Government Stealing Twice. AOL hilited today a story about South Carolina's being about to confiscate the winnings of a person who bought a state lottery ticket:

Lottery rules require the ticket holder to show up in person within 180 days of the drawing to claim the prize. That makes the deadline July 1.

Whoever has the ticket must get to one of the state's claim centers — in Columbia, Greenville and Mt. Pleasant — before 4 PM next Wednesday. If they don't, the money will go into the legislature's "Unclaimed Prizes Fund" to help cover public school expenses.

Such a short deadline, indeed, almost any deadline at all for claiming lottery winnings, surely meets the "arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable" standard that invalidates any law. What conceivable difference does it make whether a ticket is claimed within six months, a year, ten years, or fifty years? If someone bought the winning ticket and loses track of it, but eventually does finds it — or his or her heirs find it when cleaning out a house after the owner's death — why should s/he be unable to claim the prize? If the state is able to validate a winning ticket today, it should be able to validate a winning ticket in ten years. Where is the harm?
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An account for unclaimed prizes can perfectly well be created in a bank, and overflow into various small banks around the state, to be used as loans for mortgages, small businesses, college tuition, etc., so it does some good immediately. The interest on that money would be paid to the state for the purposes the lottery is intended to serve. In very few cases would any of the prize money be claimed, but it would be there to do justice to the legitimate winner, whenever s/he managed to find the ticket, in those few cases where the ticket is eventually found. And all the while the money would be doing good in the economy and paying interest to the state.
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The state legislature could reasonably place a 50-year expiry on lottery winnings, as would allow for the situation I mention above, where a ticket is found only when the heirs to a house are cleaning it out after the death of the ticketholder. A state could even fairly provide that a portion of the winnings is forfeited each year a prize is unclaimed, say 2% a year after the first year, so that the state might eventually recapture the whole sum at the end of 50 years. Moderate measures such as that are defensible. Simply stealing money someone is entitled to is not.
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The lottery is unearned money for any state, and has been rightly criticized as taking unfair advantage of the poor, who are more likely than the middle class or rich to spend excessive amounts to take a chance on winning the lottery as the only way they can see to get out of the financial hole or grind they feel themselves trapped in. Some critics, indeed, regard state lotteries as stealing from the poor. I wouldn't go that far, tho perhaps some way should be found to limit how much poor people can spend on lottery tickets (after figuring in winnings). One way that might be done is thru a tax credit on a state income tax for people of specified low income for such moneys as they may have spent on the lottery. To do that, however, we would have to find a way to track such outlays, as by putting on the scannable ticket for submitting numbers a significant and unique identifier, such as, say, the last four digits of one's Social Security number. That would leave enuf of the number unspecified to protect a person's identity but show enuf in a given locality to provide fair certitude of identity for tax purposes. It would also simplify collecting income taxes owed on winnings. Even a tax credit wouldn't work for people who don't itemize on their income tax forms. But society might find some way to lessen the burden on poor people who have a gambling problem.
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It is enuf for Government to raise/steal small amounts from large numbers of people by offering them a tiny chance at a dream. It is far too much for Government to snatch away the winnings from people who leave a ticket in the pocket of a shirt they then leave in the garage or a purse they don't usually use, or who forget to check the numbers for a few months. Government is permanent; individual citizens and their dreams are not. Government can wait to take unclaimed lottery winnings, and draw interest from such funds while waiting. There is no harm in Government's waiting. There is vast harm to a winner whose winnings are seized. The legal concept of "balance of hardships and equities" thus demands that Government pay lottery winners whenever they find their ticket.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,316 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:33 PM

 
No Crotch-Grabbing. Tho I have not watched any of the program-length tributes to Michael Jackson, I did note that in the coverage on the evening newscasts, his notorious practice of grabbing his crotch during musical performances has been edited away. Good.
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When I heard that Michael Jackson had died at age 50, I immediately thought, "Drugs." In this country, in this era, you are pretty well justified in jumping to the conclusion that a celebrity who dies suddenly at a relatively early age does so from drugs.
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It will be some time before the toxicology results are in, but speculation has already emerged that he will be shown to have died from prescription drugs. I don't know if it was prescription drugs, recreational drugs, or a combination of the two, but if he did die from drugs, his death will not have been for nothing. It will help us wake stupid young people to the reality that drugs are not harmless fun, but were outlawed for good reason, and, in the case of medical drugs, require a prescription because they are DANGEROUS. Then only the people who WANT to be harmed or killed will look enthusiastically upon use of such hazardous chemicals. And if a self-destructive person dies from drugs, the people around will understand that that was a willful act, and be able to use those deaths too as instructive cases, in trying to persuade young people to stay away from drugs.
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The Partnership for a Drug-Free America has a wonderful Public Service Announcement now running that shows two young men (tho called "kids") in a morgue, one dead from illegal drugs, one dead from prescription painkillers. The man in the middle asks "Which one is more dead?" The video should be hard-hitting, and is, for normal people. Disgustingly, some stupid, stupid, evil kids, perhaps on drugs themselves, placed joking comments at the YouTube site where a version of that PSA appears. Some "kids", and adults, deserve to die, and some of those disrespectful clowns may well die young. And feel free to take "well die young" in the sense of good riddance. You can't reach some fools, because they are greater fools than any message can move. Will stoners place jokes on message boards about Michael Jackson's death if it is revealed that he died from prescription drugs? Probably. Everything's a joke to stoners.
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If Michael Jackson died from other cause or causes, not related to drugs of any kind, there may still be some instructive tale to tell. Dr. Nancy Snyderman of NBC News suggested the day of Jackson's death that he was anorexic, under serious stress, and exercising very strenuously (in preparation for London concerts that were to have started in little more than two weeks), and the combination of strains he was subjecting himself to could definitely cause heart problems — fatal heart problems. If her speculation proves true, other doctors with media access will have to evaluate what percentage of what deadly combination could be assigned to which contributing factor, and caution young people against those risks as well. And if Michael Jackson was killed by anorexia, stress, excessive exercise, AND prescription drugs AND recreational drugs, a lot of people might learn a lot of things of value.
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Tho saddened — more than I would have expected — by the news of Michael Jackson's death, I was on the other hand glad that he need no longer suffer from the terrible things he has done to himself. That nose that was so horribly ravaged by quacks under Jackson's insane urging need no longer reproach him nor horrify children.
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Ed McMahon and Michael Jackson ended their famous lives in debt, from different causes. "Fame" doesn't necessarily go with "fortune".
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In the United States today, however, fame often does go with power, and much of what we call "democracy" is little more than name-recognition. People who start out as unknowns have to expend most of their time and campaign funds to simply gaining name-recognition, at all, and then as candidates for a given political office. Any famous person who wishes to run for office thus starts with a huge advantage over an unknown. The famous person need only attach their fame to the office they seek.
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Of course, if there are big negatives to a person's fame, that fame can do them political harm. No one would have wanted Michael Jackson to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, or run any state's Department of Children's Services. But if he had wanted to run for Congress, he'd have had name recognition working for him big-time.
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The deaths of three household names (Farrah Fawcett being the third) in one week reminds us all again that the clock is running, on all of us, and death is the great equalizer: President of the United States or garbageman, billionaire or penniless bum living in a refrigerator box on the street, celebrity or unknown, all of us are being stalked by Death, which will, in good time, get every last one of us. The brilliant comic Steven Wright has a great bit that mocks death: "I intend to live forever. So far, so good." Yes, so far. I wouldn't make plans for a hundred years from now, tho, Steven.
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The grim news this week tells us all: Get your ducks in a row, think about you want to be remembered for, and DO IT.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,316 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Another Republican Hypocrite. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford flew 5,000 miles away from his family (four young children) on Father's Day weekend to spend time with a woman not his wife! Wikipedia quotes him as having said, in general, earlier in life:

It is my personal view that the largest proclamation of one's [religious] faith ought to be in how one lives his life.

And so this champion of the "party of family values" abandoned his four young sons on Father's friggin' Day to spend five days "crying in Argentina". At least he admits to crying, which is good for straight men to hear.
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Sanford has resigned as — get this — chairman of the Republican Governors Association, but not from the Governorship. This adulterer, who has had an extramarital affair for about a year, has also abandoned his state at least twice without handing over control of the state government to the Lieutenant Governor. During one of those absences, South Carolina had a major forest fire, and the Governor was nowhere to be found, as to manage the emergency, call out the National Guard, whatever. But he's not resigning!
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George Stephanopoulos of ABC News today observed, and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC echoed, that when Democrats are caught in scandals, they resign, but when Republicans are caught in similar scandals, they hang on, and their supporters permit that. This is another proof of the basic difference between Democrats and Liberals, on the one side, and Republicans and Conservatives, on the other: Democratic Liberals are governed by principles; Republican Conservatives are governed only by tribalism.
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When Democratic Liberals violate an important principle, their fellow Liberal Democrats condemn them for hypocrisy, and the offender shows due shame and remorse, then resigns, in large part because the people they supposedly represent hold them to the principles they ran on and publicly espoused. But Republicans don't operate on principles. They operate on tribe, and the tribe stands in solidarity with its members just because they are members of the tribe. It takes an extraordinary act of betrayal of the tribe to get the tribe to turn against one of its members. Simply violating basic "principles" the tribe supposedly stands for won't do it, because the tribe has few to no principles, only tribal identity and solidarity against outsiders.
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Thus Republican "Conservatives" cannot be believed when they claim to believe in just about anything, be it the sanctity of marriage or anything else. Republican Conservatives insist that it's not the adulterers having heterosexual affairs who endanger the sanctity of marriage. No, it's those goddamned homosexuals who are agitating for the right to marry. That's what is destroying marriage and driving men away from their wives and children. Of course it is. All the way to Argentina.
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Death for Madoff. Bernard Madoff, the most monumental thief in all of history, who defrauded tens of thousands of people out of some $65 BILLION in a brazen Ponzi scheme that victimized CHARITIES and cost thousands of people their entire life savings, is indignant that prosecutors are asking that he be sentenced to 150 years in prison. Madoff suggests that 12 years would be enuf. Astonishing.
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No, what might be enuf is for every person he has cheated to have the right to punch him in the face or gut, or kick him in the head. Short of that, he should be slashed with a white-hot razorblade — as would cauterize each wound, to keep him from dying from blood loss before the punishment is completed — one stroke for each person he victimized plus one cut for each thousand dollars he stole. And only after all those slashes have been administered, only then should he be hanged by a noose fitted loosely around his neck, and by which he is lifted slowly off the ground so he can dance his way to hell.
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150 years in prison? Ridiculous. No one is going to live 150 years in prison. That's a phony punishment, a fraud. Haven't we suffered enuf fraud in regard to Bernard Madoff? He won't live more than a small fraction of that time. The b*d is 61 years old. Pronouncing a ridiculous sentence that means absolutely nothing is not going to send the right message to anyone.
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When someone steals from one person, that's bad enuf. Depending upon the amount and the hardship that theft produced, a prison sentence is appropriate in present terms, tho prison is a crappy and ridiculous way to punish almost anything. If "Let the punishment fit the crime" is the standard, then imprisonment is an appropriate punishment only for the crime of unlawful imprisonment. For nothing else. But since we are at present saddled with imprisonment as the one-size-fits-all nonsense punishment we use, we need to multiply each incident by whatever the term of imprisonment may be for a single such incident. That's what "count" of an indictment is supposed to mean: you count up the number of times a defendant violated each law, then multiply the punishment by that count. So if the punishment is 3 years' imprisonment for each count, and there are 7,000 counts, the punishment should be not 150 years in prison but 21,000 years in prison! That would, however, also be a nonsensical and fraudulent punishment.
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Wikipedia says that Madoff might also be ordered to pay $170 billion in restitution. But he doesn't have $170 billion, so this is again a preposterous fraud on the public.
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When the total length of imprisonment exceeds the convict's expected lifetime, death should always be the automatic conversion sentence. Death makes a real impression. A term in prison that no one can possibly live thru means nothing.
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Physical punishment also really means something: flogging, beating, hard labor, branding, mutilation all achieve real intimidation of criminals. Prison? That is, for much of the criminal class, a long-term vacation, all expenses paid.
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Bernie Madoff richly deserves death. Killing him would go far to restoring the sense of fairness that many people feel is missing from current sentencing, whereby white-collar criminals are treated gently, even going to what we dismiss as "country-club" Federal prison for inconsequential periods of time, whereas people convicted of street crimes are sent up for hard time in miserable state prisons. Killing Bernie Madoff would send the entire world a number of extremely valuable messages: we are serious about white-collar crime; there is no way to make up for mass betrayal and massive theft from masses of people; a life of crime can end in a death sentence, so don't set foot on the road to a death chamber; etc. Merely imprisoning the b*d, be it for 12 years he might actually serve or 150 years he cannot possibly serve would send exactly opposite messages: we're not at all serious about white-collar crime; you can "pay your debt to society" with a loss of liberty but no real hardship; and the worst that will ever happen to you if you take up a life of crime is that you will end your life at leisure in a place where you pay no rent nor utility bills, and all your meals are prepared for you. That's the American way, and that's why we have appalling rates of crime.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,314 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Of Powerlessness and Influence. Power and influence are distributed only randomly. People of little intelligence and high-mindedness are given columns and TV shows, where they get a large audience, despite their unfitness to lecture anyone on anything. Meanwhile, diligent, decent people who have much good sense to impart are rendered into the proverbial "voice in the wilderness", exiled from mass media and unable to make even the tiniest dent in public consciousness. How does this happen?
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How, indeed, does it happen that a buffoon like Rush Limbaugh and a stupid bitch like Ann Coulter achieve a mass audience while I and a million other people who counsel people to follow their better nature are consigned to utter obscurity? Is capitalist democracy just inherently incapable of finding the best people and best ideas? It would seem so.
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Pedestrian minds whose grasp of the issues ranges from A to C get all the attention. Greater minds of wider scope, whose grasp of issues ranges from A to Z, get none.
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In the mass media of the United States — I cannot speak knowledgeably of other countries' mass media — trivia trumps substance and fascism trumps liberalism. The greater the meanness of spirit or ordinariness of mind, the larger the audience. Jerry Springer has been on TV for 18 years. Oprah Winfrey, a very minor intellect whose good intentions often take a terribly wrong turn, as in fomenting surgical and hormonal mutilation of gay men or lesbians to deal with gender confusion, drove out Phil Donahue, an intelligent man who dealt intelligently with important issues.
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The United States is a preponderantly moderate-liberal Nation in which propaganda organs of the Radical Right are richly funded, but voices of the moderate Left are starved to anemic impotence. The spokespersons of the Liberal/Left are, for the most part, pussies, whose rhetoric does not begin to equal in power the vitriol of the fascistic Right. And while the Radical Right is sure of its values — wrongheaded tho they be — the Liberal/Left is often confused and self-confuting, reduced to kneejerk reactivity to an agenda set by the Radical Right, and incapable of seeing how Liberal/Left values require opposition to abortion and other things that victimize the powerless.
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The Liberal/Left is indeed in an Abortion Captivity, in which the mere fact that the Radical Right is militantly opposed to abortion seems to mindless Leftists to require the Liberal/Left to advocate abortion-on-demand. Where is the sympathy for "the little guy" when it comes to abortion? The "little guy" is obviously the unborn baby boy or girl, not the infinitely powerful and heartless mother and Abortion Industry. The fetus is the Third World farmer, worker, or tribal indigene; the mother and the Abortion Industry that backs her in her heartless attack, the multinational corporation who would crush the defenseless without mercy. The Liberal/Left knows to oppose the multinational corporation when it wants to clearcut 1,000 square miles of tropical rainforest to create a cattle super-ranch, but it doesn't know to oppose abortion-on-demand. So reactive is the Liberal/Left in the United States today, indeed, that one has to wonder what would happen if the Radical Right tomorrow took a stand against rainforest destruction by multinational corporations. Would the Liberal/Left gratefully accept the Right's change of heart, and work with them to protect the rainforest? Or would the Liberal/Left suddenly re-evaluate everything they have ever thought and said about rainforest preservation, and suddenly conclude that the interests of the poor in Brazil and Ecuador require the creation of economically constructive projects like cattle ranches in place of the economically worthless rainforest?
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You say "black", we say "white". Thus has it ever been, thus will it ever be!
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No, actually that is NOT how things used to be.
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People today who are too young to remember the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties will not know that back then, many supposed intellectuals found fault in the "big-tent" major parties of the time. The Democrats had the Dixiecrats, Rightwingers of your more vicious sorts, and the Republicans had liberals/moderates, called by some people, disparagingly, "[Nelson] Rockefeller Republicans". Social critics said that the electorate had no real choice, but ended up voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee, and nothing ever changed. They said the United States needed a real choice of political philosophy, so the major parties needed to be more ideological, like European parties that ranged from outrite Fascists to outrite Communists. They got their wish — except that our Fascists call themselves "Conservatives".
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The Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party and moved to the Republican Party, which suddenly became beholden to the most regressive forces in American society. The "Solid South" shifted from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. Are we happy now? We are not.
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It turns out that the Big Tent was what kept us from incipient civil war, a replay of the first Civil War, in which the most evil and regressive forces in society attacked the rest of us, and the great majority, despite extreme unwillingness to face unpleasant issues, was forced, finally, to say "Enuf is enuf", and defend the last line between national decency and indecency.
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Developments in the last year and a half or so have clarified that about 35% of the United States is monstrously selfish, racist, sexist, violently disposed, and, at base (a word I use deliberately), evil. The other 65% are moderately good or very good, but don't want to be harsh. The good all too often wish to believe that moderation and kindness will achieve good results. But moderation didn't defeat Nazism, Japanese militarism, nor Soviet Communism. And there is a point beyond which avoiding unpleasantness turns into surrender to evil — yea, co-conspiring in evil.
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We passed that point during the Dumbya years. Now we have to claw our way back to decency.
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The Dumbya years accustomed us to thinking of greed as natural and actually good. It worked. Or so we were to believe. Never mind that those years, and even a few years before, had started to destroy the very foundation of American society, in corrosively indebting the great preponderance of Americans to credit-card companies that were permitted to charge insanely high interest rates, over-limit fees, and late fees, and treat fees as purchases for purposes of figuring the (usurious) interest then to be charged on consumer debt. I tried to warn the Democrats in the 2000 Presidential election, and again in 2004, that debt — not the national debt, but personal debt, consumer debt — was the most important domestic issue, which threatened the Nation's very soul and stability, but they didn't want to hear it. The terms "consumer debt", "interest rates", and "usury" did not appear on their websites in either Presidential contest year.
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Then 2008 arrived, everything I warned about happened, and it was too late. No one had listened to me, nor to the other voices in the wilderness that cried out that personal debt could destroy us. And now we are in the worst financial condition since the Great Depression, because the Democrats would not address personal debt.
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I also warned, on September 23, 2002, long before the invasion of Iraq, that it was not credible that Saddam Hussein would risk having everything he aspired to ruined by an overwhelming counterattack after any use of "weapons of mass destruction" by Iraq:

Saddam is not a suicide bomber. Nothing he has ever said or done would lead anyone to think that he believes he will go instantly to Paradise if he attacks the United States and is vaporized in return. Who can believe that a man who has built dozens of palaces all over Iraq and holds out grandiose hopes for a reunion of "the Arab Nation" under his leadership would throw it all away and cause it all to be destroyed by an insane and reckless attack upon the United States?

I knew, just from logic and understanding of human nature, that Saddam did not have "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and did not even for an instant entertain thoughts of attacking the United States. But the U.S. Congress and media didn't? How could so many people be so insanely stupid? Or did they feign stupidity, in order to use fear of an attack upon the United States to permit them to attack Iraq because it was an actually credible enemy of Israel, a country far more important to many members of Congress, both Houses, than the United States could ever be? After all, Israel is God's doing; the United States, only man's. Or so they seem to believe.
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Why, more generally, are the stupid heard but the intelligent completely, absolutely, and perpetually unheard?
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Even in the democracy of the Internet, the few get all the attention, and the many get none. Mass media steer the bulk of the public to a few websites. The frequency with which those few sites are visited induces search engines to produce them first in the results of further searches, which produces more visits, which produces higher search results in future searches. It's a self-reinforcing circle of mediocrity, in which the exceptional are marginalized.
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Search engines don't value-judge, producing the best or most intelligent commentary first. They produce the most-searched, the best publicized, first. Fame replaces merit in commentary as in everything else in the mass society. There are too many voices to listen to every one. We have to focus on the ones that matter, the ones that are heard. And who determines who is heard? The mass media, with their notoriously low standards for quality.
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At end, we have still not even begun to explore — nor, thus, fix — the problems of mass numbers of people on this grotesquely overcrowded planet. Democracy has given us mediocre commentary as much as mediocre and unprincipled politicians, and celebrities more famous for being famous than for accomplishing anything of value. It's sad, and a little infuriating. I would be angrier, except I'm too busy and too tired — too old, for one thing, at 64, to be fiting this long-run battle that has no obvious outcome, but the dismal prospect that things will only get worse.
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In prior eras, arbiters of quality and good taste controlled what people got to read and see. Now, arbiters of popularity control what we read and see. We have replaced the tyranny of the elite with the tyranny of the mass. We still suffer from tyranny over our minds.
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What do we not hear? see? read? get to understand? Flash substitutes for class, fireworks in language substitutes for depth of thought. Is there any way out? Or is the mass incapable of distinguishing between chaff and wheat?
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I would like to be hopeful, but I'm not at all sure there is any mechanism whatsoever that can save us from the mess that irresponsible heterosexuals have gotten us into by putting 6.8 billion people on a planet suitable for 4 billion. And of course no one is talking about reducing the planet's population to the 4 billion that Earth could support in great good style. We're not even talking about population anymore, just the consequences of overpopulation — but without ever mentioning the word "overpopulation". For instance, all the talk about "man-made global warming" would end if the population of the planet were plummeting like a stone.
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If once we accepted that there are more than half again as many people as there should be on this planet, we'd have to confront issues that pedestrian minds do not care even to think about, like not just legalizing but actually encouraging exclusive homosexuality to cut the planet's population. We need a 50% or 60% change in mentality, but most people are willing to entertain a change of 7%. There is no 7% solution to the problems of a planet that is 70% overpopulated, any more than there is a two-state solution to the Palestine-Israel mess, which can have only a one-state solution, a Unified Palestine into which "Israel" is peacefully dissolved, with no loss of innocent life.
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Simple solutions are not necessarily easy solutions. Sometimes the only thing that will really work is hard, like a morbidly obese person's losing half his or her body weight. Planet Earth is, in terms of human population, morbidly obese. It needs to shed 2.8 billion people, and reduce mass-society to just-society. Maybe when there are far fewer of us we can pay more, and more careful, attention to each of us.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,315 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Followup. A colleague in northern England offered this emailed comment on my post of yesterday.

Did you know that the troubles of the Big 3 American car manufacturers can be traced back to the lack of single-payer health care in the United States?

Crippling costs for health care (for retired workers as well as current ones) add some $1,500 to the cost of building a car in the United States, compared to Europe or Japan. This meant that the only American-made cars capable of making a profit were very expensive ones (and because American cars are not vastly superior in quality to European and Asian ones, this means oversized gas-guzzlers).

Read more here at Diatribes of Jay.

I replied:

Yes, I thought President Obama made that point, but I didn't listen all that carefully to the news once I realized that the huge problem of "defensive medicine" and worries about malpractice lawsuits, was a function of our insane current healthcare-funding system. I fear we are going to be saddled with some half-assed system that will be plainly unconstitutional in requiring (healthy) people to spend money on a service they don't want as a condition to living in the United States. The only way such insistence on taking health insurance could possibly be legal is if it were put in the form of a Healthcare Tax, and used to fund universal healthcare. But Government cannot require you to buy life insurance, health insurance, homeowners insurance, or anything else you don't want, just as a condition to breathing. And once people realize that there could be a dedicated Healthcare Tax, on a sliding scale that starts at $0 for people in the lowest income brackets, they will also realize that there is no need for an entire industry, the health-insurance industry, and that, indeed, if we continue to permit private health insurance, we set ourselves up for a two-tier system, of deluxe care for the rich, and crappy healthchare for the rest of us.
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A healthcare tax need not be created as a separate entity, mind you, and a single-payer system could be funded by general revenues from an income tax restored to actual progressivity, with much higher taxes on the rich, and confiscatory rates on the obscene portion of the income of the obscenely rich. How is the healthcare system funded in Britain? Do you have "co-pays" each time you visit a doctor/hospital?
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Britain, in its new role of "best friend" — and/or Canada, our former "best friend" — could do us a big favor in speaking up, in messages directed to Americans, on how it made the transition to a single-payer system, how it works, how it's funded. Such an exposition might even be salutary in finding any flaws that need correcting in Britain's (or Canada's) own system. ALL the industrialized countries with universal healthcare should be speaking up NOW, as friends, saying "You can do it, America. We know you can. Just do it!" (with apologies to Nike). Such encouragement should be in the form of helpful advice from good friends, not sniping criticism and implications of European (or Canadian, or Japanese) superiority: "WE can do it. OUR system works brilliantly. YOURS is contemptible, and the proposals put forward now are the work of idiots, fools, and cowards afraid to challenge the rich. Whatever happened to that 'all men are created equal' thing? It's just hollow words, isn't it? You're just a bunch of mealy-mouthed hypocrites. You don't mean any of it. How come the rich get to live, while the poor have to die because the rich refuse to pay higher taxes so their fellow citizens can get the best care? Walk our streets. Do you see massive numbers of people walking with limps from injuries they couldn't heal from completely because the healthcare system shunted them aside? How many disabilities render how many of your people incapable of work, or incapable of functioning at a high level economically? How many of your hordes of poor ARE poor because of disabilities that your disgraceful healthcare 'system' has permitted to make them permanently incapacitated? How much does that cost you in lost productivity, lost competitiveness, lost tax revenue? Americans think they're so smart when it comes to money, but subverting your economy with a healthcare system that leaves scores of millions of people unable to live up to their best potentiality isn't smart. Your system is just STUPID, which means that YOU are stupid for holding onto it and even DEFENDING it." All that is true, of course, but it's a little hard even for a close friend to say it without raising hackles and causing the jingoists to dig in their heels even more, AGAINST making the reforms that every sane and intelligent person on Earth, looking at our problems, would instantly see as necessary. The U.S. needs an "intervention" to shock it out of its self-destructive healthcare-delivery nitemare.
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As I said recently in my Newark fotoblog,

Ever notice how glad the Republicans are to brag about how the United States is the richest country in the history of the world? — until it comes time to pay for things that benefit people other than the rich, such as universal healthcare, whereupon they jump to say we can't afford that! Make up your mind. Are we rich, or are we poor? Republicans can't have it both ways.

Is it possible to use pridefulness on the part of the Republican Right to get them to say:

Of course we can afford universal healthcare. We've got all the money in the world, and it's time to spend it to do the right thing, for all Americans, so we can look the world in the eye and say we have the best healthcare system in the world — the best doctors, the best hospitals, the best equipment and technology — instead of looking away because we won't face the fact that our current system stinks. Money is power, the power to do the right thing. The world doesn't remember Carnegie for his steel company, which doesn't even exist anymore, but for his philanthropy. "You can't take it with you." And if you believe in that "Creator" who made all men equal, how are you going to face Him and explain that you were perfectly willing to have your fellow-citizens die prematurely or suffer painful health problems and lifelong disabilities because you didn't want to pay higher taxes you could EASILY afford. So you could only have five houses and one yacht, instead of ten houses and two yachts. Those houses, those yachts, are not following you to the grave, and even if you buried them, you couldn't use them after death. Wherever you're going, housing will be provided. You might not like the climate, however, even if it is a dry heat. And your yachts wouldn't last long on the Lake of Fire.

We could also institute a separate tax on various categories of people who overburden the healthcare system because of preposterous choices they make that undercut their health — such as smokers of tobacco, the seriously obese, and users of illegal drugs — and would otherwise unfairly victimize the rest of us, who end up effectively subsidizing their self-destructive behavior. Such a tax would "concentrate the mind"* of such people on the negative consequences of bad choices. So simple a thing as a dollar figure that starkly shows an actual economic cost of self-destructive behavior might induce a lot of people to stop killing themselves. It's like the Ted Knight anchorman character ( "Ted Baxter") on the classic sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, who couldn't deal with math — until "Lou Grant" said "Put a dollar sign in front of it", whereupon, magically, he turned into a human calculator.
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Abolition of for-profit, private health insurance companies as contrary to public policy will, sooner or later, be understood to be essential to social equity. Some of the executives and clerical employees of such companies would be hired by the new national health service to process payments to providers. Others would be absorbed by other types of insurance companies. Others have skills that other types of businesses entirely can use. Some would be thrown out of work, and the law enacting a single-payer system would, in all fairness, have to provide for extended unemployment benefits, retraining, and job-placement services.
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Unfortunately, the United States likes to think itself a "moderate" country, so rather than seeing all this from the outset and just making the leap to universal, publicly funded, single-payer healthcare, we will likely institute some absolutely inadequate and unfair half-measure, then suffer with it for decades before we go the necessary rest of the way. Picture a skydiver whose timidity in exiting the door causes his parachute to get caught on the tail of the plane, so he is dragged for miles before the parachute finally comes loose and he can fall, with the parachute fully deployed, safely to earth. All the while the skydiver is being dragged, the pilot has to fite to keep the plane on course, indeed, even keep from losing control and crashing. Just JUMP, dammit!
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* By the way, maybe you knew the quote about death concentrating the mind, but I couldn't find it on Google, which is nowhere near as good as it used to be. Maybe there are just too many webpages now, but I think that if I had put "there is nothing to 'concentrate the mind' death" into Google five years ago, I would have found the quote quickly. Now I had to spend something like 10 minutes and try several different formulations, and read short bits of various webpages for further clues, before I finally came up with it:

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
from Boswell's Life of Johnson

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,313 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:26 PM

 
Missing the Point. Doctors who oppose a universal national healthcare plan make no sense. They claim that one reason healthcare costs are so high is that they practice "defensive medicine", ordering what may be unnecessary tests to prevent patients from later claiming, during medical-malpractice lawsuits, that they didn't do enuf. They want limits on malpractice awards. President Obama opposes such limits. Hold on, everybody. Just stop for a moment and THINK.
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If everyone has free healthcare under a single-payer system, why would there be huge awards in malpractice lawsuits? The main expense that victims of medical errors sue for is long-term medical care. But if that is all covered by a National Health Service (by any name, e.g., "Healthy America"), what else would people sue for? Vindication? How much of an award does that warrant? Surely Congress could put limits on awards for "pain and suffering" if a national healthcare system pays the costs of medical care to alleviate the pain portion.
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If you think about it, then, you realize that a single-payer healthcare system could drastically reduce the number of malpractice lawsuits and the resulting massive outlays for court awards, lawyers, and malpractice insurance. We could also largely eliminate "defensive medicine", and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary tests, with all their costs, not least to patients who have to put up with being poked and prodded, and then having to wait and worry until results are in.
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So we would drastically reduce malpractice insurance rates, malpractice awards, legal fees, and unnecessary costs and anxiety from tests of dubious medical value. How much would those savings amount to? If malpractice insurance is held up as a major concern by doctors, and malpractice lawsuits and awards are reduced to trivial levels by a national single-payer healthcare system paid from general revenues, reduced payments to doctors from a national system would end up being equal to higher payments today, once malpractice costs are factored in, or even higher than payments now!
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Moreover, I have seen stories that there are parts of this country where exorbitant malpractice insurance rates have forced some doctors to drop out of entire medical areas, such as obstetrics and gynecology, to the point that people have to travel dozens of miles to find an obstetrician. That too would end with the reduction to trivia of malpractice as a destructive force in medicine.
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Forbid Oil Speculation. Gasoline prices have gone up sharply in recent weeks, and everyone in media knows, and has said, that the bulk of the increase has resulted not from demand but from speculation by investors in oil. If that is true, the United States, or, even better, United Nations should simply FORBID speculation in oil, and let the legitimate forces of supply and demand — and not speculation in any measure — determine the price of oil and all oil products.
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More Lies About "Global Warming". NBC Nitely News today attempted to explain away why so much of the United States is much colder than usual, while dismissing thoughts that this constitutes disproof to any 'degree' of the "global warming" cataclysm we are supposed to change everything in our lives to stave off. In that report, the claim was made that temperatures in the Boston-to-Washington corridor have been 4 degrees 'cooler' than normal. Oh? I live in Newark, NJ, which is just about dead center in that corridor, and our temperatures have been as much as 13 degrees 'colder' than normal, with day after day of rain at some point in the day. The only way an "average" is maintained closer than 10 degrees colder than normal is by figuring in a very few days of much higher than average temperatures. But when 13 days are severely subnormal and 2 days are starkly above normal, the resulting average falsifies the reality that we are much colder than normal most of the time. We are also much wetter in much of the Nation, and the United States is a significant chunk of the total land area of this planet, over 3.7 million square miles. So not only are we not about to burn up, but we are also not facing a planetary desert.
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AOL today(if suspiciously briefly) hilited a story about a glacier in Argentina that is growing.

Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier is one of only a few ice fields worldwide that have withstood rising global temperatures.

Nourished by Andean snowmelt, the glacier constantly grows even as it spawns icebergs the size of apartment buildings into a frigid lake, maintaining a nearly perfect equilibrium since measurements began more than a century ago.

Note the wording in that AP story: "withstood rising global temperatures". Global warming is real. It's just not global, meaning everywhere!
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In the matter of "global warming", as of AIDS, if the data and the theory conflict, we are to discard the data and retain the theory. That's not the way science, or logic, is supposed to work.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,312 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:43 PM

 
Economic High Treason, Striking Back at Abortionists. The Obama Administration has insanely badly mishandled the auto-industry's crisis. The idea that the United States Government would actually force a U.S. corporation to sell out to foreigners is incomprehensible, and would have been unbelievable in any prior age. It appears that the Obama Administration is fully as globalist as the Bush Administration ever was.
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And then Obama forced both Chrysler and General Motors into bankruptcy, destroying the jobs of tens of thousands of workers and dealers. How do you aid the revival of a badly damaged economy by throwing tens of thousands of people out of work?
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None of this was necessary. There was a perfectly obvious model for an altogether different approach: the salvation of motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson.

In the early eighties, Harley-Davidson claimed that Japanese manufacturers were importing motorcycles into the US in such volume as to harm or threaten to harm domestic producers. After an investigation by the US International Trade Commission, President Reagan imposed in 1983 a 45% tariff on imported bikes and bikes over 700 cc engine capacity.

Wouldn't a 45% tariff against foreign cars for five years, or an outrite temporary ban on sales in the United States of vehicles made by foreign-owned manufacturers, have saved not just the corporations but also the jobs of American workers? During those five years, the Governmentally saved corporations could have been REQUIRED to create motor vehicles of high fuel economy and reliability, so that even once the ban on foreign cars were lifted, they could compete very effectively. That would have been a far better solution. But it apparently didn't even occur to anyone in the Obama Administration. Nor have I seen any such suggestion in the media. All these media, and not one differing thought!
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Slautering the Slauterers. Turnabout is fair play, we sometimes say. On May 31st, we had the next best thing. Unborn babies can't strike back against those who would kill them, but adults of profound conscience can, and a very few do. Good. On May 31st, one of the most brazen slauterers of babies was shot dead. He should have been killed in the same manner as he killed thousands, including in "late term" abortions, which were supposedly outlawed by the same Supreme Court that created the nonexistent right to murder your own child. He should have been stopped and executed by the Government. But the Government will not do its duty to protect the unborn, so private citizens have to risk their own lives to try to defend the defenseless.
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Commentary all over the media decries the killing of babykillers, with ridiculous language like "terrorist" and "the extreme violence of the anti-abortion movement"! Ha! MILLIONS of babies are slautered in this country, but that is not "extreme violence". That's not "terrorism". That's not "murder". Appalling.
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This country just can't ever be consistent about anything. This Nation has gone bonkers with alarm about child abductions and strangers molesting, not even killing, children. But when the mother authorizes the murder of her child, that's supposed to be OK. No, it's not. Every mother who, with no danger to her life, orders the murder of her child should be treated exactly as anyone else would who murders that child: executed.
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Abortion is our Auschwitz, the mechanistic mass murder of the defenseless. But the morally blind among us are indignant not at the guards at the barbed wire, nor the people carrying out industrial murder, but at the people who would shoot those guards and gas-chamber workers. Because heterosexuals hate children more than they love them. Kids are inconvenient, expensive, irritating, annoying. From the day they are born to the day they move out of the house — and maybe even move back when they lose a job — they are a burden and nuisance to parents, and not every adult is willing to put up with such impositions. But they don't take sufficient precautions to prevent unwanted children from being born to them, and they don't put their unwanted "accidents" up for adoption. No, they just claim the nonexistent "right" to kill "unwanted" children. How about unwanted adults? unwanted old people? unwanted politicians and pundits?
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Society is supposed to pretend there is no legitimate social interest in protecting children from murder by their parents. Oddly, parents lose that "right" the instant the child starts breathing on its own — a mother or father who strangles a child 30 seconds after its birth would be arrested and sent to prison. And nobody else has that "right" at any time whatsoever.
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Morality doesn't have escape clauses. Morality is hard, a harsh, blind master that accepts no excuses. Morality demands that you do the right thing, no matter how inconvenient it may be. Perpetually immature Americans don't want that kind of master. They want to control their own behavior, without any unwanted complications or intrusions by that unwanted voice of decency, that quiet voice they don't want to hear at all. That's tuf. You kill your own child, you die, and everyone you employ to kill that child dies too. Once we have killed off the medical hitmen and their henchwomen involved in the abortion industry — these "people" don't do this out of the "goodness of their heart", you know, but for cold, hard CASH — there will be PLENTY of room on this planet for innocent children.
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Liberals are hugely confused on this issue, pretending that 'poor, innocent women' who don't want the child they conceived have to be saved from their 'mistake', and there is no moral issue whatsoever because an embryo is just, as some people have said, a "bit of goo". Never mind that every single one of us was once such a "bit of goo". Never mind that between the unborn child and the mother who wants to kill it, the underdog is the CHILD, not the mother. The "little guy" whom Government is morally bound, according to Liberals on EVERY OTHER ISSUE, to protect, is the CHILD. Siding with the powerful mother against the defenseless child is exactly comparable to siding with billionaires and multinational corporations against the poor.
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So bizarre has this become, that Keith Olbermann, whom you might think a supremely decent person, actually echoed the ridiculous and outrageous reference to the man who executed the brazen abortionist as a "terrorist". Not "vigilante", which many Americans recognize as being at times a term of honor. "Terrorist." The vigilante-executioner is a HERO, as much as would have been someone who shot a Gestapo agent whom he managed to catch off-duty, exiting a torture chamber where he had just been "interrogating" a member of the French Resistance.
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Perhaps we need to reconceive and rebrand the anti-abortion movement as the American Resistance, and adopt a baby in a beret as its logo.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,308 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:32 PM