HEALTHCARE CAPITALISM

Every American now knows that the country is currently in the throes of a horrible wave of opioid overdoses, with tens of thousands of people dying every year.  The numbers are so bad that a recent study found that the average American lifespan actually decreased in 2018, partly due to the sheer volume of overdose deaths, which stands at somewhere over seventy two thousand a year. 
While the scourge of drug use is certainly nothing new in this country, this epidemic is different because it can't be traced back to some new form of street drug like crack, instead it has its roots in corporate malfeasance.   A recent court finding found that the owners of Purdue, a pharmaceutical company, lied for years about how addictive their drug oxycontin was.  There are even internal memos detailing how former president of the company Richard Sackler wrote in an email back in 2001  that the company should deal with people addicted to their drugs by saying "We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”  This was all part of the company's plan to promote oxycontin with outright lies about the nature of its addictive qualities, and the enormous success they had in doing that is why we have such a terrible problem with opioids now.  As the New York Times recently pointed out, Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids.
While corporate indifference to human life is nothing new in this country (how long did tobacco companies lie about their product?), these revelations highlight what is a serious problem in this country: the danger of healthcare and prescription drugs companies running as free market companies.   In many ways, America's healthcare problems are symptomatic of the whole country: we have some of the best medical technology and procedures available in the world, but we have to pay more to have access to them.  And while competition among pharmaceutical companies can spur innovation, they can also easily create problems like our current opioid troubles. While there is nothing wrong with the free market determining the sale of things like TVs and cars, healthcare is another thing entirely.  The fact of the matter is that for healthcare companies to please their stock holders, they need to provide as little actual service to its members as possible.  So nearly every healthcare plan is a crazy patchwork of what medical procedures are and are not covered, based entirely on the company's profitability.  And while Obamacare was a good first step (and despite Republican attempts, it's still mostly hanging in there), universal coverage to all American citizens is still necessary.

The good news is that the American public are getting wise to this terrible system, with healthcare being the number one issue for voters in the recent Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives.  (Even President Trump himself claimed during the campaign that he wanted to create some kind of universal healthcare program, although that was just another one of his may lies.) The Democratic party has cleverly created a catch phrase for future healthcare in this country:  Medicare for all, a smart way to piggyback onto one of the most popular government programs in existence.  There will be inevitable pushback from the corporate system, and the transition may be jarring (personally I think a slow approach, with an expansion of Medicaid eligibility, combined with a gradual lowering of the age for Medicare eligibility, is the way to go), but the possibility that sometime in the near future a Democratic president will finally usher a new age of universal healthcare for this country is not crazy.  It can't happen soon enough for me.

A NEW LOW

It's now official, another precedent has been broken by our corrupt, dictatorial president: he's created the longest government shutdown in American history.  Add that to the fact that Donald Trump is the first president ever to win while losing the popular vote by millions, and that he is also the first to  have never held elected office before or served in the military before being elected, and not forgetting his refusal to shut down his businesses while in the White House, or release his tax returns, and you can see what an insane choice this country made two years ago, and what a horrifying and surreal experience it has been to be an American nowadays.
Trump has allowed the government to shut down for one simple reason: the wall.  His refusal to sign any budget bill that doesn't have at least five billion in spending for his wall, and the Democrats refusal to spend that money has led to the longest government shutdown ever.  Yes, eight hundred thousand government workers are going without pay, national parks are getting filthy and food is often going to market with out proper safety checks, all so that our toddler in chief can have money for a wall that he repeatedly claimed that Mexico would be paying for. 
It's obvious that, despite what Trump says, the wall that he and his supporters love isn't needed  because of any actual effectiveness it might have, (most undocumented immigrants arrive her legally by plane and overstay their visas) but because of the message it sends.   It's a powerful metaphor for the preservation of white America, the fear that the country is being overrun by "the other".  This means that any and all logical arguments against the wall will never change the mind of the President and his followers because it isn't really about keeping people out as it is telling them to stay out.  Although Trump and his supporters will often throw in a few words about supporting legal immigration, it's obvious that this all about more than people coming over the border from Mexico; if Trump and his followers had their way, the whole country would be sealed off to any nonwhite immigrants.  Remember when Trump  was reported to have asked "why do we have to take so many people from shit hole countries?",  reflecting his true attitude towards legal immigration?  As offensive as that was, it was also one of his few honest statements as president.
With the situation getting worse daily, the possible end to the impasse is essentially a nuclear option: Trump is threatening to declare a national emergency at the border and use military spending dollars to build his wall, allowing him to reopen the government and still get what he wants.  The legality of this option is debatable, with strong arguments being written both for and against this presidential power.  The absurdity of declaring a national emergency at a time when illegal crossing is, according to the New York Times, is at a forty six year low, is not going to phase a man so determined to waste government tax dollars on a symbol of hatred.  But if he does make such a declaration, he will be setting a precedent for future presidents that could lead to an almost imperial style of governing in which the president could call almost anything (people lacking healthcare?  climate change?) a national emergency and bypass congress to get funding.  Is this kind of authoritarian leader what the founding fathers of our country wanted?  I certainly don't think so, but we may end up in such a situation.  Quite frankly, the election of a man like Trump has divided our country more deeply than anything since the buildup to the Civil War.  Let's hope this doesn't end the same way.

TRUMP AT TWO YEARS

The Trump presidency has now lasted two years, which is appropriate marker for a grown man who has the temperament of a toddler.  For over seven hundred and thirty days our country has been lead by an erratic, dishonest, bigoted, self obsessed braggart.  Here are some things to look back on:

-He has, according to the Washington Post, made false or misleading claims over six thousand times.  He has repeated some lies so often that fact checkers had to add a new rating (The Bottomless Pinocchio!).

-He has flagrantly disregarded the emoluments clause of the Constitution, allowing his global businesses to continue while engaging in foreign policy.  His self named hotel near the White House has become a convenient way for foreign leaders to funnel money to his corporate interests.

-Has had over forty administration members fired, pushed out or resign.  These include such winners as Scott Pruitt, pushed out for numerous ethics violations, and Anthony Scaramucci, who's reign as White House Communications Director lasted only ten days.  Many of these people who have left described his White House as chaotic and out of control.  Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson admitted that Trump ignored briefings and advice and often had to be told that what he wanted to do was  illegal.   The chaotic nature of his administration was reaffirmed by two tell all books:  Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and Bob Woodward's  Fear: Trump in the White House.

-Gave prominent political positions to family members with no experience, including putting son in law Jared Kushner in charge of Middle East peace agreements, solving the opioid crisis, and justice reform, among other things.

-He has shown admiration for brutal dictators like Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte.

-He fired James Comey as head of the FBI and admitted that it was because of the investigation of Russian conspiracy in his campaign. Since then, he  has continually called Bob Mueller's Russia investigation a witch hunt, even as Mueller has racked up thirty three indictments or guilty pleas, including former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, former campaign chair Paul Manafort, and former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, who plead guilty to crimes made during the campaign, some of which he says Trump directed him to do.  He also repeatedly belittled and eventually fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself in the Russia investigation.  He topped this off by privately meeting with Russian leader Vladamir Putin and then announcing that he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies concerning Russian interference in the election. 

-Time and time again he has attacked any negative coverage of him as fake news, at one speech he intoned “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”  At one point the New York Times reported that he tried to raise the postage rate for the company Amazon because its owner also owns the Washington Post.

-He threw out the Iran deal, the Transpacific Trade Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord without any negotiation or plans to replace them.

-Refused to criticize white supremacists after a rally in Charlottesville North Carolina turned violent, with one woman dying after an avowed bigot ran his car into a group of counter protestors.  As one post on the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer put it "Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us....
He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate … on both sides!"

-He started a trade war with China and several American allies, bragged that trade wars are easy to win, and when China responded with tariffs on American farmers from red states, gave twelve billion dollars to them in subsidies.

-Had a border policy that caused the separation of families, including a breast feeding mother, and then tried to blame it on the Democrats, even as his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the policy as biblical.

-Rolled back numerous environmental protections and discredited a study on the dangers of climate change from his own administration.  He continued to do so even as unprecedented natural disasters occurred.  After forest fires ravaged the state of California, he claimed it was because of the state's own mismanagement, and bizarrely added that the president of Finland told him about the need to rake forests as a way to prevent such fires. 

-Signed a tax cut that enormously favors the wealthy and corporations, and added over a trillion and half dollars to the national deficit.

-Appointed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and defended him even as Christine Blasey Ford forcefully testified in congress that he had once sexually assaulted her.  He also defended Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore after credible accusations of him sexually pursuing under age girls emerged.

-Pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, the bigoted sheriff who ordered his men to carry out racial profiling in defiance of the law, compared his prisons to concentration camps and cost his state millions in legal fees.

-In his two years as president, hate crimes against Muslims, Jews and immigrants have risen, with some attackers even chanting "Trump!  Trump!" during the attacks.  He has done nothing to address this, and has doubled down on his verbal assaults on immigrants, documented or not.  He was once quoted as asking why the US had to take people from "shit hole" countries.

-Recently the New York Attorney General charged his charitable Trump organization with outright crimes, saying that it  “used charitable assets to pay off the legal obligations of entities he controlled to promote Trump hotels, to purchase personal items and to support his presidential election campaign.’’

-As president he spends hours every day watching TV and has played golf one hundred and sixty seven times, after previously criticizing then president Barack Obama for doing the same.  As a candidate he once said "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.”  He has also described himself as a "stable genius" and says he deserves an "A plus.  Can I go any higher?".

-He has taken marching orders from Fox News personalities and other right wing media bloviators. This has lead him to shut down the government to demand tax dollar spending for his wall with Mexico, the same wall that he repeatedly said that Mexico would pay for.

The one piece of good news in all this is that the high profile nature of the office of the presidency means there are currently investigations into  nearly every aspect of Trump's businesses,  with previously unknown crimes possibly (perhaps even likely) to appear sometime soon.   And while there is some debate as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, it's possible that he might have a well deserved jail cell waiting for him once he leaves the White House.