich owning the huge slice of the pie and everyone else in the small slice, it's going to take a revolution and as unlikely as it seems, it is just as unlikely some frumpy old guy would ever generate such excitement. Because it should not work is just the reason to believe it might just happen.
In transplant medicine, there is the curious response called "graft vs host" in which immune cells contained in the donor organ actually attack the recipient, rather than the recipient's immune system attacking the donated organ as "foreign." What Germany., France and, to a far lesser extent, America are dealing with is whether or not we face a "graft vs host" reaction. The events on New Year's Eve in Cologne suggested the transplants from Syria and Turkey have found themselves to be strangers in a strange land. Groping, even raping un-escorted women in Tahrir Square, in Cairo or in the market in Saudi Arabia, may be considered a social norm, but it is not acceptable behavior in Cologne. In France, the Muslim population has never been accepted fully into French life, as the origins of these people were mainly North African, Algerian, and they were more or less isolated in the suburbs of Paris where rather than thriving, they festered. Speaking on NPR about his new book about US immigration policies since the 19th century, Tom Jelton notes that until 1965 the United States favored white, primarily Protestant, Northern Europeans over Asian, South American immigrants. So while the quota on people from China or El Salvador might have been 100 a year each, 50,000 a year were allowed from England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia. This kept the country white. After World War II, some Americans felt badly about having turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, and attempts to change the quota system were launched in Congress and failed. Lyndon Johnson, in his early years in Congress voted to maintain this racial bias, but 12 years later, as President, in 1965, he pushed through a change. The change was actually fashioned by a conservative, who suggested the idea of keeping families united, so rather than having an advantage if you came from Sweden, you had an advantage if you were living in the country and you wanted to bring over your wife and family. Of course, the idea was if you had lots of Swedes already here, they would bring in their family members and the racial balance would remain stable. But it didn't work out that way because the Scots, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Germans and even the Irish living in America found their family members who wanted to come to America had already come over and those who remained in Europe were happy there and so it was the South Americans, Asians and Caribbean people who were here who were able to import family members. Now, we are faced with folks of Middle Eastern descent in the upper Midwest who want to bring in their relatives, who are desperate to escape the cauldron that has become the Middle East. The Donald tells us this is a huge threat to America.
He is, of course, pandering to the worst demons of our soul, but we should, in quiet moments, reflect that even in the most hideous and repugnant lines of thought, there may be some ideas we need to examine. It is true some second generation Middle Eastern kids have got on planes to go fight for Isis. But we have not seen the sort of Tahrir Square episodes in American cities. In "The Serial" the Middle Eastern mother storms into a high school dance to drag away her adolescent son who she thinks is being contaminated by the free love of a high school prom, where girls are present who do not have a male family member to protect their virtue and where music is played and, horror, girls dance with boys. We do have among us people who reject us, reject our values. But the Muslims are not the first who have done this: Orthodox Jews, and even Catholics have rejected prevailing American values about pre marital sex, contraception and the proper behavior of males and females. What we have going for us in the United States is we accept the idea that you parents may have been born in Lebanon or Egypt, but if you dress like us, talk like us, go to our schools, play on our teams, you are as American as anyone else. It's only Republicans who believe you do not qualify if you worship Allah rather than Jesus.
