Category: 1st Issue

A Marriage Made in Hell — Joe Biden and the Medical Industrial Complex

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NO MFA

How’s this for a healthcare system to be proud of? The most expensive in the world yet with the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates among the top eleven economically advanced nations. The U.S. is number one in the prevalence of chronic diseases and in a shockingly high obesity rate. Yet the former vice-president and probable next president Joe Biden thinks that Obama’s refashioning of the U.S. healthcare system popularly known as Obamacare is “the crown jewel of the Obama administration.” Written by a bunch of health insurance hacks and borrowing liberally from the brain child of a conservative think tank, Obamacare is an expensive mess. Even after it was passed, 29 million were still uninsured and another 38 million underinsured. The pandemic has made matters worse hiking the number of uninsured to over 45 million. Not letting the desperate plight of many Americans get in the way of cold, hard donor cash, Biden dismisses a national single payer healthcare system. In fact, Biden has promised all his major donors that “nothing would change” in his administration. In grateful thanks, the pharmaceutical industry stuffed his campaign stocking with over $7 million. As the dreary statistics on the inadequacies of U.S. healthcare continue to bedevil, we wonder why that $3.65 trillion the U.S. spent in 2019 on healthcare isn’t saving more lives. With billions going into the pockets of predator investors who own 70% of nursing homes, 25% of hospitals, 47% of doctors’ practices and 45% of emergency departments, there is precious little left to make Americans healthier. U.S. medical care has become a push for immense profits at the expense of people’s lives and well-being. What will President Biden do to remedy the situation? Read “A Marriage Made In Hell — Joe Biden and the Medical Industrial Complex” and weep.

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Lost in Bidenland

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Oligarchy

In this upside-down world, change only happens when there’s a demand for it. Getting rid of President Trump doesn’t qualify. Nothing changes when he’s gone — income inequality will continue its upward trajectory, the bellicosity characterizing U.S. foreign policy will persist along with endless war, and the planet will continue to die. Will Joe Biden turn things around? Not without a big push from the voters. Remember when candidates Clinton and Obama rolled to victory claiming they would make the world a better place. Maybe we should have gotten it in writing. Millionaire and billionaire campaign contributors didn’t make the same mistake. Their donations were contingent on a (generous) return on their investment. Clinton was quick to relieve Wall Street moguls of those burdensome regulations that protected the people but stood in the way of the obscene profits the Street was accustomed to. Obama paid up by making the too-big-to fail banks even bigger and more failure-proof. There’s more of course, but you get the picture. It’s Biden’s turn now. While big donors will see a huge return on their investment, a different fate awaits the people. On all the issues they favor by large margins— Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, free college, student debt jubilee, ending fracking —he’s already turned thumbs down. Trump may go but in the absence of substantive demands, business as usual will prevail. Let’s be clear, some promises Joe dare not leave on the table— the ones he made to his multi-million dollar donors (the pharmaceutical, fossil fuel, and finance industries and Wall Street). Read “Lost in Bidenland” for more of the ways the people lose when the oligarchs win.

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What They Won’t Tell You About the U.S. Pandemic

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Greed

The cacophony of voices and heavy breathing coming from the corporate media are the latest con — trying to convince you that the U.S. catastrophic response to the pandemic is the fault of one man — President Donald Trump. The movers and shakers including the five billionaires who own the lion’s share of U.S. media don’t want you to know the truth: that unlike every other developed nation in the world, the U.S. does not consider healthcare a human right but another way to make billionaires and their corporations richer. It’s been that way for decades. The evidence is glaring —the worst healthcare statistics in the world, Americans dying earlier than people in much of Europe, Asia, and even South America. With the advent of the pandemic, things have gone from bad to catastrophic. The U.S is number one in COVID cases and deaths — barred from entering almost every country in the world and facing dire economic consequences (12 million people were unable to pay their rent in July and August). No, it’s not just one man, it’s a whole corrupt system. Check out “What They Won’t Tell You about the U.S. Pandemic” and put the peoples’ revolution at the top of your to-do list.

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Joe Biden Can Be “Brought to Heel”

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Biden Meets Pinocchio

The U.S. is running out of time to find its way out of the wilderness of perpetual war and domestic discord into a new paradigm of peace and harmony. As the social order crumbles, a pandemic rages and income inequality takes a huge bite out of the American dream, it’s time for people to step up and make their voices heard. Let’s stop being the bathmat savvy politicians wipe their feet on. They preach that our vote is critical to their success. Then let’s start demanding a quid pro quo —Joe’s endorsement of policies to staunch the bleeding of money and jobs and livelihoods in exchange for our vote. Even a Washington insider agrees: If you want to pull the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking to what you’re thinking, you MUST show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re not capable of voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you [and they won’t].” Check out “Joe Biden Can Be Brought to Heel” then join a strike or street demonstration.

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Public Utility or Private Boondoggle? You Decide

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Shocked Customers

Connecticut residents being fleeced by Eversource, a for-profit investor-owned electric company, may soon morph into a national problem. This is a company whose business plan calls for maximum effort to enrich investors while letting customers sit in the dark. That plan became embarrassingly public on August 11, when lack of preparation and general bungling forced 800,000 customers to spend days and in thousands of cases over a week without power while a historic heat spell raged. A power company that changed its name several years ago in what appears to be a pathetic attempt to rebrand itself in the face of extremely negative customer polls. Its name may have changed, its corporate thuggery has not. Eversource customers are burdened with the second highest electric rates in the country. In the aftermath of its epic failure at restoring power after tropical storm Isaias, their $20 million CEO was hunkered down in a secure location and refused to appear in public, a move that probably made “the buck stops here” Truman roll over in his grave. Why should you care? Because forewarned is forearmed. Already 72% of electric power customers are at the mercy of investor-owned companies. If they haven’t gotten around to sticking it to you, they will soon. Check out “Public Utilities or Private Boondoggles? You Decide” and find out how you can beat them at their own game.

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Ferment in the Streets: Killer Cops the Symptom of a Nation off the Rails

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“…the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open up the door to negotiation.”

Murder by Cop

Over a half century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rallied his supporters in the civil rights movement by cautioning them that true freedom was impossible without first addressing the economic disparities between the haves and have-nots in unequal America. He proposed an “economic bill of rights for all Americans” — which included a good job with a living wage, a secure income and the opportunity for all people to “play a truly significant role” in the government. Sound familiar? Today young people of all races and classes are out in the streets mobilizing to right the same wrongs — “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) The death of one black man followed by another and preceded by the wanton murder of a young black woman has set the stage. What comes next? Check out “Killer Cops in a Nation Off the Rails.”

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Flag Day, June 14: When the Empire Honors Its Flag, Ignores Its Veterans

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The Flag and Vets

What a perfect way to honor the promoters of war sitting in the halls of Congress and the White House than by invoking a little-known holiday, Flag Day. Woodrow Wilson, the president who dragooned the U.S. into an unnecessary war after winning reelection on his promise to keep the nation out of it, officially proclaimed Flag Day in 1916, less than a year before he got his war from a Democrat-controlled Congress. Defying the traditional meme that Republicans are the war party, two-thirds of the votes against the war were Republican. 116,516 young Americans paid the ultimate price. Although Flag Day is touted as a celebration of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes, a more accurate description would be the way it was celebrated in New York City during World War II — “New York at War.” Like most other national symbols, the flag is inextricably linked to America’s war obsession. Before you thank another veteran for serving in U.S. wars, check out “Flag Day, June14: When the Empire Honors Its Flag, Ignores Its Veterans.”

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Hypocrisy Is the Real Winner When the Billionaire Class ‘Honors’ High School Seniors

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Enough is Enough

Under the guise of “honoring” graduating seniors whose own graduation ceremonies were cancelled due to the pandemic, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires produced a lavish affair designed to show that rich people really care. Opening their wallets would have been a far better signal. As anyone with a working brain would have noticed, U.S. graduating seniors need much more than two hours of well-wishes and music. The world they’re destined to inhabit comes complete with a faltering economy (unless you’re a billionaire and run a large corporation), plutocratic leaders busy looting the treasury for their BFFs, banks and other financial behemoths taking their pound of flesh from the debt servitude of students and a thriving fossil fuel industry fat with government subsidies. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ever-growing problems young people will face as they try to beat the odds. The clock is already ticking on what lies ahead. The major problem — pricey post-high school education and training that will force close to three-quarters of them into debt servitude, many for life. How hard is it for the immensely wealthy like Lauren Powell Jobs (widow of Steve, worth $27 billion), ex-President Obama (worth $40 million) and LeBron James (worth $500 million) to figure out that high school seniors need a lot more than windy soliloquies, pious sermonizing and a torrent of well-wishes. Even the money raised is destined for causes that will not benefit students or help solve their financial problem. Want to know how low the 1% can go? Read “Hypocrisy is the Real Winner When the Billionaire Class ‘Honors’ High School Seniors.”

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Congress has Single Payer Health Insurance —Why Don’t You?

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Office of Attending Physicians

What turns Congress members on? First and foremost, keeping their jobs. In service to this goal, at election time, they declare their fealty to the interests of the people they are supposed to serve. Once in office, their gaze turns inward. Exhibit A —members-only health care located in an unpublicized Office of the Attending Physician (OAP). Denounced as “socialized medicine” when the American people demand it, Medicare-for-all is alive and well for members of Congress. The Office of the Attending Physician (OAP) provides virtually free primary care services to each member of Congress. If you want to know who’s paying for it, look in the mirror. The taxes we pay that Congress and a succession of presidents keep telling us won’t be enough to fund universal Medicare-for-All are enough to subsidize first class healthcare — restricted to members. What’s wrong with this picture? SA has some possible answers in “Congress Has Single Payer Healthcare — Why Don’t You?“

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Drug Company Rip Off Amidst the Suffering and Dying

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Human Need

The big drug rip-off is coming. Gilead’s drug remdesivir is being hailed as the “new standard of care. “ (Dr. Anthony Fauci ). The honchos at the drug company are agog with excitement. To throw sick Americans a lifeline? Not exactly. To introduce a billion-dollar blockbuster? More likely. Predictably, President’s Trumps scientific advisory committee is all in. Isn’t that what friends are for? First developed to treat Ebola, remdesivir flopped. But not to worry, the feds had contributed $79 million to R&D on the drug, so investors were spared most of the pain. As the coronavirus pandemic surged worldwide, Gilead bet on the same horse, hauling remdesivir out of the closet — new disease, same drug. It flopped again — “remdesivir did not improve patients’ condition or reduce the pathogen’s presence in the bloodstream…The drug also showed significant side effects in some, which meant 18 patients were taken off it. (“Gilead’s anti-viral drug, remdesivir, flops in first trial,” Financial Times, April 23, 2020.) At least, transparency prevailed and consumers around the world were among the first to know. Not exactly. These results were accidentally released by the World Health Organization, which quickly tried to put the genie back in the bottle — “…a draft document [of the failed study was] inadvertently posted on the website and taken down as soon as the mistake was noted.” There you have it — a history of repeated failures that should have diminished expectations among U.S. infectious disease experts. Why didn’t it? Read “Drug Company Rip Off Amidst the Suffering and Dying” for even more evidence that profit trumps care in the U.S. privatized health care system.

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