"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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Our main enemy is our willingness to pursue fantasies
To believe that the outcome of a presidential election will somehow lead to liberation from oppression is just fantasy, just day-dreaming. The fascist elite periodically offer us a choice between a narrow range of options, all of which primarily serve the interests of these elites. That is reality. While it is important to express a desire in the poling place in favor of greater social justice, for whatever ameliorating effects on our suffering that may represent, it is equally important to remain skeptical of the process. Getting swept away
Some nitpicking. Taking insurance company money might seem like a good idea, but the insurance industry has configured the laws so that taking any insurance is like taking a poison pill. Any self-help action, therefore, would need to be one that uses NO insurance or third party payments. This can be a difficult choice. There is intense interest on the part of underinsured people (essentially everyone now but especially those with Medicare and Medicaid) to force any such community effort to accept their insurance plans. Sorry folks, it won't work. Also, in response to other comments, I am a great supporter of "Free Clinics." They help a lot of people, but they do not represent a sustainable system. They exist as a small bandage on the immense draining wound of health care in the US. Realistic alternatives will need to be responsible about self-financing and not take the opium of "free labor." Volunteer labor only exists because most of the volunteers are dependent on jobs in the conventional system. Ultimately volunteerism only supports the interests of the economic elite and the status quo. Ultimately good care is the result of good relationships between patient and provider. Part of that relationship needs to be fair payment for labor. A functional health co-op would need to confront many, many problems. The greatest of these is the iron control that the establishment has over hospital care. People should not be taken in by the illusion that a health co-op could address their most serious needs in the short or mid term. One of the most important aspects of my original Modest Proposal is that it would have significant economic clout that it could use to force hospitals and emergency rooms to provide affordable care to its membership.
"Regulatory standards" (which are often just corrupt measures to ensure a monopoly for the current predatory system of health care) can make establishing alternative methods of care extremely difficult. As an example, consider the California law that requires strict record-keeping of all patient contacts, and that those records state that "conventional" treatments were offered and refused by the patient when less expensive, and often less dangerous, "alternative" treatments are recommended. Also, practitioners in "alternative" settings, that offer opportunities for significant numbers of people to avoid the current system, can expect to be the victims of selective enforcement of these sorts of corrupt regulations whereas practitioners in "conventional" (meaning largely practitioners employed by corporate medicine) remain essentially unregulated. Consequently, self help arrangements will need to be very well informed about the risks that their practitioners will be taking and be prepared to back them up legally and financially. Taking control of our lives back from the fascists will likely not be a pretty process, but imperfect starts toward self-reliance are what we will need to depend on to get the process off the ground. As the energy of rebellion rises in response to increasing economic inequality, we can expect that "austerity" measures will be imposed, with the intended effect of distracting people from their rage by the traditional means of denying food and shelter along with the imposition of repressive violence. Maybe it won't be as bad as I can imagine, maybe it will be worse. In the midst of this kind of chaos, regardless of degree of severity, only the most well-planned and executed cooperative institutions are likely to survive. Community solidarity will be the dominant factor in success and survival. As usual I find nothing to dispute with the factual basis of the Canadian's analysis, but if you look at the same set of facts from Israel's enemies' point of view they can be explained more easily by the assumption that Israel plans a preemptive attack that must be prepared for. After all, besides the Saddam regime (also with US backing), no country in the middle east has invaded by means of aggressive war other than Israel. Countries, like people, do tend to hold to a pattern. I suspect that Israel's enemies understand that the ongoing genocidal attacks on Palestinians and the recent brutal invasion of Lebanon are merely attempts by Israel to provoke a response that it can use as a pretext to unleash nuclear war and achieve total domination of the charred radioactive remains of the middle east, the depopulation of which will remove pesky obstacles in the way of maximal exploitation of the oil reserves by US and Israeli commercial interests. This may sound insane, but these "full spectrum dominance" folks are nothing if not insane. In an age of intense ironies, the greatest conceivable irony would be that the US is destroyed in a mass murder suicide provoked by a commander in chief who was himself a psychological war victim. Poetic justice for aggressive war making.
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