Stephan: This story gives you the true measure of the immoral and true nature of healthcare in the United States. In any honorable nation that cared a whit for the wellbeing of its citizens, you would never read this story. But here, where profit is all that matters, it is completely predictable.
Participants hold signs during the Senate Democrats’ rally against Medicaid cuts in front of the U.S. Capitol Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
States are announcing deep Medicaid cuts due to budget shortfalls stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, at the same time that millions of people lose their employer-based health coverage.
During the Great Recession, state Medicaid programs slashed coverage for services like dentistry, podiatry, and insulin pumps amid steep budget cutbacks. The current crisis “is going to be the ’09 recession on steroids,” Matt Salo, the executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, told Politico. “It’s going to hit hard, and it’s going to hit fast.”
Medicaid, which is one of the largest programs funded by states, covers about 70 million low-income adults and children — the same population that has been hit hardest by the coronavirus. Though the federal government pays more than half of the Medicaid cost, governors ultimately determine the scope of the program in each state.
Several states have already announced cuts to their Medicaid programs and others are expected to follow. Ohio […]
Stephan: This condemnation of the vulgar little gremlin who occupies the White House is unprecedented. Lancet is one of the three most prestigious medical journals in the world -- the other two being The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The British Medical Journal. As far as I can remember Lancet has never before taken such a position against an American president, and this Lancet editorial, I think, should be seen as a major alarm bell from a non-American source, telling us how seriously Donald Trump and the ethically depraved people around him have debased and degraded the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1·3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80 684 as of May 12. States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis.The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s […]
Stephan: This exegetic essay, in my opinion, states the true state of America, and the rapid dismantlement and politicization of the legal and judiciary systems that once made us the envy of the world. As this essay described we are way down the road to becoming an authoritarian christofascist kleptocracy. If Trump is re-elected, and I think he could lose the popular vote by five million votes, and still win through the Electoral College, the United States as a democratic republic will be gone from the pages of history by the time his second term ends. It is that dire.
Three years ago, President Donald Trump appeared to be politically wounded and legally encircled. On May 17, 2017, eight days after Trump had fired James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Memos written by Comey stated that Trump had asked him to “let go” of the F.B.I. investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s national-security adviser, who had been fired after he lied to Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials about the nature of a phone call that he’d had with the Russian Ambassador. As 2017 came to a close, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about the call and agreed to serve as a coöperating witness for Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s effort to flout post-Watergate reforms, which were designed to prevent a President from pressuring the F.B.I. into halting a politically embarrassing investigation, appeared to have failed.
Yet now, six months before he faces reëlection, Trump, with the help of Attorney General William Barr, is successfully rewriting that history. Last Thursday, Barr
Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges - Los Angeles Review of Books
Stephan: The material covered in this article will all be very familiar to regular readers., but that makes it no less accurate an assessment. Vampire capitalism and its absurd emphasis on individualism is destroying our society. The Covid-19 pandemic and the comparison of America's response compared to other developed nations makes that screamingly clear.
A minor note that pleased me personally: I particularly noted that the term neofeudalism I coined in this context, 15 years ago, appears to be moving into the mainstream, along with christofascism, and illness profit system.
In Capital is Dead, McKenzie Wark asks: What if we’re not in capitalism anymore but something worse? The question is provocative, sacrilegious, unsettling as it forces anti-capitalists to confront an unacknowledged attachment to capitalism. Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism? Left unquestioned, this assumption hinders political analysis. If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism, we should be able to consider the possibility that capitalism has mutated into something qualitatively different. Wark’s question invites a thought experiment: what tendencies in the present indicate that capitalism is transforming itself into something worse?
Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. Drawing from libertarian economist Tyler Cowen’s emphasis on the permanence of extreme inequality in the global, automated economy, the conservative geographer Joel Kotkin envisions the US future as mass serfdom. A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et […]
Stephan: And here we have yet another revelation of how the American system has been rigged against ordinary people in favor of the corporations and the rich. It is a picture of deliberate anti-wellbeing. And yet millions of those souls whose lives are, as this article describes, structured against them will, in November, vote for the continuance of their impoverishment. It makes my heart sick,
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on May 8 that the US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April. This is the largest decline in jobs since the government began tracking the data in 1939. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty
Don, a commercial boat captain in Sarasota, Florida, wasn’t on Twitter before the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, though, he decided to join; after weeks of struggling with his state’s unemployment insurance system, signing up for Twitter was a last-ditch attempt to make progress. “I googled how I can get ahold of the state, just looking for answers, and I saw some Twitter posts popping up,” he told me.
Don, 47, and his wife both work for the same company and were laid off on March 18. They’ve spent weeks trying to navigate Florida’s unemployment system, dealing with crashing websites and blocked phone lines, sometimes calling hundreds of times a day. Three weeks ago, his wife was finally deemed eligible to start receiving benefits, but he’s still waiting. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” he said.
