Month: August 2009

If it is not yet apparent, perhaps it is time for the last holdouts among us to accept the fact that the American healthcare system is never going to undergo any meaningful reform. Whatever comes out of this Congress and ends up on the desk of the suddenly-not-so-bold President will be watered down, ineffective, costly, and of little use to people who really need it – the working uninsured who are too "rich" for Medicaid and too poor to pay out-of-pocket.

I believe there are three main reasons for the impending and perpetual failure of reform.

First, insurance industry shills and more importantly their ideological allies now have too prominent a pulpit for spreading disinformation. ClintonCare in 1994 represented the last, best shot at reform because it was the last pre-Fox News effort. Fifteen years ago the industry lobby had to engage in a very expensive anti-reform PR campaign, most memorably the "Harry and Louise" TV ads which showed a respect for the truth on par with that of an Alabama used car salesman. Now? They don't even have to spend a dime. The right wing media does the hatchet job for them.

Why bother with PR campaigns when people from national celebrities like Limbaugh down to dopey 7th-string imitations on bad websites and local AM stations will rail against it for hours gratis?

Second, the timing is just spectacularly inept.

Even the d-bag the NY Times hired to replace Bill Kristol understands this:

But in a crisis, all the public tends to care about are jobs and economic growth. It’s not the ideal time to pass costly social legislation that promises to reap dividends only in the long term, if at all. That’s why Franklin Roosevelt waited until 1935, when the Great Depression seemed to be waning, to push Social Security through Congress. It’s why Lyndon Johnson established Medicare at the peak of the long post-World War II expansion. And it’s why Massachusetts’s health care plan and California’s cap on greenhouse-gas emissions both passed at the height of the recent boom, rather than the bottom.

This might have worked after a prolonged period – 12 to 18 months – of sustained positive economic news.

Maybe in late 2011, just in time for the 2012 election. But now? It might not even get to a floor vote. This is an unqualified fuck-up on the White House's part and the first serious misjudgment by a President who suddenly sounds a lot more like Eisenhower than the election year FDR comparisons would lead us to believe.

Third, I have serious doubts about the American public's ability to meaningfully process this issue. It is universally (see what I did there?) recognized as a complex problem with correspondingly complex solutions. They are being pitched to an electorate in which 14% of adults – one out of every seven people sitting on the bus with you – are functionally illiterate. They can't read this blog or the instructions on their Easy Mac let alone understand what a single-payer system would entail and how it would affect them personally. I feel like the public listens up to the point at which they can no longer understand it – which doesn't take long, sadly – and then the shields go up.

After that, they either decide that they fear change or that they should hide their lack of comprehension behind some slogans they heard on Glenn Beck's show. There is a reason elected officials spend so much time talking about what political scientists call easy issues – those for which citizens need no information whatsoever to form valid-sounding opinions (i.e. "moral" issues like gay marriage or abortion, which anyone can declare Right or Wrong).

Until any of these things change, and I'm certainly not holding my breath, it is pointless to even propose a serious overhaul of the status quo let alone expect one to pass.

America's inboxes lit up on Monday with the tale of a young woman who is suing her alma mater for the cost of her tuition because she can't find a job – or so the forwarded emails claim.
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She is actually filing suit because she alleges that the school's placement office is treating her differently than other students, but regardless of how her situation is or is not misrepresented she is presented as one might suspend someone over a dunk tank and charge sunburnt and corn dog eating rubes a quarter to whip baseballs at the target. That is what the media do best: make Straw Man arguments based on isolated examples of complete idiots, often complete idiots filing frivilous lawsuits, so that lazy, entitled sacks of shit across the nation can let fly torrents of indignation.
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CNN's narrative barely disguises its contempt and suggestions about how we should feel:

As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe's career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.
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This is the point at which we're supposed to get on our high horses and bloviate about laziness, hard work, personal responsibility, The Greatest Generation, and the Way Things Used to Be but no longer are. While the person in this isolated example does sound like somewhat of a knucklehead, this story is still instructive of a growing social problem: we are selling a lot of expensive college degrees to students who walk out the door and find that they aren't worth a whole lot.
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How can $70,000 for a Bachelor's from for-profit "Monroe College" be considered anything but a con? Plenty of students are leaving "good" schools and entering the bottom rung of the economy doing jobs which barely require a high school diploma. What a recent bestseller labelled The Quarterlife Crisis is transitioning from a personal issue to a social phenomenon. We're at risk for developing a sizeable generation of young people whose cynicism, social isolation, and sense of futility will make the much-publicized Generation X from the early 90s look like Up With People. The idea of having the kind of careers that previous generations enjoyed – stability, promotion, and retirement on pension – disappeared decades ago when our Baby Boomer parents sold it to Mexico and China hoping to cash out with their 401(k)s. Now the idea of finding any employment at all to justify the cost of higher education is starting to slip away.

I can hardly blame recent college graduates for adopting the overwhelmingly disinterested, what-difference-does-it-make-anyway attitude. How long can you be unemployed or working a minimum wage, no-benefit job with 50, 70, or 100 grand in college debt? How many people can graduate and celebrate the passage into adulthood by moving back in with mom and dad before they give up altogether? For how long can we perpetuate the idea that education is the cure-all for these economic trainwrecks without tangible evidence that it's worth it? This news-of-the-weird item might prove that suing universities is not the answer, but it also raises the question of whether attending them is any more productive.

I can't help but notice that almost exactly 6 months into the Obama presidency the first histrionic wingnut attempt to cash in on it has already arrived in bookstores. Yes, Michelle Malkin stopped picking the corn out of her own shit for long enough to churn out Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies, the title of which was meticulously chosen by a panel of 11 year-old boys.

Have you ever sat down and tried to write a book? It's agonizing, slow, and not unlike sitting down in an open field with a hammer and a stack of two-by-fours and saying "OK, time to build a house." To have churned out a book about a presidency which has yet to go on longer than the average baseball season requires either herculean research and writing skills or the employment of some creative time-saving measures. It's 376 pages. Three hundred and seventy-six fucking pages! I mean, I know there are some ginandtacos readers in the publishing industry and the idea that a book of that length could even be edited, revised, typeset, and printed in this timeframe would be extraordinary let alone considering that A) it had to be written (376 pages!) and B) enough things had to happen for an author to actually write about. One of three things must be true in the exercise of Malkin's tradecraft:

1. The book was written in 2008 right after it became apparent that the Republican field was not going to produce a successful candidate – you know, around January 1 – and the names of the winner and his "cronies" were filled in with a simple ctrl-f find-and-replace session. INSERT NAME HERE sure is a corrupt, godless little liberal, after all.

2. The book is a hastily-assembled pastiche of glorified blog posts which involved absolutely no research and thus could be written in just a couple of weeks, albeit at great effort. For context, the average ginandtacos post is about 800 words and, if it involves minimal fact-finding, takes around an hour. In Word that would be about a single-spaced page. So, you know, do that about 250 times and you'd have Malkin's book. Unless it has 3" margins, which wouldn't surprise me in the least.

3. 342 of the 376 pages are reproduced transcripts of the Oliver North trial.

If you want to feel like shit about this country, please understand that the book immediately rocketed to the top of the Amazon bestseller list where it currently resides snugly behind Glenn Beck's Common Sense. Who buys this shit? Can they possibly read it? Can they read? Skim the comments to learn that, contrary to the expectations one might have about a book about the first six months of a presidency but released six months and seven days after said presidency began, the book is fabulously well-researched:

Ms. Malkin did her homework and the facts, figures, and resource information presented in this cogent, well crafted, invaluable book make for a must read. Culture of Corruption will confirm what many have long suspected about this president and his administration, or will be a real eye opener for Obama supporters who went along for the ride for no other reason than the catchy slogans and still don't get why they ought to be alarmed. As an aside – this illuminating book dovetails handsomely with the important work Ms. Malkin does every day on her blog site keeping the citizenry informed. Thank you Ms. Malkin and keep on fighting the good fight.

Of course that review was written on July 28, twelve hours after the book was released. So the person who wrote that review, unless working for the publisher and privy to advance copies, didn't even read it. That is, on so many levels, fitting. Art imitates life; reviewer imitates author.