Tag Archives: healthcare system

The Free Market Is A Failure

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By TheHipcrimeVocab

Sorry for the deliberately click-bait-y headline, but I think this message is important to get out there.

In my discussions few months back on What is Neoliberalism, I noted that a core element of neoliberal philosophy is that markets are the only efficient, effective and rational way to distribute goods and services.

Neoliberals profess the idea that only competitive markets can allocate “scarce” resources efficiently, and that it is only such “free” markets that can lift people out of poverty and deliver broad prosperity. They pound it into our heads constantly.

Yet the Covid-19 crisis has illustrated spectacular and pervasive failures of such “free” markets all over the globe, and especially in the U.S. Instead of fairness or efficiency, we see systemic failure in every market we look: the food industry, the medical industry, the retail industry, the employment market. Resources are being destroyed and misallocated on a massive scale

Let’s start with the food industry, because food is the most important thing (nine means from anarchy, and all that). Thousands and thousands of pigs are being slaughtered, their meat left to rot, eaten by no-one, regardless of the forces of supply and demand:

The United States faces a major meat shortage due to virus infections at processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever making it to table…

Boerboom, a third-generation hog farmer, is just one of the tens of thousands of US pork producers who are facing a stark reality: although demand for their products is high in the nation’s grocery stores, they may have to euthanise and dispose of millions of pigs due to a breakdown in the American food supply chain.

Meat shortage leaves US farmers with ‘mind-blowing’ choice (BBC)

Potatoes are sitting in Belgian warehouses and left to rot, only two short years after a drought threatened to produce a severe shortage:

Belgium: Lighthearted campaign to ‘eat more fries’ aims to lift heavy load (DW)

Meanwhile, dairy farmers in the U.S. heartland are dumping milk into the ground, to be drunk by no one.

Cows don’t shut off: Why this farmer had to dump 30,000 gallons of milk (USA Today)

In fact, the whole food situation is rather ugly, as this piece from The Guardian summarizes:

This March and April, even as an astounding 30 million Americans plunged into unemployment and food bank needs soared, farmers across the US destroyed heartbreaking amounts of food to stem mounting financial losses.

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.

After delays and reports of concealing worker complaints, meatpacking plants that slaughter and process hundreds of thousands of animals a day ground to a halt as coronavirus cases spread like wildfire among workers packed tightly together on dizzyingly fast assembly lines.

Meanwhile, immigrant farmworkers toiled in the eye of the coronavirus storm, working and living in crowded dangerous conditions at poverty wages; at one Washington state orchard, half the workers tested positive for Covid-19. Yet many of these hardest working of Americans were deprived of economic relief, as they are undocumented. Advocates report more farmworkers showing up at food banks – and some unable to access food aid because they can’t afford the gas to get there.

None of this is acceptable or necessary and it’s not just about Covid-19, it’s also illustrative of a deeply deregulated corporate capitalism. America’s food system meltdown amid the pandemic has been long-developing, and a primary cause is decades of corporate centralization and a chaotic array of policies designed to prop up agribusiness profits at any cost.

Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here’s what to do about it (Guardian)

That doesn’t sound very “efficient” to me, does it? How about you? Free market fundamentalists, care to weigh in?

Meanwhile, hospitals in the United States, which one would think are the most important thing to keep open during a pandemic, are actually closing across the country. These are the very things you want most to be open! Why is this happening? Because health care in the U.S. is a profit-driven enterprise that “competes” in the free market. Because elective procedures—their cash cow—have either been suspended or postponed. U.S. hospitals are closing because they are dependent upon these elective procedures to shore up their profits, and markets rely on profits.

As the deadly virus has spread beyond urban hotspots, many more small hospitals across the country are on the verge of financial ruin as they’ve been forced to cancel elective procedures, one of the few dependable sources of revenue. Williamson Memorial and similar facilities have been struggling since long before the pandemic — at least 170 rural hospitals have shut down since 2005, according to University of North Carolina research on rural hospital closures.

But even as hospitals in cities like New York City and Detroit have been deluged with coronavirus patients, many rural facilities now have the opposite problem: their beds are near-empty, their operating rooms are silent, and they’re bleeding cash.

More than 100 hospitals and hospital systems around the country have already furloughed tens of thousands of employees, according to a tally by industry news outlet Becker’s Hospital Review. They’ve sent home nurses and support staffers who would be deemed essential under state stay-home orders.

Rural hospitals are facing financial ruin and furloughing staff during the coronavirus pandemic (CNN)

And how about allocating labor via impersonal markets? How’s that going? Well, not so well. The workers with the skills most desperately needed on the front lines during the crisis are taking pay cuts and getting laid off left and right. Instead of contributing, they are sitting at home, unable to work even if they wanted to:

At a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts. And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay.

That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.

“Nurses are being called heroes,” Mariya Buxton says, clearly upset. “But I just really don’t feel like a hero right now because I’m not doing my part.”

Ms Buxton is a paediatric nurse in St Paul, Minnesota, but has been asked to stay at home.

At the unit at which Ms Buxton worked, and at hospitals across most of the country, medical procedures that are not deemed to be urgent have been stopped. That has meant a massive loss of income.

Coronavirus: Why so many US nurses are out of work (BBC)

It’s an ironic twist as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation: The very workers tasked with treating those afflicted with the virus are losing work in droves.

Emergency room visits are down. Non-urgent surgical procedures have largely been put on hold. Health care spending fell 18% in the first three months of the year. And 1.4 million health care workers lost their jobs in April, a sharp increase from the 42,000 reported in March, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 135,000 of the April losses were in hospitals.

As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs (NPR)

So it doesn’t seem like “free and open” markets are doing so well with either health care or labor.

Meanwhile, U.S. states are competing against each other for desperately needed PPE equipment, bidding up the price and preventing scarce resources from going to where they are most badly needed, which would naturally be where Covid-19 has struck the hardest:

As coronavirus testing expands and more cases of infection are being identified, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers are scrambling to find enough medical supplies to replenish their dwindling supply.

But state and local governments across the United States are vying to purchase the same equipment, creating a competitive market for those materials that drives up prices for everyone.

“A system that’s based on state and local governments looking out for themselves and competing with other state and local governments across the nation isn’t sustainable,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former acting Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, “and if left to continue, we’ll certainly exacerbate the public health crisis we’re facing.”

“There’s a very real possibility,” he added, “that those state and local governments that have the most critical need won’t get the equipment they need.”

Competition among state, local governments creates bidding war for medical equipment (ABC News)

Yet neoliberals always tell us how important “competition” is in every arena of life.

Failure, failure, failure! Everywhere we look, we see failure. Pervasive, systematic failure. Resources going unused. Surpluses of food being dumped even while people go hungry and line up at food banks. Workers with necessary skills sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs. Other workers unable to even earn a living to support themselves and their families, no matter how badly they want to work. Masks and protective equipment NOT going to where they are most needed, their costs inflating, befitting no one except profiteers even as people die.

Tell me again about how the market is “efficient” at distributing resources. Tell me again about how central planning inevitably results in wasted resources, surfeits and shortages.

And here is the big, bold, underscored point:

The free-marketeers want to trumpet the market’s successes, but they don’t want to own its failures.

Free-market boosters always want to talk about the wonderful benefits of markets. How they allow multiple people to coordinate their activities across wide variations of space and time. How they allow knowledge to be distributed among many different actors. How they favor tacit knowledge that a single entity could not possess. Libraries of encomiums have been written celebrating the virtues of the “free” market. You know their names: The Provisioning of Paris, Economics in One Lesson, Free to Choose, I Pencil, and all of that. Much of what passes for economic “science” is simply cheerleading for markets– the bigger, freer and less-regulated the better.

Okay, fair enough.

But how about market failures? Why don’t they ever talk about that? Because if you read the economics books I cited above, you would come away with the idea that there are no market failures! That, in fact, there is no such thing. That markets, in effect, cannot fail!

If you want to own the successes, you need to own the failures.

Oh, they love, love, love to talk about central planning’s “failures”. They can’t get enough of that. They love to talk about empty shelves in the Soviet Union, long lines at supermarkets, the lack of toilet paper in Venezuela (amusingly, now a problem throughout the capitalist world), and the allegedly long waiting times in “socialized medicine” countries. We are constantly subjected to that drumbeat day after day after day. It’s part of every economics 101 course. Central planning doesn’t work. Central planning is inefficient. Central planning is “tyranny.”

But what about all that stuff I cited above?

Where are all the free-market fundamentalists now?

What is their excuse?

They’ll use special pleading. They’ll argue that it’s exceptional circumstances. That no one could have foreseen a “black swan” event like the global Covid-19 pandemic (despite numerous experts warning about it for years). They’ll tell us that markets work just fine under “normal” circumstances. They’ll say we cannot pass any kind of judgement on the failings of markets during such an unusual event.

Here’s why that argument is bullshit:

Pandemics are a real, and recurring phenomenon in human history. We’ve been incredibly fortunate that we’ve been in rare and atypical hundred-year period from 1918-1919 to today without a global pandemic or novel disease we couldn’t quickly contain and/or eradicate.

But pandemics are always—and always have always been—a societal threat, even if we’ve forgotten that fact. And the experts tell us that there will be a lot more of them in our future, with population overshoot, environmental destruction, encroachment on formerly unoccupied lands and climate change proceeding apace. What that means is this:

If your economic system can’t function properly during a pandemic, then your economic system is shit.

If your economic system only works when conditions are ideal, in fact depends upon conditions being ideal, then, your economic system doesn’t really work at all. If something like a pandemic causes it to seize up and fail, then your economic system is poorly designed and doesn’t work very well. Not only do the free markets graphed on economists’ chalkboards not exist in anywhere the real world, they apparently rely on a blissful Eden-like Arcadia to function as intended—a situation any causal glance at human history tells us is highly unusual. Any disruption and they fall like dominoes. They are about as resilient as tissue paper.

And the stresses are only going to get worse in the years ahead, with climate change making some areas uninhabitably hot, while other places are submerged under rising sea levels. And that’s before we get to the typical natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. And there will be new novel plant diseases as well, unfolding against the increasing resistance of germs to antibiotics.

Will the free market fundamentalists and libertarian market cheerleaders acknowledge this???

Don’t hold your breath.

No, they will continue to lionize “private initiative” at every opportunity, while completely ignoring the stuff I opened this post with. They’ll sweep it under the rug or, more likely, simply handwave it away. They’ll continue to say that we need to scale back government regulation and interference and let the invisible hand sort it all out.

Because discipline of modern economics as practiced today is not a science. It may not even rise to the level of a pseudoscience. It’s PR for laissez-faire capitalism.

Of course, we’ve had market failures before. They occurred all throughout the nineteenth century and during Great Depression, for example. These are well-documented. But many of the things that came out of those bygone market failures to prevent or mitigate them have been systematically and deliberately dismantled over the past generation due to rise of neoliberalism.

And now we’re paying the price.

Karl Polanyi made an important distinction between markets and Market Society. Markets are where people come together to buy, sell, and exchange surplus goods. These have existed throughout history. They are tangential to society; embedded in something larger than it. Such markets can be shut down without causing an existential threat to civilization.

But Market Society is dependent upon impersonal forces of supply and demand and functioning markets for absolutely everything in the society, from jobs to food to health care. Everything is oriented around maximizing private profits, and not human needs. Markets failing to function adequately lead to unemployment, sickness, starvation and death. Shutting them down is an existential threat to civilization.

As Dmitry Orlov wrote in his best-known work, the Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union precisely because they didn’t rely on the Market.

Naturalizing markets in this way is an abdication of both causal and moral responsibility for famines, a way to avoid reality and the ethical consequences for people in a position to change things. Markets are not given; they are predicated on a host of laws and social conventions that can, if the need arises, be changed. It makes no sense for American farmers to destroy produce they can’t sell while food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. This kind of thinking is a way for powerful people to outsource ethical choices to the market, but the market has no conscience.

Famine Is a Choice (Slate)

Now, to be clear I’m not necessarily making an argument for or against central planning as opposed to markets. That’s a different discussion.

But my core point is simply this: you cannot discuss market successes without discussing market failures. To do so is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and not to mention incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. If economics were a real science, instead of just PR for capitalism, it would take a look at the things I described above, and figure out ways they could have been avoided, regardless of any preconceived ideology or assumptions about the “right” way to arrange a society, or assumptions about how things “should” work. It would seek out ways for society to become, in Nassim Taleb’s terminology, “antifragile.”

But don’t hold your breath for that, either.

Media Just Can’t Stop Presenting Horrifying Stories as ‘Uplifting’ Perseverance Porn

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By Alan Macleod

Source: FAIR.org

“THIS IS AWESOME!” That’s how Fox 5 DC described its story (5/28/19) about Logan Moore of Cedartown, GA, a disabled two-year-old whose parents were unable to afford to buy him a walker, so employees at Home Depot fashioned one together themselves for him.

“No… it’s not awesome at all. It’s a painful indictment of the state of healthcare in America,” reads the first comment under this tweet by Fox 5 DC (5/28/19).

The story closely resembles another recent CNN report (4/1/19): “A Two-Year-Old Couldn’t Walk on His Own. So a High School Robotics Team Built Him a Customized Toy Car.” That piece noted how Minnesotan toddler Cillian Jackson couldn’t walk due to a genetic condition, and how his parents couldn’t afford treatment. It described the ingenuity of the school children who built him a car, and Cillian’s new found freedom, but did not explore why a baby with a disability had been abandoned by US society.

The clear implication in these stories was that those children would have been left permanently unable to move if not for the help of underpaid employees or the kindness of other children. How many disabled American children with poor parents were not so lucky? The articles did not ask. Instead, they were presented as “uplifting” human interest pieces.

Cillian’s story is part of CNN’s Good Stuff series, which asks its readers:

Want more inspiring, positive news? Sign up for The Good Stuff, a newsletter for the good in life. It will brighten your inbox every Saturday morning.

Unfortunately, these stories are part of a popular trend of unintentionally horrifying “uplifting” news, which we at FAIR have catalogued before (FAIR.org, 8/3/17; 3/25/19), where out-of-touch corporate media give us supposedly charming, wholesome and positive news that actually, upon even minimal retrospection, reveals the dire conditions of late capitalism so many Americans now live under, and makes you feel worse after reading it.

A lot of these stories involve mothers and the extremely difficult circumstances of raising children in the US while poor. CNN’s “feel good” story (8/24/18) about a teacher sitting in a car with her student’s baby so the new mom could attend a job fair raised far more questions than it asked (which was zero). Why is there so little public childcare in the US? Should a new mother really need to immediately find a job so badly? Is this good for infants’ development?

On a similar subject, Good Morning America (7/17/18) describes the “trendy” new baby-shower gift of donating your pregnant co-worker your days off to give her maternity leave. Every country in the world except the US and Papua New Guinea guarantees paid maternity leave, meaning the trend is unlikely to catch on abroad.

Donated maternity leave is a “trendy” gift you don’t need—unless you live in the United States or Papua New Guinea (Good Morning America, 7/17/18).

Many outlets (CBS, 5/20/16; Huffington Post, 8/6/16; People, 4/11/16) cheerfully reported on how one man did at least 15 years of backbreaking labor as a night shift janitor at Boston College so his children could attend for free. But none even mentioned that if he lived in nearly any country in Western Europe, this wouldn’t have been necessary, as university there is free or virtually free to attend.

In fact, rather than discussing ballooning tuition costs, Yahoo! (11/15/17) used the story to take jabs at disloyal millennials:

Millennials move from job to job in order to climb the ladder…. For baby boomers and other generations…loyalty and dedication to a single company or career drove, and still drives, much of their working lives.

Any of these stories could have been used to explore the pressing social and economic realities of being poor in the United States, and having to work for things considered fundamental rights in other countries. But instead they are presented as uplifting features, something only possible if we unquestionably accept the political and economic system.

Kids Do the Darndest Things

Many of what Think Progress (8/2/18) labels “feel-good feel-bad stories” involve children doing things they wouldn’t have to in any reasonable society. CBS invites us to enjoy an account of a boy selling his Xbox computer to help his (single) mom (4/2/19), and another repairing his town’s ravaged roads himself (4/12/19). The Hill (6/10/19), meanwhile, describes a nine-year-old saving his pocket money to pay off his school friends’ “lunch debts.”

“Hardships were never an excuse for Moseley,” CNN (5/22/19) reports—as they are, implicitly, for homeless teens who aren’t offered millions in scholarships.

NBC (5/22/19) likewise shared the story of homeless Tennessee teen Tupac Moseley graduating high school as a valedictorian and earning many college scholarships, something that was widely reported (BBC, 5/22/19; Newsweek, 5/21/19; Business Insider, 5/21/19). NBC matter-of-factly noted that after his father died, Moseley’s family’s home was foreclosed and they were on the streets, accepting this situation without comment. This was still among the most critical of the reports, however, as many did not even describe why a child in the richest society in history became homeless. CNN’s report (5/22/19), for example, did not explain the background circumstances, let alone comment on them, and frames the story with the sentence, “Hardships were never an excuse for Moseley.”

This sentence is telling: To corporate media, even the trauma of losing a parent and being forced onto the streets is merely an excuse, not a cause for poor grades. The implication is that poor housing, a lack of an adequate safety net, underfunded schools and a decimated public education system are simply excuses from bellyaching lazy people as to why they did not attend the private Boston University (at over $54,000 per year tuition), like the article’s author did.

“No excuses” is a common phrase in “perseverance porn” stories. For example, Today (2/20/17) used it in the headline of a story about a Texas man who is forced to walk 15 miles to work every day. It reveals the ultimate bootstrap ideology of the media, where societal factors are irrelevant and everyone is where they are on merit.

Thus Moseley’s story is effectively weaponized by CNN against anyone who would question the system. Terrible work conditions? No excuses! Homeless? Stop complaining!

In case you thought homeless children were something of an aberration in America, CNN (7/2/19) also recently ran a story about how over 100 homeless children graduated high school in New York City this year alone—again without comment on what this says about US society.

Another reprehensible story treated as heroic by media was that of a Michigan mother who had to quit her job to look after her terminally ill son, who died of leukemia. She could not afford a headstone, so his best friend, 12-year-old Kaleb Klakulak, worked many jobs to attempt to pay for one. Many media outlets (e.g., Associated Press, 12/8/18; Fox News, 12/9/18; NBC Chicago, 12/12/18) celebrated Kaleb’s spirit, but none asked why children are  performing hard, outdoor labor through a Michigan winter so other children can have adequate burials. Such reporting implicitly normalizes this situation, and the system that allows it to happen.

“Sweet” Stories

A common media trope is presenting kids selling lemonade as cute,  sweet stories, no matter how horrifying or depressing the reason, including to pay off school lunch debts (Yahoo! News, 5/21/19; MSN, 5/22/19), or to raise money for their baby brother’s medical treatment (New York Post, 5/28/18; CBS, 5/29/18) or their mother’s chemotherapy (KTSM El Paso, 8/4/18).

Such stories (CBS, 5/29/18) rarely if ever ask why a baby with a life-threatening illness is forced to rely on his nine-year-old brother’s selling lemonade to pay for treatment.

Or how about the story of a New Mexico girl selling lemonade trying to fund her mother’s kidney transplant? People magazine (5/9/18) applauded her resolve, and local radio described it as “heartwarming” that she had raised over $1,000. The massive problem is a kidney transplant in America can cost over $400,000. To anyone with a heart, what this story actually represents is the desperate struggle of a child trying in vain to save her dying mother. Worse still is the fact that if she lived in Sweden, Spain or Saskatchewan, she would be given a kidney free of charge and without question.

Any of the numerous other outlets (ABC, 4/30/18; Good Morning America, 5/1/18; Albuquerque Journal, 4/30/18) that picked it up could have used the story to discuss the dysfunctional healthcare system that is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the country, while producing some of the worst health outcomes in the developed world, or to scrutinize how corporate healthcare gouges the sickest and most vulnerable Americans, including children. Surely the most basic function of government should be to prevent its citizens from needlessly dying? Not if you wholly accept the tenets of neoliberalism, where education, housing and healthcare are not basic, inalienable human rights, but commodities to be bought and sold and bargained for on the market.

To be clear, while we can admire the never-say-die attitude of those in tough conditions, this is no substitute for guaranteed public programs to help those in dire need. The problem with perseverance porn is not the brave subjects of the articles, but the lack of any journalistic scrutiny examining the failings of society that placed them in such desperate circumstances to begin with.

What these articles highlight so clearly is not only the grim, inhuman and unnecessary conditions so many Americans are forced to live under, but the degree to which mainstream corporate journalists have completely internalized them as unremarkable, inevitable facts of life, rather than the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies that have robbed Americans of dignity and basic human rights. Because corporate media wholly accept and promote neoliberal, free-market doctrine, they are unable to see how what they see as “awesome” is actually a manifestation of late-capitalist dystopia.

Media’s Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn

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By Adam Johnson

Source: FAIR

You’ve seen or heard or read the personal interest story a thousand times: An enterprising seven-year-old collects cans to save for college (ABC7, 2/8/17), a man with unmatched moxie walks 15 miles to his job (Today, 2/20/17), a low-wage worker buys shoes for a kid whose mother can’t afford them (Fox5, 12/14/16), an “inspiring teen” goes right back to work after being injured in a car accident (CBS News, 12/16/16). All heartwarming tales of perseverance in the face of impossible odds—and all ideological agitprop meant to obscure and decontextualize the harsh reality of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Man walks eight miles in the snow to get to work every day (ABC 27, 3/14/17). Or was it a teen walking 10 miles in freezing weather to a job interview (New York Daily News, 2/26/13)? Or was it 10 miles to work every day (Times Herald Record, 3/17/17)? Or was it 12 (ABC News, 2/22/17) or 15 (Today, 2/20/17) or 18 (Evening Standard, 2/9/09) or 21 (Detroit Free Press, 1/20/15)? Who cares—their humanity is irrelevant. They’re clickbait, stand-in bootstrap archetypes meant to validate the bourgeois morality of click-happy media consumers.

These stories are typically shared for the purposes of poor-shaming, typically under the guise of inspirational life advice. “This man is proof we all just need to keep walking, no matter what life throws at us,” insisted Denver ABC7 anchor Anne Trujillo, after sharing one of those stories of a poor person forced to walk thousands of miles a year to survive.

A healthy press would take these anecdotes of “can do” spirit and ask bigger questions, like why are these people forced into such absurd hardship? Who benefits from skyrocketing college costs? Why does the public transit in this person’s city not have subsidies for the poor? Why aren’t employers forced to offer time off for catastrophic accidents? But time and again, the media mindlessly tells the bootstrap human interest story, never questioning the underlying system at work.

One particularly vulgar example was CBS News(12/16/16) referring to an “inspiring” African-American kid who had to work at his fast food job with an arm sling and a neck brace after a car accident. To compound the perseverance porn, he was, at least in part, doing so to help donate to a local homeless charity. Here we have a story highlighting how society has colossally failed its most vulnerable populations—the poor, ethnic minorities, children and the homeless—and the take-home point is, “Ah gee, look at that scrappy kid.”

Journalism is as much—if not more—about what isn’t reported as what is. Here a local reporter is faced with a cruel example of people falling through the cracks of the richest country on Earth, and their only contribution is to cherry-pick one guy who managed—just barely—to cling on to the edge.

Perseverance porn goes hand in hand with the rise of a GoFundMe economy that relies on personal narrative over collective policy, emotional appeals over baseline human rights. $930 million out of the $2 billion raised on GoFundMe since its inception in 2010 was for healthcare expenses, while an estimated 45,000 people a year die a year due to a lack of medical treatment. Meanwhile, anchors across cable news insist that single-payer healthcare is “unaffordable,” browbeating guests who support it, while populating their broadcasts with these one-off tales of people heroically scraping by.

It’s part of a broader media culture of anecdotes in lieu of the macro, moralizing “success” rather than questioning systemic problems. Perseverance porn may seem harmless, but in highlighting handpicked cases of people overcoming hardship without showing the thousands that didn’t—much less asking broader questions as to what created these conditions—the media traffics in decidedly right-wing tropes. After all, if they can do it, so can you—right?

Fake Everything — Confronting Our Ideological Hegemony

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By Janet Phelan

Source: Activist Post

The recent invocation of “fake news”—notably being levied by those on both sides of the political fence—points to more than allegations of conspiratorial efforts to sway the opinions of John Q Public. What we are seeing emerge is a challenge to the very protoplasm in which we live.

News is history, present tense. As such, accurate news is foundational to understanding the world we live in and the forces that mold it. It only takes a brief immersion into the recording of recent historical events to realize that the history books do not provide a faithful and truthful record.

According to many history books, JFK was felled by a lone assassin, a disgruntled ex-military and Communist sympathizer named Lee Harvey Oswald.

Less than 25% of the American people believe this today.  A multiplicity of theories have sprung up in the wake of the Kennedy assassination; what can be agreed upon is that this event remains an open sore in the American psyche, unresolved and possibly unresolvable.

Foreknowledge surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the genesis of why we went to war in Iraq and, most currently, dispute as to who launched gas attacks in Syria (which seem to be impelling us towards war against Assad)—these pivotal events remain in dispute, while facile news reports, bleeding into the history books, provide inadequate answers to troubling questions as we march on towards an increasingly dim future.

If we cannot trust news and history, what can we trust?

Very little, as it turns out….

FAKE LAWS

The US’s legal system is nearly bullet proof, we are told. The separation of powers between the three branches of government ensures an independent judiciary, pivotal to the foundational promise of freedom and justice for all. I have harped enough in these pages over the years as to the weaponization of our legal system, which can be and is levied against targeted groups.

The reality is that there is no law, in terms of its equal application. And if there is no equal application, then what we have is not law but the naked exercise of power. The recent revelations that judges are laundering under the table bribes is only further evidence that we are living in a state of legal nullity.

FAKE HUMAN RIGHTS

Our much revered Constitutional protections are reflected in a number of international human rights treaties, most of which the US has refused to sign or ratify. On the rare occasion of US ratification, such as with the Convention Against Torture, we can see where the US has resorted to schizophrenic babble in her efforts to justify her behavior. Senator Tom Cotton’s recent declaration that “waterboarding is not torture,” which echoes previous assertions by President Bush, should have alerted us that the US intends to honor no international accords. Certainly not where human rights are involved.

The international human rights community has increasingly accommodated US imperatives here, morphing from an original mandate to political support of the oppression that it is tasked with addressing.

For example, let’s take a look at Front Line Defenders, an international Dublin based NGO whose website declares that “The mission of Front Line Defenders is to protect, defend, support, and act for and with human rights defenders whose lives and health are at risk because of their peaceful and legitimate activities.”

A review of FLD’s 230 open cases reads like a carefully vetted political tract. Third World journalists and human rights defenders in China, the Russian Federation and Iran top the list. There is not one single case involving a First World individual. Not one from the US, not one from Western Europe.

Perhaps such individuals have never seen the need to contact FDL, you wonder. The answer is a resounding NO. FDL refuses its services to Western journalists and human rights defenders.

FDL’s financial statements provide a clue to its political decision making of which human rights defenders it will assist and which it will throw to the lions. FDL admits to having received 2,535,982 Euros in government sponsorship in 2016, up from 2,351,474 in 2015. Public donations accounted for a mere 38,900 of last year’s income, which totaled 4,688,641 Euros. Its state sponsors include Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany and the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. Its corporate sponsors include George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among others.

Article19, the international press freedom NGO, also appears to be toeing the line in terms of trumpeting the causes of vetted Third World journalists. Article19 has admitted to getting funding from the US State Department and while it maintains offices in the Americas, it notably excludes US journalists at risk from its services or reports.

You may still not believe that Western journalists and human rights defenders may currently be at risk. These NGOs have done a very good job in keeping up that perception.

FAKE FOOD

We are not only living in a state of falseness. We are also eating it. The supermarket food is not only GMO-laden. It is also laced with carcinogens and Alzheimer’s inducing agents. This report from the venerable National Institutes of Health is ten years old but deserves to be revisited.

In the intervening decade, the push to contaminate otherwise healthy food, such as yogurt, with cancer inducing fake sugars, has only increased.

And if you thought that your brain was immune to chemical attack, this report should stop you in your tracks. As the so called age related diseases of dementia and Alzheimer’s are now occurring in younger populations, one might want to start asking why the push to chemicalize our bodies, our brains, our environment and our futures.

FAKE MEDICINE

That would be not only vaccines. Many so called beneficial medicines are now found to cause severe illness. Drug induced liver diseases, drug induced renal diseases, drug induced neurological and auto immune diseases—one wonders sometimes if the cure is worse than the illness. The pervasiveness of medically induced medical conditions has led Dr. Josh Axe to declare that “Conventional Medicine is the Leading Cause of Death.”

FAKE RELIGION

Somewhere in the Old Testament, between the Garden of Eden and Moses coming down from the mountain with those venerable tablets, a certain perception of man’s place in the universe got launched. Genesis declared the following: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Man appears to have taken this to heart.

Dominionism. Manifest Destiny. The White Man’s Burden. Colonialism. Wars for Oil and Wars of Eugenics. All these speak to a mindset wherein man is allowed, no, entitled to assert his mastery over the earth and, if he has enough brute strength, over his fellows. The world view of humans living with, living among, not in ascendency over but in cooperation with, has largely fallen to the Biblical imperative of asserting control over and manipulation of an increasingly beleaguered planet.

Recent research points to the possibility of an entirely different reality than what we have assumed. In as yet unpublished research by Ana Willem, she writes that

The crux of the notion or argument pointing towards existence as a holographic reality, or that points to the Universe (or more correctly, Multiverse as per the work of Richard Amoroso and Elizabeth Rauscher in their book ‘The Holographic Anthropic Multiverse’) being a holographic reality, hinges on the physical and mathematical co-existence of different dimensions in which information or energy is shared or actedon in a way that it is transformed.

Willem goes on to write that

The point of departure for my work is the Mayan Calendar, and more specifically the ‘base’ Tzolkin calendar which is created using the numbers 13 and 20 to create a 260 day calendar grid. The calendar is assembled in a grid using the number 13 as the count of columns, and the number 20 as the count of rows. It is created by starting at the top-left cell of the grid, and counting to 13 as you move down the first column. When you hit the 14th row of the first column, you start counting over again at 1 as you continue to move first down, and then to the next column, and then down again, until you have counted to thirteen 20 times, and the 260 day grid is filled.

According to her,

Part of my work studies the various ways in which the Matrixes I am discovering diverge from the work on Toroidal Vortexes of Rothko and Powell. In addition, I found that the spliced grid created a numerical topology in which the inherent ‘scale’ of a given numerical matrix creates sections of coherent waves that cycle in between the harmonic topologies representing infinity and zero, changing polarity at each crest, and then cycling back. They occur only in specific sections of the spliced the matrix, and interweave like a family of related sine-like waves through one another in a way that resembles highways or streams. This is one way that the matrices I am studying are different than the ones being researched by Powell and Rothko. Much like the topologies being studied by Rothko and Powell, and being made into actual machines/products by Daniel Nunes), the phenomenology of what I have discovered acts very much like a machine.

The million dollar question, asserts Willem, is “what it means or how it specifically relates to the idea of a Holographic Anthropic Multiverse is not yet answered.”

If we are to survive this century, we will need to do more than drain the swamp. We will need to reassess not only the circumstances which bespeak profound efforts at deception by our leaders. We will also need to reassess our place in the universe, with humility and frankness. Our continued trumpeting that God is on our side, that we are in fact formed in His image—and by implication, His representative on this earth, has pushed us to the brink of apocalypse. If we are to survive ourselves, we must first recognize who we are—and who we are not.

 

Janet Phelan is an investigative journalist whose articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The San Bernardino County Sentinel, The Santa Monica Daily Press, The Long Beach Press Telegram, Oui Magazine and other regional and national publications. Janet specializes in issues pertaining to legal corruption and addresses the heated subject of adult conservatorship, revealing shocking information about the relationships between courts and shady financial consultants. She also covers issues relating to international bioweapons treaties. Her poetry has been published in Gambit, Libera, Applezaba Review, Nausea One and other magazines. Her first book, The Hitler Poems, was published in 2005. She is also the author of a tell-all book EXILE, (also available as an ebook). She currently resides abroad.

 

The Mainstream Has Failed

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague.

The mainstream became mainstream because it worked: the mainstream advice to “go to college and you’ll get a good job” worked, the mainstream financial plan of buying a house to build equity to pass on to your children worked, the mainstream of government regulation worked to the public’s advantage at modest cost to taxpayers and the mainstream media, despite being cozy with government agencies such as the C.I.A. and operating as a profit machine for the families that owned the newspapers, radio stations, etc., functioned as a basically honest broker of information and reporting.

Now, the mainstream has failed. Mainstream career advice now leads to crushing debts and career stagnation, mainstream financial planning generates high risks, mainstream government regulations are costly and burdensome, and the mainstream media is little more than a corporate-owned mouthpiece of propaganda and distributor of infotainment that is sold as “news.”

Does anyone actually believe the mainstream political process isn’t broken? Those who claim it isn’t broken are either well-paid shills just doing their job or they’re delusional.

The mainstream American diet now leads to chronic disease and early death.Supersized portions, large amounts of sugar and/or salt in virtually every packaged food item, heavy doses of low-quality fats in almost all mainstream fast foods–these have become mainstream at a very high cost in diminished health and reduced years of life free of chronic disease and pain.

The mainstream level of fitness contributes to chronic disease and early death.The mainstream lifestyle is one in which people passively watch a few daredevils pursue extreme sports on a variety of digital screens, passively “consume” music rather than learning to play music themselves, passively consume “news” rather than being engaged in community activities that make news, and so on.

The mainstream healthcare system is structured so it is incapable of promoting health. As my longtime friend GFB recently asked, “Who is happy with the current healthcare system?” Certainly not the doctors and nurses or the patients. Perhaps Big Pharma is happy as a result of their enormous profits (more of which is spent on marketing the latest marginally useful and often dangerous drug than on R&D), but even Big Pharma has legitimate complaints about the cost and time required to get a potentially life-changing drug (such as immunotherapy drugs) through the pipeline.

But the real problem is the soaring costs of the system will eventually collapse the entire economy. The same can be said of the soaring costs of increasingly marginal higher education, the soaring costs of increasingly marginal weapons systems, and so on.

medical-costs6-16a

The mainstream healthcare system is incapable of promoting health or restraining costs:

bankrupt-healthcare

The other problem with the mainstream is that any attempt to structurally reform these broken systems will trigger collapse. The mainstream systems are now so fragile that any significant change will cause them to implode. I explain why in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.

The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague. Stop eating packaged and fast foods, eat restaurant meals only occasionally, prepare 90% of your meals at home with real ingredients, including lots of fresh vegetables. Walk at least one mile/2 kilometers a day, start bicycling instead of driving (where possible), start doing yoga, tai chi, etc. every day, turn any 6-foot square floor area into your home gym–get lean.

Stop watching sports and start doing sports (appropriate to your age and climate, of course).

As for fashioning a sustainable career–don’t count on a college degree to work some sort of magic. I describe a more proactive approach to forging a sustainable career in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Don’t accept “standards of care” that include addictive pain-killers and powerful meds that require another six meds with their own side-effects to counter the side-effects of the first med. Do you own research, get a second opinion. Discover what you can do to help heal yourself first.

Stop “consuming” mainstream media except in small, limited portions and consume even these portions with a skeptical eye and ear for propaganda and rigged numbers that supports failed mainstream narratives.

We are what we do every day. Step out of the mainstream and stay out of the mainstream and opportunities that are unavailable to those who passively accept the mainstream as “all there is” will emerge.

As Douglas MacArthur observed, “There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.”

If you’re interested in avoiding the mainstream of failure and stagnation, please consider these quotes drawn from my extensive list of Aphorisms:

“We are what we repeatedly do.” (Aristotle)

“Do the thing and you shall have the power.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” (E.F. Schumacher)

“He who will not risk cannot win.” (John Paul Jones)

Saturday Matinee: Gridlock’d

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“Gridlock’d” (1997) is a film most people remember for featuring one of Tupac Shakur’s last starring roles (he was murdered in a shooting just two months after its completion). While Tupac’s performance as Spoon, a level-headed but drug-addicted jazz musician, is impressive and possibly his best, often overlooked are contributions of co-star Tim Roth and actor/writer/first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall. Roth stars as Stretch, Spoon’s impulsive and slightly deranged partner in addiction and music. Both Shakur and Roth inhabit their roles with a sense of authenticity, humanity, and charisma, giving their potentially pathetic characters believable chemistry and a likeable comic edge. The film kicks off when the third member of their jazz combo, Cookie, played by Thandie Newton, has an overdose, compelling the others to go on a quixotic quest seeking treatment for their addiction. Unfortunately for our protagonists the Detroit healthcare system is a bureaucratic maze seemingly designed to thwart their efforts. Odds of their success are decreased further when they’re targeted by cops and gangsters.

Detroit-born Vondie Curtis Hall does an excellent job balancing the script’s gritty realism and dark outlook with comedy and wit. Visually, the film is stylish without looking too glamorous or grim, and he keeps moments of humor and suspense well-paced. Hall is also suitably menacing as gangster D-Reper. Director John Sayles, who previously worked with Hall on the film “Passion Fish”, makes a cameo appearance as one of the cops. Hall hasn’t yet made another film on par with the quality of Gridlock’d, but he continues to do much acting and directing work for television.

As strong as Hall’s directorial debut is, it wouldn’t be as emotionally involving and memorable were it not for Tupac Shakur’s presence. Like his character in Gridlock’d, Tupac was at the time seeking a new beginning; a new creative direction. The fact that his life was tragically cut short can’t help but add a sense of poignancy and dramatic weight to his role and the entire film.