Think Humanely

You can now watch the latest rendition of ‘We are the World’ on Hulu, a benefit song for Haiti. It opens with an introduction by Academy-award winner Jamie Foxx ,and the video itself is directed by another Academy-award winner, Paul Haggis. “Please do more than just watch. Reach deep into your hearts and give anything that you can,” says Foxx. Commercials consistently ran through the NFL playoffs imploring viewers to donate on Haiti’s behalf. On Sunday, Angelina Jolie sat down with CNN’s Amanpour to discuss the former’s trip to Haiti. The First Lady routinely pops up in commercials imploring viewers to call the Red Cross or to text a certain number in order to send donations on behalf of the country.

One might start to get the wild idea that the reason we’re able to spend so much of our time and energy concerned with the plight of another country is due to the fact that there are no Americans who are in need of similar attention and donations. Surely if American cities had been devastated by poverty, drugs, violence, and various political decisions that continue to decimate the working class and poor, we’d hear about it during our football games, interviews with Angelina Jolie, Mrs. Obama, and so on, yes? I mean, if Americans were suffering and in desperate need of help, we’d definitely be bombarded with the news and ways to help out our fellow citizens just as frequently, if not more so, than we have been in respect to Haiti, correct? Obviously not.

I’d imagine that you wouldn’t be able to throw a stone without hitting someone who can tell you all about the plight of Haiti, the various ways to help, the commercials and ads asking for aid, and roughly how many people have died. Throw that stone a hundred times, and you’ll be lucky to find someone who can tell you the poverty level in this country, where the US ranks in terms of class mobility, the poorest city or state in the country, the state with the highest unemployment or what state has the highest percentage of the uninsured. Hell, people in this country don’t even know what the three branches of government are, let alone ‘little’ details like these.

According to the most recent Census data, Mississippi has the lowest median household income at $37,790 as well as the lowest per capita income ($15,853), barely ‘beating’ out West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana. The poorest cities in the country based on per capita income? Allen, South Dakota ($1,539); Cuevitas and Brundage, Texas ($1,703 and $2,371, respectively); and Wounded Knee, South Dakota ($2,403). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

Unemployment rates were higher in December than a year earlier in 371 of the 372 metropolitan areas and lower in 1 area, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Nineteen areas recorded jobless rates of at least 15.0 percent, while 10 areas registered rates below 5.0 percent. The national unemployment rate in December was 9.7 percent, not seasonally adjusted, up from 7.1 percent a year earlier. Among the 369 metropolitan areas for which nonfarm payroll employment were available,
356 areas reported over-the-year decreases in employment, 12 reported increases, and 1 remained unchanged.

The BLS also lists the unemployment rate for Michigan at 14.6%, Nevada at 13%, and Rhode Island and South Carolina at 12.9% and 12.6%, respectively.

Stateline.org highlights the growing numbers of the uninsured in this country:

Forty-seven million Americans went without health insurance in 2006, an increase of 2.2 million people from the year before, according to a report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau Tuesday (Aug. 28). It marks the sixth consecutive year the ranks of the uninsured have grown.

For the second year in a row, the percentage of children without medical coverage also increased. The Census Bureau estimates 8.7 million kids – or 11.7 percent – had no insurance, an increase of 700,000 over the year before.

…

“The huge number of uninsured Americans exceeds the cumulative population of 24 states plus the District of Columbia. This epidemic of uninsurance has reached crisis proportions, and Americans want to see the problem solved,” said Kathleen Stoll, health policy director of Families USA, a group pushing for a large expansion of SCHIP.

In a statement released by American Medical Association, Dr. Joseph Heyman, a board member, said, “It is unconscionable that the number of uninsured children has substantially increased over the past year. Children are our future, and for kids to get a good start in life, they need access to regular visits to the doctor.”

The state’s with the highest percentage of people without health insurance are Texas (24.1), New Mexico (21), Florida (20.3), Arizona (19), Oklahoma (18.7), California and Louisiana (18.5), Nevada (18.3), and Mississippi (18.1). An additional eight states have percentages ranging from 16-17.9.

Roughly 14,000,000 results come up when one Googles ‘Haiti AND donations.’ Some examples of these results:
American Red Cross Pledges Initial $1 Million to Haiti Relief

Support Disaster Relief in Haiti

Haiti text donations to Red Cross pass $5M

Haiti Relief Donations Qualify for Immediate Tex Relief

Haiti Earthquake Relief: How You Can Help

Haiti Earthquake Donations

Haiti Clothing Donations: Find Out Where to Send Supplies

Haiti earthquake response – Donate now

MCC to respond to Haiti earthquake, donations welcome

InterAction Members Respond to the Earthquake in Haiti

And this was just on the first two pages and doesn’t count entries from the same source.

Obviously, not all of the results are positive. To wit: one result was about Rush Limbaugh and, well, does one need to even explain what his position is about giving money to a non-Christian, predominately black country? I didn’t think so. Nevertheless, one can’t combine the words donation and Haiti without being bombarded with a plethora of ways to assist that country and its people, just as one can’t watch a football game, Hulu, or an average commercial break without being reminded of one’s financial obligations to them.

What happens when one performs the same search for Detroit? There are about 2,000,000 results, the first two of which are ‘Archdiocese of Detroit urges donations to Haiti,’ and ‘Haitian network group collecting donations.’ In fact, there is only one result on the first page that has anything to do with actually trying to donate money to help the city of Detroit, and guess what? The site is no longer available.

The easy explanation for the discrepancy between the outpouring of support for Haiti compared to the support for American citizens who continue to languor in what are de facto third-world conditions is that the cause of the Haitian crisis is not only easily understood but also spectacular. Americans like simplistic explanations (e.g., “They hate us for our freedoms”), and they like anything that looks like it could pop up in the next Michael Bay film. Americans also like it when the cause of such widespread suffering and tragedy isn’t their fault. These truisms are roughly the case with Haiti as far as most Americans are concerned.

The same cannot be said of the cities and communities all across this country that are still reeling from American-made disasters, social, economic, and political. Americans, in their laziness, ignorance, pettiness, and continued support of their sham political parties and corrupt politicians that they never vote out of office, are very much responsible for the uninsured rate in Texas, the per capita income level in Mississippi and Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and the unemployment rate in Michigan. This blame is one of the gifts of democracy. This isn’t (yet) a dictatorial government. We cannot point to a single tyrannical ruler who, by fiat after fiat, has created all the pain and suffering in this country. We can only point to ourselves, the citizens who either never both to vote for actual, genuine change, and those who do vote but not for change; rather, these men and women continue, year after year, election after election, to vote for the same people who have gotten us to where we are. They’re not pulling us out of anything – they’re simply pulling us further and further into this American-made abyss. The socio-economic turmoil in this country did not arrive overnight; it was crafted, in one legislative session after another, one free-trade deal after another, slowly and methodically.

And yet we do nothing for those who are electoral decisions hurt. We won’t admit our own culpability. We won’t face the consequences of our actions. But earthquakes? Hurricanes and tsunamis? Those are easy. Dealing with these doesn’t make us feel bad about ourselves. In fact, we can send a text to Red Cross and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well-done.

America: the only time we’re not tribal narcissists is when it comes to providing sustained help for our fellow citizens.

UPDATED BELOW

Only in a depraved, oligarchic society such as ours, in which materialism and capital are the entire points of living and the only barometer of success, can spending money be equated to free speech. The United States Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on regulations limiting the influence and participation of corporations in our elections were unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy, who had recently speculated that the Civil Rights Act was unfair (don’t you feel bad for all those poor racists who don’t want the niggers to vote?), wrote, “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.” Kennedy is begging the question. He sets up a false premise in order to justify his erroneous conclusion. Corporations spending millions of dollars in order to campaign on behalf on certain candidates isn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they protected individual citizens from government reprisal for voicing dissent, disapproval, etc. And it’s not as if these multi-billion dollar corporations have been disenfranchised (like African-Americans in the South whom the ‘unfair’ Civil Rights Act was meant to protect). In fact, all this depraved ruling does is help this country move the democratic process one step further away from ordinary citizens and toward the oligarchic factions of our society, the wealthy-elite.

Justice Stevens wrote, “”The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.” This is no mere threat – it is a de facto inevitability. Those in California will well remember what happened in the despicable Prop. 8 election and subsequent scandal, when it was revealed that the Mormon church spent obscene amounts of money to alter the outcome of a sovereign state’s election and, in doing so, managed to use it’s vast wealth (and thus influence) to change public opinion. That’s not free speech. That’s just manipulation. And now corporate America has been given free reign to manipulate the voting public ad nauseam.

UPDATE:

The President had the following to say about this travesty of a decision: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington—while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.”

Corporate money has already eroded the effectiveness of representative democracy in this country. Those who doubt this need only look to the pathetic attempts at health care “reform” that have been molested time and time again by insurance companies and the health care industry. Now watering down bills, influencing legislation, and putting in corporate-constructed Manchurian candidates will be even easier. And perfectly legal.

From an AP story earlier today:

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s plea for donations to fill a $900,000 deficit at his Southern California megachurch brought in $2.4 million, Warren announced to cheers during a sermon at the church on Saturday.

Warren said the amount raised after the appeal was posted online Wednesday included only money parishioners brought in person to Saddleback Church by New Year’s Eve. More was arriving by hand and by mail, he said.

“This is pretty amazing,” said Warren, who made the announcement by bringing out 24 volunteers each holding a sign for $100,000. “I don’t think any church has gotten a cash offering like that off a letter.”

Rick Warren is a disgusting human being, one who preaches extreme hate and intolerance while simulatenously taking advantage of thousands of people by preaching about fairy tales and the “wisdom” of backward, ignorant people from 2,000 years ago. Imagine going into a hospital for a much-needed surgery and your doctor pulling out the writings of Hippocrates for reference on how to best perform the procedure. Sure, Hippocrates was inventive and intelligent relative to how little everyone else knew and understood at the time. Today, however, even children know more about medicine. Here are some of the jewels of wisdom spouted by this fat bastard:

“Every obstacle is an opportunity. Every problem has potential. Every crisis is an opportunity for ministry.”

“”Now let me say this really clearly: We support Proposition 8. And if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8. I never support a candidate, but on moral issues, I come out very clear.”

This particularly vile line of preaching comes with video:

Here is an interview with the religious-friendly BeliefNet:

“WARREN: The issue to me, I’m not opposed to that [some partnership rights] as much as I’m opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

BELIEFNET: Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

Oh , I do. For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion – this is not a Christian issue. Buddhist, Muslims, Jews – historically, marriage is a man and a woman.”

This absurd, despicable thinking helps explain this :

“We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” Dr Warren said.

Warren was speaking in support of Ugandan Anglicans who intend to boycott the forthcoming Lambeth Conference, and this harsh rejection of tolerance for gays and lesbians may have serious consequences in a country where homosexuals face harrassment and and the threat of imprisonment.

Warren’s comment is of a piece with his support for Martin Ssempa, the Ugandan evangelist who has been a keynote speaker at a Warren conference, and who has received US global AIDS prevention funds. As I wrote in August, Ssempa wants to ensure that homosexuality remains illegal and that gays and lesbians are identified in the public mind as sexual abusers. Ssempa calls for media censorship against opposing views and the dismissal of dissenting academics, and last summer he organised a rally with the theme “A Call for Action on Behalf of the Victims of Homosexuality”, at which he railed against “molestation and sodomy.”

He doesn’t believe in evolution; he compared those who thought that a husband should be allowed to let a comatose wife (whose brain had literally turned to mush) die and the husband’s supporters to Nazis; he thinks that the government should take away the right of a women to decide for herself what medical procedures she needs to have – having compared anything other than a complete anti-choice stance to a holocaust. There’s also this excerpted passage about Warren the tax-evader:

The California megachurch minister and opponent of gay marriage who will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration had his income tax returns audited in 1996. When the IRS tried to collect the taxes it claimed he owed, Warren went to court. Congress then passed a law granting Warren’s tax deduction, pre-empting the US Court of Appeals from even taking up the case against him. The votes in the House and Senate were unanimous.

The IRS permits members of the clergy to claim exemptions for their housing. At the time of Warren’s audit the amount claimed had to be “reasonable”–it shouldn’t exceed the fair market value for the rental of the home. That 1996 audit concluded that Warren was deducting more than that–the IRS said he owed it $55,300. Warren challenged the IRS in tax court, arguing that his housing exemption should be unlimited.

The facts were simple: in 1993 Warren deducted $77,663, his entire Saddleback Church salary that year, as a housing expense–and paid no taxes at all on that salary. In addition, he claimed a deduction for his mortgage expenses–even though they had been covered by the salary. He made similar claims in subsequent tax returns.

Warren spent four years defending his housing deduction in tax court

And as a preemptive counter to those who can’t get enough of this self-serving, ludicrous figure, don’t bother citing some of the “good” things he has done. I’m not arguing that he is evil incarnate, only that he is a bigoted, destructive, hateful, delusional charlatan who preys on other people’s emotional, intellectual, and psychological shortcomings and manipulates, takes advantage of, and exploits them in order to aggregate additional power, wealth, and fame – fundamentally no different than Kenneth Hagin, Rodney Howard-Browne, Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc. He is a malignancy masquerading as a cure.

It only seems appropriate to end one one more quote by the good reverend, arguably his most intellectually dishonest and telling quote I’ve been able to find:

“We serve God by serving others. The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige, and position. If you can demand service from others, you’ve arrived. In our self-serving culture with its me-first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept.”

And Rick Warren has plenty of servants.

The senate has now finished rubbing their greasy, McTeague-like fingers all over their health care bill, having made it progressively worse with every single Congressional meeting and change. Let’s remember: the House version was already considered a weak, watered-down version of true reform that didn’t go nearly far enough in helping individual Americans. In fact, it seemed to be more supportive of the very insurance companies that the bill was supposedly designed to protect Americans from in the first place. This version now looks like the Civil Rights Act compared to what the Senate has managed to shit out.

The senate version has no public option, which in and of itself was a down-syndrome version of a universal or single-payer system. Nick Skala, who worked for Physicians for a National Health Program, had this to say about the public option:

The public option preserves all the systemic deficiencies that we see in the current system…It maintains a finance system that is based on private insurance and private insurers and their drive to fight claims, issue denials, screen out the sick and make a big profit generate tremendous administrative waste — 400 billion dollars a year.

Now you can expand coverage by just raising taxes and paying insurers to cover people but that’s not a sustainable system…But it won’t cover every body and it will fall apart quickly due to rising cost as we’ve seen in Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Minnesota — state after state after state and it hasn’t worked.

Now the definition of insanity is to repeat what has gone on in the past and expect a different result. Yet that’s what we’re doing with the public option. And as a representative of physicians in that capacity, and certainly the relationship I have with nurses and patients, I feel it’s my duty to be honest about the best policy research, the best literature, and the best experience that we have and that all indicates that the public option is going to fail.

Also see this chart comparing a single-payer system with that of the public option. It is important to note that a single-payer system would actually save an estimated $400 billion a year.

So our elected representatives first refused to adopt a single-payer system that has been proven effective by various western industrialized nations, all of whom are generally ranked higher in terms of medical care than the United States. At least the public option, despite all of its serious faults, at least provided Americans with a choice beyond the corrupt, malignant private insurers. People could finally get care and treatment at a relatively affordable cost without being subject to the whims of corporations that value profit over its customers. But that, too, is now gone.

Despite the fact that the Senate stripped their bill of such an option for the American people, they have continued to insist on a mandate. This literally baffles me. I’m a misanthrope. A cynic. I expect incompetence and corruption from our elected officials. I expect dishonesty and theft. Despite this, despite my low, in-the-gutter covered with toxic runoff expectations, I am still shocked by the unbelievable, blatantly corrupt and unethical nature of this mandate. Let’s be clear: the government is going to force every American to buy private insurance or face significant fines and possible confiscation of funds by the IRS. Some people will qualify for some government assistance, but ultimately, a gun is being put to your head and you’re being told to open your wallet and hand over your hard-earned income to the same assholes who provide such an expensive, shitty service that you either can’t already afford it or don’t want to. Democrat Anthony Weiner, echoing propaganda common among his colleagues and uncritical supporters of this legislation, tries to mask the mandate as a responsible obligation that every American should fulfill and has compared it to car insurance.

Weiner is either deluding himself to make the bill more palatable, suffering from a rather serious intellectual deficiency, or outright lying to the public. This comparison to car insurance is a classic false analogy, finding one or two similarities between the two and therefore concluding that they are entirely alike or comparable. Weiner assumes that the driving of a car is comparable to being able to receive medical treatment. No one argues that driving a car is a universal or moral right, let alone an imperative. Being able to do so is obviously helpful, but you’re not going to die or watch someone you love die as a result of not having one or having one that is of inferior quality.

Also, what is the reason for driver’s insurance? It is so that if you carelessly or recklessly cause damage to someone else’s property (or damage is done to yours), no one has to go bankrupt in order to pay for repairs. More importantly is the fact that paying for car insurance doesn’t lead to bankruptcy at all. There is a vast price difference between car and health insurance. The average cost of car insurance is $795 in 2007, an actual decrease of 2. 6%. The cost of health insurance in 2009, however, is $4,824 for an individual and $13,375 for a family, an increase of 5% from the previous year. In this same report from USAToday, John Fritz notes, “Since 1999, health insurance premiums for families rose 131%, the report found, far more than the general rate of inflation, which increased 28% over the same period. Overall, health care in the United States is expected to cost $2.6 trillion this year, or 17% of the nation’s economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.”

If you can’t afford car insurance, you still have options. You can possibly drive someone else’s car or rely on public transportation. Comparable options do not exist for health care.

In most of the western industrialized world, health care is considered a right, not a luxury. Such a belief isn’t even a recent development. Dr. King said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Hippocrates argued that, “A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings.” And Buddha: “Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering – an image of death.” No one bats an eye at not being given or provided a car. But it is grossly inhumane to deny someone medical attention, or at least the means to attain it. People die from one, inconvenienced by the other. Medical insurance isn’t about protecting other people from a mistake on your part, but about protecting yourself against the inevitable deterioration of our bodies, from accidents outside our control, from environmental poisons and toxins, from anguish and suffering itself.

The service provided by private insurance companies is so astronomically priced and provides so very little that of all the medical-related bankruptcies in this country, 60% are actually already insured. The average cost of health insurance doesn’t reflect the hundreds of thousands that one is still likely to incur if ever seriously injured or ill. This isn’t protection. It’s more akin to a mafia shakedown. Pay us money or we’ll beat the shit out of you. Paying this mandate won’t be the sign of a responsible American, but a desperate one who has been mugged in the alley, an American that is likely to fall further and further into economic disarray while receiving a product that has consistently been ranked as one of the worst in the Western world. The World Health Organization currently has us rated #37 in the world , far behind all of those “evil socialist” countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The very idea of forcing Americans to give more of their money – money that they do not have – to private insurance companies is repulsive. These companies already make billions of dollars. According to FactCheck.org, the following companies posted these earnings:

UnitedHealth Group: $859 million in the second quarter of 2009
Humana Inc.: $282 million quarterly profit
Health Net: $40 million profit in the spring alone
Wellpoint: $693 million in this quarter
CIGNA: $435 million for the quarter

All of this while the average family income has fallen. David Leonhardt writes , “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago. . . In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.” As if further stuffing the coffers of gluttonous, indifferent insurers with the diminishing savings of Americans were not offensive enough, consider not just the inferiority of the service, but the character of the companies providing it. Their profits are in direct proportion to the suffering of Americans. Former senior executive at CIGNA Wendell Potter testified against his former company before the very Senate that craft this bill. As Ezra Klein reports

The industry, Potter says, is driven by “two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

Knowing this, these companies find ways to refuse the authorization of treatments. Americans will be paying for something that they may never receive, not because of some product shortage or lack of need but simply because the insurance companies know they can increase their profit off of saying no to the sick and dying. And whereas a car insurance company’s refusal to pay a claim may only result in having to live with a dent in the side of your car, a health insurer’s declination can and does result in death.

This is who the Senate, knowing all of this full well, wants to force you to enrich. This is who they want to force you to rely on in order to live and be healthy. Is it any wonder then that the stock for these companies have increased upon completion of a bill that is supposedly reforming and regulating the industry? Shahien Nasiripour notes

Investors are seeing the Senate’s version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies — and as a result, are sending the sector’s stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option – a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

Here’s a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday’s market close:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

Americans aren’t the ones that the United States Senate are protecting and trying to help. Private insurance companies, however, are. After all, healthcare companies have spent $ 635 million dollars on lobbying Congress in just the past two years alone while the average American is still spending his or her money on frivolous things, such as food and shelter.

Bellow is an interview of Howard Zinn conducted by Bill Moyers on his PBS program, Bill Moyers Journal. Zinn is a social activist, historian, and award-winning author. One of my favorite quotes of his is, “I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”