If you are like most of us, you hate the insurance racket. It is like a giant cancer that is thoroughly capitalist in nature, yet is so destructive that it actually undermines and erodes the entire structure of the economic system that lets it proliferate. Everywhere, privatized insurance is eating away at any government social nets that have been established. It feeds on government social programs like a shark feeds on smaller fish.
Do you feel secure with the insurance companies ripping into your wallets on a monthly basis? I bet not. Most of what we pay for is so thoroughly hole ridden as to make our policies next to worthless. Lawyers and insurance companies go together, with insurance employed lawyers constantly creating bigger gaps in coverage that might make these companies have to pay out some small fraction of what they take in. This symbiotic relationship between these 2 groups is why we hate the corporate lawyers so much, yet find these crooks growing in number and influence by the second. Conservative, venal, vicious, arrogant, ignorant, and servile, these corporate lawyers fueled by insurance often fall later in their careers into government office, where they corrupt the government down into the sewer, too, alongside themselves and the insurance companies.
Wikipedia lists some interesting facts about the global insurance rip off. For example, that global insurance premiums have increased by more than 1/2 in just the last decade alone. Plus, that Japan and the US account for 1/2 of the insurance premiums paid in the world, though together our 2 countries only have 5% of world population! Do you feel all that secure now? Or less?
We have the worst medical system in the industrialized world and it’s the one disrupted the most by the insurance business. So if insurance is supposed to deliver security, it fails miserably to do so. Instead, the insurance business destroys overall social security, as it rips to shreds government and even religion based services to the community. That hospital might have a Catholic cross and pictures of nuns everywhere, but in truth, it is insurance agents running your medical care, not some benign (or not so benign) church.
Consider this too, that the $3.3 trillion global insurance business is quite connected to the directly financial sector, which is connected to those who would destroy government run social security everywhere, and replace it with private pension plans full of holes throughout. Private pensions, in fact, are nothing more than insurance plans for covering what will not exist anymore if the government run systems of caring for the elderly and infirm get totally closed down, as the super rich are constantly working to do.
Don’t mistake those hard working clerks everywhere in insurance selling offices for the crooks making the money, personally hidden away from your view. This is a business whose main work is simply in destroying the work of others out there actually helping deliver real services to those in need. The real owners are leeches on society, who drain off available funds to their own portfolios yachts,mansions, and golf club memberships. They are profiteers and pirates, not nuns, not government workers trying hard to deliver a service, not neighbors, family, and friends who might help you out in time of need. They are not providing you with a service, but rather ripping service you need away from you.
The insurance scams epitomize all that is going wrong with modern American society. Their leaders are running our government, and ruining it. They are the epitome of corruption, and today we are in a sea of that, largely because of their increasing influence on our daily affairs. It’s time to knock these companies way back down to size. It’s time for the public to make the laws, not insurance barons.
Over at the University of Chicago is a great read on why America(ns) let healthcare slide backwards…
http://www.chas.uchicago.edu/documents/JHSB04ExtraQuadagno.pdf
What’s ironic is that with all the media attention to self-help, addiction rehab, fitness frenzies, and other Oprah-isms, the provisions for quality professional care has fallen dubiously out of pocketbook’s reach.
Get a job. You’re sick. Get help. Can’t afford help. Get a job.
Pass the scalpal, the wallet is still breathing.
No wonder corps are popular. They can afford to provide the insurance. Note I said “provide insurance” not Coverage.
Bleach your teeth in oil… A credit card remains the best form of plastic surgery in the U.S.
And the corporations scream like they’re being dissected alive without anesthesia if you point out that the Employees are considered their assets.
We aren’t even considered Human Resources any more, they took the Human part out of our title and simply call us the WorkForce.
They spend more money keeping the machines in good working shape than they do keeping the Humanoid Biological Interface Units in working order.
We’re more easily replaced. A 3 million dollar steel rolling machine costs more than an employee who isn’t going to get 3 million in pay for a lifetime.
That was a good article, 13th.
Tony,
The editor has suggested (in a recent post) that this is not the place to “call attention to oneself”. I’m a little lost on the altruism as names are the heart of politics and the “frontline”.
I recently found some great photo journalism (in this site) of Springs’ activities (Camp Casey and a recent rally). It was nice to see your photo, Tony, tall in the saddle, and doing the right thing, too.
How does one humanize without “calling attention”?? Must be a modern world thing. Too many busy signals. No context.
Thanks for holding the Fort at NMT. Yep, a great many posts piss me off. How lucky is that!!
As the band RATM once said, “The frontline is everywhere.”
I think what the ‘editor’ was referring to, was that protests are more than just newshounds hounding out the opportunity to get into the newspaper or on TV. Still, since the whole world is a stage whetehr we like it or not when we protest, we should be trying to image the protest as well as it can be done. Unfortunately, we sometimes fail at doing that.
I’d like to add, that none of my posts are with the intent to just piss people off. I know that I do that at times, but it is usually unintentional. Sometimes it is unintentional even when it appears that I did deliberately write something offensive.
And sometimes just expressing one’s honest opinion about something will piss lots of people off. For example, upon the deaths of Molly Ivins, James Brown, and Gerald Ford I had 2 choices….. just to shut my trap, or to actually say how I feel about their contributions overall? On this blog, I probably offended nobody with what I said about Ford and Brown, yet when it came to Ivins, then it probably looked like I was deliberately pushing people’s buttons. Not really the case.
Similarly, here it might seem that sometimes I talk trash about liberal Christians and this might seem offensive to some that might think all the fire should exclusively be directed towards Right Wing Christians. Similarly when we talk about liberal Democrats, instead of the far easier to ridicule Republican nut cases it might look like we are being abrasive. But how else can one be other than to give the Democrats a totally free ride?
Anyway, thanks for your comments, 13th. I guesss the one thing that I hope this blog helps accomplish some, is to show ordinary folk that ordinary folk have the right to protest an,d speak out against the status quo even if they do it in less than a perfect manner. We can not just leave it all up to the academics, politicians, and police state authorities to engage alone in political activity and do it all for us, to us..
Even if you did not finish grade school, your voice still matters, and in some ways matter more than all the PhDs mouthing off their bullshit together. But only if you use that voice.
They say we don’t count but we do. They lie so get a move on Now, though it is certain to offend some nice people. Many think it rude merely that the meek should speak up.
Thank you Tony. I agree with EVERYTHING you said in the last post.
In fact, I’d buy you a beer on those words if time and distance were not factors.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll join in on the upcoming March 17th event. I’m glad you posted the date and locale. It’s a matter of a lot of personal details, and actually that just may be why I ignore them (if possible). I realize that context is vague.
Shaking hands and hand shakes… life is not always a public post… but it’ll do, and good enough at that for now.
Oh and per news and publicity “stunts”, agreed. It’s the old Salem witch advocacy…
You are guilty until proven more guilty. Float or sink.
And this too, breeds intimidation. Alas.