Monthly Archives: July 2017

THE HEALTH CARE BAMBOOZLE

Posted on July 24, 2017 by halviv

Much of the friction and divisiveness among the U.S. electorate is often the result of most Americans choosing to be either uncaring, uninformed, or uninvolved. For example, in the 2016 presidential election only about 135 million Americans bothered to vote out of an adult population well in excess of 200 million. It’s now estimated that for the upcoming 2018 Congressional elections there will be a 40% drop-off from the already weak numbers of 2016. In the computer age when a wealth of information is literally at ones finger tips, most people can’t be bothered to access such data that’s often critical to their lives and well-being. Instead they prefer to make crucial decisions based on trite slogans written on a baseball cap or a hand-made sign sticking out from a crowd. Back in the day, when I was actually young, one had to literally trudge to the library and search out hard-copy (if it existed) in order to become informed. Now that the process has become so much easier, most people are too busy with other stuff to really care. Yet, even though political and social ignorance and uncaring is so prevalent, the actions of our elected officials often have profound consequences for all too many people.

You want proof. In the presidential election of 2000, George W. Bush supposedly carried the state of Florida ( a fact still being disputed) by a few hundred votes out of millions cast, thus giving him the presidency. His opponent, Democrat Al Gore, won the popular vote nation-wide only to lose access to the White House because of the idiocies of our Electoral College system, and a disputed vote count in Florida. (Sound familiar regarding our 2016 election?) The primary difference between the two men? In 2003 Bush decide to invade Iraq in order to depose Saddam Hussein, admittedly, a really bad tyrant and despot. That war continues in one form another to this day 14 years later. Al Gore, had he become president, would have never initiated such an invasion. During the Iraqi war 6000 U.S. military and civilian contractors lost their lives, and about another 25,000 Americans were so severely wounded that their lives were effectively over. Brain damage, blindness, loss of limbs, that sort of thing. Ask a veteran of that war  who’s blind or a quad-palegic whether elections have consequences.

The relevancy of an uninformed and generally uncaring public will once again rear it’s ugly head when Congressional Republicans, for the umpteenth time, try, once again, to repeal and supposedly replace Obamacare, as the nation’s health care system. It’s once again time for the Republican health care bamboozle. In the Senate, the Republican effort is primarily based on lopping off over 20 million poor from Medicaid, in order to provide tax cuts for the rich. It’s Reverse Robin Hood time, as I wrote in a previous piece. And, of course, the proposed legislation has the solid backing of Donald Trump, who really doesn’t care what’s in the details, as long as he can claim that his administration did away with the supposedly despised and socialistic Obamacare. Good for the ego and that sort of rot. Especially for a pathological narcissist like Trump. So, since Republicans are so adamant in their opposition to socialized medicine, I thought it would be useful to cite some relevant facts in that regard, that dispute the fact our medicine is un-socialistic.

The reality is that we already have a large degree of socialized medicine in this country. Here are the facts. TRICARE, a comprehensive medical plan that’s available to active and retired military and their families for a nominal fee, already has 9.5 million participants. The Veterans Affairs system, also for the military, is free, for those that don’t participate in TRICARE, and counts another 9 million members. Medicare, a type of socialized medicine with nominal premiums for seniors, has about 55.5  million members, while Medicaid, which is free health care for the poor, adds another 76 million to its membership rolls. Throw in CHIP, which is Medicaid for poor children, and you have another 4 million participants on the governments dime. Call me crazy, but my math is saying that about 154 million Americans are already receiving subsidized or socialized health care support from the government. It’s true that for Medicaid participants, the quality of the health care they receive is often poor or low-grade, but that’s because of government stinginess in reimbursing doctors for health care services provided to poor people.

It also should be considered that another 156 million Americans receive their health care coverage from their employers. This is also subsidized by the government since those same employers are then allowed to deduct the costs of providing that benefit  from the income taxes they owe the government. So, although the various health care arrangements in the U.S. may be convoluted, there’s little doubt that the government participates in providing socialistic type coverage to about 310 million Americans. That leaves about 15 million people in the U.S. that are left dangling in the wind when it comes to protecting their most valuable asset, namely their health.

The sane solution to all of this would be to scrap all these various arrangements, and institute a universal, single payer health care system that’s prevalent through the rest of the world, especially those with advanced economies like ours. But, of course, that’s way too sensible and would not allow our Republican President and Congress to demagogue the issue as they plan to do this week. It will probably take another couple of centuries of evolution before the sanity of universal health care will be allowed to prevail.

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Categories: A malfunctioning psche, Brexit, Donald Trump, Alan Greenspan, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, presidential polls,, Economics, human affairs, Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism, World War II, Viet-Nam, Anti-Communist Witch Hunts, Army-McCarthy hearings, Islamic Jihadist terrorism, Soviet Union, Red China, politics | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

LOSING GROUND

Posted on July 17, 2017 by halviv

It has often been stated that the United States is the world’s one indispensable nation. While this statement can have a plethora of meanings, it usually refers to the concept of the U.S., in conjunction with its western allies, being  willing to challenge tyrannies and dictatorships across the globe, whenever these evil-doers seek to destroy western values of freedom and liberty. And so it was throughout the 20th century. When U.S. allies Briton and France were mired in stalemated trench warfare against Germany during WWI, it was the U.S. that sent its troops abroad to break the stalemate and win the war for western values. When Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who were the embodiment of the purest evil this planet had ever witnessed, launched a second world war, once again it was the U.S. that came to the rescue of its European allies. Of course, when the U.S. finally did enter WWII (after the bombing of Pearl Harbor), it was almost too late. Hitler had overrun virtually all of Europe, and Imperial Japan had gobbled up most of the Pacific. If Japan had followed up the Pearl Harbor assault with an invasion of our west coast, it likely would have been all over for the good guys.

But U.S. do-goodism didn’t end with defeating the axis powers of WWII. When Communists in the Korean peninsula sought to overrun Korea with the support of Mao Zedong’s Communist China in 1950, the U.S. once again militarily intervened. That was an instance where the U.S. could only fight to a draw, however. The northern half of the Korean peninsula fell under China’s dictatorship, while the southern half remained free and allied to the U.S. Next came the the U.S. mis-adventure of becoming involved in jungle warfare in Viet-Nam. France had initially, in the 1950s, tried to save South-Viet-Nam from North -Vietnam’s communist dictatorship, but had failed. Not paying attention to the obvious, we then took over from France with the zeal of a mis-guided do-gooder, only to also fail as all Viet-Nam fell under Communist control. Along the way almost 60 thousand U.S. lives were lost, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese that were also killed.

We followed up the Viet-Nam fiasco by liberating Kuwait from the evil of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, to close out the 20th century. But a new evil menace virtually opened up the 21st century, namely Islamic Jihadist terrorism and the horrors of 9/11. Thus, the U.S. once again became militarily involved in trying to keep the West safe for democracy. We invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for Al Qaida’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York, but are still bogged down there 16 years later, in a seemingly endless and futile operation against Taliban Islamic fanatics thriving in that country.  We followed that up by invading Iraq, and yes, we did remove the tyranny of Saddam Hussein from the world stage. But in his place, the even more evil Islamic jihadist organization known as ISIS has filled the void. The one overriding mission of all the Islamic jihadist organizations is to destroy Israel, Western Europe, and, of course, the U.S. Anywhere that democracy seems to be firmly entrenched.

As the Islamic terror entities continue to thrive, so does  their primary sponsor, the country of Iran, which is one of the bitterest enemies of the U.S. Iran’s military power and influence continues to expand around the globe. They are first down on the one yard line with goal to go, as far as acquiring nuclear weapons. The overriding goal of the Ayatollahs that run that country is to wipe Israel off the map on their way to destroying western civilization and democracy. On the other side of the planet, our failure to liberate the northern half of the Korean peninsula in the 1950s has come back to bite us in the you know what. Under the insane dictatorship Kim Jong Un and his predecessors, North Korea has become a giant concentration camp, but one with nuclear weapons and missiles that will soon be able to reach the continental U.S. As N.Korea’s nuclear arsenal grows each year, the U.S. has run out of options for containment. The current administration has pleaded with China to rein in N.Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but with virtually no success. After all, China and N.Korea are communist pals, and good buddies don’t turn on each other. The only other option appears to be military action which is really unthinkable at this point in time.

The enemies list of western civilization doesn’t stop with the gaggle of Islamic Jihadists, Iran and N.Korea. Despite assurances from the current U.S. administration, Russia’s tyrannical despot, Vladimir Putin, has nothing but contempt an ill-will toward the U.S. and its allies. Putin, who simply murders political opponents Mafia-style, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to assure that Hillary Clinton would not become president. Her opponent, he figured, would be a softer touch in opposing his goals of Russian expansion throughout Eastern Europe, as well as the Mid-East where he continues to support Syria’s blood-soaked dictator Bashar al-Assad who has slaughtered his countrymen by the hundreds of thousands.

So there you have it. The enemies of the U.S. and western democracy grow stronger by the day, while we standby, virtually impotent to counter their advancements. War would be unthinkable. First of all we couldn’t monetarily fund it. The U.S. budget deficit is 20 trillion dollars in the hole and growing rapidly. Any significant military action would cost an additional hundreds of billions of dollars that we can no longer afford. The armed forces of our European allies are uniformly weak and under-funded.  Even as our enemies on this planet continue to grow stronger and more powerful.

Maybe the moral of this story is that the good guys don’t always win. Sometimes evil does triumph. Western democracy won decisively in WWII, but it’s been pretty much of a downhill slide in the ensuing decades since then.

Categories: A malfunctioning psche, Brexit, Donald Trump, Alan Greenspan, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, presidential polls,, Economics, Health Care, Obamacare, human affairs, Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism, World War II, Viet-Nam, Anti-Communist Witch Hunts, Army-McCarthy hearings, Islamic Jihadist terrorism, Soviet Union, Red China, politics, Ronald Reagan, the Depression | Leave a comment

McCARTHY, TRUMP AND THE ART OF FEAR-MONGERING

Posted on July 3, 2017 by halviv

I’ve written before about how Donald Trump is doing his best to emulate the methods employed during the 1950s by Joe McCarthy to achieve fame and power. It’s almost as if McCarthy has been re-incarnated into Donald Trumps body. McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, began a calculated mission to achieve absolute U.S. political power with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in February 1950. The method he employed was classical fear-mongering and appeals to mass hysteria. In that now infamous speech, McCarthy blended a mixture of right-wing demagoguery and outright lies as he appealed to people’s fears about the Communist menace about to take over their lives. He claimed that there were hundreds of Communists who owed their allegiance to the old Soviet Union that were burrowed deep into the U.S. government, especially into our State Department. And that Democratic President Harry Truman and his administration were refusing to weed them out.

McCarthy’s speech electrified the small crowd of about 275 people who had ostensibly turned out to hear about how the U.S., and every citizens welfare, was essentially being sold down the river by treasonous Democratic politicians. (Sound familiar?) With a deep baritone voice and an infused sense of calamity, McCarthy had essentially elevated fear-mongering into an art form. McCarthy blamed “elite” Democrats in the Truman Administration who had failed to purge “the enemy within,” that threatened America’s security and way of life. “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, who are still working and shaping U.S. policy,” he thundered. Of course, no such list of names actually existed and the entire speech was a total scam.

Naturally, this speech was long before the internet or cell phones came into existence, so news that over 200 Communist traitors were still effectively passing on top secret information to the Soviet Union became known slowly but surely, like a massive blob spreading it’s suffocating deadly existence over the entire country. Eventually, McCarthy’s accusation that there was a hidden Communist cabal at the heart of the U.S. government triggered a wave of country-wide paranoia and fear mongering that would forever bear his name-“McCarthyism.” Some saw through the phoniness of this blatant exercise in demagoguery, but tragically, there were too many true believers as McCarthy’s fame as one who was fighting the scourge of Communism rose to breath- taking heights. He was put in charge of a Senate oversight committee committed to rooting out Communist traitors in all walks of American life- from government, to Hollywood to industry and on and on. Hundreds of innocent Americans were falsely accused of treason and saw their lives being destroyed before their very eyes. Some committed suicide. Those that saw through these charades and were willing to say so publicly, were denounced by McCarthy as commies, commie-sympathizers or outright traitors. His rise to ultimate power seemed unstoppable.

And it probably would have been, if it hadn’t been for the advent of that new-fangled electronics contraption known as television that was increasingly winding up in everyones homes. When McCarthy charged that the U.S. Army, like the State Department, was riddled with Communist traitors, the Army, instead of wimping out, decided to challenge him head-on, in front of live, televised audiences. It was the first time television would be used in that manner. When the viewing public could visually watch, for the first time, the phoniness of McCarthy’s demagoguery, his popularity, and, hence, his power, began taking a swan dive. McCarthy, always a heavy drinker, increased his alcohol consumption even further as his power slowly oozed away. He eventually drank himself to death in 1958, while he was in his late forties.

But here’s the real interesting part. When McCarthy headed up his Senate committee, his chief of staff who usually did all the witness questioning, was a fellow named Roy Cohen. By all accounts Cohen was every bit as despicable a human being as McCarthy was. But somewhere along the way, sometime in the 1970s, Roy Cohen hooked up with a young Donald Trump who was just making a name for himself by managing the real estate empire he had inherited from his father. It was Roy Cohen who infused a-new-to-the-game-of-politcs Donald Trump with the McCarthy brand of right-wing demagoguery that’s on display with this current administration. As it turned out, Roy Cohen was homosexual at a time when it was still deeply shocking for any celebrity to be outed as being gay. Cohen would eventually die of AIDS in the mid-1980s, still proclaiming he was not homosexual.

So now we have the ghosts of Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohen on full display in the Trump administration. Trump first rose to political power in 2016 when he began demonizing both Mexicans and Moslems. He would build a wall so Mexico could no longer send us “their rapists and murderers.” He would ban Moslem countries  from sending us their terrorists. He would go on to appoint white supremacists as among his closest aides. His calculation during the election was that there was still enough white xenophobic voters to overcome strong opposition from minority voters, and he was right by an eyelash. Anyone, especially in the media, that tries to expose Trump for his demagogic phoniness is subject to a withering Trump Twitter tantrum and cries of fake news. Sort of like the way Joe McCarthy called his opponents commie sympathizers. The base of diehard Trump supporters still continues to hold firm, even amid all the chaos and outright lies that emanate from this White House on a daily basis.

In the1950s, television exposed Joe McCarthy for the phony demagogue that he was, and for the poisonous effects his antics were having on the U.S. citizenry and their values. However, it doesn’t seem to be working these days as far as exposing Donald Trump for the fraudster he really is. Maybe people were less gullible and a lot smarter back then.

Categories: A malfunctioning psche, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, presidential polls,, Economics, Health Care, Obamacare, Huey Long, Franklin Roosevelt, Great Depression, The Kingfish,Donald Trump, human affairs, Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism, World War II, Viet-Nam, Anti-Communist Witch Hunts, Army-McCarthy hearings, Islamic Jihadist terrorism, Soviet Union, Red China, politics, the Depression, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

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