The Miami Collapse [Updated!]

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Will not be overly long on this, but have been saddened and fascinated with the Champlain collapse in Miami since news of it first surfaced. Here is a New York Times report. Here is an absolutely harrowing tick tock, with video and photos, from The Washington Post. Seriously, make sure to look at the WaPo piece.

The Champlain South building just pancaked. The World Trade Center buildings had the instigation of jet fuel laced missiles flying into them, this did not. Nor did the Hard Rock collapse in New Orleans, which was under construction and never certified nor occupied. This is different. Only four are reported dead as of this posting, but nearly 160 missing, so the number will definitely grow. Rescue efforts well underway, but it seems bleak.

This Champlain building was the “south” one. There is a “north” one that is seemingly siamesed and of the same design, materials and construct. The local mayor wants to evacuate it. And, that would be no problem, frankly I’d already be gone if I lived there.

But the problem with water in Miami and the Florida coast has been foreshadowed for a very long time. The sea level is rising. The ground is wet. This building was, apparently, built to code only 40 years ago and was in the process of “repairs”. But would “repairs” have stopped this? Am inclined to think no. So, then, what is the status of all the other buildings in that line of the relevant water table?

Also, pools belong in the ground, not on decks.

Since it is “Infrastructure Week” yet again, maybe some thought ought be given to water tables, both growing in places like Florida, and shrinking in places like Arizona and California.

UPDATE: Am going to add in this comment from Pete, and I think it exactly right:

“I am not a structural engineer nor a geologist, but I have lived in Southeast FL all of my 70 years and witnessed the ever higher and closer together high rises along the coast and even more inland Miami since the 70s on.

I think it is important to know the geology of the Florida peninsula:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Florida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Platform

Forget the underlying Florida Platform which would be bedrock that most might think of. It’s 10,000 feet down and you aren’t drilling down that far and filling up a hole that deep with concrete and rebar. So you drill into the karst limestone layer for which the record drill depth is a recent 170+ feet for a newer 57 story building in Miami adjacent to Biscayne Bay.

Limestone is the sinkhole gift that keeps on giving especially in central Florida – just ask Jim White,

Furthermore, in a pique of insanity places like Surfside as well as the Las Olas area of Ft. Lauderdale – about 40 miles North – are actually partially soft fill reclaimed wetlands. Ft. Lauderdale circa the 1920s That’s right – the build site is a lot of man made land.

I would not and cannot say that is relevant here, but in Las Olas settlement and the rising sea level coming UP through the porous land causes constant water main failure, sewage line failure, and flooding. Flooding due to water being forced UP is a major increasing problem in Southern Miami Beach.

It is reported that Champlain Towers, built in 1981, had been “sinking” mm per year since the 1990s.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9723841/Map-report-predicting-condo-collapse-reveals-Miami-Beach-spots-risk-collapse.html

As in most major disasters it’s not just one error but a series of errors and missed opportunities to avert the disaster that get missed – or ignored.”

Fertile Ground: Lack of Broadband and Disinformation Proliferation

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Focusing on infrastructure this week, The Verge published an article Monday about broadband distribution in the U.S., providing a tidy map denoting which counties are not adequately served by high-speed internet.

Do you see what I see? Because it looks really familiar, kind of like this somewhat more granular map published in USAToday:

There are exceptions to my theory, but on the face of it there’s a correlation in most states between broadband access and so-called conservative voters.

Look at these two excerpts side by side:

There may be another corollary, at least in Michigan: the areas with crappy to nonexistent broadband are the ones which were hardest hit by the third wave COVID because there are more anti-mask, anti-lockdown, ‘COVID’s a hoax’ residents on average. Here’s NYT’s national map of COVID hot spots from April 9 (sorry, I didn’t get a zoomed-in image of WI-MI at that time):

Wisconsin is not as obvious a challenge in this map but the lack of broadband and red voters correlates to COVID hot spot region in north Texas.

This map, published by State of Michigan a few weeks earlier into Michigan’s third wave COVID cases, also shows the correlation:

While there are some exceptions like Marquette and Keweenaw Counties (both of which may have been affected by student and faculty populations in state universities) in the Upper Peninsula, the hot spots tracked from March into May the areas with low broadband and red voters.

Do note the one small outlier county near the middle of Wisconsin — that’s Menominee County, which voted blue but has crappy broadband. It’s the least populated of all counties in the state but its roughly 4550 residents are more than 87% Native American. Which means there’s not enough profit for broadband providers, and no ethics or adequate legislation at either state or federal level obligating coverage.

This week’s map of vaccination uptake in Michigan as published by Mlive shows the effect of anti-vaxx disinformation. In spite of horrific case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths in the low broadband Trump-voting areas, vaccine uptake has been slow.

Note the yellow county at the right of the map along Lake Huron; this is in MI-10, an area so pro-Trump that its previous congressional representative retired rather than run for re-election. Also not served adequately by broadband. (Also ripe for manipulation by outside parties like banking and real estate investors; it’s through this county that the new pipeline for water from Lake Huron to Flint was run at considerable expense and time, in spite of the proximity to Saginaw’s water system to the north and Detroit’s to the south.)

Another layer to this onion is the lack of print news media, shown on this Knight Foundation national map:

While that Trump-voting Michigan county of Sanilac on Lake Huron has print media, there’s a correlation between other counties without adequate broadband and low vaccine uptake.

I can’t find a decent map showing broadcast TV and radio coverage but some of the same problematic counties are underserved — most definitely in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the upper portion of Wisconsin. There are concerns about how much of the state is served by Sinclair-owned television stations; they’re not as bad as Fox, but Sinclair owns far too much opportunity to push right-wing friendly content over publicly-owned airwaves.

Granted, there are some additional factors which shape the ideology espoused by persons who are slow to accept vaccination and reject masks. Some of these counties are extremely non-diverse, by which I mean more than 96% non-Hispanic white. Some are more than 55% male.

At least one of the counties in Michigan’s UP leans the other way because its population is older. Ontonagon County’s median age is 52.7 years while Sanilac’s median age is 43.

All of this is to say that the lack of broadband infrastructure serving Americans uniformly leaves them prey to disinformation about existential matters. If they aren’t getting information from a variety of media served up by broadband, AND they don’t have ready access to print media, AND they are likely underserved by broadcasters, they are ripe for whatever media is easiest to access including Facebook and other social media platforms on their cell phones.

~ ~ ~

Now here’s where it gets personal.

I have a family member who lives in a broadband desert, in a Trump-voting rural county. I thought of them immediately when Marcy wrote Radicalized by Trump: A Tale of Two Assault Defendants last week. This family member has written some things my kids won’t share with me (I’m not on Facebook and they are) because what this person has shared is so Trumpy and Qultish.

One of the two defendants Marcy wrote about blamed “Foxitis” for their radicalization. This isn’t the case for this family member because they live in a broadband desert. They may get digital broadcast but this means they aren’t exposed to Fox programming on cable. They don’t have cable, DSL, or wireless internet, only the data they purchase with their cell phone service.

This family member isn’t getting the newspaper, either; they’re not stupid but they’ve never been much of a reader.

Whatever is rotting their brain is coming through their phone, and my kids already know Facebook is one of the social media outlets this family member uses.

Fortunately this same family member isn’t prone to activism and has enough demands on their personal time that they aren’t likely to take off and go to rallies with other Trumpers and Qultists.

But we’re still looking at someone who views any messaging from the state government under Governor Whitmer and the federal government under President Biden with great suspicion and skepticism, to the point where they may resist measures intended to protect them, their family, and their community. The only information they’re getting about either state or federal government is through the filter of their limited social media.

I’m afraid this person’s mind won’t change until they have access to a lot more information from a much broader range of sources. Until they have cheap and easily accessible broadband, they’re going to be lost to disinformation and at continued risk.

This is bad enough — a family member who lives a couple hours away who I’ll have to write off as inaccessible for the near term because they have been poisoned by disinfo.

But this disinfo poisoning managed to affect my household directly.

Friends who are in agriculture suggested purchasing a side of beef soon as they expect meat prices to go up over the next few months. They recommended a processor in one of the counties which was hit hard by the third wave — a processor from whom we haven’t purchased before.

I suggested to my spouse that we try a processor up north who we’ve used in the past. They live in a very rural county which has fared a little better, and we’ve always liked their service.

When my spouse looked into placing an order, he was told they’d just lost two personnel who died of COVID and orders were backlogged.

How the heck do people who process meat for a country store in a county of less than 15,000 people end up dead of COVID?

What else may be hurting, possibly killing these people for lack of adequate, rational information?

I can’t be certain of anything except for not buying my beef there any time soon, and that country store’s location in a county indicated by blue denoting a lack of broadband.

Long Overdue Policies that Look Obvious in the Age of Pandemic

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I’m not usually a fan of George Packer. But I keep coming back to this column, We Are Living in a Failed State. The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken, which is something I might have written. It argued that this pandemic, to which the US responded like a corrupt poor country, was actually the third crisis of this century, and our responses to the previous two — 9/11 and the Iraq War, and the Wall Street crisis — simply brought this country to the place where Trump could loot it.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

Packer ends with a call for renewed solidarity.

But he might as well also call for a fix to all the failures of the past twenty years. Right now, mind you, Trump is failing, miserably, in part because he believes maximizing the opportunities for looting by his friends is all the policy he needs.

But the sheer scale of the crisis makes policies that long made sense for the United States more urgent and far easier to justify. I plan to keep a running list of those policies.

Medicare for All

No one has figured out how all the people put out of work by the shut-downs will pay for COVID-related health care. Trump has persisted in a plan to kill Obamacare, and some badly affected states never even expanded Medicaid.

Early reports suggested that Trump’s administration has claimed it is willing to pay hospital bill, so long as they pay those bills directly (thereby avoiding establishing a policy, I guess). But with so many people out of work and with hospitals reeling from the shut-down, the far better solution is to make Medicare available to all.

Universal Basic Income

The US government has been backing credit for big industry and tried, but failed, to provide free money for small businesses to keep their employees on staff. Instead, 26 million Americans have applied for unemployment, a sixth of all workers (and a third of all workers in MI, KY, and RI). Meanwhile, the Administration botched even a one-time $1,200 payment.

The government could better ensure that markets don’t crash entirely–and keep states from buckling as they try to serve all these unemployed people–if they simply gave a UBI to all people, as Spain has decided it will do. By keeping it, the US might be able to address the underlying inequality problems that have led to such a disproportionate impact of COVID on communities of color.

Decarceration

Closed spaces, generally, amount for a huge percentage of COVID cases and (in the case of nursing homes) deaths. ACLU just rolled out a paper that argues the models for COVID (which were originally based off other societies’ social patterns, including their prison system) underestimate the total number of deaths because they don’t account for the spread in our prisons.

COVID will remain lethal for long enough that states and the federal government will need to achieve some level of decarceration to prevent the prisons from becoming a source of spread to the wider community (as they have become in the localities with harder hit prisons).

In this case, even before COVID hit, there was bipartisan support to wean ourselves from overincarceration. Prisons will become less lucrative in conservative communities, especially as some states begin to end prison gerrymandering (which gives rural communities representation for prisoners who can’t vote, just like slavery did).

So now is the time to end incarceration for minor crimes, and improve the humanity of incarceration for those who need to be jailed.

Deindustrialization of the Food System

We’ll be lucky if we avoid famine conditions. That’s partly because our food system has the same institutional/retail split our toilet paper supply chain does, meaning the market for half of the food out there disappeared when restaurants and other institutional buyers shut down. That’s partly because bottlenecks in our food supply chain — most notably, thus far, meatpacking plants, but there will be others — have further undermined the market for our plentiful food production. And that’s partly because Trump’s farmer support, thus far, has emphasized direct payments that are effectively a continuation of his earlier bribery of farmers whose markets his trade war screwed, rather than purchasing up surpluses to provide to food banks.

Trump hasn’t shown an ability to get any other needed supplies where they’re needed; it’s unlikely he’ll do better with food.

Meanwhile, food supplies that bypass these commodity markets remain. We need to make this food supply chain more resilient and one way of doing so is to bypass the industrial bottlenecks.

Broadband as a Utility

When schools shut down, it suddenly became acutely visible how many Americans — both rural and urban — don’t have broadband. While some areas have gerry-rigged solutions (like driving wifi-enabled busses to poorer neighborhoods) to get some kids online and learning, that’s not possible everywhere. And even for adults, it takes broadband access to be able to social distance.

Trump is already talking about using infrastructure investments to get America working again. Extending basic broadband as a utility should be part of that.

Update: Arne Duncan describes what needs to happen for existing efforts to expand broadband access to be really effective.

Industrial Policy

Two months after we first identified shortages in necessary medical supply, we’ve barely managed to switch production to those necessary objects, even as entire factories were otherwise shut down. We’ve got shortages of not just testing kits, but the underlying supplies. We’ve got drug shortages too (and had them, even before the President started pitching miracle cures).

It’s long past time to admit that we do have an industrial policy — but right now, it’s focused on building the troubled F-35, not ensuring that the United States has the ability to build the things we need domestically, even if we interact openly with the rest of the world. This story uses the failed lithium battery investments Obama made, largely in Michigan, to talk about how we came to be unable to supply our own medical equipment.

We have an industrial policy. We just need to be willing to match that policy to our society’s real needs, not exporting warmongering.

Krewe du Boo Trash Talk

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Okay, another late start to Trash. Now if you have not heard, there is some bad bongos in Nawlins. The Hard Rock Hotel (not just a restaurant, this thing was to be huge), has collapsed in what will be an insanely huge liability claim for about thirty different fronts. People have died and their bodies still not recovered. An entire critical section of NOLA evacuated as a danger zone.

And, now, for insult onto injury, the Krewe du Boo Halloween parade has been cancelled. While not exactly the Krewe du Vieux and the other Krewes for Mardis Gras, this was kind of a thing, apparently, for NOLA. Keep your eye out for the litigation for this mammoth fuck up in engineering and development. It will be large, fascinating, and going on for a long time. Sad, in every way imaginable.

In the collegiate ranks, the Florida/South Carolina game is already interesting. After what SC did to Georgia, that has to worry Jim White. I’ll still take the Gators, but the game is in the Gamecocks stadium. Oregon at Washington Huskies is worth the watch. Michigan at Penn State is a huge game. I don’t know that it will get better for Harbaugh in Happy Valley, but it will be interesting.

ASU at Utah could, and should, be a great game. The Sun Devils of Herm Edwards are at an improbable 5-1 heading in to Salt Lake to visit a similarly situated 5-1 Utah, except nobody predicted Utah losing to USC earlier. Rice-Eccles Stadium is not a huge venue, but it is a compact and intimidating place to play on the road. Note my time in Rice-Eccles was for a couple of days on a Rolling Stones show I was working, not a football game. It is pretty, especially at the time of day the game is scheduled. If you can get the game on your carrier, it may be worth the watch.

For the Pros, the Chefs already clouted the Donkos, but lost Pat Mahomes for a couple of weeks. No problem, they just have the Packers and Vikings the next two weeks. But Matt Moore is not a scrub, Kansas City can still play with him at the helm. Speaking of the Vikings, they are at Detroit, and I smell an upset by the Kittehs. Oakland is at the Packers, and that could be a far better game than you would think. Philly at the ‘Boys could be okay. For you noisy 49ers fans, no, they are playing the Skins. They should win.

Arizona at the Gents is not a great game, but could get very interesting. Kyler Murray and the Cards offense has been better than expected, and the beleaguered AZ defense gets Patrick Peterson back, and he is still one of the best corners in football. Saints at Bears “should” be good, but Teddy Bridgewater has the Saints plugging along, I’ll take them. Ravens at Squawks is a matchup of two of the three best running QB’s in the league. Should be fascinating, but it is in Seattle, and man is that a tough place to play on the road. Lastly, the Pats visit the Jets on MNF. Jets are a LOT better with Sam Darnold back. Is that enough for a huge upset? I doubt it, but it may be close.

Lastly, MLB. It is the time of year where baseball counts, even here. The Natinals have already swept St. Louis and have their place in the World Series locked up while resting their superb starting pitchers. Astros up 3-2 on the Yanks, and heading back to Houston town for games 6 and 7. They will have the ridiculously good so far in the playoffs Gerrit Cole ready to go for one of them. It was supposed that would be for game 6, but that does not seem to be a given, they may save him for a knock out game 7. How that pitching decision plays out will be fascinating. I think I’d go ahead and let him throw game 6.

That is it for this week folks. Music by the great Lowell George and Little Feat.

[Photo by Piron Guillaume via Unsplash]

Another Kind of Recovery: Post-Maria Puerto Rico and Health Care Critical Infrastructure

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I was away most of the last several weeks because I was recovering from surgery. I was lucky, not only because surgery fixed a life-threatening problem, but because I had IV bags and tubing for saline and pain medication.

lt doesn’t seem like this should be a big thing but it is for many critical health care situations. Imagine having major abdominal surgery, followed by days of post-surgery care. The pain could be debilitating without a continuous drip pain medication. Imagine the extra labor required to administer pain medication if automated IV drip feeds aren’t available.

Now imagine caring for an unconscious influenza patient suffering from dehydration. Imagine a ward filled with these patients, including children and elderly who may be difficult to hydrate by mouth. Imagine not having enough IV bags and tubing for a severe flu season.

No need to imagine this; hospitals have been dealing with this very shortage for more than a month. Some hospitals are administering Gatorade by stomach tube because they don’t have enough IV bags for hydration.

I hate to think of the challenges for patients in treatment for cancer and other long-term illnesses.

Why the shortage? It’s because Hurricane Maria affected the largest U.S. manufacturer of IV products. Baxter International’s three Puerto Rican plants make 44% of IV bags used in the U.S.

Most Americans aren’t aware 46% of Puerto Rico’s economy is manufacturing. Pharmaceuticals represent the lion’s share, including IV products. This industry represents 18,000 jobs, $40 billion in pharmaceutical sales, and $3 billion in federal tax revenues.

Hurricane Maria may have caused other pharmaceutical shortages. If so, production increases in other locations or substitutions remediated the effect. But there aren’t alternatives given IV products’ manufacturing concentration in Puerto Rico.

The Trump administration has done a pissy job handling post-Maria hurricane recovery in every respect. It almost looks personal, as if he’s punishing the island for a Trump-branded golf course’s failure.

But here’s the kicker: the Federal Emergency Management Agency says it’s done with emergency response in Puerto Rico. It’s pulling out though many residents are still without water and lights. Chalk it up to more bad faith on the part of this administration.

Why hasn’t the administration treated Puerto Rico’s pharmaceutical industry as critical infrastructure? The National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) lists health care as critical.

Is it because former President Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 21 (pdf) established the NIPP? Trump has systematically unwound 20 or more Obama policy directives to date.

Trump’s proven he could give a rat’s patootie about brown-skinned people. If Trump mentions Puerto Rico in his SOTU speech tonight he’ll call federal response a success. FEMA gave him a news peg with ample time for his speech writer to stuff it into tonight’s hypocritical bloviating. He counts on the mainland blowing off Puerto Rico now the way it has sloughed off the island’s thousand-plus hurricane-related deaths.

But with the IV products shortage and the ongoing flu season’s severity, this indifference isn’t affecting only Puerto Ricans. It may already have cost lives while increasing health care costs here in the continental U.S.

Heaven help the rest of us if we face a mass casualty event or a pandemic before we fix Puerto Rico — and Trump.

Pay Now and Pay Later: What Losing CHIP means to America

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Let me tell you something you (most probably) secretly believe, secret even from yourself,  because you are an American: poor and sick children aren’t going to amount to anything. This is true whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. The two sides will argue it’s for completely different reasons, but the conclusion is the same. We all know that poor and sick children aren’t going to live lives of note or interest.Nevertheless, we all want to be good people, and that’s why CHIP has bipartisan support. CHIP is the Children’s Health Insurance Program, originally SCHIP, a Clinton-era expansion of social security specifically for children who were too poor to get insurance, but not able to be covered by Medicaid.

CHIP’s Congressional authorization expired in September. The program is slowly running out of money, with just under nine million children potentially facing life without access to healthcare.

Americans talk a lot about the cost of healthcare. The cost of not providing healthcare to children in a world with failing environmental protections and failing schools is impossible to calculate. It is very high, it lasts lifetimes and generations.

I am taking breaks as I write this. My neck and shoulders are making typing hard, and I am coughing up a yellow sputum, very much the same as I have been coughing up since I was a child, and I will have to see the doctor soon about it. I am an active 44-year-old woman, lifelong non-smoker, with a healthy BMI who has been receiving healthcare in Europe for the last three years. But for my life before my 40s, I was mostly an uninsured low-income American, born and raised in Los Angeles.

I was an active child and an avid dancer. When I became a teen I slowed down a bit, there were times when I would cough and cough for weeks, sometimes coughing up little solid and foul smelling lumps of material from my lungs. I threw up involuntarily a lot when I exercised. I didn’t talk about it much, there didn’t seem to be any point.

I dealt with mental health issues, which were treated by the school district. That treatment was not only substandard, but deleterious, always pushing poor children to see themselves as the source of their troubles, even at times when the troubles were obviously medical in nature. Everything was always in our heads, everything, even throwing up involuntarily and migraine headaches were something I was doing to myself.

Los Angeles in the 1980s was a time of intensive personal responsibility and very poor air quality. It was the Reagan years, and we were all self-reliant cowboys. There was always a cadre of depression-era grandparents around, calling themselves the Greatest Generation, and telling us that no matter what happened we had it easy and our complaints were just whining. The drug war was at fever pitch, and the world was made up of Good Guys and Bad Guys, and you sure as shit did not want to be one of the Bad Guys. And the air that I grew up in was so bad you could live next to a mountain range and not know it for months.

CHIP was created in 1997. The Clintons were pushing the nation towards centrism, the air in LA was getting cleaned up, and I was 24 — far past the age where it could have helped me.

I was used to making due by then anyway. Poor kids aren’t allowed to be sick, it’s a moral failing, and I’d learned to compensate and sneak to get what I could. But still, even after some kind of insurance became available, it was never because we deserved it. As children we’re burdens on the struggling poor. As students and eventual adults, we’re no better. We’re making it up, we’re lazy, we’re difficult, we cost too much and are worth far, far too little. The political debate has never been about letting us find our potential, for we have none. The debate has been about whether it’s more moral to help us or let us die quietly.

Of the 9 million kids insured on CHIP 3 million are, like me, chronically ill. Not all of them would die without medical treatment, I’m sure they could move on, scarred, struggling to survive, out of childhood and any realistic chance of being cared for. I know how it feels to be one of those children. I try to be a generous and caring person and see all of humanity as my family, but there is a part of me that really doesn’t care what those children decide to do to the rest of you. You have it coming.

Being uninsured when you’re a chronically sick child isn’t just the lack of care. It’s the constant and unrelenting sense that you are not valued, not desired by your society. It is the rejection of your ability to live itself, the feeling that you can never be more than lice on the body politic. Any self-esteem you can grab back from the way society treats you comes with a hate so dark it makes ISIS look like a summer camp.

But the truth is these children mostly won’t do anything. They’ll wander desperately through life, looking for hope, going to the ER for rescue inhalers, and trying to score many kinds of drugs to dull the pain both physical and mental. Some will escape up the socio-economic ladder, but they’ll hide where they came from because you think we’re all worthless. That’s what I did for years. Statistically, we’ll die younger than you, probably uninsured, in a hospital. The commentary on our lives won’t be: What have we done? How did we fail these fellow humans so terribly? What have we lost in creativity and talent? Instead the political story of our lives will be: This causes healthcare costs to rise.

There are sick children all over the world. There is only one country that blames them for making healthcare costs rise because we won’t give them care as children.

CHIP passed in 1997. In 1998, I got my first employer healthcare. The diagnoses started rolling in. Migraines, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Major Depressive disorder. GERD with Barrett’s Esophagus. It wasn’t caused by weight, but because my esophagus doesn’t close. It just doesn’t. Weird, huh!? That would have been handy to know sooner.

That diagnosis wasn’t a surprise, as least not after I understood the context. I tended to throw up if I bent over too far. I was a high school gymnast, and even back then the contents of my stomach would regularly come out of my nose on the uneven parallels. My coach would send me home sometimes, but no one ever suggested I see a doctor. It was in my head, I was doing it to myself somehow, being a burden on everyone.

After the ’98 round of medical diagnoses and treatment, I came back and yelled at my mother for never believing me. I cried, I apologized later. She’d been a child herself when I was born, and she was trusting authorities who were telling her I was broken, and so was she. She apologized too, we cried and screamed and stomped off and hugged and cried some more.

This is how we cope. To try to think about this not personally, to see it as part of politics and society and an economic plan is too big and too painful to contemplate. Even now, it makes my throat tighten and a wave of nausea pass through me. It is so evil.

The diagnoses kept coming in the new century, and I became ineligible for any kind of insurance that wasn’t employer-based. EDS Hypermobility type, Cervical Dystonia, PTSD. The last one I crowdfunded to pay for, the old-fashioned way. I passed the hat amongst my friends and raised the money to pay the PTSD therapist. It was a difficult and sometimes humiliating decision, but it was the right one. I emerged from my therapy not fixed, but healing. I had tools I hadn’t had before. I went back to work. My friends had passed up dinners and presents and special things to help me get that therapy, but it worked.

GoFundMe brags about raising $5 billion in crowdfunding for medical care in America. Of course there’s more than that over the years; families that sell their houses for each other, friends that skip vacations to give the people they love a chance at life. Leonard Pitts wrote rather viciously about a conservative man trying to raise money to retain his sense of sight. This man was politically unworthy, socially irresponsible, and medically suspect; he smoked and owned a house. How could he ask for help? This is America, and even the people who believe in universal healthcare balk at care for those they deem Unworthy. We don’t even know how to imagine a system that just cares for people because they are people.

It’s been two years, and I hope that man is not blind, and I hope his loved ones haven’t suffered too much. Between people who love each other, there is no better use of these little monetary tokens to express love than paying so they may live and live well.

From an economic perspective, it’s a disaster. Every meal and trip skipped to pay for medical expenses slows down the stimulus that money could provide. The medical payments funnel money into the upper echelons of society where is slows down, sits, and ossifies. It is a disaster in every way.

But Congress is full of good people who are the somebodies who think of the children, and so CHIP is bipartisan. But it’s so expensive, and it’s hard for Congress to find the ~$14b it will cost. When it comes to funding stupid planes perfect for types of wars that don’t exist anymore, Congress has no problem finding the budget to switch from the disastrously stupid F-22 fighter (>$70b) to the next stupendously expensive F-35 fighter (>$400b for R&D). The F-22 finally saw action in two countries several years after being discontinued: against ISIS in Syria, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, both military forces more known for fighting out of the back of pick-up trucks than dogfighting with jets. More money goes to the federal employee travel budget than goes to CHIP. (According to Hatch and Coburn) More money goes to the black budget devoted to spying on everything and everyone on the net than goes to CHIP, but most of Congress probably doesn’t know how much more, it’s a secret. Congress can even find billions to make stupid fucking pennies no one wants.

A sick kid doesn’t realize the money that could help them is going to something as stupid as fighter jets no one needs or black budgets that may be straight-up illegally spying. But they do know that they’re a burden, they know that the world doesn’t want them. It makes them sad and angry, and everyone around them scrambles to find billions of dollars in spare change to take care of the people they love because Congress is so bad at finding things.

When you don’t treat the minds and bodies of children, it isn’t just those children who are affected. Something as simple as getting check-ups, interceding on basic problems early, and making mental and sexual health resources easy to access can stop a lifetime of expensive and heart-rending problems that weigh down families and communities and echo through generations.

Programs like CHIP, or universal healthcare as provided in Europe, are not about handing things to the worthless poor. They are about the epidemiology of the whole of society. Treating your neighbor’s kid now is about not having to treat them later, and not living with the consequences of their illness in your environment or tax expenditures. It is choosing to not live in a society of desperation and constant quiet anger. Programs like CHIP, and the proposal for Medicare For All, are fundamentally selfish, just a long-sighted form of selfishness that Americans are kind of bad at.

Without a program like CHIP, we are in the position of hoping parents bring their children into the ER for routine needs, jacking up our healthcare costs to ever more ridiculous heights, because the alternative is somehow much, much, worse. Untreated children don’t just infect other children with their diseases, they drag down schools, divert the resources of their families, increase crime and even lower property values. They spend so much time struggle to find their own worth, they deny the world their talents. If you don’t want to treat poor sick children, you might be better off going all Sparta on us and throwing us off cliffs than just letting us struggle along in society.

By the way, Sparta was a terrible place to live, despite what you’ve seen in 300. It was miserable and authoritarian and full of legally-required slavery and child rape and never really developed or got better. The Persian Empire, and even Athens, were better societies on every count, including military. Sparta wasn’t good at infrastructure and tended to steal what they did have. Infrastructure is what makes society nice to live in, and worth the bother. This is a fact Americans used to get; we like our highways and dams and standing armies and power lines, but apparently the water’s edge is schools, pollution, healthcare and paying taxes. Those are, for some reason, not infrastructure.

I never accepted my worthlessness, I never stopped fighting. I also never shot anyone or became a drug addict. I did a lot of sketchy things to get medical care. I’ve taken a lot of other people’s leftover drugs, and coordinated with other people to pass around drugs and advice from medical professionals who may have never known where it was going, and probably didn’t want to. And I rebelled and rejected society, sometimes violently, so that I could do worthwhile things not in keeping with my station in life.

Now I live in a place that provides me care. I haven’t had to prove my economic worth, which is good because it’s likely I never will. But now, after my expenses, I still have a little money left over. And every Saturday morning after food shopping, I go get myself a good cappuccino in the city center, and sit for a while enjoying the light, watching people go by, and little children chase dogs and birds. I’m not in paradise, there are plenty of problems here, like everywhere. But none of them are sick children hiding the yellow sputum they cough up from their parents because no one can afford a fucking inhaler.

My work for Emptywheel is supported by my wonderful patrons on Patreon. You can find out more, and support my work, at Patreon.

Some of my sources were:
https://www.kff.org (many articles, it’s a treasure trove of information)
8.9 million children enrolled, cost is around $14 billion. 35 million children are enrolled in CHIP or Medicaid or both.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-12/america-s-health-care-crisis-is-a-gold-mine-for-crowdfunding
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/3/16730496/orrin-hatch-chip-tax-bill

More information on children on Medicaid: https://www.medicaid.gov/chip/downloads/fy-2016-childrens-enrollment-report.pdf

Three Things: Non-Nuclear Proliferation

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The entire social media universe has been panicking over Fearless Leader’s whacked-out statement on North Korea at the end of his bigly speech yesterday on opioids. His hyperbole was on par with his decades of hawkishness about nuclear weapons, so both unsurprising while infuriating.

What I want to know: did he say what he did to distract from the Trump-Russia investigation underway, and/or did he say what he did roughly 30 minutes before the stock market closed for somebody’s benefit? I’d love to know who might have been short selling yesterday afternoon and this morning after his recent petulant tweet hyping the stock market’s record highs. Things don’t look good today, either, in spite of calming noises from Secretary of Exxon Tillerson.

[source: Google Finance]

Whatever. Let’s look at some non-nuclear matters.

~ 3 ~

The New York Times’ op-ed, Our Broken Economy, trended yesterday morning on Twitter and is still making waves today. It’s a pretty good read with compelling charts, if not very deep. Morons across the internet have misinterpreted what it tells us, which is that income has stagnated or fallen for the majority of the U.S. while the income of the uppermost 1% to .01% has skyrocketed in less than a decade. Loss of leverage in wage negotiations due to union busting and the skyrocketing cost of secondary education have held back the lower 80%.

What has most recently ‘weaponized’ the growth of income, while destroying any illusion of the American dream? In my opinion, three things contributed the most:

— the loss of Glass-Steagall Act and the subsequent unmooring of the financial industry from risk-reducing practices which siloed capital;

— Citizens United, which exacerbated the trend toward regulatory capture;

— the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent loss of wealth for the lower 80% in terms of savings, investments, and property ownership.

But a fourth, rapidly growing factor is making difference and may also be exploding as an unintended consequence of legislation passed in 2007 requiring a larger percentage of margin on commodities trading. Algorithmic trading, conducted out of sight, skimming from every trade, on stocks rather than on commodities and at inhuman speed and scale, has increased unearned wealth but only for the very wealthiest.

Matt Bruenig says we must confront capital. Yes, but I think the appeal to do so is based in fairness, a universal ethic. A system which distorts pricing by not allocating true and full costs of the commons consumed to products and services  sold is unfair. It is not a ‘free market’ and certainly not a fair when the playing field isn’t level and not every business pays for what it consumes of the commons.

And it’s not fair when businesses deliberately suppress wages below workers’ real cost of living. That’s slavery. We don’t need charts to tell us something is wrong when the prevailing wage won’t provide meager shelter and food.

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The effect of Michigan’s criminal state government on Flint doesn’t remain in Flint. More than 70 new cases of Legionnaires disease have been reported in southeastern Michigan; this time the state’s health authorities have been prompt about reporting them, unlike the shoddy reporting around cases 2-3 years ago directly related to the water in Flint.

I will bet good money many of these new cases have a link to Flint since the water system has still not been completely replaced.

Eclectablog reminds us Flint’s Water Crisis is now at Day 678 and the city has yet to be made whole though Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder admitted he knew that Flint’s drinking water was poisoned with lead. There are still Flint residents who cannot drink their tap water without the use of a water filter.

Given the outbreak of Legionnaires disease, I wonder how many more Michiganders may actually sicken and die because of Rick Snyder’s handling of Flint’s financial emergency and the water system.

~ 1 ~

You might already have read about the lawsuit filed against Disney for its failure to protect children’s privacy; I know Marcy tweeted about it. More than 40 applications Disney developed and sold collect information without consent about the kids using them, putting them at risk, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

But here’s what really bugs me about this on top of the privacy problems: Disney not only had a history with violating COPPA; the government went after them in 2011 and 2014 for problems with Playdom and MarvelKids. Disney must have known competitors Mattel and VTech had problems with their network-enabled electronic toys breaching children’s privacy circa November 2015. Why did Disney fail to remediate their 43 applications more than 18 months ago when both Mattel and VTech were under fire?

Disclosure: I own Disney stock. And yes, I’m thinking shareholders should be pissed off about this failure to disclose a material risk in financial reports BEFORE parents filed a lawsuit.

~ 0 ~

That’s it for now. See you tomorrow if we haven’t already been fried to a crisp. This is an open thread – treat each other nicely.

The Jetzon’s Self Driving Auto Car Drone Aint Here Yet

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1376873104000-xxx-future-1

History shows again and again
How nature points out the folly of men.

Yeah, truer words never spoken. Even if in relation to Godzilla. And you can apply that to the relentlessly ballyhooed “autonomous driving automobiles”.

Seriously, this stuff is Henny Youngman type of slapsick comedy. It ain’t happening.

Okay, I am cribbing from Atrios, but dammit, what the hell do you think us conspiracy propagators are supposed to do??

I’m just saying these cars won’t ever (in our lifetimes – sure, eventually the singularity might arrive) really work as hyped and certainly don’t deserve all of the press they’re getting. I also don’t think that even if they did work they’d be a big improvement for all (some) of the reasons people think they will be, but those are more debatable issues which I rarely bother to debate because the fact is the things aren’t going to work. Okay, I’ll define “work.” Basically, you have to be able to tune out 100% over 90% of the time. I’ll even allow for a “last mile” kind of “time for you to drive” thing as long as the rest of the time you can kick back and read your book or whatever. Because if you have to pay attention but usually not doing anything, what’s the point? It’s just better cruise control. A neat feature for some, but nothing more than that.

Ya. I am sure that all of you out there driving their Tesla 3’s will squawk [oh, wait, they are not out yet!]. As I am sure all of you on the waiting list for Tesla 3’s [good luck with that!] that is already years behind technical and production capability at Tesla are oh so defensive of the giant Elon Musk dream. Surely the dream will catch up to reality, it must!

Also, the supertrains between Los Angeles and San Francisco (okay, forget the “cheaper” stuff, that was a joke!) and between New York and Washington DC are totally gonna be ready to roll after New Year’s Eve.

When the candidates talk about their totally awesome “infrastructure and jobs” proposals, maybe ask what the hell they are talking about. Because it is probably bullshit. Hold them to it.

Blumenthal, Booker Point to Unsuccessful Attack for Call for TSA in Trains

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Richard Blumenthal and Cory Booker are using a thwarted attack on a train in Paris as reason to call for more TSA presence in trains.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) are urging the TSA to “to implement security and safety improvements … to our country’s public transportation and passenger rail systems” that the duo said were “mandated by Congress in 2007 but still not implemented.”

“This effort comes on the heels of an attempted terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train last week in which three Americans successfully subdued the attacker,” Blumenthal’s office said in a statement previewing an appearance by the Connecticut senator at Hartford’s Union Station.

That’ll fix Amtrak’s woes: to make taking the train as humiliating and time-consuming as flying.

As it happens, DHS’ Inspector General is looking at what TSA is doing for Amtrak security right now.

Screen Shot 2015-08-25 at 3.11.18 PM

So the Senators might wait until that is done.

More interesting, however, the National Transportation Safety Board still hasn’t solved the May 12 derailment in Philadelphia that killed 8 and wounded 200. Last we heard, NTSB was asking, again, for trains (both freight and passenger) to be equipped with the kind of recording equipment that would help determine the cause of accidents.

Call me crazy, but passengers stand at least a decent chance of thwarting a gun attack on a train. Not so something wrong with the train itself.

Maybe we should work on fixing the trains themselves — and while we’re at it the infrastructure. Only then should prioritizing this kind of policing take precedence.

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