Dreams of the Worm Turning

Remarks at Prescott Park, Fall, 2017

Jumbotron shows images of adorable immigrant children coming in at Ellis Island mixed with more recent children at the detention centers for women and children in Texas, mixed with images of the wall along the Texas border and the Statue of Liberty.

Leftist Marching Band and Revolutionary Rhythm Section play under a flag:  Liberty League, Indivisible They are playing “With a Little Help from My Friends,” then “I Can See Clearly Now.”

Old man walks on stage and sings, acapella , to the tune “Oh, Death.”

Ooh Trump!

Whooooah Trump

Won’t you build me a wall right away?

Well, what is that I can’t see

With no Trumpcare taking care of me.

Well I am Trump none can excel

I’ll open the door to heaven or Hell

Whoa Trump someone would say

Could you build me a wall right away?

The children prayed the preacher preached

Time and mercy is out of your reach

I’ll fix your  eyes so you can’t blink

I’ll fix your brain so you can’t think

I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see

This very hour come and go with me

Trump has come to take your soul

Leave your body and leave it cold.

Old man leaves stage handing microphone to MC, who wears a hat “Qui Tacit Consentit”

MC:  Wow! Will you look at this crowd!  Biggest crowd since…well ever. 

And the lines of people still trying to get in!  Thousands out there. Stretched all the way back to the Maine border, which is, I admit, just the Piscataqua River, but really incredible. 

I heard this is even bigger than the crowd at the Inauguration! Which, I don’t know, may be true. Lady in the parking lot told me. Same lady who told me vaccines cause mental problems. So incredible. Really. All the way to the border.

And I heard Paul LePage is building a wall on his side of the border. You know Paul Le Page: He's the first coming. Now we've had the second coming of the Mesiah. But Paul was the first. And he’s building this wall and he's making New Hampshire pay for it, because, you know, Maine is open for business. And you know what that means.  Do you know what that means?  Tell me, what does that mean? I never could figure that one.

So you’re probably wondering why I invited you all here today.

I’m asking myself the same thing. Really, I think it’s group therapy.

Not like a group hug. I’ am so  through with hugs, man, really had enough of that. Time is over for talking about how scary life is, how mean, how uncaring--had enough of that.

So what do we do?  Well, we are here in a pretty small state, so what can we do? We are not the smallest state by population. There’s Rhode Island, and Wyoming. Is Wyoming actually a state?  They have two Senators,  must be a state.  Then again, Kentucky has two senators and looking at that as a indicator of statehood, well, the bar for statedom has got to be pretty low. What, really, is a state? One thing is it has got to have borders. Walls, not so much, but that may be coming. Personally, I think if they extended that wall down in Texas all the way around that state, we might all be better off. Keep those Texans behind that wall. Like crating Fido, you know? But that's not really why we're here.

I digress. I do that a lot. It’s better than smoking pot and it’s just as diversionary.

Even, small as we are, people pay attention to us. For about two weeks in January, every four years, they pay attention to us and then they move on.  It’s like “Will you still love me tomorrow?” And they never do. Talk about a one night stand.  And we fall for it every time.  

But for those two weeks, it’s really fun.  And then, about seven, eight months later, that’s the typical gestation period, we find out what we got.

So, I had this idea:  Maybe we could actually have a conversation. You know, not just wham bang, thank you New Hampshire, but maybe we could actually say something that mattered.

Did you know that when one of George Washington’s slaves escaped, Ona Judge, she somehow got all the way from Philadelphia to New Hampshire—man, she must have really not liked Washington—and Washington, well, he was a nice guy in a lot of ways I guess, but he apparently got pretty worked up about his property getting up and leaving, so he told the governor of New Hampshire he wanted his property returned to him—and this was before the fugitive slave act—and the governor of New Hampshire said, “Well, actually, what you are calling your property, is a human being, and this particular human being says she does not want to be owned by you, or anyone else.”

“But you can’t listen to that. That’s my property. She doesn’t have any rights.”

And this was way before Dred Scott, right?

And the governor said, “Well, maybe she doesn’t have any rights in Mount Vernon, but up here in Portsmouth, she is a human being and human beings have rights.”

Now, of course, I wasn’t around at the time. And in the 18^th century, there were no recordings or TV or youtube, but I like the story the way I told it. Sort of alternative facts, or alternative history. And, any way, the essentials must be pretty close, because Washington never did get his slave back. 

She was the winner, in that one. She was a refugee who got across the border and was free.  And, far as I know, people around here are happy she did.

So, we've said and done important things before. No reason we can't do that again.

We The People Vs. We The Maps

We the People is the way our Constitution begins.  That document describes the rules and outlines of a new nation, and it begins not with geography, or money, or descriptions of purple mountain majesties or rivers, but with the people. 

A government of the people, by the people for the people, Lincoln said, as he formulated the reasons for the second American Revolution which was the Civil War. 

But, of course, Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington and enough of the founding fathers, those 18th century men in whigs and silk stockings were afraid of "the people" so they constructed a country of states with borders and the government embodied land, borders, states as players just as important, more important than the people. 

Looking at the 2016 census, you can group the states in different ways, but there seem to be several distinct categories:

1.  States of roughly 20 million or more souls:California (39 m), Texas (27 m), Florida (20 m) New York (19m). These are the Huge States. (4 states)

2. States of 8-13 million:  Pennsylvania (13 m), Illinois(13m), Ohio (11m), Georgia (10m), North Carolina (10m), Michigan (10m), New Jersey (9m), Virginia (8m). These are the Big 8 States. (8 states)

3. States of 4-7 million: Washington (7m),Arizona (7 m),Massachusetts (7 m), Tennessee (6m), Indiana (6m), Missouri (6m), Maryland (6m), Wisconsin (6m), Colorado (6m), Minnesota (6m), South Carolina (5m), Alabama (5m), Louisiana (5m), Kentucky (4m), Oregon (4m), Oklahoma (4) Connecticut (3.5m)  These are Middleweight States.  (17 states)

4. States of roughly 3 million: Iowa(3m), Utah (3m), Mississippi (3m), Arkansas (3m), Nevada (3 m) Kansas (3m), New Mexico (2m), Nebraska (2m), West Virginia (2m) These are the Lightweight States. (9 states)

5. States of less than 2 million: Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming. These are the Mini States. (12 states)

2016 vote by population

All these states get about one Representative in the House per 700,000 population. But in the United States Senate, Barbara Boxer represents 18 million voters where Bernie Sanders represents 312 thousand voters. 

2016 vote by counties

Until the 2016 election, half of the biggest group (Middleweight) states were liberal, blue states, but that fell to 1/3 with the election of Trump. Of the Huge states, half are liberal, half conservative. Of the Big 8 States, only 2 are consistently liberal, the other 2/3 flip back and forth. Of the lightweight states only one (New Mexico) is liberal. Of the dozen Mini States, 1/3 are reliably liberal.

Of the 21 states in the Lightweight and Mini divisions only 4 are reliably liberal (New Mexico, Hawaii, Delaware and Vermont.) 

The End Result of Disproportionate Political Power

If the Senate were reconstructed to reflect population, then 17 states which now exert disproportionate power would enjoy only a power proportionate to their people.  These 17 states now stand in the way of a single payer/government option for health care, a Supreme Court which lives in the 21st as opposed to the 18th century, a robust environmental protection agency, the development of wind and solar power on a scale which could connect nearly every American home to the grid without increasing CO2, the resurgence of labor unions and any hope for a fair break for the middle class, free college tuition at reliable not for profit state universities, a tax code with is friendly to the middle class and which asks more from those to whom much has been given, and a huge new infrastructure program could be undertaken which would provide full employment for generations. 

If the Supreme Court were composed of 9 voting justices, the 9 most recently appointed, with 2 new justices appointed by the President with each Presidential term, then progress on a multitude of fronts would be possible.

But that is not the America we have. We are still living with the distrust of We The People which we inherited from some men who were slave owners and from some who simply distrusted the rifraff. 

Slaver

Fever Dreams

Unlike liberal Democrats, those of  the reactionary Republican persuasion have been thinking about what they want for years. 

In 2000, the platform of the Texas GOP included:
1/ A return to the gold standard
2/ Abolition of the Federal Reserve
3/ Elimination of the minimum wage
4/Abolition of Social Security
5/ Repeal of the 16th Amendment (federal income tax)
6/ Elimination of the IRS.

We are not talking about some wacko splinter group, living off the grid survivalists in Wyoming here. We are talking about a mainstream, state of Texas state Republican party.  The party of Louis Gohmert. 

Now, I ask you, while these fellow Americans have been dreaming these fever dreams, what have liberal Democrats been dreaming?

You know, the fact is, for something to happen, you must first imagine it.  Well, that's not entirely true. You can develop a disease you'd never imagine in a million years. But if you want to create something, if you want to go somewhere, build something, you have to dream first. And these people have been dreaming fervently. That is a problem for the rest of us, don't you think?

Here are members of today's "Freedom Caucus" in the United States Congress, the guys who blocked the All American Healthcare Act, because it still required insurance companies to cover hospitalization. 
I'm going to Google each one of these guys, day by day, just to see how really creepy they are. But remember, these guys are representatives of thousands of people, who think like they do.

Sweet dreams.

Andy Biggs

AZ-5

Bill Posey

FL-8

Dave Brat

VA-7

Jim Jordan

OH-4

Justin Amash

MI-3

Louie Gohmert

TX-1

Mark Meadows

NC-11

Mo Brooks

AL-5

Paul Gosar

AZ-4

Randy Weber

TX-14

Raúl R. Labrador

ID-1

Rod Blum

IA-1

Ted Budd

NC-13

Ted Yoho

FL-3

Tom Garrett

VA-5

REPEAL! Don't Let that Dog off the Leash

The Republicans in Congress are that classic brand of coward who will taunt the dog who is leashed to the front porch, dance around throwing stones at him, as long as they can see nothing will happen to them.

But once that dog is off the leash, they don't want anything to do with that beast; they won't even set foot in the front yard. They'll cross the street and run as fast as they can.

So every day for 7 years they hurled invectives at Obamacare, said what a disaster it would be/is/was and they threw stones and they voted daily to repeal it, because they knew their votes would never have any effect.

You might think they would have been thinking about what they would do to replace it, if they ever got a chance. You might think when President Trump won the election November 8, more than 4 months ago, they would have done a few retreats, listened to some invited experts about what a good health care plan would require, had some late night sessions about what they wanted to do now.

But no.

They are all talk, no action.

Action would require crunching numbers, talking about policy, thinking about what sort of world they would like to see.
But no.
They are what they've been since at least 2008, the party of No.
Mitch McConnell said his only job in 2008 was to make sure whatever President Obama wanted to do would not happen.


Apparently, he liked that job and will do the same for Mr. Trump.

Repeal and Replace Fails: Trump Claims Victory

Got to hand it to President Trump: He said he'd drain the swamp and he did it.
As he said tonight, he has said for the past 18 months Obamacare would implode and everyone would lose health care and it's in its death spiral and now the country is going to get what it deserves for allowing the Democrats to kill the Republican American Healthcare Act.
I mean how can you vote against a bill called the American Healthcare Act?
Maybe they should have called it the "All American Healthcare and Winning Act," but I quibble.

People will die! And they deserve to!  They wouldn't listen to me.

I was wrong. I could not imagine the Republicans would not pass this law after they voted every day for 7 years to repeal it. You just knew that whole time they were crafting their bill, which would provide the world's best medical care to the top 1% and pretty good health care to the top 20% and okay health care to the next 20% and the rest of the population could just die, because, well, they really are so undeserving anyway.

This is more fun than the Trojan war!

Well, it's on to tax cuts, and I got to say, I'm relieved. The tension the past few days has been close to unbearable.  I kept expecting Jim Jordan to tear off his shirt and reveal his wrestling singlet and leap up onto Speaker Ryan's podium and scream, "You want a piece of me?" 

It's his fault

It was reassuring to see Louie Gohmert on camera explaining how the Party has to just go back to fundamentals, like organizing posses to track down dark skinned Mexicans who have slipped across the border President Obama refused to defend, intent on raping white women. Well, who wouldn't want to rape white women? Mr. Gohmert is pretty obsessed about the raping of white women, something which bothers President Trump, too. He keeps bringing up that woman who was raped by a Mexican who shouldn't have been in the country.

Do Black or Hispanic women or any kind of non white women ever get raped? Are white women rape magnets? What is this thing about rape?

But about health care.  Speaker Ryan sighed and said it will be with us in its death spiral for the foreseeable future, which Mr. Trump says will be a short future because Obamacare is in its death throes. 

I want to see more of Jim Jordan. He says he's going to work tonight on another plan.  He's been working on plans for the past 7 years, but tonight he's going to get serious, right after he does 100 push ups and 200 sit ups. 

Now that's what I call preventive care. 

What Should An American Government Do?

This morning I went on the website of the Food and Drug Administration to find out what the FDA could tell me about the safety of a particular drug. If there were no FDA, I suppose I could have gone on a university medical school website for the same information, or maybe a commercial website like "The Medical Letter" but the FDA provides that service.

I also checked out the weather report on the Weather Channel and they use government weather satelittes put up in space by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
And I drove over the Merrimack River, which is now clean and full of fish owing to the EPA's regulations which cleaned up what was once a cesspool.
The road I drove in on is part of the Eisenhower interstate highway system.
Overhead flew airplanes guided by air controllers in the employ of the Federal Aviation Administration.
On the way in I listened to the radio story about a boat which needed a United States Coast Guard rescue.


I suppose all these things could be done by private companies, eventually.
President Trump recently submitted a budget which increased spending for the military and decreased it for everything else.
It was a very masculine budget. We spend on weapons, surveillance, border protection, armies, navies and war planes.
We don't care about soft things like healthcare, which we want to cut out of the government budget as much as possible. We don't have any use for the arts or national parks or stuff that isn't masculine and tough.


If the Marlboro man wouldn't like it, our government should not be interested, either.

Where does money and finance fall on that spectrum? All those economic and financial reports which the government churns out: employment, consumer price index, calculation of GDP.  I guess private companies could do that, the same way private companies rated the risks and value of various mortgage backed securities right before the financial crisis of 2009--if you can't recall how well that worked, just watch the movie "The Big Short."


Government is Bad, except when it's tracking down Mexicans

I don't know, maybe the Republica ns are right. Maybe we don't need no friggin government, except for defense and border control and to hunt down people who like doing abortions.

Then again, what do Republicans know about all the things government actually does?

Paul Ryan's Francis Macomber Moment: That Undeserving 3%

Paul Ryan and his friends will probably prevail today, whatever that means.
Well, I guess we do know what that means: He'll get his bill through the House of Representatives, claim victory and Mr. Trump will go to Wisconsin and claim another "Promise Kept!"

What you got is the healthy paying for the unhealthy, and the poor. Bad idea!

It all reminds me of the idea which kept coming up during the war in Vietnam: Let's just declare victory and go home.


Or that wonderful Hemingway story: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," in which a rich man on safari raises his rifle to shoot a lion but loses his nerve, drops it and turns to run when the safari guide behind him raises his gun and shoots the lion dead. The native hired hands, who carry the rich mans baggage, who are paid by the rich man, then hoist him on their shoulders and carry him back to camp, as if he has had a great victory.

So, later today, Paul Ryan will have his Francis Macomber moment. Both he and President Trump will be carried off on the shoulders of the Congressional Republicans as victors.

It's going to be so great. You'll love it.

Health care, and the legislation affecting it,  is actually more complicated than Mr. Ryan or President Trump appreciate.  I certainly do not understand it.  But as we used to say at the hospital: The most dangerous intern is not the intern who doesn't know; it's the intern who doesn't know he doesn't know.

click to enlarge

One thing I've learned through all this is by far the vast majority of our citizens are not covered by Obamacare--only about 3% are--most people are covered by employee plans, Medicare or the Veterans Administration.  The 9 million or so who use Obamacare can easily be ignored, as they had been for generations, by the Republicans and all the members of Congress. The wonder is President Obama ever got anyone to vote to help them.

But there might have been a reason Democrats were able to get  Obamacare done:  Those uninsured people, as small a portion as they were,  kept showing up at emergency rooms, and the hospitals had to pay the doctors and nurses who took care of them in the ER's, in the hospital, and  in the operating rooms, and that burden ultimately got passed down a line of hands to the government and prices for everyone's health care premiums rose.

So you had this slow leak of the tire which kept getting in the way of the functioning of the whole car.

Seven years ago,  John Boehner finally blurted out his  greatest fear about the new Obamacare bill--If you give people a taste of health care, they'll never want to live without it.  

It was a version of that droll bit of wisdom I'd hear in the South all the time from the comfortable upper class country club types:  "Don't feed a stray dog: He'll follow you home."

Which, in case you missed it, means that once you show kindness to the hungry varmits, they'll become dependent on you, so never be kind or generous, it'll be a burden. He might be your brother, but he's really too heavy.

I promised we'd kill Obamacare and we did!

Without knowing the details of Obamacare, it seemed to me when I first heard about it, if you were going to tell insurance companies they had to insure all those sick people out there with pre existing conditions, who have not been able to get health insurance because they were sick and needed health care (the customers no insurance company wants) then you have to feed the insurance company a huge new pool of customers who will never need the insurance company to pay anything, namely healthy young people. But healthy young people are invincible and don't see any benefit to health insurance so you have to intimidate them to pay money for something they don't want.  That was the "mandate."

The basic flaw in the argument is that health insurance ought to be a commercial enterprise whose raison d'etre is to make a profit for investors in insurance companies.  Any business wants to take in as much money as possible while spending as little as possible. But the purpose of a hospital, a clinic is, in fact, to spend money, or actually, to provide services, which is pretty much the same thing.  So the idea of health care as a profit center is a contradiction. You are trying to make money while not doing the thing you are being paid to do.

And then you've got those young people, from whom you are trying to make your profit. It's the young, healthy, not needy from whom you extract your profit. Of course, those healthy young people are already unwillingly paying for stuff they would never pay for unless they were forced by law to do it: Social Security and Medicare.  We have those programs because the government discovered you have to force people to plan for the times when they will no longer be young, something no young person believes will ever happen. So we said, suck it up, you don't want to and you don't like it but we are not going to support you when, so we are going to make you eat your spinach now.


But the Freedom Caucus, Paul Ryan, the Tea Party want to say, Live Free and when you get sick, Die! They don't believe in no durned gov'ment making people behave like responsible adults and when those irresponsible adults show up at the Emergency Room with their I phones and their gold necklace bling, just turn them away. Serve 'em right.


Except some kind hearted do gooder liberal Emergency Room nurses let those folks in and the whole system goes to hell in a hand basket. So what we need is a law which puts the TSI agents out in front of the ER and they don't let anyone get through the gates unless they have health insurance.

Not a dog, but you get the idea.

Don't feed them stray dogs.