What Americans Do Not Understand about Healthcare

What Americans Do Not Understand about Healthcare

 

I was intrigued to watch Charles Krauthammer’s extended interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show the other day.

 

Here’s the link (sorry if the link changes or whatever, but I don’t run the host site):

 

^{http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/shows/thedailyshow?videoPackage=140192
I'm sorry.  The Daily Show is banned in Canada by the comedynetwork.  They prevent Daily Show content from being shown in Canada.  I'll offer a link to the first part of the interview that _can_ be shown in the U.S.: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/g4whw7/exclusive---charles-krauthammer-extended-interview-pt--1  For similar shows, similar websites can be consulted.  The comedynetwork.ca, actually based out of Beijing, does not allow paying subscribers access to content (comedynetwork.ca observed "it was the last place in the world we could match up our initiatives with those of willing parties; we kind of like this Xi guy")/} 

 

(Krauthammer’s* a go-to right-wing Fox “News” flack who has written a book about himself, or summing up his thoughts in recent decades, or whatever.)

 

I was struck by how it was a mature discussion, the kind of thing you see/hear in America about as often as a ’58 Edsel (I was going to say “UFO,” but of course Americans on mass-popular overnight talk shows see those nightly and repeatedly, strangely unlike citizens of every other country on the planet, who instead tend to see things like stars and clouds).

 

Of course Krauthammer was against “Obamacare.”  He referred to it, constantly, as all on the right do, as an “entitlement.”  Going to the global well again, I can’t believe that there would be another country anywhere on the planet, even the poorest and without any tangible resources or means whatsoever, which would call “health” or “care” or the compound word “healthcare” an “entitlement.”  Americans are proud of their 200 years, but attitudes like Krauthammer’s could explain why it could take them another 200 to catch up with the rest of the world and stop seeing well-being not as an “entitlement,” but as a matter of civic concern and, ultimately, of tremendous fiscal import.  Krauthammer did allow in one vague moment that the really destitute should maybe get some care, somehow.

 

His key point about the Obamacare entitlement, though, was that it would bankrupt the nation.  He felt that adding yet another “entitlement,” on top of others, would just destroy the U.S. fiscally (as if it hadn’t, through its financial sector, made any efforts in that direction itself).  Krauthammer cited the example of “Europe,” in particular.  This one, of course, was laughable, but I guess Krauthammer could refer to “Europe” as some medical-basket-case-wasteland because most Americans couldn’t find it on a map, anyway.  What I was of course immediately thinking was, “are you honestly saying that Germany has bankrupted itself, while America hasn’t, over healthcare??”  Europe, with its socialized medicine, has actually done incredibly well, from Germany to Holland to Belgium to Switzerland and on an on—to say nothing whatsoever of the Scandinavian countries.  Those countries really in dire fiscal straits either already had them or were sent on the way by American fiscal precedents.  Look at what American financial deregulation did for Ireland—a fantasyland of growth for a brief period that ended up like California, with endless suburban homes with no-one to buy them or live in them once actual financial reality, instead of packaged debt sales, came home to roost.  Ireland’s gorging was so alluring even Iceland, a formerly stable place, tried to get in on the American act with its banks and now the whole country feels the shame and crippling debt that left behind.  Portugal and Spain?  Well, these are countries barely more than a generation out of fascism; they could hardly be expected to stand on the same footing as France or Britain.  Greece?  Well, it’s hard to think of Greece as “European,” but it’s got the same problem most basket-case countries like the U.S. have—a huge percentage of the populace doesn’t pay taxes.  And besides, why not also look at the central/east often landlocked European countries that are rapidly advancing, like Poland or Croatia or Slovenia or the Czech Republic or Slovakia—weird how they can embrace healthcare and have burgeoning economies even from very daunting circumstances.

 

I guess Krauthammer could also have referred to Canada, which, at least until the unsound economic policies of the Harper government, had conquered its deficit problems and had begun to gnaw furtively at its giant debt.  But Krauthammer probably didn’t want to do that, because Canada was maybe just close enough that a few Americans might have known something about it.  Then again, perhaps not.  I’ve had American colleagues for years, highly educated university professors and the like, who still actually look at me from behind their coke-bottle glasses and brown teeth and declare that they could never allow themselves to be in situations in which “they could not choose their own doctors.”  The vein of ignorance amongst even the most educated Americans is so deep that they probably ought to mine it for shale gas and pay their premiums that way.  (Stewart did later obliquely bring up Germany.)

 

Stewart observed that “Obamacare” was actually a Republican idea Republicans were now repudiating barely a decade later, that it was actually a half-measure thing that was nothing like more single-payer models used in advanced democracies, that it would still allow American insurance companies to rape and pillage Americans, that only a fraction of Americans might benefit, and that all Americans could still choose their own health plans, and so on.  Comically, Krauthammer gestured to American businesses like chain restaurants that were now cutting down workers’ hours so those businesses weren’t hurt by draconian employer healthcare premiums.  Ah yes, those McDonaldian workers’ paradises, now threatened by Obamacare!!  Krauthammer was really just looking out for people he’d never met before, and if that isn’t a gesture of altruism, I just don’t know what is.  In fact, it may be the most purely American gesture there is: thinking about others you have never broken bread with and then advancing proposals based on what you think.

 

The elephant in the room that was never brought up in this discussion, though, was that Americans, and the American government, already pays the highest costs for the least healthcare in the developed world.  There is nowhere, nowhere that the gap between money paid and health results gained is lower than in the U.S.  For a quick primer, look no further than the exhaustive TIME article by Steven Brill.

 

(This link:

 

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html

 

is just to TIME and the article page.)

 

Stewart actually had Brill on his show, and expressed amazement that an organ such as TIME would even attempt something like long-form journalism.  I was so astonished after seeing Stewart that I asked my dad a province away to hang on to a copy for me.  And Brill’s piece is one long, long piece on health care; many Americans might spend almost as much time reading it as filling out insurance forms.  It took me more than a few turns of the treadmill to get through it.  It was repetitive and too long, but it observed basic journalistic tropes: focus on a few individuals, extrapolate, research, do some interviews, offer on tiptoe faint conclusions actually bellowed by your research.  Anyone outside the U.S. would wonder why it was so long, but, well, you have to consider the audience.  To get it past editors, and then people, Brill must have had to amass so much evidence that it would be like proving a Sasquatch sighting (Damn.  I forget Americans see them everyday, too.  I’m all mixed up on my mixed metaphors.)  Anyway, things Brill observed were that Americans paid massively more for the most basic services than anyone else in the world.  An aspirin that costs .69 in France cost $69 in the U.S.; a Q-Tip costs nothing in Romania, but $50 in the U.S., and so on.  And, whenever Medicaid was involved, bureaucrats were tough bargainers and costs were massively reduced everywhere, with the government introducing competition and sanity that helped every taxpayer.  And if a company that willingly sells a drug into France for $2/pill, but says in America that it can’t keep afloat if it can’t charge $100/pill, then someone—obviously never Charles Krauthammer—ought to be asking questions.  Someone has to help the American people.  They’re good people, and they can’t help themselves.

 

Well, it doesn’t matter, in the end.  Americans, in the end, will go on paying much more for worse healthcare than any other advanced democracies.  It is hard-wired into American DNA.  It will not change.  Obamacare is simply an incrementalist approach; it’s one president (and any credit probably goes to people like Pelosi, not Obama) trying to get one little thing done so as to help to show Americans that medicare can actually work and bring up in large relief just how massively Americans are paying for a stunningly cost-ineffective system.  If America’s Medicaid system had simply been larger, its government treasury, and the health of its citizens, would have been billions and millions of dollars and hearts better.  But what does it say on the American dollar bill?  “Ideology before reason.”

 

The cute elephant in the room in all of this is—what if Americans actually were healthy and productive?  That would be good for competition and business and so on, surely.  What if more Americans were healthy?  I mean, how can anyone pretend that being healthy isn’t on a direct line to workplace productivity?  Well, I’m sure Americans have an answer for that one, too, how being fat and addicted to cheeseburgers and 86 oz. Cokes is actually a way of warding off government plots to take away guns, and so on.  Talk about defending yourself by killing yourself.

 

Any posts here are obviously written mainly for a Canadian audience,**and I strenuously try not to address American topics, for various reasons not dilated on here.  However, when American issues obviously inflict Canadian ones, one feels a need to say something.

 

It doesn’t matter how much I love American people; in the cold, hard light of day, they are trying to bankrupt themselves by shutting down their government and making sure that many of them can’t access healthcare, and that those who do pay much more for it than anywhere else—this just isn’t good.  If you share “the world’s longest undefended border” (and that one is really in quotation marks now. . .quick note to Americans—Canadians are not in charge of admitting terrorists to America; Americans are), then it’s a concern.  If Americans can’t buy Canadian stuff, let alone Chinese, then that’s a problem.  And if Canadians can’t get high-quality American goods made by Americans because all American jobs have been shipped overseas, that’s a problem.

 

If anyone has actually gotten down this far on the post—if anyone has actually read this far, well, then, I owe you one of my Croatian burgers.  But let me close like this.  This issue is of extreme moment to Canadians and Canadian taxpayers.  One of the comparatively apparently small, but hugely, hugely rapidly increasing cost factors in health care is drug costs.  Krauthammer not only said that healthcare was an “entitlement” (which I disagree with), but he also did sound an alarm that many have been sounding, that healthcare costs have been going up astronomically because of technology and, yes, drugs.  Look, no-one anywhere expects their tax dollars to pay for a Mayo Clinic.  Life isn’t that complicated.  You get born, you grow up, you age, you die.  The idea that we should all have millions shed on us when we’re 50 or 60+ is perverse—it would have been utterly perverse to Tommy Douglas.  That’s where the “care,” not the “health” part comes in.  First you have “health,” then you have “care.”  The more you have “health,” the less you need “care.” No-one ought to suggest that in between these two there ought to be a 30-year bonus gap where billions are spent on life-extendency, and so on.  The idea that ALL people can have their bodies cryogenically frozen and have access to the same healthcare that Tom Cruise does is ludicrous.  But that all people should have access to decent healthcare?  That’s a plausible and desirable goal.

 

However, it’s yet one more goal that is being attacked by the Harper government.  Apparently, a trade-off in the vaunted European free-trade negotiations is that the Harper government will extend, yet again***, the ability of multi-national pharmaceutical companies to jack up charges on their drugs and throttle any generics.  Of course, this will mainly hit seniors, but in their clinical political caluculi, the Harperites have gathered that most of their voters are already so rich or too poor that they’ll like or not vote enough to know what Harper has done (Harper needn’t worry about his own family, since he is not really one of us or a Canadian taxpayer).  Even the most moderate of commentators on the right-right Canadian media spectrum has touted that the Canada-Europe free-trade deal will be a great thing.  These people are obviously so rich and unconcerned that they’d leave their kids with Clifford Olson if they knew they’d have a chance to shag someone they were interested in at a Hallowe’en party.  Since when does an advanced government leave its people utterly, utterly in the dark about a major trade deal?  Since when?    And since when is it a good thing to bargain from a position of weakness?  Harper isn’t just negotiating against Lichtenstein; he’s negotiating against the European Union.  That includes a lot of players, and they can trade off amongst themselves like musical chairs.  Meanwhile, Canada has a domestic government desperate to fend off opposition at home and “change the channel.”  This, this puts us in a good trade negotiation situation?  Is this what Andrew Coyne’s dad taught him, that negotiating from a point of abject weakness and keeping your family in the dark is a good thing?  Sadly, I guess it is, if Andrew and Andrew himself can find a new hair dye and effective comb-over.  Canadians ought not to be held hostage to ephemeral political imperatives, but we are, and pundits like Coyne abet the government and harm Canadian history by so doing.

 

And so it goes—Canada threatens to withdraw from the Commonwealth because it thinks there are enough Tamils in Toronto to sway a riding; Canada votes against the UN small arms treaty (http://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/SALW/) that even the US voted for, in some sort of misguided and drunken effort to please gun-owners in Canada.  Canada blindly, like no other country in the world, addresses the Middle East peace process by uncritically supporting only one side (oh yeah, that’s always sure to get a resolution).  One cannot imagine Diefenbaker or Stanfield or even Mulroney peering over the border so as to determine what domestic action they ought to take, but it’s what the Harperites take to heart—what did Karl Rove say? What did Ayn Rand say?  Back in the day, Canada used to breed its own Conservatives; now it breeds only American wannabes like Presto Manning and Stephen Harper, who learned from Texans and pundits who couldn’t get a job in America like Tom Flanagan and Margaret Wente.  Canada has become the backwater where frustrated bottom-feeders go to preach ideologies they can’t preach effectually enough or get rich off enough in their home countries.  Cheap drones, is probably the American intelligence file on it.

 

Healthcare isn’t an “entitlement.”  It’s not a “privilege,” obviously, and it may not even be a “right,” whatever that is.  Are doctors poorly paid?  Are they paid strikingly more than doctors with similar or greater educations in other fields?  Do doctors resent having to doctor to poor people?  Do doctors simply hate the fact that they are called upon to treat people who can’t pay their fees?  Should medicine be taken out of universities entirely so that people like doctors could not profit obscenely from the misery of others?  Ask yourself: which doctor is the one you want: the one that can charge the highest fees, or the one who demonstrates an interest in healing you?   An advanced democracy struggles eternally with this equation.  Only once in a blue moon will you actually hear a doctor address this issue because, well, doctors aren’t really interested in medicine or in healing others; they’re interested in protecting and advancing the massive wealth they can accrue.  They’ll talk about “oh, well, I have to run an office, and so on, and I have to pay taxes, and so on,” but notably, it’s never actually about what they were trained for—supposedly, medicine.  No, if you hang out with doctors, what they’re chiefly obsessed about is not keeping up with the literature or knowing something about medicine; it’s actually about rent and taxes and staff costs and profit margins. That’s the key for medicine, from a doctor’s standpoint.  How many people can I cycle in and out and get paid for the most.  Forget helping anyone; it’s about trying to maximize profit and minimize time spent; I dare any doctor to contradict me.  I dare any doctor.

 

--zr

 

*Obviously I’ve seen Krauthammer’s, ah, memorable face before, but I really didn’t know anything about him, not getting Fox “News” and so on.  I didn’t know that his formative years were Canadian, that he started out liberal, and so on.

 

**though I’m considering going back what I originally intended, just some sort of miscellany in the spirit of what I took this now-antique form, the blog, to be.  Maybe I’m just too fat n’ lazy.

 

***The first was under Conservative minister Harvie Andre in 1986.  In latter age, but knowing he could benefit from it while future Canadians could not, Andre agreed to extend patents for European pharmaceutical giants so that generics could not compete and enter the marketplace.  In this way, Andre helped to kill off many Canadians prematurely, the while enjoying massive benefits for overseeing a deal that damaged thousands of Canadians and helping. . . ?  Perhaps in his casket, Andre wore a sash saying “Yeah, I helped to kill off a lot of poor people who probably didn’t donate to us, but man what a ride it was.”

Why There Is No Left, Left (and Francis Fukuyama)

((Perhaps like Francis, I bit off more than I could chew. I started this post and set it aside for a while, but still I decided to finish and post.  Whatever you may think of anything I say, at least I try to offer some points.  Francis, given the opportunity in numerous powerful fora across the world, took only the opportunity to say that things were “highly puzzling and complex,” and added very little else. (Yes, we all write books—a basic function of anyone who wants to write a book is to provide a précis or an abstract; if you really want to, or just plain have to, then you just have to and you will.  If you have a point to make, you will make it, so it is no valid criticism to say Francis also had a book but made puzzlingly little effort to précis it in any meaningful way.  .  .he could have and didn’t.  At least I tried.))

 Under the title of “America’s Plutocracy,” one-time darling of the right Francis Fukuyama has now written a querulous op-ed about why poor Americans always support the most right-wing candidates who do them the most damage and exploit them the most.  (You can read the whole book, or failing that read excerpts everywhere, like here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/money-power-and-class-in-america/article4666223/)  His insights, perhaps predictably from his eyrie, are bleary.

 Fukuyama seems ready to assert a plutocracy, but he’s lean, lean, lean on details as to how this came about.  Take this excerpt:

 

It has come as a surprise to many on the left that Mr. Romney – the “sneering plutocrat,” in the words of New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait – has pulled alongside or even ahead of Mr. Obama in some polls. They shouldn’t be so shocked. Money, power and class continue to play out in American politics in highly complex and puzzling ways. Plutocracy has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis. And it just might push one of its prime beneficiaries, Mitt Romney, to a victory at the polls next month.

 

First of all, it isn’t a surprise to people on the left.  It stopped being that a long time ago, arguably decades ago.  Shocked?  From where he sits, I doubt that is a verb Fukuyama can even estimate the meaning of, unless he visited himself as a wild-eyed Republican radical gameboy a quarter of a century ago.  “Money, power, and class. . .play out. . . in highly complex and puzzling ways.”  Good one, Francis.  Thanks for your insight.  Now have another drink. 

 This, this is what Fukuyama has come to, chiding people for not realizing they’re being ripped off and their country, and western, success and mores are being sunk because it’s “highly puzzling and complex”?  Good of him to be so highlily and puzzlingly “complex.”  Next time I’m trying to solve a puzzle, I’ll call you, Francis.  Four letters, meaning unaccustomed to insight, lacking oppressive wit, or just being a patronizing gasbag. . .hm.

Well, since so few others are willing to take a shot, but since it is (or I hope is at least starting to be) on a lot of people’s minds, let’s have a go. Let’s try to answer the question of why the people (coal miners, autoworkers, cashiers, etc.) who can least benefit from, or afford to support right-wing candidates, have become their greatest supporters.  Let’s try to answer that question, of why the poorest people support the most right-wing candidates, just like in good ol’-Mussolini days (by the way, did he really make the trains run on time, or did he just run them over you if you didn’t support him?  Anyone with knowledge, feel free to remark.)

 Anything I will suggest will naturally blend into, bleed into other ideas you or I might have, but to try to prevent the kaleidoscope from crushing into a maroon-black centre, I will try to separate them out (a bit). 

1)  Let’s go back to the beginning.  Reagan wins, Gorbachev acquiesces, capitalism wins, communism loses.  Ok.  But look at things now.  Rampant communist-capitalist country (China) wins, capitalist-oligarch system returns with a bang (Russia), and former “socialist” satellites like Poland and Slovenia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic rocket ahead.  Turns out these last countries kind of like things they grew accustomed to under communism, like health-care, transit, and so on.  Throughout most of the United States, “transit” is a word you could only encounter in a Latin class at Harvard, but in Europe, it’s used to increase efficiency and productivity and enhance capitalist goals.  A person can travel at night in Romania, but in Tennessee?  Get serious. And that’s a problem, if you want to have an economy, much less a community or a country.

2)  Let’s take on the obvious, the so-called demise of unions.  Well, union voters never were or are left-wing voters or Democrats.  Statistically, that can be proven.  Most union voters admired the boss and wanted to be like him, even if capitalist state structures made it virtually impossible they ever could be.  What unions do, and what the right knows, is something far more insidious—they create, as the right knows, that one thing most anathema to the right—community.  People get together.  They talk.  (Family, amongst the right, doesn’t mean “family values”—it means “my family, right or wrong.”) They share insights and family goals and gossip and information.  They have BBQs, play softball.  They realize they’re all in this together, and have a mutual stake in making their lives better.  If you look at the media, it’s all about wages and strikes, but if you look to the strategists of the right, you know what they’re trying to undermine.  Why did American slave-buyers make an explicit point of separating families, mothers and fathers from children?  Why did American slave-buyers make sure no slaves came from the same West African village?  Because if they did, they could _communicate_.  And if you’re in the top 1%, the last thing in the world you want is for the bottom 99 to be able to communicate.

So yes, unions, in the formal sense, have been withering, but it isn’t because of strikes or agitation for higher wages—it’s because the increasingly powerful 1% has determined that working people must not be allowed to communicate.  A 2% or a 4% wage increase is irrelevant; an engaged, informed, interested workplace is sheer terror for the right.

3) So tiresome it’s not even worth bringing up, but here we go.  Only an American could think this, but an American I know pointed out that, sure, a lot of people in America were toothless and dirt-poor, and would never, ever eat anything more than raccoon, but they were embodied (embalmed, drunk?) with the idea that, if they ever did discover oil on their land, or somewhere, they sure didn’t want anybody else taxing them.  If they won the lottery, or a distant uncle left them oil shares in a will, then no G-man was ever gonna take it away. Call it anticipatory or pre-emptive selfishness. It’s the American dream, a fantasy the nightmare of which so many Americans end up living out, especially if they get sick and lose everything because of medical bills.  The idea that someday you’ll just somehow get rich, like on TV.  Lord knows how long most Americans carry this dream into their middle and old ages, but many do.  They really think one day they’re going to get rich, and when they don’t, they want to make sure that no-one tries to make their Cokes cost .01 to .02 more.  It is to weep.

4) But that feeds into education.  Education rates have been embarrassingly low in the US forever, and they have been getting lower for a long time in Canada owing to the ongoing separation of classes and increasing inaccessibility of higher education.  If you can keep people stupid, you can keep them thinking that, somehow, with their toothless grins, they, too, will turn out to be Romneys.  Say nothing of girls in Afghanistan or Pakistan; there are probably countless black girls in Texas, or native girls in northern Canada, who’d take a bullet in the head if they could get an education and escape the cycle of hopelessness they’ve been born to.  When was the last time a U.S. politician’s son or daughter was harmed in an American war?  That’s now left to poor people who will sign up to take a bullet because it may be the only shot at grappling out of poverty that they can imagine.  Keep the people in a nasty, brutish, and mean state of fear and aggressiveness, and they will not think about making common cause with others.

5) And then there is technology and how that affects interaction.  Facebook and so on, blah, blah, it seems too tiresome even to discuss.  But people increasingly see themselves as private islands and VIPs.  Even in despair, on notecards, teens take to the web to express their individual hopelessnesses and have them magnified a thousand times over.  Young people could never imagine actually joining a political party and sitting through meetings and consulting with others and trying to make a positive difference.  No, that’d take too long.  Thus, NGOs and eco-tourism and the like are much more popular.  Students I’ve known shave their heads for cancer and think that’s resume material, that they should get a special commendation for it.  I imagine I’ve known over 10 000 post-secondary students, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of more than about 3 who could actually give a care about politics.  But volunteer at a food bank?  Oh sure, because that gives instant feelgood gratification and can go on your resume.  Try to do something about why we’d even need food banks in some of the very richest places on the entire planet?  No, that wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t give that immediate sense of being a great person.  You can shave your head and go on facebook, but going to a meeting and eating old donuts and drinking lousy coffee in somebody’s apartment does not, not cut it on facebook.  If the only way you can imagine expressing yourself is on strictly individual terms, then you’re either right-wing, or, yeah, you’ll spend a few months in Ghana building a water pump that will break down when you’re on the plane home and then get a job with a bank.  Sure, people are disaffected with politics, for countless reasons—when have they never not been?  But I hold to my point—that a technologically enabled sense of the person as island has contributed to an increasing unwillingness to engage in grassroots change-positive action.  Signed a petition on facebook lately?  Good for you.  Might as well put “brushed my teeth” on your resume.

6) This last does come to the democratic deficit.  It used to be that just about any party would urge people to “get out and vote!” because that was kind of an obvious, universally sanctioned thing to say, like “take care!” or “don’t drink and drive.”  But, of course, in the age of robo-calling and voter suppression and attack ads and the like, the mantra is more like “please slip on the ice and have to go to the hospital on voting day.”  Harper has imbibed all the tactics steeped in experience by his Republican mentors, and he knows that, if he can just slice and dice the electorate finely enough, the base and 5% is all he needs.  Ergo, yes, disaffect everyone you possibly can, and turn them off politics as much as you possibly can, through sleazy tactics, illegal campaign donations winked at by meaningless bodies like Elections Canada and bystander courts, proroguing, and so on and on.  Keep the people out, and you will keep the left out, too.  The closer you can get to 1% doing all the voting, the closer you get to Atlas shrugging at the wimps on the beach he commands.

7a) And this suggests the fourth estate, a concept one can only find in old dictionaries now.  Time was, the media had a role in informing people about what was going on, but, with the mainstream media being univocally right and increasingly concentrated, what few progressive voices are heard in local papers or on public stations are like whispered prayers in a stadium full of vuvzelas.  Now more than ever, journalists fear losing their jobs for not supporting right-wing causes, and/or desire above all to emulate their masters, so that, like a, say, Mike Duffy, they can eat soft donuts in a plush leather chair all day if they want.  Many know this one, with the “journalist” gushing over the criminal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtRkZ3i1ERQ

7b) But oh we do have lots of media, that 24-hr news cycle that turns a major issue into a one-minute hit, like a 400-page omnibus bill supplants a past process which would have seen legislation studied and mulled.  That 24-hr news cycle breeds contempt for politicians we are familiar with, and like our general computer world, makes us fatigued at the notion of having to spend more than 140 characters thinking about anything.  It was funny trying to watch relatively sober organs like the New York Times Magazine dutifully trying to come up with serious features, week after week, about cartoonish, inane Republican candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain and Rick Perry who were the 24-hr news cycle’s flavours of the week.  There simply was no there, there.  Back in the day, people like that wouldn’t even have made the first cut of media attention.  But 24-hr news makes us insatiable for Palins and their spinoff shows and the spinoff shows of the offspring, and so on.  Politicians themselves simply can’t be, or become, or afford to be reflective.  They’ve got to propose the simplest solutions to the most complex problems, the father of which in recent Canadian history is Presto Manning.

8) Related to some if not most of the above, is a loss of secular belief, a faith in ourselves that we all could actually do something positive that would benefit us all.  We can now only see ourselves on facebook (with lots of friends), or, if we’re lucky, tv.  In the 1990s, Ontario’s Mike Harris government, keen for right-wing cred, helped a private consortium to just go ahead and build a private toll highway, the 407.  The public sector could have built that, and the public could have reaped the gains.  Everyone knows Ontario is in a hard place right now, so why can’t anybody fathom why it is perverse that the millions upon millions of dollars that *could* have flowed right back to Ontario citizens are now flowing into a few private clutches?  Casino billionaire (a man who takes jobs from others) Sheldon Adelson spent, at a very modest estimation, 53 million to try to elect first Gingrich, then Romney (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/11/08/why-sheldon-adelsons-election-donations-were-millions-well-spent/).  How many jobs could $53M create, in America or anywhere?  53 million.  Think about it.  Shelley could have built a factory to employ disaffected Republicans for decades and kept 100s of them in work until they were pensioned off.  They could have made. . .bumper stickers, or license plates.

9) Penultimate closing thought.  It was interesting to see some of Ken Burns’ documentary about the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the dirty 30s lately, and to read in the New York Times magazine lately about the basketball franchise there.  Singly or doubly, these media emanations offered intriguing data.  OK always was a Republican state, but during the dust bowl, FDR did his best, and told it like it was, that no president could control the weather.  The government offered employment and did what it could, and OK went Democrat for a time (cf. the essentially duly reviled fleeing Brit R. B. Bennett in Canada, whose austerity buggies were but the wry name representing real sacrifice of people more stoic than prineer anywhere).  Despite the incredible privations, the suicides and so forth, it doesn’t look like anyone just up and starved. That didn’t seem to happen.  There was a government.  It wasn’t like New Orleans lately. Then OK went back Republican and is now.  But after it was bombed by a white-supremacist far-right looney tune, OKC began to rebuild.  And rebuild how?  Well, duh, by beginning to work together on things, and actually *accepting* things like penny-fraction civic taxes so that roads and galleries and monuments and parks and so forth could get built.  So it just goes to show that you don’t need to be far-right anti-tax in order to progress; you can be a Republican, and have a park.  Incredible.  If only the Canadian government could go on a fact-finding mission to Oklahoma.

10)  A closing thought.  So much has been written about how the Republicans are so out of touch with the changing demographics of America that they will have a hard time getting re-elected again without moderating their policies.  Probably that’s an overstatement, but there’s much to it, still and all—if Republicans can’t appeal to more than just the old white men, paraphrasing the much criticized but not so inaccurate words of candidate Obama, who cling to their guns (and Bibles they can’t read much less comprehend), then the Republicans are in trouble.  But things change.  I am more worried about the demographics in Canada.  I’m not eager to see a coalition of the NDP and the Liberals, but there is much to be said for MP Pat Martin’s point that, given our non-representative political system, Harper can be Prime Minister until he gets bored just by getting 1/3 of voters to vote for him.  That is a democracy?  And the PM has wasted no time while he’s been PM trying to shut down voters—robocalling false voting stations, using lying attack ads, sucking up taxpayer money on government propaganda ads that Putin studies with envy—even wasting your money and mine—close to a million of it—to find out how much the ethnic vote (read: Asians and Indians) likes him.  This is *your* government, spending *your* money to promote itself and self-strategize (http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1287450--immigration-ministry-paid-for-media-monitoring-of-minister-jason-kenney-s-image), but apparently it’s of little consequence to Canadians.  Funner to shave one’s head to fight cancer, instead.  Pity no-one can find a link between shaving heads and creating accountable systems that maximize results.  Want to crowdsource?  Try not shaving your head.  Try supporting your dying buddy by having a meeting to get together people to try to come up with a way to figure out how we can maximize health care dollars and affect or create government towards providing the best cures for the greatest number of people, including your buddy/mom/friend, etc.  No?  Not cool enough?  Sorry.

Sorry.

zr

Obama's New Girlfriend: (her name is Sandy)

I am growing so, so, so weary of pundits saying that Sandy was a blessing for Obama because it gave him a chance to “look presidential.”  He wasn’t looking presidential.  He was the President.

It wasn’t about “looking” anything.  In times of crisis, you look to your president, your leader.  There was Katrina, there was Bush.

To listen to pundits, it’s as if New Yorkers and New Jerseyians called down wrath upon themselves so that Fox/CNN could blame them for Republican shortcomings.

 Most leaders (reality check) are going to have to deal with problems; if the issue becomes how they “look,” then we’re really in trouble.  Say Romney wins—will he call the national weather service not to find out what hurricanes are coming but how he will “look”?

-zr

And another thing!, he stormed uselessly and thunderously.  This whole "look presidential" and "photo-ops" crap mostly comes from the tv media itself.  So you're a journalist, so you've been subjected to a "photo-op"--whatcha gonna do about it?  Call it a photo-op, or act like a journalist and talk about what actually happened?  What Jane Doe or John Doe sitting in his/ her living room in Oklahoma really ponders the issue of "looks presidential"?  Journalists have been sucked in and are trying to report on themselves before they report on the story at hand. 

First, there has to be a crisis.  Then, there has to be a leader.  Then, there has to be a leader seen dealing with it.  You don't leap out of the gate with: "here's a chance to look presidential!!!"  TV journalists are so infected and indissociable from their own medium than they can't sift anything for reporting or analytical purposes.

Where was the journalist who said: "er, this storm is causing damage.  The president said "blah."  He is taking "blah" measures."  Oh no, it was all about journalists getting to speculate on whether or not whatever candidate "looked" presidential.  How messed up is this, completely.  Say a journalist's mother gets breast cancer.  Does a journalist's mother stand by eagerly and say: "yes, yes, she's looking like a warrior.  She looks like she's ready to fight it.  For those who counted her out, here she is saying, defiantly, that she's in this race until the finish."  The media offering me nil in the way of moral compass, as usual I'm going to have to make up my own, on which I'll report later, I guess.