The daily newspaper is now always loaded with Dickensian characters.
The country has a class of people, a club that hated the last two thirds of A Christmas Carol.
Often they have truly negative security implications for the general welfare.
Take Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the man behind the biggest egg recall in US history, profiled in the Los Angeles Times last week.
As the head of Wright County Egg Farms in Iowa, the paper couldn’t have painted him more poorly. If there was something evil Decoster hadn’t done in food production in the last few years, one can’t imagine what it might have been.
Decoster caused child labor laws to be rewritten in Maine, was sued by neighbors for “beetle infestation,” had eggs his company produced banned in New York, and was declared a “habitual violator” of environmental regulations in Iowa for “mishandling of hog waste.”
And in 1997 he was fined by the feds for “numerous egregious safety and health violations” in Maine.
But the US system just can’t get a guy like this off the street, even after he’s directly responsible for sickening 1,500 with Salmonella enteritidis.
In the predator state, the bad company led by bad men will literally poison the public. And they won’t stop until people are killed. In the predator state system, still that’s not even enough to get them [dragged off].
A year ago Baxter International and another US company it did business with killed people by selling tainted heparin. Heparin is a necessary drug in US medicine and it used to be made here. But in the rush for profits, like many other US businesses, both companies subcontracted their formerly in-house work to China, where there were people willing and malicious enough to deliver a cheaper counterfeit substance, a derivative of chondroitin sulfate, used to mimic heparin. The counterfeit material sickened hundreds and killed a number of people outright. There were news stories and vows of reform. And then nothing happened; it was back to business as usual in the predator state. It was no time to get in the way of commerce!
Today readers have the spectacle of the house hearings in which Peanut Corporation of America’s CEO, Stewart Parnell, is seen as willfully urging his employees to get his salmonella-laced peanuts out the door.
“[Parnell] gave instructions to nonetheless ‘turn them loose’ … ” reports the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. At the time, Parnell was engaged in finding a laboratory that wouldn’t return a positive salmonella test, kind of like fishing through a high school bundle of failed exams, looking for the lone good one, the coincidental exception, that could be waved around to show what a diligent student you were.
However, despite making hundreds ill and killing a handful, Parnell’s still on the street and the bulldozers haven’t been called. Literally, months go by — sometimes years — and the US government just will not remove such people.
In the predator state, this is the way things work, or — don’t work.
In the predator state, it is important to look the other way, to pretend to be concerned, but to actually remain indifferent to such things as long as humanly possible. Because to take action would be to interfere with the business of predators, the making of profit at everyone else’s expense.
Two years later, and despite lots of noise from the Obama administration about making regulation stronger and revamping the FDA with someone named Margaret Hamburg — someone at the time of appointment alleged to be great — it’s the same old story.
Not enough regulations, or regulations put in place too late, or ignored, or any other miscellaneous excuse from a bottomless grab-bag to explain why we have the trouble we do.
The Los Angeles Times profile of DeCoster had someone attesting he was at least good for local tax revenues. This because in desperate times people will accept anything really bad as long as there’s a bit of money that comes with it.
And one of his old attorney’s added: “I know Jack pushes the envelope because he’s growth oriented.”
Growth-oriented and envelope-pushing to the extent that today newspapers read:
Federal investigators found piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons and other birds inside the hen houses at two egg farms suspected of causing a nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness, officials said Monday.
Investigators made public their observations of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, two massive egg producers who have recalled nearly 500 million eggs since Aug. 13.
===
FDA officials said Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms appeared to violate federal regulations for egg safety that took effect July 9, as well as voluntary industry standards for sanitation. Company officials have said they were in compliance. — the WaPost
On its blog, the LA Times explained salmonella had been virtually eliminated from state egg production by institution of a rigorous program of sanitation.
The program, which includes vaccinating hens and testing barns regularly for bacteria, has essentially wiped out salmonella on California farms, industry officials say. Yet only nine other states have enacted similar government-sponsored efforts.
In other words, protecting the public has impacted business and that we cannot abide:
One reason, the Armstrongs and other California farmers contend, is cost. Injecting chickens and swabbing cages takes money — not a fortune, but enough to send egg distributors searching for lower-cost sources.
“We have lost contracts over pennies a dozen,” Ryan Armstrong said. “They want cheap eggs.”
One obvious answer to this is for the US government to regularly destroy a business and ban its bosses for causing mass illness through negligence and cost-cutting. And to do it swiftly.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen in what’s left of our lifetimes. You’re going to regularly see more and more of this type of thing.
Hand in hand with it — almost unnoticed, however — will go regular increases in expenditure to increasing food security against attack from terrorists.
The article from old DD blog continued:
In the predator state, it is critical that attention be diverted from real liabilities to the external menace, potential threats which can even be trumped up in the absence of proof that such things exist in a practical sense. In the case of tainted food and drugs, it has been the radical Islamists under Osama bin Laden who have been passed around as those who would easily poison and contaminate American food and drugs.
Terrorists might put botulism in milk, killing hundreds of thousands.
Terrorists might put anthrax in beef, rice or orange juice. (It was an American, an insider, working from a biodefense lab, who put anthrax in the mail, killing five. But only recently has research on dangerous agents been suspended at the lab where the insider, Bruce Ivins, worked so that the military-run disease house can be internally put in order.)
Osama bin Laden might even poison meals at school!
In fact, one famous example always used to squeal about what terrorists can do to food was also an American example, the work of the Rajneeshee cult in The Dalles, Oregon. And while it was intentional, it still was not as effective at creating illness, monetary loss and disruption as the recent egg recall.
Bioterrorist attacks could be covert or announced and could be caused by virtually any pathogenic microorganism. The case of the Rajneeshee religious cult in The Dalles, Oregon, is an example (1). The cult planned to infect residents with Salmonella on election day to influence the results of county elections. To practice for the attack, they contaminated salad bars at 10 restaurants with S. Typhimurium on several occasions before the election. A communitywide outbreak of salmonellosis resulted; at least 751 cases were documented in a county that typically reports fewer than five cases per year. Although bioterrorism was considered a possibility when the outbreak was being investigated by public health officials, it was considered unlikely. The source of the outbreak became known only when FBI investigated the cult for other criminal violations. A vial of S. Typhimurium identical to the outbreak strain was found in a clinical laboratory on the cult’s compound, and members of the cult subsequently admitted to contaminating the salad bars and putting Salmonella into a city water supply tank. This incident, among other recent events, underscores the importance of improving preparedness at all levels.
There’s a way of logically looking at these problems. But the US government doesn’t do it and corporate interests work to discourage it.
History shows that bioterrorism as a mechanism for causing illness and disruption is not nearly as frequent, effective, or motivating as the combination of greed, lack of regulation, and an utter disregard for the public welfare.
This blog has devoted some time to the biodefense industry lobby formerly called the Graham-Talent Commission. And what a nuisance it was.
For most of its tenure Graham-Talent existed only as an appendage/p.r firm for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center/Center for Biosecurity and the bioterror defense industry group, the Alliance for Biosecurity.
The US government eventually stopped underwriting it.
And although defunded, last week DD wrote of its latest piece of mischief, political legislation as advertising for the alleged wisdom of itself here.
One of the commission’s co-chairmen is none other than Bob Graham, THE Bob Graham of Graham-Talent.
It’s an atrocious choice.
Either the President never actually paid attention to what Graham-Talent did under Bob Graham, quite possible, because it existed only to plant news stories and opinion pieces busting his chops on bioterror defense. Or the President took counter-intuititive advice from the usual Whitehouse staffers, advice to appoint what amounts to a very bad penny, an infamous political hack always turning up. Someone who has established a set of dubious skills as a “commission chairman” when it’s important the commission so chaired will be friendly to whatever industry is connected to the problem it is charged with investigating.
Let me paint the unpretty picture for you.
If Bob Graham runs the BP Deepwater Horizon Commission the way he ran the WMD Commission, within about a year — or less — its staffers, advisers and consultants will all be stealth choices from BP, companies that worked with BP or other oil industry firms.
And that is because Bob Graham, and his compadre Jim Talent, allowed the WMD Commission to be taken over by staffers from the biodefense industry. And when this happened, it began issuing reports and press releases with only one purpose — to disguise calls for greater funding to the biodefense industry it represented behind an argument that the Obama administration was leaving the country unprepared for catastrophic bioterrorism.
Because no one really paid any attention to Graham-Talent except newspaper op-ed assigning editors and minor Congressional politicians willing to indulge their regular bashing of the Obama administration on bioterror preparedness, few have noticed how rancid and/or impressively cynical an excercise in national leadershig choosing Bob Graham is.
If you wanted to pick one of the worst people to head an independent commission on a catastrophe and national trauma that’s front page news everyday, one who — judging by his track record — would work to stuff his commission full of staff and advice from the industry the agency is supposed to be looking into, Bob Graham is the absolute go-to guy.
It’s an astonishing, eye-rolling thing.
One asks, rhetorically: What in Sam Hill is wrong with President Obama? Does he have a subconscious desire to set himself up? Or is it just more political expedience and daily not-paying-attention except for what the usual partymen have to say?
“The bipartisan commission named by President Obama in May to study the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the future of American offshore drilling will hold its first formal meeting in mid-July at the earliest, most likely delaying the delivery of its final report into next year, a co-chairman of the panel said in an interview,” wrote the New York Times a few hours ago.
Potentially giving it and Bob Graham plenty of time how to figure out to make it surreptitiously BP and oil industry friendly.
There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,'” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
Today, in from the wires on Satan’s favorite bank in Pasadena, OneWest:
Many borrowers complain they get the runaround when they call their lenders for help, receive contradictory information from different employees and are required to repeatedly fax the same documents.
At the same time, suicide threats from distressed borrowers are so common that one lender, OneWest Bank Group in Pasadena, Calif., had to establish procedures for alerting the police. Lenders’ call-center employees are under heavy pressure. “These people make $14 or $15 an hour, and we ask them to move mountains,” said a OneWest executive at an industry conference last month.
That’s so considerate. One can but be astonished at the great labor of the “lender’s call center” and pure milk of human kindness dispensed by OneWest.
From the Wall Street Journal inside a larger article on how another big menace, Bank of America, locked a woman out of her home unjustly and stole her pet parrot.
Now if Jihad Jane had been caught doing such things, the US government’d handle things a little differently, DD thinks.
A couple facing foreclosure from OneWest Bank has joined the growing number of homeowners, attorneys and real estate professionals who believe the bank would rather foreclose than modify a loan.
“It comes down to money and greed. All they want is your home,” said Tom Cravalho, who with his wife Mona has been working for nearly two years to get out of an adjustable rate mortgage.
The Cravalhos said their original lender, IndyMac Bank, agreed to a loan modification in the summer of 2008 that would have offered them a 3 percent interest rate for five years. But then IndyMac was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which sold the bank’s assets to a group of investors who formed OneWest Bank in March 2009.
Tom Cravalho said OneWest Bank has refused to honor the original agreement or discuss new terms. The Cravalhos’ attorney believes OneWest is more interested in reimbursement from the FDIC for the bad loan under a so-called “shared loss” agreement than it is in modifying the Cravalhos’ mortgage.
DD began writing on Satan’s favorite bank when the Huffington Post started its celebrity-run campaign to get people to move their money from big evil parasite banks to small community-oriented banks that allegedly care about their customers.
Just to keep current, I went back to Move Your Money to check if OneWest was still in the list of recommended allegedly not-evil banks.
Yep. No change. Large evil bank still in master list of allegedly small not evil banks.
“AlterNet writer Stephen Pizzo has a simple question for people still using a big bank,” states the Move Your Money blog fatuously. “Why? They’re bad for you, bad for the country, and everybody knows it.”
From an old Ted Nugent column on healthcare reform, at Human Events, the extreme right website/magazine for assorted lunatics:
Let’s get one thing straight about health care. The biggest problem with health care is not the assured escalating costs, but rather that too few Americans actually care about their health. Look around you if you doubt me. We are the most blubber-infested, obese nation in the history of the world. Not only do many Americans eat far too much, others still suck on cancer sticks, others drink too much, and yet others fail to do anything to improve their health.
Yet still some of these bloodsuckers have the audacity to believe someone else should pay for their health care when they obviously do not care about their health. Is this the Planet of the Fat Apes or America?
A dose of truth: health care is not a right. It is a personal responsibility. If you don’t give a damn about your health care, how dare you demand another free man to pay for it. Only the bloodsuckers need feel guilty.
Here’s the short version: Sick people are bloodsuckers. They wouldn’t be sick if they didn’t eat too much, drink alcohol, or spend what little money they have on drug habits.
It’s stupid, heartless and blunt. But it’s what the GOP believes. Health care is only for people who deserve it, like Ted Nugent.
Krugman, today, in a column entitled Afflicting the Afflicted:
The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.
While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is.
There’s another line from Ted Nugent’s explication of what health care ought to be.
It concerns how businesses and the government are run and it’s a real rib-tickler:
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes.
“Bank of America Corp’s (BAC.N) investment banking chief Thomas Montag received $30 million in total pay in 2009, driven by the company’s buyout of Merrill Lynch, according to the company’s proxy filing on Friday,” it is read here today.
“The compensation for the senior executive team of the largest U.S. bank by assets highlighted the pay curbs tied to the $45 billion in U.S. government aid the bank repaid in December 2009.”
“U.S. communications regulators will unveil on March 17 a blueprint aimed at bringing fast affordable Internet access to more than 90 million Americans being held back by fees and technology,” reported Reuters today.
Cue big horselaugh.
Such a promise must be anathema to current US Internet service providers, regularly bent on advertising connection speed ‘bargains’ that aren’t bargains at all — marketed as as ‘bundling.’
Reuters continued:
The Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday that the long-awaited National Broadband Plan will try to help connect 93 million Americans to high-speed Internet to find jobs, access educational and healthcare services, and reduce household energy costs … The FCC, which in August started a series of fact-finding workshops, will submit its recommendations to Congress on March 17, in an effort to lift the United States out of the 19th spot behind Japan, Korea and France — the leaders in a 2008 world ranking for broadband speed.
One could spend hours musing how the GOP might reframe any US government effort to improve broadband in the country as tyrannical and un-Constitutional. Or consider the words of little Tommy Friedman on Sunday, advising that everyone will have to cope with having much less of everything. Except him.
It will never get to that, though. The US is not a ‘can do’ country. It’s not much a leader in anything except on what can’t be done.
To succeed would require an actual investment in infrastructure upgrading, creation of a resource not shaped by current Internet access sale as an unfairly priced commodity rather than a utility which must be delivered to all cheaply, and a dedication to see something happen that was good for the civilian population, not the free market.
Readers will note the prescription/prediction, safely moved into the distant future so no one will remember the big words a year from now,
“Last week [an FCC official] said he wants Internet service providers to offer a minimum connection speed of 100 megabits per second by 2020,” it was told.
As opposed to the greater than one order of magnitude less crap you have now.
The future of FAIL in the US is immense. FAIL holds such an advantage in the way things are done now that nothing can impede it much. Certainly not promises and talk from someone in the FCC.
California makes up at least ten percent of the US GDP. Since it is so large, it only makes sense that it’s the same as the country as a whole in 2010. Irresponsibly run, almost broken beyond repair.
A good example of the dysfunction is Meg Whitman’s run for governorship.
The video is her campaign commercial, which runs frequently. Here, some wag has posted it to YouTube, apparently when it interrupted an comedy skit.
Whitman is a standard 2010 GOP candidate. Anti-big government, anti-tax — which actually got California into its current mess, anti everything but sycophants wishing to kiss her ass.
Like many very wealthy people, it’s a trait that serves reasonably well in 2010 US. It banks on a solid belief among many in the citizenry that it’s good practice to be lickspittle to rich people, to blindly accept everything they suggest, because as my idiot mother used to put it irrefutably: “If you’re so smart, howcum you ain’t rich?”
The corollary to that would then seem obvious.
In Whitman’s commercial, one immediately notices the pics of her on the covers of magazines, underlining the message that here is someone who’s rings deserve kissing.
Whitman’s two big recommendations are to cut spending and ‘fix education.’
In this, she also hews to ruling orthodoxy in 2010 US. That the two prescriptions are incompatible in 2010 California is not important.
Her motto is “Mean what you say, say what you mean.” That this is senseless and hysterical when coming from her means nothing. She was, after all, on the cover of business magazines and the head of eBay.
In an editorial in Canada’s Globe and Mail recently, one columnist described California thusly:
Mired in partisan bickering, the state has shown itself incapable of managing its finances in recent years. It’s now facing a $20-billion (U.S.) budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, and another big gap in 2011. Even with brutal planned cuts to government services and dramatic tax hikes, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked for nearly $7-billion from Washington to fill the gap – a sum he is unlikely to get.
The reason for this, unmentioned, is the affliction in Sacramento is the same one infecting the US government. As in the US Senate, an overwhelming majority is required to pass legislation. This has allowed the GOP — the minority part in the state — to block everything. And so California cannot be governed.
Whitman espouses fixing education in California but it was tax revolt which broke that in the state. And it is the current GOP-controlling minority which gums up everything now.
In fact, spending has been cut radically in California. One of the very noticeable results has been the continued firing of teachers.
Districts are handing out the notices of potential layoff to teachers and other staff in response to the state budget crisis. The recently enacted state budget included $11.6 billion in cuts to public education budget over the next 15 months.
“School districts up and down this state are sending out pink slips to tens of thousands of hard-working, dedicated teachers, administrators, and school staff,” O’Connell said. “Cuts of this magnitude will have devastating effects in our classrooms across the state.”
The recently enacted budget cuts come on top of several years of reduced support in the state budget for public education. Last year, roughly 10,000 teachers received pink slips and an estimated 5,000 ultimately lost their jobs.
“Before the current cuts were enacted, California already ranked 47th in the nation in per-pupil spending,” O’Connell said. “These current cuts are sure to push us further down the scale.
The Newport-Mesa Unified School District Board of Education will vote Tuesday night on a resolution that calls for the elimination of nearly 125 full-time positions, and more than half of them will be young elementary school teachers fresh out of college.
The recommended layoffs, including the dismantling of the district’s Adult Education program and its ESL classes, are expected to save the district $13.5 million in the 2010-11 budget.
The anticipated job losses are a direct result of the state’s recent cutbacks in education due to the fiscal crisis playing out across the entire state, said Laura Boss, a spokeswoman for the district.
Whitman’s strategy is a standard GOP line, more nicely-put Ted Nugent-like philosophy, suitable for framing: If we can just get rid of all the welfare leeches, parasites in state government, and a bunch of undeserving union-protected teachers, that will fix things.
“What has struck me about Whitman is how normal she seems,” writes courtesan Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard. “She’s rich. She donated $30 million to Princeton to build a sixth college on campus (dubbed Whitman College).”
The Wall Street Journal says:
Ms. Whitman, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in California, is fashioning herself as the latest crusader promising to crack down on abuses of the welfare state, which is nowhere more corrupt and costly than in the Golden State … California is twenty years behind the curve on welfare reform, and Ms. Whitman may be the first candidate in a generation with a concrete plan to replace lifetime welfare with work and dignity.
One peruses the abstract of a paper, entitled “A desperate means to dignity: Work refusal amongst Philadelphia welfare recipients”:
Sentiments favoring a sweeping overhaul of the United States’ social welfare system culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 – a law that mandates states to move almost all recipients from cash assistance on welfare to paid work. This ethnographic study examined work refusal among women who left menial jobs to return to welfare, or to subsistence by other means. Seventy interviews and 18 months of participant observation revealed a pattern of confrontations with authority figures at various job sites as well as resentment of the subservience often demanded of workers in the lowest tiers of the primary economy. Confrontations in training programs and at work afforded impoverished women the chance to express their resentments about being relegated to unrewarding, low income work and to maintain vestiges of even a defiant dignity in the face of a hostile social order.
Related:
“Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel,” writes little Tommy Friedman at the New York Times today.
“We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag … The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past — past profligacy — all at the same time. We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever, when public trust in government is lower than ever.”
There are no more vilified figures in the US than Wall Street bankers and health insurers.
For being the objects of unrestricted hate, there’s no topping them.
Nevertheless, some try. Here’s Fox Business News, portrayed everywhere this morning, castigating a Wellpoint/Anthem insurance p.r. man not for gouging and looting customers — but for gouging and looting them at just the wrong time, giving the Obama administration ammunition to push again on healthcare reform.
DD is a resident of California with Anthem coverage.
Here’s how Anthem works. It takes premiums and never pays out.
The deductibles and co-pays are so high one learns to never go into the doctor’s office for illness or health problems that don’t immediately threaten to put you in the emergency room.
I learned this the hard way years ago.
Growth on your nose that might be cancerous?
Forget it. Pay for removal and biopsy yourself.
Painful skin condition? Pay for the drugs to control it with own coin. Or endure it even though the cure is a matter-of-fact one.
I’m certain it’s that way for thousands who now constantly must wonder why they have health insurance at all.
In any case, these are wonderful Sheriff of Nottingham-like quotes:
“Even a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was compelled to feign concern …”
Fox Business News: But [Mr. Wellpoint/Anthem man] this is like Jaws 2, just when you thought it was safe to get out of the healthcare debate, you brought everybody back into it. […] Didn’t someone though, wasn’t there a committee that said listen, let’s take Wall Street’s lead, do the minimum we can, wait for this to blow over and maybe a year from now try to hike rates?
DD is going to leave it to the President and Democratic Party to turn this into a disaster as only they can.
In a month or two we’ll see that government initiatives to make robbing customers blind are horrendous things, fought tooth and nail by many of those being robbed blind.
Here’s a British video showing actor Bill Nighy as a banker reduced to squirming when being questioned about the proposal for a Robin Hood Tax on bank transactions.
The British newspaper The Guardian writes about the campaign to introduce the tax and how bankster firm Goldman Sachs immediately tried to game an opinion poll on the matter at the tax proposal’s website.
Contrast this with video from Fox Business News where a couple of guys, one glabrous and one odious, castigate Barack Obama for wanting to rob from the banks to give to the poor.
You see, in the United States the good guys are the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne. Everyone knows that.
And DD still can’t find a YouTube video of the Jack In the Box commercial, now playing all the time, portraying an employee who poses as Robin Hood as a laughable buffoon. Because he wants to take from the rich and has a fat ass in green tights.
John Pike, a defence analyst and founder of Virginia-based Global Security, said he doubted the test would change Gates’s view. “[Bob Gates] seemed to believe that there was no prospect of the plane engaging targets at ranges of several hundred kilometres, and that engagements at ranges of less than 100 kilometres were not militarily interesting,” he said.
The [Missile Defence Agency] statement did not specify what the range was during the test.
Ivan Oelrich, a physicist and vice-president for strategic security programmes at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “What would be interesting would be how far away it [the missile] is.” He said that to be useful, the laser would have to be able to shoot down missiles from at least 100 miles. It would also be expensive to keep one or more planes on stations waiting for a missile.