Bill Maher and Oliver Stone

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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 It was really something – there were angry policy holders there and people who had had their policies rescinded, and other people who had had claims rejected.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.

Mediocre Mad Max

Great Britain suffers from a common law system called “primogeniture” wherein the first-born male in each family inherited the entire estate of the father. This had the effect of keeping large estates intact and preventing them from being scattered to the wind.

It also insulated first-born males as political fixtures. That system still survives in the British House of Lords, and with succession to the throne. It has given us Prince Charles in all his Tampon-seeking glory.

Since genes don’t transmit intact, and since much of what we call “talent” is developed in reaction to environment, a system that awards leadership to inherited wealth will probably yield mediocre leadership. We’ve seen it in this country with rule by Kennedy’s and Bush’s, and in this state with a senator who seems to believe he has some sort of entitlement to office, Max Baucus.

Baucus is mediocre at best. What ever convinced him that he was cut out to lead? Likely it was a family background (his middle name is “Sieben”, like that large land and sheep operation near Helena), and access to the best schools.

People trained at Stanford often go on to leadership and great accomplishments. But what happens when we bestow the best available education on the mediocre thinker, the uninspired leader who thinks he’s entitled to lead anyway? (There’s a problem with people who lack depth – they don’t have the depth to know that they lack depth.)

With George W. Bush, we sank into preventive war, special tax treatment of wealth, decay of infrastructure and privatization of government services.

With Senator Max Baucus, we have … well, not much. He’s never really led the floor on any issue, never inspired his fellows in the Senate. His public speaking is rambling and incoherent, and his impulse has always been to serve wealth.

Typical of an aristocrat, he seems to beleive that some sort of legacy mission had fallen on him, and cloaked in his purple robe, he has taken on the health care issue for all of us. But, typical of an aristocrat, he has no sense of the problems faced by ordinary people, and has restricted himself to back room dealings with insurance and pharmaceutical company representatives. In a move bespeaking pure arrogance and tone-deaf political skills, he held Potemkin-like “hearings” on health care solutions, and when single payer proponents tried to insert themselves, had them arrested.

Right in the middle of all of this, he also held “Camp Baucus”, a golf/fishing schmoozer for his wealthy and influential backers. Seeing a potential for confrontation with the untouchables, he opted not to attend.

Leadership by entitlement usually produces mediocrity. Occasionally in baseball we will see the genes of one player passed on to his son, as with Ken Griffey, Jr., Prince Fielder or Barry Bonds. But that’s the exception – most often we see regression to the mean, as with Pete Rose, Jr.

It is better for the nation as a whole to break up large estates, to allow new blood to enter the best schools, to keep the Dubya’s and Max’s of this world in low-level positions where they do minimal damage. Money will always bestow privilege, but should not automatically convey the right to lead.

Footenote: Perhaps Max’s worthwhile legacy will be that in 2005 he fought against privatization of Social Security. Credit where credit is due.

Swiftboating seniors

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Gregg Smith ran the above ad over at Electric City Weblog, credulous as ever and thinking it to contain useful information. It’s propaganda. By propaganda, I mean … propaganda, defined as

… the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations.

“Psychological manipulation” is key here. The ad is designed to scare senior citizens.There is no hard factual basis to any of the statements in the ad other than citation of other right wing sources, like Heritage and Wall Street Journal.

There is an oblique reference at the opening that we have fifty million uninsured. Incredibly, the ad sets up the uninsured as the enemy of senior citizens!

Here are the buzzwords the ad uses to achieve its goal: hurt seniors … end Medicare as we know it … ration … limit lifesaving medications … long delays … cancer …, and of course, the usual boogeyman, long waits … Canada and England.

This, unfortunately, is just the beginning. There will not be an honest word spoken for a month now, one lie heaped atop another. I despise that about our country – lies, liars, and media that allows itself to be used for lying by liars.

The ad features an embedded ad (which rotates with others) urging people to apply for health care insurance in Montana. It’s a cherry-picking operation. They entice people to apply for health insurance and then turn away everyone but those who they think might be profitable. The rest … they dump on MCHA, which is too expensive for most of them anyway.

“The League of American Voters” does not offer its list of contributors – it is not a 501c(3) – it welcomes corporate contributions,and is likely a front for the health insurance industry. It does not publish a phone number or email address. Getting information on who they are and who backs them will take a long time, and will not emerge until this propaganda campaign is over.

It’s disgraceful. It’s shameful, deliberately trying to scare seniors and pitting them against the uninsured. These are not honorable people we are dealing with – they are insurance salesmen. They have no bottom except their own bottom line.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will”

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937

Every now and then I scatter the blogs with pessimistic words regarding our current representation in Washington and the prospects of health care reform. It can be no other way – Max Baucus is indeed a mediocre soul, devoid of vision or any other inspirational qualities. Dennis Rehberg is a creature of wealth, smart and quick with the rejoinder, but lacking a feel for the troubles of ordinary people. He lives in service of wealth, including his own. Jon Tester is an unfolding book, but the early chapters make me think that it’s pulp fiction, cheap and predictable.

We hiked with friends over the weekend, and saw before us the destruction done by pine beetles. It’s everywhere, and it’s serious. One consoling thought was that the forest lives on, that our lifetimes are short and we don’t see the forest in its longer setting. Over time, destruction is improving the forest. Those trees that survive are resistant, and their progeny will be more durable. But it’s a slow process, and so it is easy to be sad in the present.

In the health care debate, there is progress. Many have acknowledged the failings of our system who before thought us the best in the world. People are now intrinsically aware of the problem of insurers resistance to covering the poor, the old, and the already sick. There is even some progress in public awareness of how other countries have it better, do it better than us. The principle of universality seems to have grown deeper roots among us.

We have to accept small progress as the best progress we can have. And we have to acknowledge the law of unintended consequences – that massive changes in our current system might bring disaster, a return to the old ways, and in the end, a setback.

Single payer never had a chance, and a national public option will likely be perverted into service and subsidy for the insurance industry in some form.

So let’s look for progress where it exists:

  1. San Francisco as instituted a true and strong public option, and it is working. People are saving thousands of dollars annually, and receiving the same level of care as those who have those gold-plated Blue Cross policies. That example is going to spread.
  2. Massachusetts has taught us the foolishness of trying to build universal coverage with the private insurance model. It cannot work without massive subsidy, and in the current environment, we are tapped. Massachusetts serves as a bad example.
  3. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has introduced a bill that garnered support from both parties that would preserve the right of individual states to institute single payer if they so choose. This might be a good place to draw a line and stand and fight: States’ Rights. There will be small breakthroughs, as in San Francisco, and then, just as it played out in Canada, good example will spread.
  4. I hear very little praise for Max Baucus anywhere – he is reviled nationally, and even here in his home state the scales seem to be falling from some eyes. Montana is best represented by a Republican, as that is the majority of our population. Perhaps the person who takes Max’s seat will be one of quality and compassion, with the ability to both listen and lead. We’ve not had decent representation for many a year. We’re due.

That’s all I got right now – pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the soul. I’ll do some ‘PS’s below as other reasons for encouragement occur to me, and ask I my seven readers to add to my list.

Have a good day.

Emergency Rooms Closing in California

Here’s an interesting list published by the Los Angeles Times – conservatives tell us that we have universal care becuase any of us can go to an emergency room for treatment.

Never mind that ER’s are the worst imaginable care delivery system – we can’t go there for checkups or tests. We have to be in crisis. Never mind that the treatment is horribly expensive and that it is anything but free (save for the poorest among us). The above article points out something even more interesting.

There are 39 hospital emergency rooms in California that have closed since 1998. The problem is particularly acute in Los Angeles, with its large illegal immigrant population. It’s a private sector response and it is routine and rational – if a profit center becomes a loss center, close it down.

That’s actually a crappy answer to the problem, but the only one private-sector health care can give us. Universal care conflicts with their business model.