Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.
The tag 'health care' is associated with 4 posts.

FTR #995 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

In FTR #967, we high­light­ed the Nazi group Atom­waf­fen, one of whose mem­bers was plot­ting an attack on a nuclear pow­er plant. (The would be nuke  ter­ror­ist was Bran­don Rus­sell, a Flori­da Nation­al Guards­man.)

New arti­cles on the group dis­close that they have been respon­si­ble for a num­ber of recent mur­ders around the coun­try.  More mur­ders should be expect­ed because Atom­waf­fen pro­duces ISIS-style videos pro­mot­ing mass neo-Nazi vio­lence designed to sab­o­tage and implode soci­ety.

FTR #888 details the work of Glenn Green­wald in run­ning legal inter­fer­ence for the lead­er­less strat­e­gy advo­cat­ed by the likes of James Mason and the Nation­al Alliance. Specif­i­cal­ly, Cit­i­zen Green­wald freed up the likes of Atom­waf­fen et al from civ­il lia­bil­i­ty for their ISIS-style YouTube exhor­ta­tions to vio­lence and mur­der.

In FTR #437, we high­light­ed counter-cul­ture fas­cism and the pen­chant of some to pro­mote fas­cist out­crop­pings like the Charles Man­son cultists to bohemi­ans. Atom­waf­fen idol­ize both James Mason and his Siege newslet­ter and book, as well as one of Mason’s idols–Charles Man­son.

Mason expressed sup­port for the Nazi eugen­ics and euthana­sia pro­gram. (We have dis­cussed eugen­ics and euthana­sia in numer­ous pro­grams, includ­ing Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Shows M12 and M60, as well as FTR #‘s 117, 124, 140, 141, 534, 664, 908, and 909.)

He has com­pa­ny:

Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don (UCL) recent­ly dis­cov­ered that there’s been a secret eugen­ics con­fer­ence host­ed in its cam­pus since 2014.

One promi­nent attendee to these con­fer­ences is Toby Young, the head of the New Schools Net­work – a net­work of “Free schools” — non-prof­it inde­pen­dent schools fund­ed by the state. Anoth­er is Richard Lynn, the ‘aca­d­e­m­ic’ who sits on the board of the Pio­neer Fund and who pro­vid­ed the bulk of the work in The Bell Curve pur­port­ing to show racial dif­fer­ence in intel­li­gence.

Atten­dees at the invite-only con­fer­ence were told about the loca­tion at the last minute and asked not to men­tion it to any­one.

We con­clude with a very impor­tant op-ed col­umn in The New York Times under­scor­ing the con­ti­nu­ity between Amer­i­can and Ger­man eugen­ics, the Nazi T‑4 pro­gram and GOP “aus­ter­i­ty.” The Repub­li­cans and like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als like Prince­ton fac­ul­ty mem­ber Peter Singer are advo­cat­ing against the dis­abled is being “cost inef­fec­tive.”

” . . . . We often say what hap­pened in Nazi Ger­many couldn’t hap­pen here. But some of it, like the mis­treat­ment and ster­il­iza­tion of the dis­abled, did hap­pen here.

A read­ing of Hoche and Binding’s ‘Per­mit­ting the Destruc­tion of Unwor­thy Life’ [a bedrock intel­lec­tu­al ele­ment of the 1920’s Ger­man eugen­ics movement–D.E.] shows the sim­i­lar­i­ty between what they said and what expo­nents of prac­ti­cal ethics, such as Peter Singer, say about the dis­abled today. As recent­ly as 2015, Singer, talk­ing with the radio host Aaron Klein on his show, said, ‘I don’t want my health insur­ance pre­mi­ums to be high­er so that infants who can expe­ri­ence zero qual­i­ty of life can have expen­sive treat­ments.’

These philoso­phers talk about the drain on ‘resources’ caused by lives lived with a dis­abil­i­ty, which eeri­ly echoes what Hoche and Bind­ing wrote about the ‘finan­cial and moral bur­den’ on ‘a person’s fam­i­ly, hos­pi­tal, and state’ caused by what they deem lives ‘unwor­thy of liv­ing.’ Experts point out the recent Repub­li­can health care pro­pos­als would strip Med­ic­aid fund­ing that helps the elder­ly, the poor and the dis­abled live health­i­er and more dig­ni­fied lives.

A recent New York Times arti­cle quot­ed the Rev. Susan Flan­ders, a retired Epis­co­pal priest, as say­ing: ‘What we’re pay­ing for is some­thing that many peo­ple wouldn’t want if they had a choice. It’s hun­dreds of dol­lars each day that could go towards their grandchildren’s edu­ca­tion or care for the peo­ple who could get well.’ In the arti­cle, Flan­ders, whose father had Alzheimer’s, is described as ‘utter­ly unafraid to mix mon­ey into the con­ver­sa­tion about the mean­ing of life when the mind dete­ri­o­rates.’ Prac­ti­cal ethi­cists are sim­i­lar­ly unafraid to do this. As were the Nazis. . . .”

With the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s dereg­u­la­tion of agen­cies like the EPA and the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion, the Amer­i­can peo­ple are going to be exposed to car­cino­gens, muta­gens and unsafe food and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts. Years from now, the coun­try is going to expe­ri­ence a big upswing in the inci­dence of can­cer and oth­er degen­er­a­tive dis­eases, as well as birth defor­mi­ties.

The strong pos­si­bil­i­ty that this tsuna­mi of degen­er­a­tive dis­ease and birth defects could over­whelm the health care sys­tem and lead to the imple­men­ta­tion of an Amer­i­can T‑4 pro­gram is one to be tak­en very seri­ous­ly.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1.-The con­flu­ence of Manson/Nazi cultists with eso­teric Nazism, high­light­ed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 991 and 992.
2.-Review of Man­son vic­tim Sharon Tate in the Los Ange­les area cam­paign of Robert F. Kennedy.
3.-Review of Robert Kennedy’s state­ment to Tate and her hus­band Roman Polan­s­ki (as well as oth­ers) that he would re-open the inves­ti­ga­tion into his broth­er’s mur­der after get­ting to the White House.
4.-Review of Ed But­ler’s attri­bu­tion of the Tate/La Bian­ca killings to the Black Pan­thers or oth­er “black mil­i­tants.”
5.-Review of the prob­a­ble Man­son fam­i­ly author­ship of the mur­der of Mari­na Habe, daugh­ter of anti-fas­cist writer Hans Habe.
6.-Review of the affin­i­ty between the bril­liant Nazi hack­er Andrew Aueren­heimer aka  “Weev” and the Atom­waf­fen.
7.-Review of Wee­v’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in Glenn Green­wald and Lau­ra Poitras’ par­ty cel­e­brat­ing their receipt of the pres­ti­gious Polk award.


The US Falls Down the GOP’s Tax Scam Memory Hole. Again.

When is a tax cut more than just a tax cut? When it’s a GOP tax cut. Because when the GOP cuts tax­es, it’s nev­er just an attempt to cut tax­es because tax cuts are just one ele­ment of the GOP’s much larg­er agen­da of cre­at­ing a soci­ety run by and for the super-rich. And mas­sive amounts of pro­pa­gan­da and decep­tion are part of the tax cut pack­age too. It’s why GOP tax cuts tend to be so much more than just tax cuts for the rich. They’re Big Lies designed to fool soci­ety into dis­man­tling itself. So it should come as a sur­prise to no one that the cur­rent GOP tax cut plans are hor­ri­ble abom­i­na­tion being sold to the pub­lic by a web of lies. But what is gen­uine­ly sur­pris­ing about the cur­rent GOP tax push is just how shod­dy that web of lies is turn­ing out to be this time. As we’re going to see, it’s almost as if the fail­ure to pass Trump­care only increased the resolve of Amer­i­ca’s right-wing oli­garchs to final­ly pass leg­is­la­tion that’s even more polit­i­cal­ly awful than Trump­care. But as we’re also going to see, even if the tax cuts turn into a polit­i­cal dis­as­ter for the GOP that will still be fine for the GOP as long as the pub­lic for­gets to remem­ber that we’ve been here before.


Guess What? Grandma is Moving In. She’s Got Medical Bills. Maybe to Share. It’s Medicaid Brought to You by Kochcare.

Is kick­ing senior cit­i­zens out of nurs­ing homes good pol­i­tics? That’s a ques­tion GOP ask­ing itself these days. One of many ques­tions relat­ed to the pol­i­tics of health care. Although not many are ask­ing it since the pub­lic large­ly has no idea the ques­tion is being asked at all as recent polls show. With the Sen­ate’s ver­sion of ‘Trump­care’ final­ly released to the pub­lic, we’re now learn­ing that, yes, the GOP appears to think kick­ing seniors out their nurs­ing homes is good pol­i­tics. Because trans­fer­ring Med­ic­aid costs to states and indi­vid­u­als has been a key GOP goal of Trump­care’s con­gres­sion­al authors the entire time and nurs­ing homes are paid for by Med­ic­aid for the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple. So in addi­tion to the many pro­found moral ques­tions raised by the GOP’s health care ‘reform’ plans, a grow­ing num­ber of pro­found polit­i­cal ques­tions are being raised the more we learn about Trump­care as it takes form. Includ­ing whether or not putting nurs­ing home cov­er­age on a fis­cal death spi­ral makes for good pol­i­tics. Granny would prob­a­bly say ‘no’, but she’s got com­pe­ti­tion.


Trumplandian Feudalism: Employ the Unemployed While Still Starving Them

Did Trump sud­den­ly drop his oft-repeat­ed crit­i­cism of tra­di­tion unem­ploy­ment report­ing and asser­tions that in real­i­ty its 42 per­cent and 94 mil­lion Amer­i­can adults are out of work? Well, as we’re going to see, prob­a­bly not because his admin­is­tra­tion is still plan­ning on redefin­ing the “offi­cial” unem­ploy­ment rate to be much “loos­er” and his claims that 42 per­cent if Amer­i­can adults are out of work are nec­es­sary to achieve a long-held GOP goal cham­pi­oned by House Speak­er Paul Ryan: con­vert­ing the US safe­ty-net — includ­ing Medicare, Med­ic­aid, and Social Secu­ri­ty — into a “work for a pit­tance to get a pit­tance of gov­ern­ment support”-net that traps the poor in sys­tem where if you have to find full time work to get any help at all. Maybe even for the elder­ly. And the help you get in return for that work-require­ment will keep shrink­ing year after year. It’s a plan that can’t hap­pen unless almost all non-work­ing adults are defined as “unem­ployed”. So, no, Trump did­n’t change his mind. He just still thinks we’re all stu­pid (maybe).