Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Living in Nebraska

The reality of the health care “reform” bill is settling in now. The fight is over, and the employees are sweeping up the popcorn and empty cups. Democratic functionaries have obviously been told to emphasize that Obama “got it done,” and that health care reform is now a “reality.” That perception seems to be sinking in. (Bumper sticker they are circulating for the faithful: “Yes we did!” No yellow ribbon discernible. Has a subtle fragrance of “Mission Accomplished” about it.)

I think I was mentally prepared for this as it started, as I lived through the Clinton years and saw the power that The Party has over its members. They will not think for themselves. It produces discomfort, also known as “cognitive dissonance.” We are mostly rational in our everyday lives, seeing that certain things are in our our interest and others not. We are leery of sales people in cheap suits and politicians of the “other” party. We somehow survive in a very tough world.

Yet when it comes to their own party, the members drop their vigilance. Any fool can easily see with a modicum of “research” (as Googling is called these days) that the health care reform bill consolidated the power of the health insurance industry over us. They used the opportunity provided by a storm of negative public opinion to do some classic jujitsu moves. They used our energy to their own advantage. There was deft perception management and political theater, impressive to watch. They guided us to a bill they wrote before the “debate” even started. We had tea parties and renegade senators and a president who “sat on his hands,” supposedly unwilling to interfere in the debate.

And when the congress people all settled on a horrible bill, which happened to be the bill written before the debate started, our president sprung into action. Indeed he did have power and indeed he was persuasive. Indeed he could maneuver and threaten and cajole and bribe people to fall in line.

But he only acted after the sheep had been penned.

What did I expect? If I say that I got what I expected, I’ll be called a cynic. But I got what I expected. The process in motion right now is the clean-up, the “shit=Shinola” part. People are internalizing defeat, convincing themselves that something good happened. Victory is being consolidated on the lower levels, with people putting the dissonance to the back of their minds. If party leaders say it is a good deal, who are they to argue? And anyway, where are they going to go? The other party?

When I was a kid a friend of mine convinced me that I should join the Boy Scouts. I was suggestible, and thought that it must be something good. I went to meetings, and my parents, who indulged me just a little too much, bought me a uniform. I remember sitting at a card table with my older brothers around Christmas one year , wearing my uniform and waiting to be taken to a meeting. They kind of looked at me funny. I felt weird outside the Boy Scout setting.

I was part of the “Burning Arrow” patrol. As I now realize, our patrol was a bit like the Delta Tau Chi Fraternity in Animal House – a ragtag group of misfits. The other patrols had kids who seemed a better fit for leadership, tall and handsome, hair in place and minds right.

Towards the end (I never quit – I just drifted away) we were at a meeting, and were told that we were to break into groups for games. We were asked to suggest games to play. I said “How about Ring Around the Rosie”? That brought a stern rebuke, not from our Scoutmaster, but from another patrol leader: “We don’t talk like that around here.”

Outsider status is its own validation, I suppose, though not too many people pay compliments for it. It gets easier with advancing age. I was never a group-groper, though I was impressionable like all. I went down this path and that, got sucked in, bought in, but always backed out at the end. Here I am now, about to turn 60, and I realize that I am still that smart-ass Boy Scout, laughing at group behavior.

The only difference is that now I look back on that smart-ass Boy Scout and admire him. At that time I thought there was something wrong with me. It took years to understand that there was something right with me.

A message for Democrats and Republicans: It’s like living in Nebraska. You’re just doing it because you don’t know there are other states.

Please take this message to heart: You are free to leave. You have always been free to leave.

Knee surgery, here and abroad

I recently had arthroscopic surgery on my knee to repair a torn meniscus and clean out the joint. Here’s some data on the cost and insurance coverage:

Total Cost of surgery: $15,966
Amount paid by me: $2,359 (15%)
Amount that Anthem BCBS refused to pay, forcing doctors and clinics to absorb: $9,269 (58%)
Amount paid by Anthem BCBS: $4,338 (27%)

The amount that Anthem did not pay results in large part from “in-network” versus out-of-network. Those numbers could be mere perception management, as Anthem highlights on their settlement statements how much the insurance saved me. It could be that the cost is inflated to make it seem as though I got a bargain. That is Marketing 101.

However, if I did not have insurance, I would have been billed the full $15,966, and they would use all of their muscle to enforce payment.

Insurers are in large part responsible for the high cost of health care because of their refusal to pay claims in full. Doctors and hospitals, not being stupid, merely raise the overall cost of all services to make up for those parts that insurance will not cover. The result is the famous $30 aspirin, which is unique to American medical care. In addition, insurers inflict high overhead on the whole system – the cost of commissions for salesmen, all of the elaborate schemes to filter out unhealthy clients (like eHealthInsurance.com, whose sole function is filtering), and all of the costs involved in dumping costs on government, hospitals and doctors, and patients and defending themselves in court. (Return on investment to stockholders encourages investors to sink their money into this pointless activity, this private for-profit health insurance, and further adds to our burden.)

I looked around a bit, as I am quite sure that in other countries this type of surgery would cost nowhere near $15,966. Here’s what I found:

The average for arthroscopic knee surgery in the US is about $8,600. The doctor told me afterward that my knee was pretty messed up, so my surgery could have been more extensive than average. I don’t know that $15,966 was out of line for this country and my procedure.

Other countries average the following costs for the comparative surgery that costs $8,600 in the US:

Mexico $4,446
Costa Rica $2,800
Norway $1,228
Belgium $2,366
Spain $6,699
Germany $2,115
Argentina $2,400

In other words, if I felt like traveling, I could have the procedure done in any number of countries for approximately what I paid out-of-pocket, likely with the same expertise and professionalism, as good doctors are everywhere. (Norway would have been nice, and the savings would have paid for the ticket.)

Recently-passed health care legislation does nothing to bring down our costs to be more reasonably in line with the rest of the world. We are uniquely expensive. Insurance companies surely play a large part in this, with their Cadillac overhead, and the costs they impose on doctors and hospitals, all of which could be eliminated with no suffering to any of us but them, about whom I care not.

But that is not all of it. I do not know what other factors make us so expensive. I’m all ears.

Clueless

I was listening to a liberal talk show out of Portland this morning, and the hosts suggested that Obama should take this opportunity to nominate a real progressive to the Supreme Court. They said that the Republicans are going to fight him anyway, so he might as well go for it.

Ariana Huffington urges Obama to nominate Elizabeth Warren to the court.

Good grief! At what point are these people going to realize that Obama is not a progressive, never has been a progressive, never will be a progressive, has no progressive leanings, and only branded himself as somewhat that way to take advantage of disenchantment with Bush and the Republicans.

This is Clintonism redux – it never goes away. Democrats are clueless beyond belief.

Quote for the day

From Edward Abbey:

Autobiography: Perhaps I, like Boswell, and neither neurotic nor psychotic but a type of psychopath: “intact intelligence, defective superego, self-destructive tendencies, social maladaptation, unpredictable behavior, intense narcissism, weak ego – this type often very gifted, even brilliant and creative” (from the book Great Men). Certainly the description suits, satisfies, even pleases me – I am particularly eager to accept the final terms of the diagnosis: like any other psychopath, I’m perfectly content to be sick if I can also be clever.

Hamid Karmai receives death threat from Obama

The U.S. is running a “counter-insurgency” campaign in Afghanistan on the heels of the mostly-successful one in Iraq. Such campaigns are brutal and can be devastating for local populations. They involve targeting and murder of people hostile to U.S. occupation, and terror. The terror is brought about by indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians, as seen below, and Gestapo-like house-to-house raids in the early morning hours, and, of course, torture as seen at Abu Ghraib.

The objective is to kill as many young men in resistance forces as possible, and to terrorize those who might consider joining. Those who make it through the Abu Ghraib compounds (there are many such compounds) are sent back to the neighborhoods with tales of indecency, terror and indignation. Word spreads among the young, and joining the resistance is thereby discouraged. Large segments of the population flee – over two million people fled Iraq, and another 2.7 million were uprooted. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands were put in concentration camps, known in propaganda parlance as “fortified villages,” or “secure hamlets,” and in counter-insurgency as “draining the swamp.”

It’s Orwellian. The peasants were protecting the insurgents, and so the U.S. sought to remove the protection the insurgents were getting from the local populace. Hence, concentration camps.

In the meantime, at least of what we know, The CIA was conducting “Operation Phoenix,” in which suspect insurgents were murdered. The number commonly given is 40,000 murders. I think it is just a number.

Terror works.

The ability to engage in such behavior requires a concerted effort to lie to us, and to keep images of the reality of war from entering the mainstream.

In Vietnam, it was the occasional image (tiger cages, little girl fleeing a napalm attack, the bullet-in-the-brain boy) that undermined the terror effort there. Part of the problem was returning conscripts and their stories. Conscripts are notoriously weak when it comes to inhumane activity. Hence a decision by Nixon in the early 1970’s to eliminate conscription.

Beginning with experiments in the attack on Granada under Reagan, the Pentagon reformed the management of the media during war time. Reporters who covered that invasion were “mushroomed” – kept in the dark and fed shit, and were not allowed to take pictures until the business at hand was done. This was also the model used for the first Gulf War. It was largely successful, as the U.S. public to this day knows little, if anything, of the barbaric nature of that 1991 attack.

In the second Gulf War, pictures and images again were strictly controlled (even censoring flag-draped coffins), but the Pentagon also experimented with the idea of “embedding” correspondents. The idea was that the reporters themselves would become part of the band of brothers, and would be part of the war effort. It worked: The public wrongly perceived that it was getting actual on-the-ground coverage of the war, and images were still contained.

Still, the war effort requires total control of information flow. All mail and Internet activity from Iraq and Afghanistan is monitored, and returning soldiers are kept in line by threats of loss of benefits. (There is no mainstream outlet for their stories anymore anyway.) Further, more than half of the boots-on-the-ground in those countries are private Blackwater-like mercenaries. They present no security threat, as killing is their business.

____________

In Afghanistan, the counter-insurgency proceeds largely as scripted. But there is a nettlesome problem in the form of President Hamid Karzai. He has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. is killing too many civilians in his country, and has further stated that Iran is a friend of his country. He doesn’t get it at all. Killing civilians is the terror objective, and Iran can never be talked about in a positive light.

Karzai’s days are numbered.

So now we learn that the U.S. is concerned about his personal drug use, and also that the election that brought him to office was not legitimate.

The leaders in the Pentagon, the Obama Administration, do not give a rat’s ass about a man’s personal habits so long as a man does what he is told and cooperates. The U.S. does not care about the fairness of an election so long as the election produced results that the U.S. can tolerate.

And so it is necessary to connect the dots … this, and this. Karzai is being afforded the courtesy of a warning. If he does not step down, and soon, he will be assassinated.

Expect him to leave office soon, either to retirement or the next world.

_____________

Update: Hillary Clinton on Face the Nation tells us that Karzai is “reliable.” Much to make of this: She is either saying he has capitulated, and will be a team player, she could be reading a death warrant, or there could be an internal split between intelligence and the White House. No way to know. There are many factions here, and frankly, Obama has little to do with it, despite the title above.

Murrrrrr….der! Murrrrrr….der!

The video below on the murder of civilians in 2007 in Iraq went viral, and has been seen all over the world now. I was curious about Denver – it was not mentioned on local TV news, and there is no mention of it in the Denver Post or on its web site. In other words, local news media is performing its two functions: 1) They dominate the local news market Econ 101: exclusion), and 2) they prevent us from getting news.

The US Court of Appeals decision yesterday regarding net neutrality is ominous in this regard, as the Internet has provided us with a way around the news filters. We only know about the existence of the video because of Wikileaks. (A search of the Denver Post web site returned “O’Clock” for Wikileak.) Without equal access, corporations, who own the major news outlets and control the flow of “news”, and who are deeply invested in both foreign and domestic policy, will also control the flow of information on the Internet. You might still be able to access this site, Piece of Mind, for instance, but only after a 30 second or one minute wait, or I might just disappear after refusing to pay pay some corporation for faster speeds (access to the commons, known in economics as “exclusion). I have no illusions of grandeur. I know I am nothing. But on a large scale, this means that we’ll go back to the pre-Internet dark ages, with news coming only from CNN and FOX and local news outlets at the bottom of the food chain.

Finally, Glenn Greenwald made a critical point on Democracy Now! yesterday regarding the Wikileak video: There is a danger in management of perceptions much as with Abu Ghraib and Mai Lai. Most people think that the photographs leaked of Abu Ghraib showed an anomaly, and that the behavior stopped with exposure. Not very damned likely. Much more likely is the Mai Lai effect, where after exposure of that atrocity, Lt. Colonel Colin Powell managed to quarantine and isolate the event by punishing some low-level participants. In doing so he left the impression that it was an isolated event rather than a normal every day occurrence.

That’s how he advanced in rank. He was damned good at his job.

In the Wikileak video. The soldiers in the attack helicopter are going about their jobs much as assembly line workers in Sri Lanka, doing repetitive tasks as if it is just another day on the job. They are detached and indifferent, even laughing as a tank rolls across a dead body.

This is business as usual. It has been going on from the beginning, is going on today in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It was called “counterinsurgency” before the name was tainted. Now it is called by other names, but it is the the same program: Mass murder.

There will be blood

Years ago when the U.S. first attacked Iraq, in 1991, a courageous reporter named Peter Arnett was working for CNN and reporting from the Al-Rashid Hotel hotel in Baghdad. Arnett, with Vietnam credentials under his belt, was a lingering reminder of a time when journalists went to battle scenes and reported back to us on what happened there. CNN at that time was the only news outlet capable of relaying pictures to the outside world of the effects of the U.S. attack. There were forty others in the hotel, but all left, leaving Arnett by himself.

The CIA approached Arnett and asked him to leave the hotel, as they intended to destroy it. He refused. It was Alexander Cockburn who connected the dots, who realized that the reason for the need to destroy the hotel was due to the pictures and reports by Arnett. Cameras are considered weapons, honest reporters enemy combatants.

These days we all have phones that take pictures and the Pentagon allows journalists to be embedded with American troops. And yet … we see fewer images, and there is less honest reporting of our aggression than ever before. Those that do roam free often end up like Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, two Reuters employees shown in the video above: Dead. The pair was murdered in cold blood by U.S. troops from an attack helicopter high above. Their apparent crime was assembly in an open square, and their weapons were cameras.

About a dozen people were killed that day, and two children seriously wounded. The soldiers who committed the crime blamed the “insurgents” for the wounded children, saying that they were at fault for bringing kids to a battle zone. (The kids were inside the minivan that was attempting to rescue a wounded man trying to crawl to safety.)

No doubt the Pentagon is investigating this event. The want to know who leaked it. There will be blood.

This is not for the faint-of-heart. This is no video game. This is murder.

The problem of the corporation

Some on the right have reduced the view of us lefties on “the corporation” to this: We think they are evil. This is much akin to saying that predators are evil when they kill prey. It has to be contextualized to be understood.

The problem is one of accountability. The military is the perfect example. Troops on the ground are given orders to carry out atrocities by distant commanders, and are subject to harsh punishment if they do not obey. Resisting is far harder than obeying, and so the town is destroyed, the bombs dropped, the chemicals sprayed on the jungle. Killing another person is hard for just about everyone, and yet in the military it is done routinely (though, to our credit, we have developed elaborate means by which to do our massacres from great distances, making it easier). It could not be so without the command structure.

The corporation offers us a military-like structure. The reason why the structure itself is rightly criticized is because of lack of accountability. Dave Budge recently gave me a heart-rending account of his corporate experience where managers anguished over the necessity of denying or reducing health care benefits for other employees. That’s kind of like the point. The orders came down from above. It had to be done. There was no accountability – the people above answer only to stockholders, who are even less accountable.

Normal people don’t behave well in the unaccountable environment. Sociopaths present an even greater danger. If Martha Stout is right, and if 4-6% of the male population are sociopaths, and if these people are drawn to the business world out of sheer boredom, then the corporation offers the perfect lair for antisocial behavior.

And that is the problem with the corporation. The behavior of people down the food chain is mandated by people at the top who are not accountable, and are often enough sociopaths.

This is why health insurance companies refuse to cover people with preexisting conditions and rescind policies for sick people. It’s sociopathic behavior, but perfectly normal in the corporate environment. This is why corporations should not be in charge of our health care system.

I am not saying that corporations should not exist or that they are no socially useful. I am only saying that they need to be heavily monitored and regulated, and their executives held accountable for antisocial acts. If the day should ever come when they are in charge of most of our affairs, if they ever manage to take over government, then we are in deep, deep trouble.

Colorado Springs goes up in flames!

God, if there is one, will strike me dead one day for repeating quotations from works I have not read, but this one is so delicious that I am doing it anyway. It is from Sir William Osler, and the book that I am reading credits him with being “the father of modern medicine.” Here it is:

“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”

The first to come to mind are the Teabaggers, who are painfully ignorant in all of their public displays. Then come the free market set – the Freidmanites and Randians and their fellow travelers who live in a theoretical world where the worst aspects of human nature are overcome by simply letting that nature go on full display. I suppose there is something to that in the same sense that forest fires self-regulate. They do stop burning when they run out of fuel.

The book that cites Osler is “Why Evolution Works (And Creationism Fails)”, which I just picked up last night. The clerk at the book store said that he had been taught by one of the authors, Paul K. Strode, a local high school teacher here in Boulder.

Amazon.com, where I used to buy books, recently pulled out of Colorado, ditching local distributors, for our state’s attempt to impose sales tax on purchases through them. At that point I realized that I was doing local book sellers a great disservice by using Amazon, and opted to forgo any further purchases via that legal person. Our choices here in Boulder are many – Boulder Book Store, where I shopped last night, is always busy, so I hope they can survive Internet competition. But then, this is Boulder, a college town, a liberal town, so it is natural that books would be a popular commodity.

In Colorado Springs, our conservative mirror image, the most widely read medium is the billboard. They recently, and I am not making this up, censored bus stop posters that had a picture of a female puppet showing cleavage. A puppet! The sexual repression in that town is palpable. It may someday spontaneously combust.