Author: Mark Tokarski

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

CNN Panel on Hitler and Obama’s Health Care Reform

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Some of us on the left saw real parallels between some activities of the Bush Administration and the regime of Adolph Hitler. We were constantly reminded of Godwin’s Law, which states that whenever an argument devolves to the point where someone invokes Hitler against the other side, that side has lost the argument.

Anyway, Hitler was a one-time event – a perfect storm. But there was one Hitler/Bush parallel that I took seriously: Preventive war. Hitler invaded Poland and other countries using very similar premises as Bush when he invaded Iraq and Afghanistan: Self Defense. That’s a real parallel and ought to be addressed, as the implications are quite serious. Preventive war is a scourge upon mankind, and is illegal.

Anyway, no one took any of us on the left seriously when we pointed out real parallel – Godwin, lefty whackos, extremsism, they said. Whatever. So it is interesting that the absurd accusations and parallels being drawn between Obama and Hitler are being taken seriously. People of note are scratching their chins and are discussing this matter with sincere gravitas.

It’s a journalistic spectacle. Not only are the accusations absurd, but the people making them are off-balance, screaming and yelling at public meetings, much in the manner of Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch — oops. Invoked Hitler. Godddddwinnnnnnn ….

So why is CNN taking this seriously? I do not know. I do not watch CNN, and so don’t know what to expect from them? Are they only a milder version of Fox News?

Anyway, their coverage of the accusations as if they should be taken seriously reminds me of Paul Krugman’s criticism of modern American journalism:

If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.”

Free markets and sociopaths

Over the past ten years (or more) I’ve had quite a few interactions with people who believe in “free” markets, and unrestrained capitalism and trade. Many of these people believe that we are all isolated individuals, each of us responsible only to ourselves and bound to pay our way. Any program paid with public funds is a form of forced charity, and any tax on an individual a form of theft.

It’s an odd set of perceptions and, fortunately, only a few people carry things to such extremes. What stirs my curiosity is not the libertarians/Randians who carry these views, but rather those who take advantage of such ideologues.

In the health insurance business, people often make cold and calculated decisions – to reject people for coverage, to rescind coverage when someone gets really sick. But I’ve observed further in the business world that there are certain people whose whole life ambition is to “win” the game, to accumulate as much as possible. They don’t seem to care about anything else. They don’t care who they deceive, who gets hurt, who is bankrupted. Such people would feel at home in the health insurance business.

I suspect these people are sociopaths. Dr. Martha Stout, a Ph.D. at Harvard, thinks that as much as four percent of the population are sociopaths of varying degrees. Others put the figure lower, as low as one percent. The number might rest somewhere between 1-4%.

Who are these people? I’ve met quite a few, as we all have, though we don’t know it. We might think that they tend to go into the serial killing business, but most lead much more mundane lines. The military, the cops – those seem likely professions of choice, but cops and soldiers are on the lookout for them and try to keep them out. Oddly enough, according to John Seabrook (Suffering Souls
The search for the roots of psychopathy, The New Yorker, 11/10/08), most find a place for their life’s work in business.

Sociopaths don’t have much else to do but amass wealth. They don’t care about relationships (though are often good at faking them). For most of us, relationships take up a lot of time. For sociopaths, there are better things to do. It’s all about ‘the game’.

So “free markets” are a natural fit for sociopaths. Who wants rules and regulations? Who wants to be fair? Who wants to enforce an honest deal or protect a consumer? Free markets pit ordinary, kind, compassionate and trusting people against sociopaths, who know how to win. They accumulate fortunes, and want more.

Sociopaths intent on accumulating wealth usually manage to place themselves at pivotal points where money changes hands. So we have entrepreneurs who do nothing but scout for various business activities, whatever the current fad. They are not driven by lvoe of a product or inventiveness, but rather to be where the action is. They need to be in the game, to be doing something where there is active trade, to cash in, to make as much as they can, and then get out.

In health care it is likely sociopaths who don’t give a damn about health “care” and form insurance companies.Those companies, after all, make their money by denying health care to clients. Hence we have “Dollar Bill” McGuire of United Health Care, who collected $1.6 Billion in salary from that company for one year’s labor.

In the United States, more so than other countries, we tend to let these people have free reign. We look up to them. The mere act of amassing a fortune is seem as a sign of worthiness. Imagine the same amount of money amassed by thousands of people making a decent living by forming a labor union – that sort of activity, though it is essentially the accumulator’s act spread over more people, is frowned upon.

Wealth accumulators are not wealth creators. Quite the opposite. There is no harm in taxing them at high rates, of throwing them in jail when they misbehave. (I imagine that Bernie Madoff has some sociopathic tendencies.) In our strange world, a poor person goes to jail for stealing a pack of cigarettes,while people like Jack Welch, a man who ruined the lives of hundreds of people by sending tech jobs overseas, is honored. Then there is “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, who makes his living by firing people. Do I suspect these men are sociopaths? Yeah, I do.

Of course I speak broadly, as many men (and women -oddly,most sociopaths are men) men are simply good at what they do and are normal in other ways to boot. But if indeed 1-4% of us are sociopaths, and if sociopaths have nothing to gain in love and life itself, then it is highly likely that they are the ones who put work themselves into pivotal positions to cash in on the rest of our labors.

Bill Maher and Oliver Stone

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

This was not an ordinary interview. It’s got the usual stuff about movies and all of that, plus some vicariously satisfying political things, like Richard Nixon saying that Ronald Reagan was a “dumb son of a bitch”. But it was the part about drugs that caught my attention. Stone says that drugs were part of his growth process, and that of the soldiers he knew in Vietnam, it was the ones who were smoking grass who maintained their humanity.

I love counterintuitive.

Addendum: I almost forgot why this grabbed me. Stone mentioned that Nixon was plagued by “self loathing”, and hence had great doubt. Doubt is one of the most useful of human intellectual activities. It leads scientists to debunk previous science, formerly religious people to reject religion. Nixon was a complex man becuase he doubted himself.

Neither Reagan nor Bush I or II ever doubted. That is a sign of their intellectual vacuity. Nixon may have been one of our smartest president, the Bushes and Reagan among the dumbest. Clinton was smart and unprincipled.

My town hall meeting experience …

I just got done attending a health insurance town hall here in Boulder – this one put on by Blue Cross of Colorado and New West Health Insurance. It was really something – there were angry policy holders there and people who had had their policies rescinded, and other people who had had claims rejected. But the most prominent complaint was this, voiced by a matronly lady:

My husband and I work hard – I have health insurance on the job, but I have to pay extra to have him on the policy. Right now we’re paying $600 a month, and our deductibles keep going up, and my employer keeps complaining about how expensive it is, so we can’t be sure that policy is always going to be there. My question is this: What about your own coverage? Do you worry about health care costs at all?

There was applause, and then silence. The CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sherry Cladouhos, sat silently for a moment, and then said

“No – I guess I don’t really feel that. I don’t worry about that. I do worry about our costs, and we do oversee claims very carefully, but I have to say that we are often insulated from the problems of policyholders, and don’t empathize. So I thank you for asking the question, and pointing out part of our problem – that we who administer health care in the private sector have taken great pains to ensure that we never have to deal with policy holders. That’s why I’m here tonight. I go home tonight with a different attitude, and tomorrow morning, I am your employee.

Now admit it. I totally had you, right? You bit when I said that a private health care corporation would actually have a town hall meeting. Embarrassed?

Pretty good web site …

Please Cut The Crap is doing due diligence in the health care debate, and is worth a read. Lotta stuff there.

Milt Shook, the guy who does the work behind the site, spends a lot of time deconstructing right wing lies about health care. But as I suggest in the post down below, the point of the lies is their immediate impact – agitprop. By the time they are deconstructed, the liars are on to newer and better lies.

Overmatched, we are.

Obama and incubator babies

Back in 1991, as I was in transition from conservatism to whatever it is that I am now, the U.S. was preparing an attack on Iraq, and was looking for ways to manipulate the public into supporting the attack. George H.W. Bush would trot out something new every day – it’s about oil, he said, and then jobs, and none of it ‘took’. Finally they settled on what was really a common and well-used theme:

(Fill in the blank) is the Next Hitler.

But Hitler alone doesn’t get the job done. They needed more. A public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton of Washington, DC, was hired by the government of Kuwait to drum up American support for the attack.

There was no Internet then, and so no viral emails. In those primitive times, rumors were circulated manually. But they were still used very effectively. Hill and Knowlton started one that Iraqi soldiers had burst into a Kuwaiti hospital and ripped hundreds of infants out of incubators and thrown them on the floor to die. It was started at a congressional hearing.

It worked. The rumor was surreptitiously supported by government and media. Months later the lie would all be exposed, the woman who told it to a congressional panel found out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. But it did not matter. Agitation propaganda only has to be effective in real time. Learning about it afterward does not blunt its impact.

It is as a Bush official [probably Karl Rove] told Ron Suskind

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality –judiciously, as you will –we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Agitation propaganda (“agitprop”) is but one form of propaganda, but the most powerful kind. Most of the propaganda we endure here in the U.S. is “pre”- propaganda, or done in preparation for our whole lives of loyalty to the state. Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every day, standing and singing patriotic songs at ball games, teaching children supposed “history” in school, making movies about the glorious exploits of our wonderful soldiers – all of these are part of the formation of attitudes that stay with us forever. Agitprop is something different, used when an immediate shift in public opinion is needed.

Professional agitation propaganda probably has its American origins in the work of the Creel Commission before World War I. By the time that infamous body was done with its work, Americans had rioted and burned books and schools (even in Lewistown, Montana). The country gleefully entered a deadly European conflict of no particular importance to us. Crazy times!

Perhaps even the Creel Commission itself was surpised. Agitprop is is powerful, and can lead to disasters, riots, lynchings, and even invasion of innocent countries.

But it is used for other purposes too. Currently, there is a professional agitprop campaign going on – it is being used to fuel the disaffected citizens calling themselves “tea baggers”. The insurance industry has hired some firm or firms – we’ll find out who later – to stir up passion and muddy waters, scare people and shut off debate. They are even bussing people into public events for the sole purpose of disrupting them. It’s working as planned. Polls are showing a steep drop in support for “single payer” health insurance and a so-called “public option”.

The propaganda itself is deliciously simple and amazingly transparent lies. They are circulating viral emails (the new form of rumor) saying that old people will be euthanized, that the government will decide who gets to live and die. The process – scaring low-information right wingers and senior citizens – is having an immediate and dramatic effect. It’s like watching a professional musician – the beauty of the melody combined with the skill of the performer are enthralling. Professional propagandists are masters of their trade.

Which reminds me – where do they get their training? It’s not taught in the colleges, not even elite Ivy League. It must be entirely on-the-job.

It has gotten bizarre. Here’s Sarah Palin on her Facebook page:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

This is no accident – Palin is the poster child of the far right. Her entry into the debate with such inflammatory remarks is not something she did on her own. She had to have done it on advice or instruction, maybe as a favor. Perhaps she was paid to do it. She does need money. We’ll never know.

A while back I wrote in a comment over at Electric City Weblog that the reason that Blue Dogs and Republicans and Democratic leadership wanted to stall the vote on health care until September was to allow the insurance industry time to run a propaganda campaign. I also wrote that the American people were very susceptible to such campaigns, and that it would be effective, and that it would kill reform.

It’s way too much work to go find that comment. Anyway, I write maybe three hundred times a year at this blog. I just want to point out one time that I was right in predicting something.

Health care was killed by the insurance industry, who hired the public relations industry to devise a sophisticated campaign kill it. There is widespread support for this campaign in high circles of government and media. It has either worked already, or will.

And anyway, didn’t we all know that Obama was the type of guy who would tear 312 infants from their incubators and throw them on the floor to die?

Ooops! Wrong campaign.

A Pharma-Quiz

Forgive me for mindlessly parroting a piece from the LA Times – this is as engaged as my brain will be for several days. Hope they don’t sue me – the content is 100% Greg Critser. Hard to pass up, though.

A quiz on how the drug companies interact with the healthcare industry.

By Greg Critser
August 9, 2009

With the pharmaceutical companies at the bargaining table on healthcare reform, and Congress considering new restrictions on drug advertising, it may pay to bone up on some facts about the industry with the following quiz:

1. What percentage of Americans over the age of 65 take at least one prescription drug on a daily basis?

a. 20%
b. 40%
c. 60%
d. 75%

2. In 2005, what percentage of all continuing medical education for physicians was paid for by Pharma?

a. About 25%
b. About 50%
c. About 75%
d. About 90%

3. Who told a congressional panel in 1983 that “we believe direct advertising to the consumer introduces a very real possibility of causing harm to patients who may respond to advertisements by pressuring physicians to prescribe medications that may not be required.”

a. The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission
b. The chairman of Abbott Laboratories
c. The head of the Food and Drug Administration
d. The head of the Consumers Union

4. In the same hearings, who said, “The potential pressures of public advertising of prescription drugs on the scientific decisions of the physician are both unwise and inappropriate.”

a. The chief of the FDA
b. The chief of Eli Lilly & Co.
c. The chief of the Sioux Nation
d. The chief of the House Committee on Science and Commerce

5. Who, in 1983, first proposed that the FDA roll back its regulation and allow drugs to be advertised?

a. The chairman of the FTC
b. The chairman of Abbott Lab- oratories
c. The head of the FDA
d. The head of the Consumers Union

6. In 2003, what did the head of Pfizer pharmaceuticals say was the key to the industry’s future success?

a. That “we should push as hard as we can to get patients to talk to their doctors about our newest drugs.”
b. That “we should give patients good, solid facts and encourage them to use logic to make their decisions.”
c. That Pharma “must move toward the emotional way of marketing, because in that way we can move toward the spiritual-ethical method.”
d. That Pharma should “really think about free Krispy Kreme coupons as a way of encouraging sales.”

7. Today, most new prescription drugs are expected to show profitability within:

a. 90 days
b. 120 days
c. one year
d. three years

8. According to the leading scholar on the subject of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Ritalin, a stimulant, became the leading treatment for ADHD because:

a. It was effective
b. It was safe
c. It was not called amphetamine
d. It made teachers happy

9. In 2002, who said “we are entering what could be the golden age for kids and pharmaceuticals”?

a. The head of PhRMA, the powerful pharmaceutical lobby
b. The head of Eli Lilly
c. The head of Pfizer
d. The head of the drug committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics

10. In ancient Greece, “pharmakon” meant:

a. An untrustworthy agricultural worker
b. A reformed criminal
c. A delicious beverage
d. Both “remedy” and “poison”

Answers: 1-d; 2-d; 3-b; 4-b; 5-c; 6-c; 7-a; 8-c; 9-d; 10-d

Greg Critser is the author of “Fat Land,” “Generation Rx” and the forthcoming “Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging.”

Showing my tree rings

Wendell: It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?
Ed Tom Bell: If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.
No Country for Old Men

That line from that great movie came to my head as I got up this morning and walked through our house. We are eye-high in boxes everywhere, and are eating off paper plates with sporks.

Tuesday morning the movers come, and on Saturday, we will wake up for the first time as Boulderites, Coloradans. I’ll still be a Montana blogger, but will slowly fade from the scene, and the 200 or so people who come here (who are you?!?) will fade out too. Hopefully there is as lively a community of Colorado bloggers as in Montana. But as a newbie, I’ll have to be withdrawn and observant and mind my manners.

Yeah. Right.

Some Montana observations:

People come here to slow down, and many of those who come from the bigger cities looking for for the quiet life often find that they don’t like the quiet life. It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. But our group of friends here in Bozeman like it here, and none want to leave. It’s got everything – mountains and trails and coffee shops and restaurants, skiing, high-tech businesses and a college. And, it has a prominent and vocal far-right subset encircling a smaller liberal group comprised of college professors and adjuncts and granolas. The latter don’t like being represented in Helena by the likes of Roger Koopman and Scott Sales. Drives ’em batty.

If Missoula were excised from Montana, what remained would be Utah without those batty Mormons. It’s mostly a right-wing state, with remnants of union Democrats in Butte. For some reason, the Farmer-Labor movement never really took hold in Montana. The state voted Democrat one time in my memory – 1992 for Bill Clinton, but then only with 37.6% of the vote. A former blogger once observed how Montanans like Bill Clinton. No, they don’t, really.

I have often wondered about the future here, whether with climate change the non-pine-beetled forests are going to burn, leaving us with a Nevada-scape. But then, long before my time, western Montana was decimated by conflagration-like forest fires. Look back to 1910, 1914, 1917, 1919, 1925, 1926, 1929 … there’s a roadless area up by Missoula called the “Great Burn”, where forest fires decimated the area, and it reseeded, and forests fires decimated the saplings, and nothing was left. There’s been regrowth since -it’s a beautiful area.

The point is that we tend to think of good times as normal times. Drought is as common in this state as moist years, perhaps even more the norm. We were hiking last Sunday and came across a tree that was cut down to clear the trail. It happened to be about as old as me, and so I looked over the tree rings for good years and bad. Parts of the fifties and sixties were good, the seventies, too. But mostly those rings were sliver-thin.

It’s a drought-prone state. Eastern Montana is a poverty belt. It’s a resource colony, and the Republican majority seems to like it that way. They even once gave us a governor who begged to be a “lapdog” to industry. Until that attitude changes, until unions return, until Democrats put forward a new Thomas Towe, there will not be much change here.

But it’s a good place to be. It’s out-of-the-way, and the major problems of the cities are absent. Montana is far away from 9-11, smog and smug and traffic. Why we want to move away from the good and towards s&s&t – has to do with grandkids. Nothing more. Were it not for that, we would have stayed and had our ashes scattered somewhere in the Beartooths.

Still might.