Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Real “Democrat”ic reform

I thought I should get a letter in our local organ before moving on to Colorado.

Editor:

We Americans imagine ourselves more enlightened than others, even thinking ourselves justified in bombing other countries to make them “free.” But our own freedom is mere illusion.

Our two political parties are financed by the same concentrations of wealth. There are differences – big oil tends to favor Republicans, while trial lawyers have always had a particular affinity for Democrats. Wall Street finance houses have deep tentacles in both parties. But for the most part, money has no ideology, and shifts with the political winds.

Tea-baggers and “birthers” take the place of political dialogue. These same elements once screamed about Whitewater and Monica, and then were quiet for eight years. Now they’re back, crazy as ever. But they are a mere distraction. That’s not an exchange of ideas. That’s lunacy.

There is an important issue at the fore – reform of our health care system. The public by overwhelming margins wants real change. Democrats have enough power now to easily defeat the Republicans. But they won’t do it.

Our own senator, Max Baucus, is the leading anti-reformer. He supposedly represents the “liberal” side of our spectrum, but is more like a right winger himself, frustrating attempts at real reform.

And this is the nature of our “two party” system. Lacking any real mechanisms by which we can translate public will into public policy, our precious freedom is a mere illusion. Our parties are bought – the one representing “hope” and “change” merely covering the other’s back.

We have nothing to teach other countries. We need our own regime change. (Perhaps we should bomb ourselves?) We legally bribe our public officials. Because of our campaign finance system, real reforms in other areas are not possible.

Before we will see health care reform, we must fix campaign finance. Nothing changes before that.

This Just In …

In a stunning development, it turns out that not only was Barack Obama born in the United States, but that he was in fact born in Mena, Arkansas. His real mother, who was white, also gave birth to Obama’s half-brother, Vince Foster. She was, according to former girlfriend Juanita Broadrickk, a well-known drug runner for the CIA. She was memorialized in the 1987 film Air America, Arkansas. She died from complications of injuries resulting from a small plane crash in 1976, for which her insurance company refused coverage.

An un-original thought …

Most people are aware of our racist tendencies – all of us – and awareness creates its own antidote. As Mark Twain is said to have said (who knows – it’s off the Internet)

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Racism exists in a minority, but social pressure has suppressed its open expression. It still comes out, but in non-obvious ways. For one, some people, as at the Bozeman Tea Party on July 4th, referred to President Obama as a “Nigerian”. Get it?”Nigerian?

I am beginning to agree with those, including Bill Maher, who say that the “birther” movement is an expression of racism. It’s subtle, never been used before against a sitting president, and has an element of ‘foreigner’ in it that can easily be applied to his race.

I suspect that’s where the low-brow, low intellect, stupid, scared and paranoid racists went to hide.

Somebody help the boy!

I bought an I-Touch today, and could not wait to use it. But we are staying at a Motel 6 in Casper, and they require that you agree to a two-page agreement of terms before they allow you to use the Internet. I paid for the agreement, and can use it on my laptop, but I wanted to play with my I-Touch. No-can-do. On the I-Touch, I cannot check the box at the bottom that says “I agree”, and therefore cannot access the Internet. It’s making Starbucks in the morning, which requires that I sign in to AT&T Wireless, a hopeless prospect.

Two questions for anyone who knows the answers:

1: Is there any way we can get the motels to fire their attorneys so we don’t have to “agree” to these four page agreements that no one reads to protect their asses before we use their routers? Coffee shops (except Starbucks) seem to survive without this stupid bureaucratic nonsense.

2) Is there any way, on an IPod Touch, to enter a check mark in a box about the size of the end of a toothpick?

Anyway, it’s Motel 6, the A/C doesn’t work, I’m an American and used to all of the comforts of life, and so am distressed.

Do you know any lawyers who are members of the American Civil Liberties Union? I am a member of that organization, and I would like to have somebody who is a member of that organization represent me.

Traveling Day …

We are on our way to Boulder today, and won’t return here until we have found a place to live down there. Boulder has its own vocabulary. Words like “spacious” and “open” do not mean there what they mean here. We are going to rent for a year and then buy something, and that year of renting will likely put us in a townhouse or condo, squished and compressed.

Something occurred to me as I was trying to answer some very legitimate questions over at Electric City Weblog. I have mentioned before that one of the reasons private insurance seems to work in the workplace is that employers tend to hire healthy people, so that workers are “pre-cherry-picked”, and the insurance companies’ job is done for them.

Then it dawned on me – every injury that might happen in the workplace is covered by Workers Compensation, so that insurance companies have even less exposure than they would otherwise have.

So health insurance companies have two reasons to cover the workplace: 1) pre-cherry-picking, and 2) shared risk.

What a deal!

The Perils of the Yangtze River

The concept of insurance, as a college professor once told us, originated in ancient China. Each year the farmers and craftsmen who lived inland had to load their goods onto boats and take them to markets on the coast via the Yangtze River. Each year some boats were lost, and a few lost everything. They decided among themselves to spread their goods over many boats, so that if one or two were lost, each would lose a little, but none would be devastated.

We had an interesting discussion yesterday over at Gregg’s Electric City Weblog, and I learned quite a bit from a guy calling himself Wolfpack. I observed that the concept of for-profit insurance did not seem to work in health care, and should be run on a non-profit basis. He asked me

Mark T. said, that one thing that other countries have done is to outlaw for-profit insurance, which is colossally counterproductive. Mark- Are you opposed to “for-profit” car and home insurance also?

It’s a good question. Why does for-profit insurance work in some areas but not others? For example, in many rural areas private fire fighters respond when a house catches on fire. But the homeowner has to pay a premium for this service, and if he has not, the fire department will simply watch the house burn. A better solution is to make fire fighting a government service funded by tax dollars. That way everyone has coverage and no one has to watch a house burn while fire fighters sip coffee.

The private protection model does not work well in that mode, but does for fire “insurance” – reimbursement for loss after-the-fact. It also works well for personal liability and for automobiles. There are many companies who provide that kind of insurance, and they compete for our business. They respond to that competition by providing adequate protection and prompt claim settlement (There are exceptions, of course, and insurance companies have to protect us from abusers. They are diligent about claim service when there is suspicious activity surrounding a loss.)

I have driven cars for 43 years, and have never caused an auto accident. Most of us will pass through life without an incident. Only a few of us are so unfortunate. But with health care, sickness is a virtual certainty. As we age, it becomes more so (which is why for-profit insurers refuse to cover old people). It is here that the Chinese boat example works. Among ourselves we can agree to share our risks, each of us absorbing some the cost to protect those who are currently suffering. When our turn comes, others will take care of us.

Because suffering and sickness are universal, we don’t need an insurance company in the middle of the process trying to extract profit by avoiding the sick. We need government to collect taxes and provide the insurance. It’s broad insurance with universal risk and huge costs which will affect all of us in our lifetimes. We don’t need the money people mucking it up. We simply need to manage the system for ourselves, using our government to do so.

It is our right as citizens to boot the for-profit insurers out of the system. By its very nature, for-profit insurance has to avoid sick people and avoid paying claims. It’s not a match.

The problems with our health care system are caused by right wingers and conservatives who are convinced that some people taking more out of the system than they put in is a moral hazard. Not so. Health care should be a right. We can help each other in our mutual suffering by any means we choose, including our government. Screw capitalism.

Bob Garner: ‘Nuff said’

I wrote a piece one time on a backpacking trip I was on, and closed by saying that if I could have good coffee in the morning and [Southern] Comfort at night, I could endure anything in between. A fellow named Bob chimed in that I must be a Janis Joplin fan. I didn’t get it at all. Bob told me that Janis lived each of her adult days with Southern Comfort at hand.

Later I wrote a post about a gal named Anna who was a Hillary Clinton supporter over the Left in the West. Anna was very hard to deal with. I called the post “Anna Montana“, and in it I quoted a long passage written by this same Bob. It was impassioned, thoughtful, historical and moving. Anna’s response was pathetic. I ended Bob’s words with my own … “Nuff said”. It turned out to be one of the most widely read posts here at this blog. It’s fitting that most of the words belong to Bob Garner.

I got to know Bob after that – after some hemming and hawing, we got together for coffee, and at my urging, he opened his own blog, which he called Waves and Particles. It was not about politics. It was poetry, some prose, and his photography. He didn’t do it for long, He found it too stressful to have to put something fresh up all the time.

We invited Bob out to our house for dinner, and had a fun evening. He was surprised that a curmudgeon like me had a lovely and charming wife. (He was charmed by her – that happens frequently.) We talked on into the evening. Bob often mentioned his friend Christina,who I imagined to be someone his age. Bob was in his seventies.

Later, after we told him we were moving to Colorado, Bob took us out to dinner, and we finally met Christina. Bob first met her when she was a barista at the Leaf and Bean, and took a fatherly interest in this bright and lovely girl. She’s an acupuncturist now here in Bozeman, and she and Bob shared a deep friendship. He was old and gnarly, she young and beautiful. No doubt Bob wanted to be 30 years younger.

Bob and I and another friend were to have lunch tomorrow, but Christina called this morning. Bob fell and hit his head, had some internal bleeding, and passed away.

I was at Bob’s house but one time, and now wish I had stayed longer, but we were on our way to places. His house was exactly what I expected – a small kitchen, a computer on a small desk, and books books books everywhere. I’m not clear on his life or background, and I hope others will fill me in later. I know that he lived in California, where he knew Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. Here in Bozeman he ran a motorcycle shop, and I think he was a former biker. (I can picture that.) He was once a press secretary for our Secretary of State. He did not like my frequent criticisms of journalism. He has a son who is flying in from Africa, and a brother who is undergoing brain surgery in Pennsylvania.

Christina said that Bob did not want a memorial service. I wish they would do it anyway. I want to hear people who knew him better talk about him and his life. If anyone who reads this knows him and has a few kind words to say about Bob, please do so. There’s a far deeper and lovelier man there than I ever had time to get to know.

So long, Bob.

The ‘S’ Word

Certain terms get tossed about in discussion, among them liberal, conservative, progressive, right winger, fascist, democratic and the s-word, stupid – no – socialist. I call myself at times a liberal, a progressive, a socialist, and a conservative. Others use another term listed above.

“Conservatism” is appealing to me in this sense: Progress is slow, and achievements, though often stunning in science and engineering, are plodding and slow in politics and social structure. It is not wise to make dramatic or haphazard changes in our institutions due to unintended consequences. We should observe the example of others and respect the wisdom of those who came before us. What appears to be wise in the present may not stand the test of time.

But we have to embrace change. Piecemeal and slow is the way to go.

Conservatives tend to support “free” markets and trade. I am therefore not a conservative, as I don’t support either concept. It is here that people use the ‘s’ word against me. (“Socialist”, dammit, “socialist!”)

I reduce “free” markets to a simple analogy: markets are campfires that keep us warm. Unregulated markets are more like forest fires, destructive of everything in their path.

I am also opposed to “free”, or unregulated trade when the traders are in unequal bargaining positions. Free trade has decimated resource colonies, left Latin and Central America in extreme poverty. They cannot protect their markets or build domestic industry. They find themselves importing food and exporting cash crops from productive land owned by foreigners. It’s absurd. That’s what free trade does to poor countries – it keeps them poor.

But when bargainers each have power, free trade makes sense. Canada and Western Europe and the United States, all strong and wealthy, should trade freely among themselves.

Progressives tend to want to regulate markets, tax wealth at high rates, provide public benefits like welfare, retirement, disability and survivor benefits, education and health care. I like those ideas except that sending support checks to young and healthy individuals each month tends to corrupt them, make them lazy. I support giving them commodity-style food, health care, and education – a fighting chance, without destroying initiative.

So I am somewhat conservative and quite progressive. If you call me a socialist, it would be technically wrong, as I don’t think that government should own or manage basic industries. But in current parlance – supportive of the welfare state – the term is accurate.

So go ahead and use the s-word on me if you wish. (“Socialist”, dammit. “Socialist!”)

One term needs proper defining, as many of them masquerade as conservatives. These are our right wingers. They are not conservative in any sense – they don’t believe in gradual change, they don’t respect the wisdom of others or the past. Given the reins of power, they would throw us all into chaos. In fact, they have.

Most so-called “conservatives” these days are really thoughtless, mindless reactionary right wingers. These people are the ones most deserving of “s” word.