Koch Brothers' Limitless Greed Would Destroy Obamacare, Causing 10K Deaths per Year

The Koch Brothers have been bankrolling the current challenge to Obama's Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court. It's outrageous that their attempt to declare Obamacare unconstitutional has gotten this far. Experts say that if the Court decides against the ACA on what perhaps amounts to an infelicitous textual technicality, it could send the Act into a "death spiral" that could eventually deprive tens of millions of people of their health insurance. The result would be 10,000 more people dying per year.

The point of contention turns on the distinction between federal and state subsidies. Legal experts say it is unlikely that the Court will side with the plaintiffs, who scoured the hundreds of pages of the bill to turn up with this mean-spirited ultra-slim "gotcha" point. But these legal minds specialize in foaming over details and avoiding a view of the whole. They seem to ignore the damage their point will do, while making every effort to divert attention from their real agenda, which is to further enrich the hyper-rich Koch Brothers. Fortunately, Justice Anthony Kennedy sees a Constitutional problem in the huge social impact that siding with the plaintiffs would cause. Kennedy, the so-called "swing" vote, has swung rather conservative since his predecessor in that unofficial position, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, left the Court in 2005. His Constitutional interpretations (anti-abortion, Citizens United, anti-ACA) have seemed rather naive and obtuse until now. Could he be waking up?

The outrage is compounded by the success since 2008 of the "too big to fail" and "too big to jail" policies, which has saved the bankster lawbreakers, whose shenanigans caused a world-wide economic crash, from being held accountable. Just imagine if a hundredth of the legal assiduousness spent on trying to destroy Obamacare was turned to financial law to prosecute the likes of Jamey Diamond and Lloyd Blankfein, of Morgan-Chase and Goldman-Sachs respectively. They, their lieutenants, and their cohorts across the industry would be in prison stripes breaking rocks for years.

The Emerging Republican Majority.2

In 1969 Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority in which he argued that the South, a naturally conservative region, would soon switch its allegiance from its “solid” votes for Democratic office-holders and presidents, dating back to the Civil War, when Republicans carried the banner of anti-slavery and by implication racial equality, to the contemporary Republican party, which had staked out its ideological territory as defending “traditional values” of self-reliance, family and religion. The Democratic party, meanwhile, under the influence of FDR, had embraced social justice, government administered programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and later Head Start and many others, and which was then closer to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement (which many Republicans still embraced at the time), had become the more progressive party.
    He was right. The Republicans took over the South, not without covertly embracing racist policies, including opposition to Affirmative Action, but later including the practices that encouraged racial profiling, the differential enforcement of drug laws that landed disproportionate numbers of blacks in prison, lock-step support of the gun lobby, that tended to stoke racial fears, and eventually the support of the prison-industrial complex, with its endorsement of long sentences and greater incarceration rates, both of which increased its profits despite great social costs, and finally Stand-Your-Ground laws, with their covert racial content.
    The larger goals of Republicans, however, along with many Democrats, have included the transfer of wealth to the wealthiest, the increase in inequality. After all, it was the wealthiest through their mega-corporations and industry associations that paid them the most. So Republican campaigns, think tanks and political organizations such as Rove’s Crossroads, are lavishly funded by the interests they serve, all with the legal blessing bestowed by Citizens United.
    At the same time, however, there has been a nefarious increase in the number of highly manipulable computerized voting machines, manufactured by companies that openly proclaim themselves sympathetic to Republicans and right-wing agendas, and administered by Republican state election commissions with the help of Rove’s giant organization.
    It must be said that as the Bush administration ended there was call for investigation and prosecution of Karl Rove for his questionable activities in the previous eight years. Had this been done, we might not be in the predicament, where, as Jonathan D. Simon and others have pointed out, there is extremely strong evidence of computerized voting machine manipulation, leading to widespread election theft. See Simon's book Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century. (This is not a new phenomenon: Mark Crispin Miller exposed it in Fooled Again [2007] about the theft of the 2004 Presidental election, but it has become much more endemic, virtually institutionalized since then). The practice has been virtually ignored in the mainstream (corporate) and left-wing press, but the upshot is that it amounts to a situation that in many states Democrats must win by around 60%, while Republicans win elections with only around 40% of the real vote.
    This situation virtually guarantees a Republican majority in halls of power, though they are a diminishing proportion of the actual electorate. It is the rule by the few, representing the richest interests in the country. The increasingly unavoidable conclusion is that this is being done through criminal electoral theft, and it is leading to a deep undermining of our Constitution on many fronts. But as Chris Hedges has pointed out, every fascist or totalitarian state is founded on great crimes.
    How is this possible in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?
    For this we must turn to Sheldon Wollin’s penetrating concept of “inverted totalitarianism.” As he explains in Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008), this is a condition in which certain concepts, call them truths, cannot by examined or even uttered in the main organs of communication in the country. Thus it is forbidden to take seriously notions such as the CIA conspiracy to kill JFK (though there is more than ample evidence); the government complicity to bring down the WTC towers on 9/11; and now the rampant manipulation of computerized voting machines always to favor Republicans, and which is most probably responsible for the recent GOP sweep in the 2014 elections.
    This throws into open question the legitimacy of those now in positions of power. As a consequence, the widespread apathy among voters, so bemoaned by liberal commentators following last November's election, can be read as a reaction to this steep decline in the legitimacy of our election system—the very cornerstone of our democracy.
    So if the first “emerging Republican majority” was covertly based on racism, this second one is based on covert criminality. We need to expose it.

National Security State: it's all about MONEY

    On Monday morning’s Democracy Now! (January 5, 2015) author, lawyer, and Harper's Magazine staff writer Scott Horton was  talking about the mushrooming of secrecy in our belligerent operations, such as the recent drone strike in Waziristan, Pakistan, that killed 9 people, and how the CIA has taken over war-making powers, which they cloak with secrecy “for national security reasons,” of course. He notes that our sloppy drone warfare has drawn together the Islamic radicals and the village councils, which formerly kept their distance from each other. But the villages have suffered far too many needless casualties in this undeclared and mostly secret war. So now we have a bigger enemy, with more recruitment, of course.

If we put that together with James Risen's new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, the real agenda becomes apparent: it’s a huge money-maker for the National Security state, the armaments manufacturers, contractors, etc. We’re essentially in the same position as Egypt under al-Sisi's current dictatorship: the military, a major profit-making organization, has taken over the state to insure its own continued income. We do it more subtly, more indirectly, in a more hidden fashion with a more complicit mainstream media—and on a much grander scale.

Disgusting; anti-democratic, a real usurpation of power. This is the "End of America," that Naomi Wolf writes about. It is probably also the reason the government is out to get Risen, demanding he reveal his sources or face prison—he really spills the beans on what this is all about, viz. money, viz. a $70 billion industry, all emerging from the founding myth of 9/11, as Dick Cheney reminded us in his now infamous Meet the Press interview last month, where he said he’d “do it again in a minute,” namely torture (though even the CIA admits it’s ineffectual) which according to him, has prevented another terrorist attack. Horton hits him hard with the legal definition of “depravity,” namely the advocacy of actions that heedlessly cause harm to innocent people. Then he criticizes the press for giving such a criminal so much air time, with so little for his critics, and with no challenges to his outlandish statements.

In Memoriam: Stéphane Hessel

The late Stéphane Hessel, October 6, 2012, Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Photo by me.

         The great humanitarian and fighter against fascism and oppression, Stéphane Hessel died Tuesday at the age of 95. Here is a link to the NY Times obituary. Hessel was born in Berlin and became a naturalized French citizen in 1938 while still a student. He escaped to London to join DeGaulle after the Nazi occupation of France, then returned to fight in the Résistance, where he was capture three times in toward the end of the war, but managed to escape each time. Here’s a link to the  Times obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/world/europe/stephane-hessel-author-and-activist-dies-at-95.html?_r=0

         Among the things that this obituary leaves out are Hessel’s struggles with the creators of the United Nations to strengthen its commitment to human rights. He notes, for example, that Dag Hamarskjold was chosen as Secretary-General because he was considered a rather anodyne economist and wouldn’t stir things up. He turned out to be a very activist occupier of that office, whose death in a plane crash remains suspicious.

         Hessel worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and became France’s first ambassador to the United Nations. He continued to struggle his whole life for justice, as he documents, among other things, in his impassioned autobiography Danse avec le siècle. He was also very involved in the art world, through Pierre Roché, his mother’s lover and father’s close friend, who was an art dealer, and famously the author of Jules et Jim. That 1953 novel and 1959 film by François Truffaut fictionalizes the love triangle—and and takes revenge on Hessel’s mother, Helen (Catherine in the novel and Truffaut film), by having her character drive off a bridge with her children and husband. In reality, she dumped him when she found out he had had a child in secret with another woman. But she had died 12 years before the novel came out.

         I saw Hessel speak at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, this past October, where he was as impassioned as ever. I wasn’t sure who he was, but I was impressed with his message and duly photographed him and added him to my Apostles of Justice collection (www.joelsimpsonart.com). The chairman of the conference held up his pamphlet Indignez-vous (A Time for Outrage) and stressed its role in inspiring the Occupy movement. All the official photographs of Hessel depict him as a benevolently smiling old man. But I saw him in the throes of his outrage as he addressed us (see photo, above), that same outrage which probably enabled him to survive Nazi torture and imprisonment, and which fueled his personal fight for human rights thereafter, to the world's enormous benefit.

North Dakota Oil Convergence

Theodore Roosevelt's Cabin, South Unit, Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park

Interior of Theodore Roosevelt's Cabin

"Cannonball" formations, badlands of Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park, North Unit, near Watford City, a North Dakota oil drilling center.

The March issues of both National Geographic and Harper’s feature cover stories on the same subject: oil exploration through hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the Bakken shale in North Dakota. In reporting this exceptional boom, which has driven North Dakota’s unemployment rate to 3%, the lowest in the nation, neither article exudes optimism. The articles supplement each other. The one in National Geographic anchors itself in the perspective of a 39-year-old woman, a risk-taker—fiction writer, painter, filmmaker, and lead singer in a rock band in her earlier life—to leave the desperate financial straits she, her husband, and two daughers were in in southwestern Montana, to travel alone to North Dakota, where she learned to drive an 18-wheeler, and then plunked herself down amidst the “testosterone cloud” of nearly all male workers, where her superior trucking skills found her work that very quickly solved her families financial problems back home. Truckers in this land of fraying two-lane roads, make six-figure incomes, as do many of the other workers in this oil-boom region, which in the past two years has surpassed California and Alaska in its oil output, behind only Texas now. The boom, like any boom, has strained the local roads, hospitals, schools and other municipal services, attracted vice and guns, and quintupled housing prices, forcing many long-time residents to leave. While workers are well-paid, most are from out of state, and the profits enrich company owners in Texas and Oklahoma. The state, which has legislated that the drilling poses no environmental risk to the fragile prairie, receives an 11.% on oil sales, which has led to a $1.6 billion budget surplus during this time of cutbacks. The National Geographic article provides excellent cutaway illustrations of how the drilling works to extract the elusive oil. It voices concerns about the toxic effects of the chemicals used in fracking, but couches them in the fears of others, not the author of the article.

         The Harper’s article by Richard Manning roots its perspective in the experiece of Theodore Roosevelt, who in his twenties and reeling from the deaths of his mother and young wife on the same Valentine’s day in 1884, bought a ranch he named Elkhorn, and where he rusticated for two years, minutely recording his experience of his natural environment, but saying nothing about his mourning process. (His cabin is preserved near the Visitor Center of the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park, near Medora, N.D. that features magnificent badlands, and which I visited this past summer—along with the North Unit, which has its own distinctive badlands, equally beautiful.) When Roosevelt returned to public life, he founded the conservation movement and was determined to preserve the American wilderness against business and especially oil monopolists, like John D. Rockefeller, whom he called “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth” (turned into his more famous “malefactors of great wealth” in a speech in 1907).

         Though National Geographic, with its social and technological emphasis, is careful not to take position on the environmental impact of the massive drilling the Harper’s article offers many facts on the subject that speak for themselves: that there were 1100 oil spills in North Dakota in 2011, that a berm designed to prevent the runoff of toxic water from a reserve-pit was breached resulting in a massive fish kill, that drainages has permanently killed all vegetation in their paths, that a drilling rig located close to an eagles’ nest resulted in the death of all the birds, one of them by gunshot, arriving at the summary conclusion, “Gunplay, the roads, the rigs, the noise, the trucks, the off-duty oil workers on all terrain vehicles (ATVs), the general disregard for anything living that is the consequence of industrializing a once-wild landscape”—all of these killed the eagles. And Manning notes that the 8000+ wells, involved more in a “plumbing” operation than an exploratory one in the Bakken shale of North Dakota has never entered the national political discussion around climate and environmental issues. Yet it's so big that the natural gas burnoff fires (as he shows with a photograph) rival the metropolis of Minneapolis-St. Paul from the air at night—except that they're red. He adds a significant note on the Keystone XL pipeline that has provoked so much protest, saying that it’s “designed to relieve a bottleneck caused, in part, by a glut created by increased Bakken production,” adding that such pipelines are cheaper, safer and less carbon-producing than the massive amount of trucking now used to transport oil.        

         So the logic seems to be clear: as long as our dependence on oil is not questioned, and especially as long as the “externalities” (meaning the human and environmental costs resulting from a commercial operation such as oil drilling which the the companies don’t have to take responsibility for) are excluded, the virtually unregulated oil drilling in the Bakken and the Keystone XL pipeline are no-brainers. The problem is that they are killing the environment, and may end up killing us.

In the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook shooting and the choruses of "When Will They Ever Learn," as Michael Moore points out that there have been 61 mass shooting since Columbine, perhaps it's time to rename the gun lobby the "Death Lobby," taking a page from the Heritage Foundations dubbing of the inheritance tax the "death tax."

So now we can target Congress members who accept money from the "Death Lobby," as in, "How much money did you receive from the Death Lobby this year, Senator?" That should get them scampering.

The Coming Romney Implosion

Although, like so many others, I've been very disappointed in President Obama's performance, especially in the policing of the banking industry, the drone war in the Middle East (and the Presidential power to murder anyone anywhere in the world deemed a "terrorist"), and his signature health-care bill that enshrines the profits of insurance companies; I can't help enjoying what appears to be the unraveling of the Romney campaign these days, over his prevarications regarding his control of Bain Capital after 1999 (when it became a job exporter & destroyer), and his refusal to make his tax returns public. An aura of  slickness and dishonesty is forming around him, and the more he tries to "clarify" things by splitting hairs in business-speak, the more he begins to sound like Clinton trying to fend off accusations of sexual impropriety by implying that oral sex is not true sex, without mentioning the former (remember, "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is"?) Both Charles Blow and Gail Collins offered revealing columns on this subject in Saturday's New York Times (July 14).

So the Republican Presidential campaign is beginning to implode, and the Democrats are gleefully nudging it along, as they should. By the time we get to the national convention at the end of August Romney's stink might be so great the would be GOP kingmakers may actually betray their distaste while praising him on the podium, and the gut-based voters back home may get the subliminal message. How long can Boehner and others insist that the election is not about who Romney is or what is leadership would be like, but only about getting rid of that usurper in the White House and replacing him by anybody (even a Bush retread??)? Can non-racists, non-Obama haters (who think he's both the devil and a socialist) actually swallow this?

The problem is that any Republican nominee would have the same problem. Since they're all really working for the big corporations and giant banks and don't give a whit about the poor (whom they try to prevent from voting—and soon, eating, judging by their recent attempt to defund food stamps while preserving big agribusiness "farm" subsidies) corporate malfeasance, the environment, infrastructure, education, etc. etc., the GOP election strategy is perforce to crap on the opponent and stay as mum as possible about the character and background of their nominee. Fortunately, we still have some investigative journalism left, and the Boston Globe has been doing the digging around Romney, requiring him to make 5 network TV appearances to split those hairs over his disssociation with Bain (despite a 6-figure salary) after he accepted the unpaid position as Salt Lake City Olympics chair in 1999.

This season is going to be fun.