Mercenaries and the VA

Veterans in this country get a raw deal.  Send 'em off to the proverbial harm's way with a promise that if they make it back, but the fine print says we cut that.  And then we cut it some more.  (Undoubtedly some vets get what they need, but some don't, and - here's a tale from the not-so-distant past: Back when I was a union rep for some employees of the Buffalo VA, I once had to represent a member for discipline because she processed claims that were indisputably legit.  All the claims had to go through her small, cramped office, and she had received a direct order that when a claim came in she was not to process it or even look at it.  What was she to do with it, you ask?  Deny them all.  Automatically.  Sans peak.  And add each to the pile on a table on one side of the room that strained under the weight of such unsung paperwork, where it would remain, subject to the gnawing criticism of, well, if not rats, then silverfish and the like.  Until the wronged veteran appealed the denial.  Then and only then was she allowed to take a gander, and if qualified, approve the delivery of veteran benefits.  But one case was so pitiful, and clearly qualified, and the veteran and his family called and pleaded so heart-rendingly, that she went out on a limb... and processed a valid claim.  Boom!  Insubordination!  Nice, huh?)

Anyway, back to the present.  People like Bernie Sanders get big bills passed to help veterans.  People like the Tea party cut benefits.  And Hillary Clinton, loathsome though she may be in other regards, are given a spotlight, of all things, over a particularly stupid roost to which the chickens returned home in 2012.  Benghazi.  Ugh, more on that later.  But today, after her special extended spotlight, which probably helped her candidacy for free more than events she has spent millions on, what's rightwing talk-show-host-dom on about?  Glenn Doherty, who died at Beghazi fighting tha attackers, still hasn't gotten his veterans' benefits three years later.

Probably because he was a f***ing mercenary.

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Health care markets

So a friend got this email from Patrick Leahy about supporting the effort to remove big health insurance companies' exemptions from anti-trust laws. I saw it on an email list, but only after some Libertarian smartass had chimed in:

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Don't leave the ACA out of Xmas

Sorry, it's been a while.  Work, work, work.  But I have been arguing with a friend of mine (both of us are members of Labor for Single-Payer, but he's more active in it), and here's my latest spew:

First let me say I do think the ACA is "woefully inadequate."  Single payer is what we need, or nationalized health care, but some business interests (and not others, interestingly enough) and their lapdog politicians have blocked anything close to that (along with much that is not even close).  And since we failed to get either of those things, it would have been nice for elected representatives (especially Democrats) to at least include what was called "the public option" at the time.  I don't think any of those things would have necessarily solved the problem this poor guy [see below] is bringing up, but I'll get back to that.  I still have to say the ACA helped millions of people get coverage, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Black Lives Matter

At first I thought, why write about all the police killings and other violence toward African Ameicans, so much in the news lately.  At first I thought Black Lives Matter is keeping the problem on the front burner, where it should be, so what's to say?  Arguing with ignoramuses so often reduces to, "You are an ignoramus."  And that's not much of  contribution really.

So here's the thing.  As a Southerner I am well aware of the long history of police attacks on black Americans.  "Blue by day, white by night," we used to say.  I've witnessed some police asshattery, myself, and I'm not even black.  Too, now that I've lived in the North awhile, I know for a fact it's not confined to the South.  That is exactly zero excuse for Southern bigotry, which is very real and sometimes shockingly unabashed, even brazen.  Moreover, the violent racism that continues throughout the South is the real story there, not some idiot with an un-potty-trained mouth.  We white Southerners have a very special responsibility to work against racism, without excuses.  But don't let me hear white folks anywhere say it's not their problem.

Next thing: I have a low tolerance for bullshit.  People like to talk out the side of their neck.  Is every police shooting a genocidal conspiracy against African people?  No.  A man was shot in the area here last week.  He had a gun earlier when he committed robbery.  He holed up for hours and then came out waving something and ran towards some cops.  Maybe he was delusional, and maybe - probably - the effort to talk him down could have been better, but no outrage here, just human tragedy.

Even Michael Brown in Ferguson may not be the best rallying point in my opinion.  While the ensuing outrage is certainly justified, if only by the long history and broad context of police violence that African American communities and other people who care what happens to our fellow human beings are rightly furious over, too many questions remain for me to feel certain that the police murdered this man in Missouri.

But Eric Garner?  You must be kidding.  The choke hold they used was against regulations, even if we didn't have video evidence that the police were the aggressors.  And they escalated the situation on purpose.  The response of the official system responsible for protecting human life is only further proof of the endemic nature of the sickness.  Eric Garner was murdered on camera by the very people charged with protecting and serving him.  That's just a fact, no matter what the grand jury says.

But let us be abundantly clear: it is not about Eric Garner, or Michael Brown, or Rodney King, alone.  It's about an ongoing slaughter.  And these killings do not represent a 'crisis.'  A crisis is a turning point.  The long file of African Americans into the mortuary ushered in by police violence is an old story just breaking into the newsmedia.  The crisis is political: the rioters and the Black Lives Matter movement have forced politicians to pay attention.  At long last.

But it's still being seen in a fairly liberal (nonthreatening) context, divorced from the broader issues of inequality and incarceration in which racism serves the fat cats quite well.

Really, Grand Jury?

Let me just say, when George W. Bush gets it (well, sorta), it is not rocket science, friends.

Shortly on taxes

Many people are under the simplistic impression that tax cuts are automatically a good thing.  A lot of people say this is just right-wing propaganda, but I think not entirely.  It's also because of a very real fact: taxes historically have been foisted exclusively or at best disproportionately on the working population by the rich to pay for ruling class adventures in faraway crusades (if we are lucky) and for their other institutions on the theory that they protect us (from other rulers who are pulling the same scam on their people) or more recently that they provide us with jobs.

Besides the obvious facts that they provide fewer and worse jobs as our more money is shifted from us to them (in various forms - tax cuts to them, shifts in the tax burden to local government, sales taxes which the rich mostly avoid and working people largely cannot, etc), and that "they" "protect" "us" in modern times even more cleverly than before - by getting the young peasants to risk their lives while the knights stay home and play golf, they have also figured out a way to use the democratic institutions that we demand - supposedly to wrest power from them - to actually take power from ourselves and give it to them, including money (which is not speech, but power).  They've lowered their taxes and raised ours (relatively).  Now when they demand lower taxes, we are right there with them.  Ingenious!

Fear and ignorance are the enemy.  Organize!

Back to the Future

Dean calls it again.  And as usual, the man behind the curtain is -- you guessed it! -- rich people trying to take your money!  We now have an economy wherein working people pay taxes (and the rich pay some, too, although less and less and less and less) to subsidize big businesses, which decrease wages, and to cut social services we need.

At least it's not the Medieval Period, when the Lords and Kings ran the show and lived it up while demanding taxes from the poor serfs and craftsmen, you know, as "protection money" and for other services, which were pretty meager ... wait, maybe it is a lot like that.

Civil rights? Oh, no!

The Democratic Party is so full of contradictions they can't even approve their own nominations now.  The Democrat-controlled Senate just rejected Obama's nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the US Justice Depts civil rights division, because ... well, he's a qualified civil rights attorney.

The best quotes, as usual, were from Republi-cons: that's what you get for helping a cop-killer, slap in the face of law enforcement, blah, blah, blah.  But seven Dems are what killed the nomination. 

Yeah, that Obama, it's all his fault, right?  Well, he has been a major disappointment, but as to the question of why he doesn't do more -- we need look no further than his own party.

I crane, you crane, we all crane our necks to the Ukraine

When people in any country start getting rowdy with respect to their economic or political overlords, I am generally one who smiles.  Rebellion, revolt, and talking back are messy, flawed, ugly-beautiful, human-all-too-human enterprises.  They usually need to be done, and usually need to be done differently, but they usually still need to be done.

That said, we shouldn't be babes-in-the-woods cheerleaders, either. 

Remember Black labor history

Black History Month is not widely viewed as labor's biggest commemoration, with all that implies.  Right or wrong, there is clearly a profound wrong embedded in it.  We always say labor built this country, but that foundation of labor is significantly slave labor, and slaves in North America have been -- not all but -- almost all of African descent.  And when I say "significantly," consider this: