"They've seen too much and don't want to know/Violence grows/Violence grows/Violence grows." Brit punk rockers writing their own rules. Honey Bane on the mic. Boosted by John Peel. Edgy and timeless.
How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
How Angry is America?
“If we desire respect for the law,” said Louis Brandeis, “we must first make the law respectable.” (1916)
"Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati told the New York Times there’s an issue. “There’s a latent undercurrent here of how frustrated people are with the health care industry,” he said. “I’m not condoning the action in any way, but there’s a lot of soul-searching we have to do about an industry that consumes nearly 20 percent of our G.D.P. and yet our outcomes are not nearly as good as countries that spend half as much.”
"Societies that give citizens no way to control their own lives, but put the fate of their people in the hands of distant masters with no concern at all for their wellbeing, invite disaster. We’ve always known that. It’s one of the main reasons for the passage of our antitrust laws. So I hope we can get some control over our society again, before we truly do spin out of control."
SCOTUS, the Robert's Court, has undermined respect for the law. A judiciary and police that protects the most litigated, lawbreaking potus and major political party in American history undermines respect for the law. Monopolist billionaires partying it up while millions struggle with health care bankruptcies undermines respect for the law. Biden pardoning his son only acknowledges that our democratic system just elected a new admin that does not respect the rule of law, but in fact openly encourages violence and phony prosecutions against its political enemies.
I remain somewhat uncertain about this Medicare Advantage Trap. I recently signed up for Medicare Advantage with Kaiser, basically, because I've been with Kaiser (and Group Health before they became Kaiser) through my work for going on forty years. I don't yet, knock on wood, need health care much and after looking around a little I decided to go with what I already knew and, yeah, I liked that I could get everything I needed (health, dental, vision) in one place.
My parents, whose affairs I've managed for last few years, are a very different story. They're in the original Medicare system. In addition to Medicare they have to carry Medigap plans that cost them $300-400 a month each. And they have additional insurance to supplement coverage of their medications. They're in their late 80s and at this point require 24/7 care support.
I don't doubt they might be denied more health care services if they were on Medicare Advantage but all this coverage they already have still does deny them services on occasion. Hartmann reports that on average 18% of health care services are denied by Medicare Advantage plans. United Healthcare, the plan ran by the CEO recently murdered, reportedly, denied 30% of the health care services submitted to them for support. I take some comfort that the denial of services rates lists Kaiser at 7%, the lowest denial rate on the list Hartmann shares, but I still wonder what is the real denial of service rate in the old Medicare? It's not zero, or not in my experience anyway.
And the old system is in fact ridiculously complicated and wasteful. The original Medicare probably doesn't allow as much of the exorbitant CEO and private for profit equity skimming that Hartmann describes going on with Medicate Advantage. But once you're involved in the health care system, the Medicare and Medicaid systems, I must say it's obvious that there are lots of "termite"-like price gouging going on inside these insurance systems, hospital care and specialty services charging inflated rates to insurance plans and routine understaffing of care workers. It is a flashing red alert to me that recent nursing strikes don't mention underpay as much as understaffing levels that endanger patient care.
I definitely don't think increasing profit seeking in health care, which the private equity people like to euphemize as "choice," is the solution. Reducing it is closer to the real task confronting the health care economy in the future. And Medicare Advantage is a privatizing move, private industry trying to secure control of more public monies. But I'm not sure it's this public vs private binary either. I like the idea of Medicare-for-all, build universal health care into the tax base, no co-pays for basic health care services, but that would still by necessity include lots of private enterprise, and would have to be heavily regulated to squeeze out as much of the termite price gouging as possible.
But, most emphatically, I don't think cutting Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid would solve any of our health care problems either. Look around, senior poverty is a thing. My parents would now be destitute and homeless without Medicaid supports, point of fact. And I have no doubt cutting any of these crucial supports would mean more destitution and homelessness, for the working classes, I might add, that worked hard their whole damn lives paying taxes into these programs expecting them to be there when they needed them.
Cutting these programs will not make the law or government more respectable. It will make them less so. But this appears to be where we're at. It's that line, again, about how "the Republicans are the party that insists the government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it." Seventy-seven million Americans voted for forced deportations, sadly, but I'm fairly certain they did not vote for cutting their own health care and Social Security?!
And doing so, obviously, won't stop random vigilante violence against health care CEOs.
The Tony Soprano Syndrome and the Rage of Deaths of Despair
"We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents
Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”
Reminds me of this early '90s paleo-conservative big think piece I recently read about portraying The Godfather film trilogy as an epic story of "Geimenschaft" (family and community) making a last stand against "Gesellschaft" (society and impersonal bureaucratic rules). Really? And here I thought it was something about how family businesses based on criminal violence end in destruction of the family and the fraticidal paranoia and isolation that results?! Any victory for family in The Godfather is at best pyrrhic or tragic, suggesting that assimilation, wealth and success, Gesellschaft, requires the ultimate destruction of Geimenschaft bonds, or that's my distant memory of those films anyway. What strikes me here isn't how republicans get the Tony Soprano story wrong, mistaking bad guys for good guys, so much as they recognize Tony Soprano and Grump as bad guys but identify with them as bad guys, outlaws, fighting for a noble cause, family, America, Christian Nationalism, or non-liberal elites like them, and might even recognize this conflict as more or less a lost cause but identify most with the macho nobility of the idea of not going out without a fight. It's falling on your sword machismo, basically. This is how they delude themselves about their own selfish toxic masculinity. And this is the animus that will drive the revenge of Grump 2. Deaths of despair revenge aided and abetted by corporate elite panic about coming antitrust and democratic reforms. Any credible or effective opposition will be people who believe in a future talking people who don't off the ledge or coaxing them into putting down their guns. And then people making the clear case for how we get to a better future. It's going to be exhausting.
Serwer is The Cruelty is the Point guy. One of our most insightful critics of the Grump Era.
Hip-hop is the genre where men come to terms with their mothers
"The rollercoaster saga of Eminem and Debbie exemplifies the way in which hip-hop is perhaps surprisingly rich with empathetic songs about struggling mothers. Even when artists reveal difficult truths – like Biggie sharing his mom’s cancer diagnosis with the world on Suicidal Thoughts, or underground hero Boldy James complaining of being neglected by the woman of the house on Mommy Dearest – it tends to culminate in a moment that reveals a touching respect, or the mending of a broken relationship.
It’s the genre where working class men come to grapple with complex relationships with the women who gave birth to them – like Debbie and Marshall Mathers. While the road might be rocky and painful memories are likely to be excavated, rappers (and by extension their fans, who feel “seen” by the lyrics) that immortalise their mothers in music tend to walk away with much lighter shoulders."
One of only a few rap songs preserved in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress: "Dear Mama," 2Pac (1995)
The Pop Group and Mark Stewart's Agitprop Post-Punk Funk
"The Pop Group has this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything," once said Vivien Goldman, journalist, member of The Flying Lizards, and Chrissie Hynde's NME London flatmate in the late '70s.
The Pop Group were the first post-punk band or in that conversation, anyway. On paper they were irresistible, for their hilariously blunt agitprop titles alone: Learning to Cope with Cowardice; As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They were also very into Black music; members eventually formed relationships with On-U-Sound records that has lasted into the 21st century; a label devoted to reggae and dub and related beat music. In the burgeoning punk era British pop press of the late 1970s The Pop Group were a prototype post-punk band. So hot they were on the cover of NME before they even had a record.
And Mark Stewart's voice is the unmistakeable calling card of The Pop Group and Stewart's subsequent outfit, Mark Stewart & the Maffia, and in its loutish way a punk rock monument in its own right. Like a drunken pirate, inflamed with bitter lamentation. Like a 17th century ranter or 19th century romantic poet, caterwauling against the void. Stewart's maybe too smart and didactic and political for a goth icon but he carries on in gothic histrionics anyway. He grabs your attention, whether you like it or not. He'd probably make a great street corner preacher if he wasn't such an angry humanist. He often wails through a bullhorn like a street preacher, even if you'd have to really play close attention to make out much of what he is howling or muttering about.
Which is part of his achievement, turning his tuneless warble into this big scenery-chewing personality, apoplectic about the human surrender to entropy and passivity, or the placid indifference to the poly-crises raging all around us. Stewart is not having any of it and has some things to say.
In your face vocals are a common if not universal feature of punk rock singing, of course. And by such criteria alone Stewart is on a very short list of great punk rock singers. But, it should be noted for the same reasons, this makes anything with Stewart's voice impossible to listen to as background music, how I must admit I do most my music listening anymore. The dude will not blend into the music; or tends to "dominate the frame," is how producer Dennis Bovell once put it.
But in small doses, songs, Stewart's hectoring, shamanistic and dramatically delirious spells are cast; "We Are Time," "Where There's a Will There's a Way," "She's Beyond Good and Evil," etc. And maybe contrary to what you might expect from such a big personality Stewart is actually into the collaboration and band thing. I've never had a full blown crush on any Stewart album but there are times when nothing quite hits the spot like one of Stewart's dub-heavy funky free-jazz political jeremiads.
And this be, I'm afraid, one of those times.
A live record of The Pop Group from the '00s is titled "Idealists in Distress from Bristol." Mark Stewart is an idealist in distress and a post-punk original.
"Rob a Bank" (1980): Robin Hood as Punk Rocker.
"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (1980): Punk-funk, post-punk, perverted disco, etc.
"I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," William Blake.
Mark Stewart and the Maffia's version:
Grump Blasts Biden for Issuing Pardon Without Being Paid For It
"PALM BEACH—In a series of scathing Truth Social posts on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump lambasted President Biden for issuing a pardon without being paid for it.
“Pardoning someone for free was an incredibly selfish act,” Trump wrote. “This will lower the market value of every future pardon I give.”
“The framers of the Constitution gave the president pardon power for one reason: to make money,” Trump continued. “I have too much respect for the Constitution to pardon people for free.”
In perhaps his strongest denunciation of Biden’s actions, he added, “Any decent father would have made Hunter ambassador to France.”
Nice response to journalists crowing about how Biden pardoning his son justifies Grump pardoning the Jan 6 perps. The journalistic "bothsidesing" in the election was always predicated on making these kind of preposterous comparisons; Jan 6 was justified payback for the BLM protests, etc.
Biden was right to pardon his son simply to spare him further persecution by Grump's weaponization of the government against his political enemies, which he did 2016-2020 and promises to do in his second term, only worse. And doing so really isn't proof, like some want to suggest, that Jan 6 or stealing national security documents or conspiring to change the outcome of the '20 election were partisan attacks as much as scuttling their prosecution before the '24 election is absolutely proof that republican packing and weaponizing of SCOTUS isn't a threat but for all practical purposes already a done deal.
I only say "for all practical purposes" because we don't know how far SCOTUS will let this go. We only know they already let it go too far.
And it's more evidence, unfortunately, that the media in a vain effort to stay relevant will bend over backwards to accommodate Grump's fake news frame. Grump pardoned Manafort and Stone for their crimes related to the 2016 election, for just two instances. (There are many more!) Biden pardoned his son for buying a gun while lying about his drug addictions. No treason or election interference. And not comparable but the NY Times hasn't figured this out.
Or what about the nepotism angle? Grump pardoned his son-in-law's father, guilty of big financial fraud, in his first term and named him ambassador to France for his second term. Biden is trying to spare his son being persecuted for the next four years for his, Joe's, political ambitions. Seems compassionate to me, and a principle he ought to extend to other obvious targets of Grump's illiberal wrath.
Democracy does depend on voters being able to discern basic differences. Crooked Hilary was never as crooked as Grump, the Biden Crime Family was never as criminal as Grump's, by orders of magnitude. The failure to recognize this obvious distinction, as in the election, jeopardizes the American democratic experiment.
Why "They" Lost
"In 2008, when Obama won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that 62 percent of voters who said they were dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. In 2024, when Trump won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that, again, 62 percent of voters dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. Even against an opponent carrying as much baggage as Trump, the Harris campaign was never able to overcome the axiomatic principle of presidential elections: When one party sinks in the public’s esteem, the other rises."
Ronald Brownstein @ The Atlantic
So, again, it's the economy, stupid. Longtime elections analyst, Ronald Brownstein, sorts the data available so far and has a long debrief with the Harris/Walz campaign strategists. Biden/Harris were unpopular, associated by the many with the post-pandemic inflation and rising costs of living, and this axiomatic principle overrode any misgivings the electorate might have had about Grump.
Okay, but if the real economic factors, beyond Covid, most responsible for the recent rise in the cost of living were actually republican-leaning corporate price gouging and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates (with the stated intention of imposing "economic pain" on wage workers), not really Biden or the Dems, doesn't that make this axiom of elections a kind of heads-we-win-tails-you-lose proposition for republicans running the economy? At the very least it puts partisan republican interests in a position to extort the electorate.
This dynamic might not be entirely operable without the cover of a pandemic or war or some other big global disruption to trade and normal economic global exchange but we face no shortage of such events, right? And we just came out of one. And, most importantly, if this axiom is so strong that it can override concerns like violent attempts to overthrow the government and treasonous collusion with hostile foreign dictators then we got bigger problems than the price of gas, I'm here to tell you.
Anyway, I actually like the idea that the number one responsibility for any government, or administration, should be to stabilize prices and sustain a reasonably affordable cost of living for the many, the working classes and wage workers. There's a norm I can get behind. Good idea. Let's do that. But if you're going to do that then you have to give the gov the ability to do that and not leave it in the hands of those, big corporations and Wall Street, who would rather the gov have nothing to do with prices and interest rates or, as partisan Republicans, would like incumbent Dems to be blamed for inflation and the rising costs of living.
This election was made possible by a disastrous alliance of billionaires and violent bigots in the republican party. When they screw up the economy and they surely will-- Lusk is already talking about cutting trillions in social benefits essential to the working classes-- then we hope the ironclad political economic axiom prevailing in '24 still holds but don't be surprised if the culture war against whoever-- immigrants, women's rights, LGBTQ, Muslims, liberals-- doesn't become, again, a paramount national emergency requiring more austerity and sacrifice from the working classes.
But Grump will most likely be able to lower the price of gas, or for awhile anyway. So no-college wage workers have sold out for the price of gas, again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)