Bad American

Everywhere big Pharma and big Med executives must be chuckling.

What was it President Lyndon Johnson was so fond of saying: “got his pecker in my pocket?”

In this case, Big Med and Big Pharma have Charles Schumer and the rest of the spineless bought and paid for Democrats peckers in their pockets.

From The Hill:

Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their two presidential candidates, saying that even if their party controls the White House and Congress, sweeping change will be difficult.

It is still seven months before Election Day, but already senior Democrats are maneuvering to lower public expectations on the key policy issue.

In the back of their minds is the damage done to President Bush’s second term by his failed attempts to change the nation’s Social Security policy.

Excuse me? So we’re equating Bush’s planned EVISCERATION of Social Security with a movement to try and PROVIDE MORE OF A SAFETY NET to Americans? Does this line of reasoning make any fucking sense? Of course not - it’s a red herring.

For some senators, the promises made by Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) outside of Washington may not match the political reality on Capitol Hill.

“We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a Finance Committee member and an Obama supporter, referring to the presidential candidates’ healthcare plans. “What they are doing is … laying out their ambitions.”

But of course there is PLENTY OF GODDAMN MONEY FOR THE FUCKING WAR YOU SHITHEADS VOTED FOR. Jay Rockefeller, like Chuckie Schumer (the Thing from AIPAC), is one of the biggest assholes among Democrats in Congress but noting his background of privilege, nothing he does on the side of the military-industrial plutocracy should come as a surprise. Like Schumer and Pelosi, he is a TOTAL SELL OUT.

For instance from yesterday’s Boston Globe:

By month’s end, House Democrats plan to produce a major supplemental spending bill - totaling as much as $170 billion - to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the next presidency, channel more federal money to the ailing domestic economy, and set policies they hope will begin to move US troops out of the Middle East.

Yeah, enough money to “do all this stuff.” AMAZING isn’t it what you DO find money for, isn’t it Jay you sack of shit.

The Democratic candidates say their plans would cover the 47 million uninsured people living in the United States, except for millions of illegal immigrants. Their push for universal healthcare has sparked sharp exchanges over who would do more to cover the uninsured. A recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 58 percent of Americans say healthcare costs are an “important” part of their economic concerns.

But veterans on Capitol Hill say that getting a sprawling piece of legislation requires broad compromise from both parties and outside groups.

Translation: the health care companies who fund our campaigns won’t like it. We work for the highest bidders not the American people.

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership and a key Hillary Clinton ally who also sits on the Finance Committee, said he is “not sure we have the big plan on healthcare.”

“Healthcare I feel strongly about, but I am not sure that we’re ready for a major national healthcare plan,” Schumer said.

Schumer said he would focus “on prevention above all and cost cutting until we can get a national healthcare plan.”

Schumer is, as he always been, a complete dog, a coward, a sniveling little shit who has sucked the hindquarters of ever big money special interest in Washington. What the hell makes him so sure we’re not ready for a major national healthcare plan?

Most likely his big money donors don’t like it, of course. Schumer is NOT on the side of the American people and never has been. Like Pelosi, he’s a typical champagne and caviar Democrat who enjoys the perks and privileges of his cushy job more than he appreciates nor cares for the struggles of average Americans.

But the fault ALSO lies in US - the stupids who keep voting for shits like these (not that we have much of a choice EVER - I’ll grant you). Of course, ONE candidate running for President would have pushed for a true single payer national health care plan - Dennis Kucinich - and almost everyone ridiculed the guy. Being tough about slaughtering brown skinned people around the world means far more to the average dimwit American than decent affordable health care. Well, I suppose we’re just going to continue to get what we deserve as long as we are unwilling to break the back of corporatism in this country. Send some more crumbs down from the rich massa’s table, please!

Making sweeping changes to healthcare issues often takes several Congresses to work through. For instance, a bill to create a drug benefit under Medicare passed the House in 2000 and 2002, but didn’t land on Bush’s desk until late 2003.

“You don’t want to rush and do something and do it incorrectly,” said former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), who helped negotiate the Medicare law.

Breaux is another phony progressive from the birthplace of political chicanery, Louisiana. What he’s offering is an excuse to do nothing.

Congressional Democrats have set smaller goals on healthcare next year, like an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which has been repeatedly vetoed by President Bush. But passing broader proposals aimed at insuring greater numbers will more than likely have to wait, they say.

Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), a Clinton supporter who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, said “the money is not necessarily there right now” to enact the plans and said calls to end the war in Iraq might consume Washington’s attention. The healthcare proposals are a “really good start,” he said, but any promises that the next Congress would enact the healthcare plans “at even the beginning of next year to mid-next year would really be political talk at this point.

“I hear on the campaign trail, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’ as if there is not a Congress here with feelings and experience on this issue,” Meek said. “I think it’s important that everyone takes that into consideration and that this is not a kingdom, this is a democracy.”

You know what’s so goddamn stupid about Meek’s quote? The REPUBLICANS NEVER consider that once they’re in power they have anything other than a mandate to ram through whatever the hell they please. But the Democrats, even if they have control of the White House and Congress, are still too cowardly to do the bidding of the people because they are more inclined to do the bidding of corporations. Meek’s patently idiotic reasoning is again, another lie, another smokescreen for inaction. They know what side their bread is buttered on and it’s not the American people.

DAVID SIROTA in Huffpo comments:

First and foremost, to those in Washington who say the nation should just wait for Washington to act on health care and wait for Democrats to win control of Congress and the presidency, this story exposes the glaring failure of that strategy - especially as states move forward into the breach. Health care reform has to be a dual effort - at the federal level and at the state level. And most likely, real reform is going to start in the states - in part, because Democrats in Washington are so afraid of their own shadow and bought off by Big Money interests that they are now acknowledging that they are no serious about fulfilling their health care promises.

Second, you’ll notice the right-wing arguments being made by Democrats in this piece. Schumer, like a reliable Fox News anchor, tells us that America isn’t “ready” for national health care plan, despite polls over the last decade showing strong support for such a concept. Likewise, Meek - playing right into the Grover Norquist “drown it in the bathtub” mantra, claims the federal government doesn’t have the cash to pay for a health care overhaul - even as Congress continues writing blank checks to fund the Iraq War.

Finally, this reminds us of the need for progressives to focus on building a social movement, rather than exclusively on winning elections. Democrats are effectively saying that no matter how many elections are won, they will not move forward on the most pressing domestic issue. That’s because there isn’t yet a powerful social movement putting constant pressure on both parties - and instilling fear in both parties. The infrastructure that has been built in recent years is largely partisan rather than movement-oriented - that is, aimed at buttressing the Democratic Party, regardless of what it does. If we are to get health care reform, it will require a movement - not a party.

What? What powerful social movement will get Democrats to do anything? Seriously David, when you have people working 50+ hours a week and living paycheck to paycheck, how the hell do you propose they form some kind of social movement for health care? In my mind, burning down the corporate offices of health care companies might be a good start since in this country, power never concedes anything without brute force anymore - it’s the only language they understand. Perhaps, like the movie John Q, we should come armed to doctor’s offices and make the bastards treat our children. Again, America, especially the plutocracy, only fears raw force.

But since the sheeple won’t behave like South Americans (like it or not, their violent protests actually gets things done), I suppose there’s nothing left for average Americans to do but grumble about losing their homes and businesses after operations and pleading with assholes like Schumer and the rest of the spineless corporate butt sucking Democrats in Congress to do the right thing.

These are the times I honestly wish I lived somewhere civilized.

So why bother voting at all in this upcoming elections? If the health care bloviations of both Democratic candidates mean absolutely nothing than why bother?

You can say, well they’ll some other things. Like what - end the goddamn war? We elected a Democratic Congress in 2006 and did they do ONE SINGLE THING to end the goddamn war? Hell no. Bought and paid for. Craven Cowards.

James Boyce writes about the phenomena in HuffPo today - good reading and it also backs up what I’m saying here in a nutshell:

Democrats, especially the subset of the species that lives in Washington, DC are nothing more than spineless, clueless eunuchs.

It’s true - outside of a Second American Revolution, I’m of the opinion that absolutely nothing will change in this country. So why bother voting when, no matter who you vote for, big corporations and the moneyed class will win every time?

CNN News

I would use the line from Willy Wonka: “so shines a good deed in a weary world” but this isn’t a deed that comes from whatever substitutes for a heart among Wal-Mart executives. This was forced, but all Corporate America knows is force. So be it.

Example:

A former Wal-Mart employee who suffered severe brain damage in a traffic accident won’t have to pay back the company for the cost of her medical care, Wal-Mart told the family Tuesday.

“Occasionally, others help us step back and look at a situation in a different way. This is one of those times,” Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Pat Curran said in a letter. “We have all been moved by Ms. Shank’s extraordinary situation.”

Absolute lying bullshit. What Wal-Mart was “moved” by was sixteen tons of overwhelmingly negative publicity, the charge led by Keith Olbermann, who vowed to lead his “Worst Person of the Day” feature with Wal-Mart’s CEO Lee Scott until he relented.

Surprisingly, CNN even linked to this blog in their blog reaction piece. I got a few hits from it. So don’t think that individual bloggers can’t make a difference.

In fact the only people who seemed to be talking Wal-Mart’s side were the truly heartless bastards over at Lone Star Times, who must be puking in their bitter coffee this morning because, for once, predatory American capitalism had to retreat.

Again, my point from an earlier post still stands - there are many Debbie Shanks’ out there in the decaying American heartland and you won’t ever hear about most of them. But today, just for today, we can celebrate the one time where a flower breaks above the concrete, metaphorically speaking. Just once when the collective force of the people can make a corporation do the right thing.

In fact, corporate America backing down is so rare, Jim Shank thought it was an April Fool’s prank:

On Tuesday, Wal-Mart said in a letter to Jim Shank that it is modifying its health care plan to allow “more discretion” in individual cases. Watch Wal-Mart reverse its decision »

“We wanted you to know that Wal-Mart will not seek any reimbursement for the money already spent on Ms. Shank’s care, and we will work with you to ensure the remaining amounts in the trust can be used for her ongoing care,” Curran said.

“We are sorry for any additional stress this uncertainty has placed on you and your family.” (You oughta be - ed.)

Wal-Mart’s reversal came as shock to Shank.

“I thought it was an April Fool’s joke,” he told CNN.

The only fool(s) here are Wal-Mart executives. Perhaps, just perhaps, this will set a new standard of decency. I won’t hold my breath.

ONE MORE THING: I see I’m getting a lot of visitors from CNN this morning. Thanks for checking me out and hang around and read some more. I update this blog quite often with what passes for my commentary. But do one more thing for me: e-mail Keith Olbermann and thank him for what he did. NOTE: I THINK the right e-mail is countdown@msnbc.com.

Pain Dealer

Gotta give the PD props for keeping this issue in the public forefront because its going to get a lot worse. Of course, they’re not going to go for the real root causes of why some many middle aged guys are offing themselves. That’s where I come in.

In the early 1980s, young adults had among the highest rates of suicide in Northeast Ohio. Today that same generation of boomers, now in their late 40s and early 50s, is behind a surge of suicides among middle-agers.

While the elderly are most likely to carry out suicides, there is growing recognition of boomers in crisis. Experts say disappearing jobs, fraying families, drug and alcohol addictions and untreated mental illness are eating away at the generation that supposedly has the best of everything.

After spending three months in constant visits to a local convalescent center (where old people are sent to die) I can clearly understand that the elderly are the most likely to carry out suicides. In many respects, they carry them out for the same basic overriding reason the guys in their 40s and 50s are now on the fast track to catching up in the suicide sweepstakes do - they feel used, abused and tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage. Our society worships youth, money, sex and obscene conspicuous consumption. At some point, if you’re kicked out of the game you suddenly find you become invisible - you no longer count. And this is reinforced every time you turn on the idiot box - do you live like these people? Then you must be some kind of loser. And you should go away.

Research has found that post-World War II children are prone to depression and other mood disorders. Then recently some startling numbers came out of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The suicide rate among Americans aged 45-54 jumped about 20 percent from 1999 to 2004.

The knee jerk reaction will be that this was truly a candy-ass generation that was spoiled and now has a hard time handling personal adversity. Insofar as this is true, one must remember that until this point in our history, we didn’t have a mass culture predicated on instilling the virtues of ‘you are what you own’ into its people. People could handle the Depression (the Great One) because the 1920s were a blip of prosperity that, contrary to popular mythology, most people didn’t really share in. We didn’t have televisions and the kind of mass consumerism we have today.

What you have to remember is that when you bombard a developing mind with images of how society is and how you should be, that kind of brainwashing has deep and lasting effects on people. Edward Deming and the tactics of mass commercialism and such things as ‘brand identity’ were in their infancy in the 1920s. Now we have a whole host of social pathologies that can directly trace their origins to advertising as propaganda. The whole body image crisis is a great example. Anorexia nervosa was unknown until Karen Carpenter died of it in the 1980s. These impressions, made thousands of times - cars, homes, clothes, lifestyles, etc., have an impact.

There as a time when all a man had to have was the love of a good woman and some kind of steady income. Now he has to show several different successful faces in society and at work. I also find it incredible that the base issues of home, family and love no longer hold the wolf from the door. Many women do not understand that how society sees the man has become, sadly, more important than how she sees him. To understand why more and more middle aged men commit suicide we have to face the fact that we have created, in the last 50 years, a society that made him useful and wanted and then, as they hit their 40s, changed the rules and those that were casualties of outsourcing and youth were told that their services were no longer needed - not just at work but on the street as well.

And to many men who were doing their best to hide mental illness, this was a death sentence of the soul.

The news was no surprise to Dr. Joseph Calabrese, a psychiatrist and longtime director of the mood disorders program at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. People born in the 1950s and ’60s have rates of bipolar disorder and major depression two and three times higher than previous generations, he said. Most are untreated or inadequately treated.

There are two reasons for that. One, of course, is that most American men still are taught by society that mental illness is a moral weakness to be hidden at all costs. Check out any site that tell you what to say and not say at a job interview: we have to present ourselves as grand, glorious and Godlike or we will be denied an opportunity to earn a basic living. And even when we get the job, so much of who we are must be sublimated at the worksite because there is no pity in capitalism. As I was told at the age of 16 at my first job at McDonalds: “either fake a smile or go home.” And that brutality, which is what it really is on a psychological level, takes a gradual toll on a person - regardless of age, sex or gender. But we won’t change that, will we?

The second reason is that therapy, even if one seeks it, is often beyond the reach of many men who have lost their jobs and their health insurance. In many cases, although this is starting to change, even decent health insurance pays paltry sums for mental health care. In America we still see people who seek mental health help as malingerers until proven otherwise and who wants to spend money to coddle someone’s weakness? Even battle hardened Iraqi war veterans with serious PTSD are being shamed as malingerers and denied precious mental health care. They understand that our country and society, having used them and abused them, now just wants them to go somewhere quietly to die.

It works the same in the military as it does in civilian life.

A Plain Dealer analysis found white middle-aged men in Ohio have especially high rates of suicide — more than twice the overall national rate.

Attention is often focused on triggering events such as financial crisis or soured relationships. But mental illness underlies the vast majority of suicides, experts say. It’s often compounded by substance abuse. Boomers have high rates of that, too.

Ohio has it tough due to our economy and a general malaise that I have found in the population, having returned from a 10-year absence. There is a certain sense of fatalism among northeast Ohioans that makes this population seem listless and depressed in many cases. Our winters and lack of recreation and resources taken for granted elsewhere also compound the problem. The thing is, you see drearier landscapes in Central Illinois and it seems to be different there. For what reason, I’m not sure. Perhaps its an agricultural base vs. a formerly robust industrial base. In any case, we live in are where one could walk into an auto plant or a steel mill and raise a family on your wages and have enough for vacations and some of the finer things in life. Now, again, the rules were rewritten, always to the detriment of the working class for the benefit of the smaller ownership class. But now people are noticing because the rules are also being rewritten for the white collar middle class who are now seeing their jobs disappearing. And they are being told in ways large and small - retrain, lower your expectations, keep your damn mouth shut and don’t complain.

Mental illness and substance abuse go together like a horse and carriage. You almost can’t have one without the other (apologies to Frank Sinatra). But it’s true and it’s a cruel irony that while more desperate people in pain seek to self-medicate, our society makes it more of a criminal act to do so. The legalization and regulation of marijuana would go a long way to helping people self-medicate because pot is so much more safer than booze. But, again, we live in a society that seems to take great delight in kicking people when they are down. More and more decent people who are looking for a few hours of being free from pain are being locked up to support local prison economies and for-profit prison industries. Rather than spending money on actually helping people in need, we choose to lock them up. Now I am not talking about legalizing crack cocaine or anything like that. But we have to find some way of making proper mental health and job resources available to people or we will continue to see these pathologies grow.

There are those who will always choose criminality over work. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about otherwise decent people who have done all they can, worked hard and obeyed the law and paid their taxes and petted their dogs, etc., even while, in many cases, fighting mental illness. But there comes a time, and middle age is right about it, where these guys look all of their efforts being eaten away by changing economic rules that they had no say in. Or maybe they were just victims of vindictiveness at work. The American Dream, that ever-shifting goal of attaining the ‘good life’ that is thrust in front of our noses 24/7 by the idiot box, starts to recede in the rear-view mirror. And these people start asking the central question many suicidal people ask before they start to serious contemplate offing themselves: “is that all there is?”

To those who are mentally healthy and reasonably affluent with strong family structures, all of this might seem like poking your head into a foreign dimension where nothing makes sense to you. I understand that. All I am asking is for you to try to understand what so many of these otherwise good people are going through. Don’t just read the PD story and say, ‘oh, too bad, those people need help’ because that person could very well be your brother or father or someone else in your life you never suspected was going through these agonies. And they are not weak and undeserving of your attention.

Carolyn Givens was busy running the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services when she found out her husband, Greg, was mentally ill and a substance abuser. In 2003, Greg drove to a park and slit his wrists. He was 50 and had lost his job a few days earlier, and had not told her. Police found him before he bled to death, and he survived.

“I missed signs,” says Givens, who is now executive director of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation. “I thought he was tired. He seemed very tired. I didn’t know he was depressed.”

First of Ms. Givins, I don’t know you but please try not to be so hard on yourself. Most men keep these things closely guarded secrets precisely because they don’t want the people they love, the people closest to them, to worry about them.

But here comes a very big red flag and I’m glad to see it here: complaints of being tired. This is one of the most overlooked symptoms of the suicidal, especially in men. Often we will tell our loved ones when they ask why we seem so down that we are tired. And, truth be told, we are very tired both physically and mentally. It’s a fatigue that transcends simple sleeplessness and cannot be cured with a good night’s sleep, which is often elusive anyway. In the military, people speak of soldiers with the ‘thousand mile stare.’ Again, it’s the same in the civilian world. You’ll know that stare when you see it. It is a cry for help.

I’m not saying that a suicide watch should be mounted for every middle age man who loses his job, but there are signs to look for in addition to the obvious disappointment over being cast aside by your employer.

The thing I wonder, and I hate myself for typing this but it must be said - did her husband want himself to be found in time? I hope so for both of their sakes. I sincerely hope he is doing better now.

Several experts said job loss is high on the list of traumas that push some down the darkest paths.

From her vantage point in Stark County, Carole Vesely has seen it firsthand. A recurring theme in suicide notes is a former breadwinner who can’t support family and feels worthless, she said.

“When I interview people who have attempted suicide, the most classic statement I hear is, ‘My family would be better off without me,’” she said.

Ladies please hear me on this and believe me: for many if not most men, our jobs define us. We don’t like it, of course. We’d like to be thought of first as decent human beings, good fathers, loving husbands. But our peculiar system of American capitalism has cast many of us in the role of ‘we are what we do.’ Think about it in this way: how many women define themselves by how they get paid? In most cases, I’ve found women basically live for their after job hours - then they ‘do’ what they do to make themselves happy and derive gratification from life.

But we’ve been stuck in the world of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, like it or not. Note that the book and movie were from the mid-1950s and we still haven’t figured it out or admitted that this way of life is ultimately corrosive to the soul. With a fatalism born of hard experience, men still bear the burden of having to prove their worth as human beings in the marketplace. And as the bar of what is defined as success keeps rising and the ability to attain that bar get even more problematic, the casualty list of real lives will grow.

And we seem completely helpless to stop this crazy machine.

You can also use Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman as a perfect example of what we’re talking about. Widely regarded as the most depressing of American plays, Death of a Salesman acts as a momento mori of the American Dream and is often shunned when performed by the very people to whom it speaks. But its essential truths continue to become even more prescient to our culture today.

Was Willy Loman a ‘loser?’ Many have commented over the years that, indeed, he was. I find the most poignant parts of the play when his wife Linda demands that “attention must be paid” to Willy by his sons and, perhaps, by society at large. Her plea resonates throughout American history and is most often ignored.

But the two works I have mentioned were created in a brief and rare period in American arts and letters when introspective pieces were honored and considered. Nowadays, perhaps, the best we get is something like Glengarry, Glen Ross or Wall Street, which still romances the dog-eat-dog culture of American business. And even Glengarry author David Mamet now seems to have drunk the Kool Aid of conservatism. Success and money will do that to some people. You start to believe the old adage: ‘I did it, why can’t these other useless punks?’

And the casualty list grows.

University of Akron psychologist James Rogers said suicide trends are not well understood, but he said lack of job stability and the collapse of pension and health benefits play a big role in the middle-age phenomenon.

“My dad worked 35 years in the same place. A lot of folks our age grew up in that world, which has dramatically changed,” said Rogers, who is president-elect of the American Association of Suicidology. “Those things have to contribute in some sense to a feeling of helplessness as we get older. Does it cause suicide? There’s no one thing that causes suicide.”

Of course those things contribute. And of course, there is no one thing that causes suicide, generally. There is, of course, a belief that whatever happens to our economy, such as the so-called non-negotiable inevitability of globalism, will cause some casualties and, while that is regrettable, not everyone can or should be saved. Despite protestations to the contrary, we need to admit that in most cases we still allow our society to operate under what has come to be called ’social Darwinism.’ To some people, the people that they step over on the sidewalks to get to their jobs are actually testaments to the effectiveness of our form of capitalism: some people simply aren’t fit to compete and live and, therefore, we shouldn’t spend our hard earned tax dollars trying to turn natural born losers into winners.

Now imagine the shock when that same self-sufficient denizen of the capitalist class hits 50 and his boss tells him that his ideas and ethics (let’s say its an ad agency, that’s always a good one but it can apply to many businesses) are outdated and new fresh, young-thinking blood needs to be brought in. We appreciate your 20+ years at the firm old man, but surely you see the rationale in our decision? We’ll give you a good reference of course. Now if you could just clean out your office and check in with personnel for your exit interview on the way out. . .

And then the same man finds himself a few hours later on the sidewalk staring at the ‘bum’ he had walked over just that morning and something clicks in his head. Not . . . that . . . far. . . from. . .

And what will he tell his wife and loved ones when he gets home? He’s a used up old man at 50.

Is that all there is?

Loree Vick, a former local TV anchor and now media relations manager for University Hospitals, lost her husband, John, when he committed suicide three years ago. His was another case of a man who largely kept hidden the psychic pain of depression, and what Vick now believes was unrecognized bipolar disorder. John lost his job as a business executive at age 51, and he began a two-year downward spiral.

“He was able to mask it by being successful, being with family, having things go well for him,” said Vick, who has joined a local group called the Suicide Prevention Education Alliance, and who speaks publicly to cope with the emotional fallout.

“If you have a mental disease, you’re less equipped to handle setbacks and traumas in your life. It becomes debilitating,” Vick said.

True. I’m glad to see this vignette in this story because so many people here know of Lori Vick from her TV work. And it brings home the painful fact that success and appearances are both deceiving and fleeting. When Sinatra sings “riding high in April, shot down in May” he wasn’t kidding. It happens to a lot of people and some are more equipped psychologically to deal with it than others.

To many men it is an absolute truism that a lot of internal pain can be masked by the outward trappings of ’success’ as defined by our capitalist/consumerist culture. Once the mask is ripped away, however, there’s little to fall back on. One would obviously ask - well what about his lovely wife and family and home, etc?

Again, like it or not: we are what we do. I wish it was different but do you ever notice when men introduce themselves to each other, generally right after the names its “so what do you do for a living?”

I am reminded of the Bruce Springsteen lyrics to “Out of Work:”

I go to pick my girl up
Her name is Linda Brown
Her dad invites me in
He tells me to sit down
The small talk that we’re making
Is going pretty smooth
But then he drops a bomb
“Son, what d’ya do ?”

I’m out of work
I need a job, I’m out of work

And then:

I’m out of work
These hard times, they’re enough
To make a man lose his mind
I’m out of work
Up there you got a job but down here below

The bounciness of the song belies the desperation in the lyrics.

And in the case of Vick’s husband, how many men want to admit that their wife is ‘carrying’ them until they can find a job? Ladies, most of you have no idea how hard this is for most men. Yes, it’s a sexist carryover of a society we thought we changed. But there is more about the society that never changed in regards to work, self-worth and sex roles, than did change.

In Cuyahoga County, which averages about 160 suicides a year, an effort is under way to conduct psychological post-mortems. Information about mental health histories and events leading up to suicide could bring greater clarity to populations at risk and guide prevention programs.

“We’d have some greater insight into what’s going on, because right now we don’t know,” said Rick Oliver, who oversees the county suicide hot line and sits on a county prevention task force.

The Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation hopes to raise money for pilot programs in Cuyahoga and Franklin counties, Givens said.

Isn’t it funny in a dark sort of way that American society is so good at locking the barn door after the horse has escaped? Post-mortems are, I suppose, less expensive than actually providing easily accessible and affordable mental health services for people.

But as long as there’s more money to be made in Viagra than keeping depressed men from offing themselves, I suppose nothing will change. We’d rather have our tax dollars go to bigger and better warships, guns and methodologies of killing people than actually saving lives. If that sounds harsh, tough. It’s true. And it brings up something else that often gets overlooked among the suicidal.

It’s this: people who are very sensitive and intellectual suffer a great burden in American society. Introspection, intelligence and sensitivity are not valued in our society - try making money with those traits. But the thing is, people who have this hard gifts are the ones who figure out, many in their childhood, just how insane is the society they’re being brought up in.

In many cases, they struggle their whole lives feeling somehow that maybe they were put here by accident, that they are ‘mistakes’ in a culture or society that doesn’t quite feel what they feel or perceive what they perceive.

Many of them do their best all their lives to work and fit in. But they always know that this is a game they never wanted to play in the first place and they feel, not without reason, that the game is rigged against them.

We lose the resiliency of our youth in many cases, to bounce back, to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. I suspect that for many of these men, they hit middle age and, having tried their best to play the game all their lives, stare into the gaping maw of the downside of their lives and ask:

Is that all there is?

And in their heart of hearts they absolutely believe that their families, most of whom do not understand them, would be better off without them bringing everyone down at Christmas time or at other family gatherings. After all, they know people don’t like to hear ‘whining’ and after awhile, it becomes apparent to them (in their minds) that no one really cares whether they, the core person inside them, lives or dies. They spare others the pain of themselves.

Calabrese of University Hospitals said the post-mortems would reveal “undiagnosed, untreated illness for a long time.” In the past 19 years, three dozen patients treated in his mood disorders program have killed themselves, he said.

“I always go back and obsess about these things — it was completely unpredictable,” Calabrese said.

“My explanation is we got them too late. We get them after they’ve had illness for decades.”

We “get them?” I’m sure you didn’t mean it but it sounds like your capturing butterflies in a net. And that’s another point. Many people are reluctant to seek mental health because they have a fear that if they confess their darkest thoughts, the analyst will press a little unseen button on the desk in front of them and the burly men in the white coats will come and take them away, after, of course, they check their insurance coverage.

This is exactly what happened to a woman I knew who went to seek counseling at Laurelwood in 1995 about problems she was having getting along with people at work. After checking her insurance coverage, the nurse locked the doors on her, told her she was ’suicidal’ and ‘homicidal’ and then the facility proceeded to see how many days they could collect on her insurance before ‘releasing her’ back to to the community.

Because of that incident this woman will never, ever, seek treatment again. And remember the poor guy who hung himself near Legacy Village a month ago? The one Regina Brett wrote about? Yep, they turned him out as soon as his insurance ran out. There’s the lesson - as long as your illness can make money for some doctor or corporate entity we’ll pretend to care about you. The second the money runs out, you’re dog meat on the street.

And with 19 fatalities in your program, maybe your effectiveness should be reviewed rather than this ‘aw shucks, too late’ mentality. Always gotta protect the institution, I get it. Believe me, I get it. And I bet your patients do as well.

Look, this isn’t all that difficult. In many respects all we have to do is completely remake American society.

Start with bullying in the schools. Listen to and respect people as human beings worthy of being here, not as disposable widgets like the readers of the Lone Star News replying to the story below do.

Get serious about ending the stigma about mental illness. Provide for affordable treatment and medications for people in need. Don’t like that? Then keep building more prisons and digging more graves. Your choice.

But most of all listen. The people who are thinking of killing themselves are really talking to you, albeit not always verbally.

Addendum:

Needless to say the brain-dead are crawling out from their mid-day rocks at the PD site to spew their little ignorant comments:

Reminds me of the suicide crisis we had during the great depression, and the recession of the 70’s.
Not.People have been getting layed off, or flooded, or tornadoed, etc.. since the begining of time.
Only now they are whiny, spoiled, selfish, frightend, and MEDICATED.

So how do we attempt fix it?

Carolyn Givens was busy running the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services when she found out her husband, Greg, was mentally ill and a substance abuser. In 2003, Greg drove to a park and slit his wrists. He was 50 and had lost his job a few days earlier, and had not told her. Police found him before he bled to death, and he survived.

“I missed signs,” says Givens, who is NOW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation. “I thought he was tired. He seemed very tired. I didn’t know he was depressed.”

We MUST do better than this…

Selfish people do selfish things.

Alternet

If you want to see just how cruel and heartless corporate America can be, check this out. Olbermann just had a field day with it, giving Wal-Mart a well-deserved Worst Person in the World award:

Debbie Shank used to stock shelves at night for Wal-Mart so she could spend time in the afternoons with her three sons. Now she lives in a nursing home, requires around-the-clock medical care and owes Wal-Mart almost $500,000.

The story of the Shank family is heartbreaking in the sense that it could happen to anyone. Driving home one night, Debbie’s car was hit by a tractor-trailier, leaving her brain-damaged and paralyzed. After collecting health insurance money for hospital bills (Debbie’s policy with Wal-Mart paid for over $400,000 worth of emergency care), the Shanks sued the trucking company responsible for the accident, hoping to provide for Debbie’s long term needs.

Now Wal-Mart has sued the Shanks, citing a line of fine print in Debbie’s insurance policy that entitles the company to any lawsuit settlement. Wal-Mart intends to collect $470,000 from the Shanks, despite the fact that this will undoubtedly bankrupt Debbie’s family.

Wal-Mart could take its legal victory and simply do the right thing and leave the Shank family and their money alone. Surely, even CEO Lee Scott himself would agree that the Shank family has suffered enough.

Actually no. From  InjuryBoard.com:

A Wal-Mark spokesman expressed the company’s sadness about Shank’s condition but said the company had to pursue repayment out of fairness to all participants in the health plan.

Oh yeah, fairness. Pardon me while I die laughing. The fairness of Wal-Mart to its employees with that remarkable health care plan. Oh yeah.

But hey, if you think THAT is bad, you haven’t seen the best examples of heartless America, corporate anus-sucking Texas assholes (isn’t Texas the breeding ground of most American fascist assholes?) as the comments from this absolute piece of mis-bred human garbage blog known as Lone Star Times.

To quickly recap, a tragic accident happened to a Wal Mart employee. She was covered by the Wal Mart health insurance plan and the plan paid out $470,000 for her care. Her family hired a lawyer and sued the company that caused the accident and received a $1 million award. Of which her lawyer took $583,000, 58.3%. The Wal Mart health plan then sued to recover the money it paid out, as specified in the plan’s charter.

Take a look at how CNN reports this story. First, they include the fact that her 18 year old son was killed in action in Iraq after her accident. No question, this adds depth and color to the story but is it relevant to the matter at hand? Or does it simply lend sympathy to the cause?

No because you can’t have sympathy when the poor little corporation needs to be protected from big bad disabled people who are screwing those God-fearing stockholders out of $417k.

Look, I’d go on but I just get too mad. I hate the fact that I even have to share the planet with people so small, so greedy, so hateful, so unfeeling, so devoid of any semblance of humane feeling that they have to write such shit. It reinforces my opinion we should have let Texas and the rest of the Confederacy leave the union so they could forever dwell in their miserable backwater. But no, we had to win the Civil War and have Reconstruction and civilize these people. But it ended in 1877 and they resisted civilization and now we have the problems we have in this country.

If Wal-Mart cared about smart PR they’d stop this kind of heartless raping of sick and helpless people for the sake of capitalistic excess. But they don’t. Boycott Wal-Mart if you’re not already doing so.

Pain Dealer

One in three Americans say their families skipped medical care because of cost, according to a survey released Tuesday by the AFL-CIO.

A quarter of the respondents said they had serious problems paying for the care they needed and 79 percent said health care is a top voting issue.

snip

“Our country is in an economic nose dive,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a conference call. “Health-care costs are a significant part of the economic crisis.”

Sweeney said the results showed that the “lucky ones” - those who have jobs and insurance - also are struggling because of medical costs.

The influential labor organization conducted the survey so presidential and congressional candidates can “hear the needs and concerns of American working families,” Sweeney said.

The AFL-CIO planned a national effort to help its members and others know which candidates “are serious and which are paying lip service” to reforming the nation’s health-care system, he said. The group has planned a day of walks for health care on May 17, Sweeney said.

snip

Families USA, a national health advocacy organization, is releasing a state-by-state analysis of how many people die prematurely because of lack of health insurance. In Ohio, the group estimated two residents die each day, about 750 a year, because they postponed or were unable to get medical care.

The AFL-CIO survey broke out results for some states, including Ohio. While 29 percent nationally said they did not fill a prescription or skipped doses because of cost, 35 percent of Ohioans surveyed answered that question similarly.

Five percent of all survey takers said they had considered or filed for personal bankruptcy because of medical debt; the figure was 9 percent of Ohioans.

I applaud the AFL-CIO for performing a community service with this study but I think its folly to expect any of the three candidates to do anything about the health care crisis.

John McCain, of course, objects on ethical grounds. Since we live in the land of great capitalist opportunity, anyone who can’t afford health care is obviously a loser - someone with moral failings - who doesn’t deserve to live anyway. Capitalism should allow the herd to be trimmed so the ‘winners’ can get their rightful share of what they’ve earned.

Hillary Clinton takes more money from Big Pharma and the rest of the health care industry so when she’s bought, she’ll stay bought. Expect nothing from her that won’t continue to transfer money from the people to the health care industry. To make sure HealthCo gets its due on Wall Street, she’ll force people to buy health insurance thereby chaining people to a system that enriches the few at the expense of the many and delivers more of the same.

Barack Obama is too cowardly to do the right thing: advocate a Canadian-style single payer system. He takes too much money from Wall Street as well and knows he would be destroyed for advocating such ’socialism.’

And besides, in the end analysis, as long as Americans don’t mind shoveling 50 percent of all their tax dollars into the gaping maw of the Pentagon war machine to bring ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to unwilling Arabs, then there’s no way we’re going to be able to afford to take care of our own people anyway. We’re broke, but still shooting.

Grover Nordquist wins. Corporate America wins. The rest of us lose.

. . . is brought to you by Soylent red and Soylent yellow, high energy vegetable concentrates, and new, delicious, Soylent green. The miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.

Drudge links and headlines the MSNBC First Read news blog which I wasn’t aware of until this morning. Not a bad compendium of things political and much to comment about. The “bad week” entry is already a few takes down the list.

The First Read headline refers to the three campaigns but probably could be broadened to many Americans due to the imploding economy and its effects on Main Street which I get a ring side seat to view every day from my window.

The Pain Dealer reprints an article about the troubles at Borders book chain, linked here from the London Telegraph.

Borders, which has racked up losses of more than $300m in the past two years, has appointed JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch to find a buyer or strategic investor.

The business, which has seen its shares fall from $23.41 last May to hover above $5, has a current market value of $313m in spite of annual revenues in excess of $3.8bn.

There’s some speculation that Barnes and Noble or even Canadian chain Indigo may swallow Borders but good luck getting the deal pulled off in what is fast becoming a very soft market for full price retail booksellers.

Which is, of course, somewhat music to my ears and yet my business is also off.

America isn’t awash in readers anymore and while people may not be willing to shell out $29.95 for a new hardcover, would they be willing to pay $7-10 for that book at a reseller? Or is $15 at Sam’s club enough?

It’s news like this that makes me hang in there. Who knows where we’re going? When people can no longer easily afford cable movie channels (or cable) or other forms of entertainment, perhaps they’ll discover the cheap thrills from a good book, bought at your local book reseller and buyer.

At least we know books and reading will not die in the way Ray Bradbury envisioned in Fahrenheit 451. Not from repression, but from ignorance and boredom.

But discretionary spending does seem to be going into the toilet at least from where I sit. Other retailers are also biting big bullets this quarter and the expectations only seem worse as the year goes on. Everyone from Sears to Wal-Mart is hurting as the cost of getting goods to market rises inexorably, payrolls shrink and the dollar’s buying power implodes. Wal-Mart will survive the year, Sears, which at one time helped my father raise a family, may not.

For the luckless soldiers of the empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a new number coming up on the very near horizon, perhaps this week - 4,000 deaths in five years. And no one wants to be casualty number 4,000. Dying in a useless war for geopolitics is bad enough but who wants to be singled out as special for being the 4,000th victim of George W. Bush’s legacy?

This seems to be a very sad Easter holiday coming up all over the world. When you think of the real pain real people are experiencing in this economic downturn, the obsessive coverage of candidates and celebrity continues to take on a more odious tone. Nero supposedly fiddled while Rome burned; it seems that most Americans continue to rather follow the exploits of LeBron James and Paris Hilton than turn their needed attention to the wreckage of their country.

I visited my mother this morning who continues to recover from her foot amputation in a local community care facility. Due to complications in recovery, she’s been there since just before New Year’s Eve. Hopefully she’ll finally be coming home next week.

It’s hard to be in an ‘up’ mood after visiting one of these facilities which are scattered all over the country. Most of the time, when I get there in the morning, the staff has wheeled several of the inmates into the middle hub area where the hallways intersect. There they sit for no discernible reason other than, perhaps, to get them out of their rooms for an hour. Many are suffering from Alzheimers or other mentally degenerating illnesses. Others are simply beyond depressed. Often they reach out and call to me for help as I pass by.

It’s heart wrenching. I am often reminded of what Sister Mary Harriet, my junior high match teacher at Notre Dame Elementary used to make us pray for - a happy death. Being 13 at the time and with no real view of our own mortality, it seemed like a loony thing to pray for. Now I see the wisdom in her intercession.

I once saw one of the inmates (that’s what I call them for they do try to escape and are foiled by staff and security systems) being gently harangued by her family who had put her in a place she did not want to be. The woman’s son, his wife and their kids were huddled around grandma’s wheelchair trying to convince her that this was as nice as any place to be brought to die. After all, it’s what we do in our capitalist society. We could pay for in home care assistance for everyone, but how would the entrepreneurs that run the lucrative for-profit convalescent industry make their Wall Street sales projections?

Anything else would reek of socialism and we can’t have that.

Of course sonny and his wife probably did a pretty thorough job liquidating everything grandma had ever worked for in her life so that Medicaid could shovel enough money at the care facility to keep the old woman out of the way of her family until she kicks off. No one needs the downer of a momento mori hanging around in a culture that worships youth, beauty and material success.

I often wonder if, when things get really bad, we’ll see the ‘ethical suicide parlors’ from the movie Soylent Green so people who are no longer able to turn a buck and stimulate the economy can do their patriotic duty to capitalism and off themselves. I suppose when Medicaid finally suffers Grover Nordquist’s dream of drowning it in a bathtub and quits paying the for-profit death housing industry, we may see those parlors.

I want scenes of amber waves of grain and something nice by Roxy Music playing when I’m strapped to the gurney. Remember the old man telling Charlton Heston - “Why, in my day, you could buy meat anywhere! Eggs they had, real butter! Fresh lettuce in the stores. . . “

Actually no. I’m not going to die in one of capitalism’s death houses nor am I going to burden anyone with wiping my ass. When I look at these literally godforsaken people sitting there in the morning in various stages of confusion, pain and distress, I reserve the absolute right to check out at a time and place of my own choosing before I get anywhere near that stage.

And I bet a lot of you feel the same way but you wouldn’t dare talk about it around any of your good Christian relations.

Look, I know its a downer but you never know when you’re going to land up being impaled by a bus and saved by our miracle medical system which will save your life as a paraplegic and then bill you out of everything else you’ve ever earned as a result.

Remember Richard Dreyfus in Whose Life is it Anyway?

And isn’t it funny how we hardly ever see either Soylent Green or Whose Life is it Anyway on cable movie channels or broadcast TV?

Such downers. Or prescient. Take your pick.

Ok, I’ll stop. It’s funny what kind of musings can run from a title seen on Drudge. I’ll try to find something ‘up’ later in the day.

Capitalism uber alles!

Previous from WKYC-TV 2/22/08

Standing near her car, Donna Edwards said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. This was my life. I feel like part of me is gone. This is so painful.”

“Yeah, there is a lot of anger about that,” said Seyer. “A lot of people in this town have invested most of their lives in the Johnson Rubber Company.”

How much you wanna bet there’s a numbered Swiss bank account that has about the same amount of money recently deposited in it? There’s sloppy accounting and then there’s sloppy accounting but you just don’t ‘lose’ $4 million in a company this size.

One can only hope that the bankruptcy attorney gets to the bottom of it.

In the meantime, the little people written about in the above story, the victims of all of this, are now subjected to a double whammy - the health insurance they paid for has not been delivered:

Pain Dealer

Instead, for three months — June through August — none of the workers’ claims were paid. What’s more, weekly pay stubs provided by employees show that Johnson Rubber continued to withdraw $10 to $20 per employee each payday to cover health insurance.

Yet, Johnson’s management didn’t pay administrative fees during that period. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Ohio, which administered health claims for the self-insuring company, said it stopped coverage at the end of July because of that.

And Johnson already had virtually stopped paying medical providers.

Meanwhile, employees and their families continued to get sick and have accidents that required attention. Collectively they incurred between $300,000 and $400,000 in hospital, doctor and prescription expenses.

Republican response: too damn bad. Pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and pay for it yourself. There’s a McDonald’s in Middlefield - apply for a job there! No work is beneath you!

Even longtime Johnson employees had no idea their health-care payments came from the company. On Feb. 21, the day she learned her job would soon end, Maggie Callahan, with the company 12 years, said Johnson had stopped paying its insurance premiums, leaving her and her co-workers financially vulnerable.

Republican response: So what? Capitalism’s first and only loyalty is to the ownership class. You are owed nothing and should expect nothing. Get your own company.

Nancy Marten, another employee who was leaving the Middlefield plant with Callahan, said one colleague had suffered a motorcycle accident during the summer and got hit with $17,000 in medical bills for injury treatment.

“What’s he going to do?” Marten asked, agitated. “He thought he had health insurance.”

Republican response: he should assume all the risks of riding a motorcycle. The company owes him nothing! Get a job!

You know, just once, it would be nice to see some corporate suits, especially in this case, do a perp walk. But the system protects its own. There will probably be golden parachutes for the owners of Johnson Rubber and golden showers for all the employees.

Love it. Two stories today about the medieval fiefdom that is The Cleveland Clinic.

Remember when they took down that wonderful painting last year? The Clinic may have some of the best doctors in the world working for it but also undoubtedly has some of the most Neanderthal management going.

Today we see a story where a 26-year veteran nurse with a stellar record tells the truth about Clinic management and, of course, she gets fired:

Adrienne Zurub spent 26 years as a nurse in the cardiac operating room of the country’s foremost cardiac hospital, the Cleveland Clinic.

When she wrote her memoir, observations about her career and her employer were bound to be a part of it, offering a rare peek behind the scenes at Cleveland’s largest employer.

She self-published “Notes from the Mothership” on Jan. 8.

Two weeks later, she was fired.

“They told me I was fired because of the book . . . after 26 years of stellar employment,” Zurub, who has hired a lawyer, said in an interview. “The two administrators who fired me admitted to me they did not even read my book.”

But they said they had seen excerpts. And that was enough.

Zurub compares the Clinic in her book to a “prison environment” where nurses, to survive, must have alliances with certain surgeons who afford them protection based on the surgeon’s stature within the hierarchy.

“I have observed angry, uncontrolled behavior from so-called educated people that on the street would get them arrested, beat up or shot,” Zurub writes. “But that culture was/is considered part of the culture of this environment, a culture of impunity, and thus covered up or taken care of internally or generally tolerated.”

The Clinic obviously doesn’t see it that way. Though she said the hospital wouldn’t comment about a specific personnel matter, spokeswoman Eileen Sheil wrote in an e-mail: “A critical-care patient environment demands teamwork, trust, and strict adherence to patient confidentiality.“

Which, of course, in this case, is bullshit. Zurub obviously didn’t identify any patients, but she all but identified someone else:

Even without specific identification, one of those unnamed doctors is clearly Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, whom she calls “the emperor” in a story she writes about gifts he promised nurses, after U.S. News & World Report named the Clinic the nation’s top heart hospital.

“One colleague said to him, ‘Oh, you mean another shirt that says I’m part of the world’s greatest cardio-thoracic team and all I got was this (expletive) T-shirt!’ That day, I don’t think the emperor . . . laughed, but I wet myself!“

That was probably enough for the sack, but there’s more and it’s important:

Zurub’s book offers a glimpse. She says a doctor she worked with for years, whom she does not identify, was an “arrogant, misogynistic, dehumanizing yet brilliantly talented bastard.”

Paging Dr. House?

She recounts memories of doctors using crude language and belittling nurses. She has details about one doctor yelling at a patient. She called the Clinic a “doctor’s hospital where nurses are seen as secondary to the mission. . . and aren’t included enough in the collaborative patient-care process.”

Ouch! You knew they weren’t going to like that!

Well we operate under several myths in America and one of the biggest myths is that private institutions, whether they are hospitals or software companies, want and and encourage continuous self-improvement.

This is a lie.

In fact, institutions, operating under the Iron Law of Institutions (the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.), only want improvement to come from the top-down, not the bottom-up. That way, executives can justify their obscene bonuses and perks.

And the ‘management class’ that is bred in this country, absolutely do not, under any circumstances, want criticism from ANYONE. We have raised a class of management in this country, going back to the nation’s founding, that act as if their positions derived from the Divine Right of Kings rather than some form of merit.

Most people understand that what Zurub writes is true - the Clinic is a place that puts doctors on a pedestal where they can, and do, get away, literally, with murder both toward their patients and their underlings, the nursing staff. Zurub has done a great favor by bringing this out into the open.

But the problem for her is that she had better concentrate on her writing and stand up comedy because if I also know the Clinic, she will be blackballed from now until the end of time from ever being a cardiac care nurse in this country.

And that, of course is a Goddamn shame but we blindly accept this sort of medievalism in this country when we, in practice, allow management to do whatever it likes with its employees. Again, like the Divine Right of Kings.

If the Clinic had intelligent management they would take Ms. Zurub’s work to heart, for the sake of their patients and staff, and devise a plan to rein in the out-of-control doctors and management staff.

But you can bet they won’t.

Instead, they’ll continue to behave in their usual arrogant and stupid manner as evidenced by Phillip Morris’s column today about barber Stanley Jackson:

A large portion of Stanley Jackson Sr.’s scalp is locked in a freezer at the Cleveland Clinic.

He wants it back.

More importantly, he wants it reattached. He’s tired of wearing an uncomfortable protective helmet.

But reclaiming one’s scalp from a hospital isn’t that simple, as Jackson has recently learned. Especially if you are broke. The 58-year-old Cleveland barber has no money and no insurance, and since a nearly fatal cerebral aneurysm Sept. 20, he’s found himself in no condition to pursue either.

snip

“I was set for follow-up surgery in January, when a woman called from the Clinic and asked how I intended to pay,” he said. “I was unprepared for that question. They knew I wasn’t insured, but I didn’t think that the hospital would let me go with a piece of my head missing.

“I figured that somewhere, this billion-dollar corporation had money set aside for situations like mine. I’ve worked all of my life. I just couldn’t afford medical insurance.

“Now I’m stuck trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do. I can’t really go anywhere and I can’t work because I have to protect my head. So I’m mostly at home doing lots of reading.”

Jackson fully understands that he should be dead. He also understands that medicine isn’t free.

Whoa, wait a minute here Phillip. It isn’t “free” in Canada either but hospitals can’t hold a person’s scalp there as ransom either. Why? Because they have a humane and civilized medical health care system in Canada and we don’t. So knock off the “free” crap, OK? Unless you just love throwing rhetorical bones to the know-nothing right wing readership in the PD.

So we’re still OK, with ‘your money or your life/scalp’ in this country?

But he quietly fumes when he considers that many people who have never worked - and prison inmates - qualify for taxpayer care or care at taxpayer expense, while lower- and middle-class people often are left to fend for themselves when calamity strikes.

That’s what has him thinking universal health care.

No, no, no — Canadian style single payer national health insurance. “Universal health care” is a misleading statement. If you seize money from people’s paychecks (ala Hillary Clinton’s plan) you do GET universal health care but not the kind that will really help people - all you do under THAT plan is continue to make the Medical Industry even more fantastically wealthy at our expense.

Jackson says the Clinic is attempting to qualify him for Medicaid. Failing that, Clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil says the hospital has a “generous” charity care program that can be used to resolve certain cases.

That may bode well for Jackson. His tab currently stands at $186,000.

So let’s get this right. The Cleveland Clinic, awash in an orgy of profit, is going to try to get the Federal government to pay for Jackson’s care anyway BEFORE it considers letting him have his life AND his scalp back?!

Mighty white of you guys down at The Clinic.

Tell me again why we shouldn’t have Canadian style single payer again?

And just look at that figure - $186,000. As Bruce Springsteen sings: “debts no honest man could pay.” And that’s the price for your life - in penury and grinding poverty the rest of your life which you can pass down to your children. Because they hospital will go after your estate once you die and then, if that doesn’t satisfy the debt, will go after your heirs.

And, as is almost never pointed out, they apply interest to that debt and it just grows and grows. . .

I’d rather have died that pass on that kind of legalized debt slavery to my kids.

Tell me that the United States of America can’t do what other civilized Western nations (and many non-Western nations) do for their citizens? Tell me again why? Tell me more pretty tales about Adam Smith and bootstraps and who deserves what and all that shit.

Justify this barbarity!

So now we know. Apparently it was Prozac:

UPDATE:

Apparently it was a lot more:

(CNN) — Steven Kazmierczak had been taking three drugs prescribed for him by his psychiatrist, the Northern Illinois University gunman’s girlfriend told CNN.

Jessica Baty said Tuesday that her boyfriend of two years had been taking Xanax, used to treat anxiety, and Ambien, a sleep agent, as well as the antidepressant Prozac.

Baty said the psychiatrist prescribed the medications, a fact that made her so “nervous” that she tried to persuade Kazmierczak to stop taking one of the drugs.

She said he had stopped taking the antidepressant three weeks before the Valentine’s Day rampage on the NIU campus in DeKalb, Illinois, which left five students dead and 16 wounded. He then killed himself.

In an exclusive interview with CNN Sunday, Baty said Kazmierczak had been taking the anti-depressant for obsessive-compulsive tendencies and anxiety caused by school pressures.

She told CNN that, during their two-year courtship, she had never seen him display violent tendencies and she expressed bewilderment over the cause of the rampage. Watch where Kazmierczak turned for gun advice »

“He was anything but a monster,” Baty said. “He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.”

Kazmierczak told her he had stopped taking the anti-depressant “because it made him feel like a zombie,” she said during the interview Sunday at her parents’ house in Wonder Lake, Illinois. “He wasn’t acting erratic. He was just a little quicker to get annoyed.” Watch girlfriend remember NIU shooter »

She said he had also had problems sleeping.

In her second conversation with CNN, on Tuesday, Baty said Kazmierczak began seeing the psychiatrist shortly after they transferred from NIU to the University of Illinois in Champaign in June 2007.

Wearing an orange University of Illinois sweat shirt, (Steve Kazmierczak’s girlfriend Jessica) Baty briefly stepped out from her mother’s home in Wonder Lake, Ill., about 70 miles northwest of Chicago, to address reporters there.

“You’re presenting him like a monster, and he wasn’t,” said Baty, before retreating indoors.

Her family put a sign in the yard saying, “Our thoughts, prayers go out to all the victims of the NIU incident. Please respect our privacy as we need to grieve and mourn this tragic loss of so many lives.”

In an emotional interview on CNN, in which Baty wiped tears from her eyes — a peace ring visible on one of her fingers — she said she was baffled about Kazmierczak’s actions.“He was anything but a monster. He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.”

She went on to say “he was a worrier” and that Kazmierczak told her he had “obsessive-compulsive tendencies” and that his parents committed him as a teen to a group home because he was “unruly” and used to cut himself.

Baty said he saw a psychiatrist monthly but stopped taking Prozac a few weeks ago. She said the medicine “made him feel like a zombie.”

But Baty said that recently he was “a little quicker to get annoyed.”

“He wasn’t erratic,” she said. “He wasn’t delusional.”

Of course the Prozac made him feel like a zombie. That’s what it does for many if not most people, especially those who have sensitive personalities. Of course he wasn’t delusional. Of course he was “a little quicker to get annoyed.”

Of course.

Here’s what happens when you just quit taking SSRIs, based on reliable first-hand information:

First, you cry. A lot. Your emotions come right to the surface and stay there. Anything and everything can bring you to tears.

Now for the differences:

Zoloft - As Billy Joel once sang “it’s either sadness or euphoria.” You get them in equal doses when going off Zoloft. The other thing you get are those nifty little electrical impulses that zip across your brain and are accompanied by a “zzzzt!” sound you actually hear, most notable when you turn your head or shift your eyes from left to right or vice versa. Initially, it’s kind of cool, then it becomes annoying, then it becomes ‘mother make it stop!’

It does stop, usually after 10 days or so.

Paxil - same as above but worse emotional swings. After 5-6 days off Paxil you want to strangle a kitten. Hopefully no one gets hurt.

The same kind of problems are inherent with going off most SSRIs.

Some good background on SSRIs here:

The mainstream media, of course, is trying to spin the story by claiming Stephen snapped because he stopped taking his medications. MSM headlines proclaim, “Illinois Shooter Stopped Taking His Medications.” What these headlines fail to communicate is the fact that psychiatric drugs cause long-term disruptions in the brain which lead to a strong dissociation with reality. These young, male shooters hardly even know they’re in the real world anymore. They no longer see their fellow classmates as human beings, but rather as lifeless objects to be used for target practice. For those people taking psychiatric medications, there’s even a strong dissociation with one’s own life, as evidenced by the repeated willingness of these shooters to ultimately turn their guns on themselves.

These are precisely the kinds of things acted out by people who take psych medications: Disconnection with reality, disconnection with self, and disconnection with others. Modern psychiatric medicine is in the business of taking people who feel depressed and chemically lobotomizing their brains so they feel nothing. Once they feel nothing, there’s nothing stopping them from unloading on fellow human beings with firearms. They no longer feel empathy or compassion. Nothing matters anymore. This is strongly characteristic of the well-documented side effects of psychiatric medications.

You see, what most people fail to realize is that there are a lot of decent, warm, sensitive human beings out there who go through our insane American society completely misunderstood. They may not be ‘into’ making money, gaining fame, talking about celebrities, into watching sports, television, supporting imperialism, etc. etc. In short they are society’s otherwise decent misfits. Think of flower children, for instance. Or those quaint folks who sit a the mall food court playing D&D. Or the person standing on the street corner collecting money for Greenpeace.

They feel lost in this world of hyper-competitive kill or be killed you are what you own.

So many of them, so overwhelmed the message society sends them: you are a misfit!

So they wander into the local shrink’s office or mental health clinic. Its not so much they want to be told they’re sane (that’s part of it) but they want to know how to cope with living in a society that is as hostile to their temperament as a noise chamber would be for an autistic. They may be diagnosed with something like oppositional defiance disorder.

And, usually, they are pumped full of SSRIs to help them ‘adjust’ to the world as it is, not as they wish it would be.

And the one thing so many of these folks begin to notice, whether its Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac or whatever, is that they get what might be called a flat affect. That is, they no longer experience the sharp range of emotions and feelings that they used to have.

And this is refreshing. At first.

But after awhile, they miss little things they used to do. Like cry with something is sad. Now they’ll just feel a bit of a remorse. Or they won’t laugh a great belly laugh at things they used to find hilarious. Now they’ll just chuckle a bit and find it wry.

The thing about these meds is that while they flatten the range of your emotional response, your brain, the reasoning part, generally keeps working. If you tend to carry on enlightening conversations with yourself in your head or out loud, generally these will continue.

And your rational brain will start to notice and remember the way you used to laugh and cry and remind you of it.

And a little bell goes off in your head which says - something is wrong; you’ve changed.

And for many people, perhaps, like Steve Kazmierczak, you want to know what it’s like to feel again. For better or worse, you want to know what its like to be fully human again.

But unfortunately, by that time it’s too late: the SSRIs have unalterably changed your brain’s chemistry. Now you must take them, possibly, for the rest of your life.

You, however, may not know this or believe it. After all, drug companies lie like thieves.

And you’re willing to take the chance.

And you can do it - you can break free of a particular SSRI, but only if you step down your dosage very gradually over a period of months under a doctor’s supervision.

That’s right, I said months, not days, not even weeks but months. It will still be hell and may leave you eventually feeling more drained and hopeless than before you started.

If you decide to just stop you are playing with fire. You can’t just stop.

What happens to many people when they just stop?

I would think the vast majority of them don’t land up shooting up schools but quite possibly land up in jail or in psychiatric wards where the people monitoring those facilities may not completely understand what just happened.

The reason I’m spending so much time with this today is that so many people just want to instantly demonize the mentally ill who kill, thinking them intrinsically evil. I referenced such people in a previous post.

And the ‘lawnorder, string ‘em up’ types find comments like Jessica Baty’s to be inconceivable. HOW could a person like Steven Kaczmierczak be characterized as “the nicest, most caring person ever?”

Sounds like that line from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), doesn’t it? “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

There’s a reason it’s so eerily familiar.

I am becoming convinced that what we as a society are doing, through the pushing of these anti-psychotic meds, are creating a new biochemical class of humans. These are people whose brains will be chemically altered for the rest of their lives.

And for the most part, those of you who aren’t on some form of anti-depressant, won’t even know who those people are unless they get up the courage to tell you.

And if you want a clue, check this out:

Thursday, December 2, 2004

"Adult use of antidepressants almost tripled between 1988-1994 and
1999-2000. Ten percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men now
take antidepressants."

And those were 2004 statistics which didn’t count all the kids put on various mind altering drugs. If we extrapolate the data at current trends, at least 15,000,000 Americans out of a population of 300 million are permanently on some form of anti-depressant. And the actual numbers could be far, far higher.

More here:

According to a government study, antidepressants have become the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. They’re prescribed more than drugs to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, or headaches. CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen discusses the CDC study on antidepressants »

In its study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in visits to doctors and hospitals in 2005. Of those, 118 million were for antidepressants.

And if there’s another great argument for Canadian single payer national health this is it: these people had better be provided with their meds at all times, no questions asked, or incidents like what happened at NIU and Virginia Tech will be happening every week.

These drugs, which the above-references CNN story talked about, are not benign mood enhancers. Let me stress again: THEY PERMANENTLY ALTER THE CHEMISTRY OF YOUR BRAIN.

When I read stories like this (from the link above):

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Dr. Ronald Dworkin tells the story of a woman who didn’t like the way her husband was handling the family finances. She wanted to start keeping the books herself but didn’t want to insult her husband.

The doctor suggested she try an antidepressant to make herself feel better.

She got the antidepressant, and she did feel better, said Dr. Dworkin, a Maryland anesthesiologist and senior fellow at Washington’s Hudson Institute, who told the story in his book “Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class.” But in the meantime, Dworkin says, the woman’s husband led the family into financial ruin.

a cold chill runs up my spine.

Folks, without trying to sound like the plot of some sci-fi movie, I really don’t quite think we understand what we’re doing here.

Financial ruin is one thing, shooting up public places quite another.

One day, I suppose, history will look back upon this age of The Altered Brain Humanoid and remark about this trend as leading human society to a period of ruin not unlike the Black Death of the 14th century.

I believe, for the sake of massive drug company profits and the sincere desperate desire of many Americans to feel good about themselves in an increasingly insane society, that we are playing games with the one organ of the human body that we understand the least - the human brain.

And the time has come for someone to say ’stop.’

Before its too late.

Finally a bulleted point article most Americans can understand easily.

From Sara Robinson in TomPaine.com

A few highlights:

5. You don’t get to choose your own doctor.
Scurrilously False. Somebody, somewhere, is getting paid a lot of money to make this kind of stuff up. The cons love to scare the kids with stories about the government picking your doctor for you, and you don’t get a choice. Be afraid! Be very afraid!

For the record: Canadians pick their own doctors, just like Americans do. And not only that: since it all pays the same, poor Canadians have exactly the same access to the country’s top specialists that rich ones do.

7. Canadian drugs are not the same.
More preposterious bogosity. They are exactly the same drugs, made by the same pharmaceutical companies, often in the same factories. The Canadian drug distribution system, however, has much tighter oversight; and pharmacies and pharmacists are more closely regulated. If there is a difference in Canadian drugs at all, they’re actually likely to be safer.

Also: pharmacists here dispense what the doctors tell them to dispense, the first time, without moralizing. I know. It’s amazing.

8. Publicly-funded programs will inevitably lead to rationed health care, particularly for the elderly.
False. And bogglingly so. The papers would have a field day if there was the barest hint that this might be true.

One of the things that constantly amazes me here is how well-cared-for the elderly and disabled you see on the streets here are. No, these people are not being thrown out on the curb. In fact, they live longer, healthier, and more productive lives because they’re getting a constant level of care that ensures small things get treated before they become big problems.

The health care system also makes it easier on their caregiving adult children, who have more time to look in on Mom and take her on outings because they aren’t working 60-hour weeks trying to hold onto a job that gives them insurance.

And the big one for ‘personal responsibility’ ‘Murkan types:

9. People won’t be responsible for their own health if they’re not being forced to pay for the consequences.

False. The philosophical basis of America’s privatized health care system might best be characterized as medical Calvinism. It’s fascinating to watch well-educated secularists who recoil at the Protestant obsession with personal virtue, prosperity as a cardinal sign of election by God, and total responsibility for one’s own salvation turn into fire-eyed, moralizing True Believers when it comes to the subject of Taking Responsibility For One’s Own Health.

They’ll insist that health, like salvation, is entirely in our own hands. If you just have the character and self-discipline to stick to an abstemious regime of careful diet, clean living, and frequent sweat offerings to the Great Treadmill God, you’ll never get sick. (Like all good theologies, there’s even an unspoken promise of immortality: f you do it really really right, they imply, you might even live forever.) The virtuous Elect can be discerned by their svelte figures and low cholesterol numbers. From here, it’s a short leap to the conviction that those who suffer from chronic conditions are victims of their own weaknesses, and simply getting what they deserve. Part of their punishment is being forced to pay for the expensive, heavily marketed pharmaceuticals needed to alleviate these avoidable illnesses. They can’t complain. It was their own damned fault; and it’s not our responsibility to pay for their sins. In fact, it’s recently been suggested that they be shunned, lest they lead the virtuous into sin.

Of course, this is bad theology whether you’re applying it to the state of one’s soul or one’s arteries. The fact is that bad genes, bad luck, and the ravages of age eventually take their toll on all of us — even the most careful of us. The economics of the Canadian system reflect this very different philosophy: it’s built on the belief that maintaining health is not an individual responsibility, but a collective one. Since none of us controls fate, the least we can do is be there for each other as our numbers come up.

This difference is expressed in a few different ways. First: Canadians tend to think of tending to one’s health as one of your duties as a citizen. You do what’s right because you don’t want to take up space in the system, or put that burden on your fellow taxpayers. Second, “taking care of yourself” has a slightly expanded definition here, which includes a greater emphasis on public health. Canadians are serious about not coming to work if you’re contagious, and seeing a doctor ASAP if you need to. Staying healthy includes not only diet and exercise; but also taking care to keep your germs to yourself, avoiding stress, and getting things treated while they’re still small and cheap to fix.

Third, there’s a somewhat larger awareness that stress leads to big-ticket illnesses — and a somewhat lower cultural tolerance for employers who put people in high-stress situations. Nobody wants to pick up the tab for their greed. And finally, there’s a generally greater acceptance on the part of both the elderly and their families that end-of-life heroics may be drawing resources away from people who might put them to better use. You can have them if you want them; but reasonable and compassionate people (ed. - my emphasis here since this is something conservatives have trouble understanding since they lack basic human qualities) should be able to take the larger view.

The bottom line: When it comes to getting people to make healthy choices, appealing to their sense of the common good seems to work at least as well as Calvinist moralizing.

Couldn’t have written it better. Folks, link the main article to your favorite places anytime you hear any pompous right wing ass start bloviating about the Canadian system. Then you can use what’s in this excellent article to shut them the hell up quick.

PART 2

Debunking the Free Marketeers - Sara Robinson

Government-run health care is inherently less efficient — because governments themselves are inherently less efficient.
If anything could finally put the lie to this old conservative canard, the disaster that is our health care system is Exhibit A.

America spends about 15% of its GDP on health care. Most other industrialized countries (all of whom have some form of universal care) spend about 11-12%. According to the WHO, Canada spends a bit over 9% — and most of the problems within their system come out of the fact that it’s chronically underfunded compared to the international average.

Any system that has people spending more and getting less is, by definition, not efficient. And these efficiency leaks are, almost entirely, due to private greed. There is no logical way that a private system can pay eight-figure CEO compensation packages, turn a handsome a profit for shareholders, and still be “efficient.” In fact, in order to deliver those profits and salaries, the American system has built up a vast, Kafkaesque administrative machinery of approval, denial, and fraud management, which inflates the US system’s administrative costs to well over double that seen in other countries — or even in our own public systems, including Medicare and the VA system.

Not incidentally: one of the benefits of single-payer health care is that it largely eliminates the entire issue of “fraud.” You can only “cheat” a system that already views its primary business as rationing and withholding care. In Canada, where the system is set up to deliver health care instead of profits, and medical access is considered a right, this whole oversight machinery is far cheaper and more compact. In general, the system trusts doctors and patients to make the right choices the first time. As a result, people generally don’t have to lie, cheat, and grovel to get the system to deliver the care they need. They just go and get it — and walk out without a moment’s dread about the bills.

Shareholder profit, inflated CEO salaries, and top-heavy administration — all of which serve to work against the delivery of care, not facilitate it — are anti-efficiencies that siphon off 20-25% of America’s total health care spending. These are huge sums; yet it’s mostly money down a gold-plated rathole. In the end, it doesn’t provide a single bed, pay a single nurse or doctor, or treat a single patient.

Make sure you read the rest and bookmark it when the Kevin O’Briens of the world start mouthing off.