Another Fine Mess
(Government • Death)
So it would appear on this Veterans Day that President Obama will pull the trigger on 30,000 or more American soldiers very soon, sending them to join our sons and daughters already in Afghanistan.
If Obama follows through on this plan, I hope he and his advisors will, for the benefit of the kids putting their lives on the line and for the rest of us who love them, explain the intent behind this action.
I don’t think there’s any doubt about Al Qaeda, our sworn enemy playing hide-and-seek along the Pakistan border. But their sometime-friends the Taliban? Are we in Afghanistan and growing our presence there because we are trying to uproot and destroy the Taliban?
What about the country we’ve invaded? Are we there to “save” Afghanistan from the Taliban? Are we there to enforce some sort of democracy? If we’re backing Afghanistan democracy, then what if rural Afghans elect Taliban leaders?
And if we’re fans of democracy, how do we square rigged elections that give President Hamid Karzai more than a million fake votes?
Not to mention heroin – the addicitve narcotic derived from opium poppies grown within a large swath of Afghanistan, much of it in a region controlled by Karzai’s brother who, according to reports, controls opium distribution routes in southern Afghanistan and, oh yeah, has been collecting hefty payments from the CIA for years, in exchange for some damn thing.
So are we fixin’ to send another 30,000 of our finest children off to serve as cannon fodder (195 dead, 1,000-plus wounded since July) to keep the world’s strongest heroin dealers in power?
Just curious, really damn curious, to hear the justification for sending our hope and our future off to die some more.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 11, 2009, 06 08 am
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Why Your Kids Missed Those Flu Shots
(Medical • Government)
The other day, the mayor of the upscale Houston suburb of Sugar Land found himself a dose of flu vaccine, had it administered in front of the cameras and turned the event into a tone-deaf press release, urging his fellow citizens to follow his example and in fact get two vaccines from their doctors right away – one for the seasonal flu and one for the swine flu.
As noted here at the time, neither vaccine was available to most of his fellows – thanks in great part to government ineptitude and free-market forces gone awry.
But it’s nice to know that, while many of the 25 million residents of Texas have already contracted swine flu while waiting for the vaccine cavalry that never arrived, at least some high-risk citizens have found inoculation against the Pig Plague:
Employees of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Time Warner and several other big New York companies. Cross my heart. You just can’t make up stuff like this.
Even though it sounds like something out of the Black Helicopters Subscription Service, the same Centers for Disease Control that couldn’t get any swine flu vaccine into the Lone Star state before every cowboy caught the pandemic nonetheless managed to help get the vaccine into the veins of elite private employers – many of them, coincidentally, the same ones we bailed out with billions of our tax dollars after they blew up the financial system.
Obviously, then, if you’re Johnny Nobody out in the sticks, or if you’re unemployed anywhere – or even if you have an OK job right there in Emerald City – you’re just not quite as good as the citizens at JPGoldmanCiti, riding First Class and disease-free with Jesus, on the backs of the New American Peasantry.
Bitter? Who’s bitter?
→ B.Dunn, Nov 08, 2009, 06 01 am
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Let Them Eat Ammonia
(Food • Government)
As if you needed more evidence that the Food and Drug Administration is, to put it kindly, run almost by accident, there’s this:
Starting in spring 2011, sales of fresh, live oysters from Texas, Louisiana and Florida will be prohibited from May to October unless they are processed after harvest, an FDA official told the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference last week.According to FDA data, Vibrio vulnificus infections cause an average of 30 illnesses each year in the United States, from which 15 people die…Vibrio deaths usually occur among people with underlying chronic conditions such as AIDS, cancer, kidney disease, diabetes and alcohol abuse.
Get it? This is an emergency of such immense proportions that the ban on spring and summer oysters is being put in place in two years. And once it’s in place, it could result in the saving of up to 15 lives (12 of whom likely will go on to expire of other causes within weeks).
Yeah, sure, the entire city of Apalachicola, Fla. (which harvests some fine oysters by the way) and a couple hundred people associated with the Galveston Bay oyster industry will lose their jobs, but probably fewer than 15 of them will die of starvation.
Meanwhile (and here’s the fun part), E. coli, mostly the 0157:H7 variety, and much of the time coursing its way through improperly processed hamburger, hospitalizes at least 2,000 Americans each year, kills 60 of them and permanently maims others.
Yet government food inspection agencies aren’t threatening to ban the sale of hamburger until Cargill and the nation’s other giant meat-processors stop including floor sweepings and ammonia in their “Angus Beef Patties.”
So, guess who has the biggest bank account: the American beef lobby or the Apalachicola oyster fleet owners?
→ B.Dunn, Oct 28, 2009, 07 10 am
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Insure My Ass
(Business • Government)
Various components of the insurance industry have been bleeding me for decades. Nothing in which I can sit and also aspire to own is free from a veneer of insurance, least of all my own skin. Essentially by spreading their bribes around over the years, the industry has ratcheted down regulations and laws to the point that I can’t spit in my own back yard without carrying a salivation policy. And if I spit twice, my neighbor is required to get flood insurance.
I’ve heard many call it a necessary evil, but can’t help questioning the necessity. It seems to me that in essence, insurance is a hedge against God’s temporary disfavor. That in itself provides a clue with whom you are dealing. How smart is it, really, to insure yourself to the point you can be Smitten by your Maker and just shrug it off as a chaotic mathematical inconvenience? How far can Fate be bent before the fabric of the universe is rent?
Which brings me to the congressional attempt to modify the current American health care system of either sending insurance companies $2 in advance for every $1 you think you might have to give to a doctor after first paying off your $3,000 deductible and using all the expired antibiotics you horded from last winter, or waiting for six hours in the Oxbow County Public Poverty Hospital emergency humiliation room to get your arthritis prescription renewed.
As I have watched this drama unfold over the past several months, I have repeatedly found myself compelled to ask the same question: Why is everyone pretending that there is any difference at all between the insurance industry and congressional Republicans? The insurance industry and the congressional Republicans (with the exception of Olympia Snowe but with the addition of Joe Lieberman) both (all) utter the same lying public statements about what “insurance reform” will mean, what percentage of senior citizens will be asphyxiated and barbecued and how many of our children will have to be sold into servitude to major retail outlets in order to buy coverage under the new and as-yet largely undefined reform plan.
The Republican Party and the insurance industry lobbyists even quote the same “non-partisan” (insurance-company-owned) research institutes. And when they quote them, the Republican Party and the insurance industry lobbyists even use the same nouns, adjectives and verbs strung into the same sentences. They are on the same page, joined at the wallet.
Other than the independently wealthy, I don’t think any honest American possessed of a fully functional brain believes the current health care system is not in need of serious reform. Everyone agrees that insurance middlemen obtain too many of the dollars flowing through the system, in return for far too little value.
Apparently there is some disagreement over whether every human deserves to be able to see a doctor when they are sick, though. Most congressional Republicans and, of course, the insurance companies, seem content to allow all retail employees, lawn-care company workers, roofing crews, migrant farm workers, journalists, union members, artists and unemployed people to obtain health care over at the Oxbow County Public Poverty Hospital emergency humiliation room.
For those of you who just like to cut to the bottom line, here it is, (and I apologize in advance if this is too blunt for your sensibilities, but this is my opinion and if I can’t say it on my own blog than what the fuck?):
The insurance industry has bribed itself deep into the wallet of every American who has one, and has created a system where it does not have to risk insuring the poorest and sickest members of our society. And now that their money spigot is being threatened, they are spending their largess on an ad campaign full of big honkin’ lies. And, of course, on congressional Republicans like the one in my district, who see more opportunity in taking bribes from the insurance industry and race-baiting the lunatic fringe than in attempting to do the right thing for all of their constituents, not just the richest, whitest ones. Congressional Republicans have come out of the closet and put their personal fortunes and their political affiliation before America.
Really, this should be the greatest moment ever in the history of the Libertarian Party.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 14, 2009, 05 08 am
