The Chris Moeller Archives

The dunce cult and its collapsing empire

A quiz: What is structurally wrong with the following sentence…? “Hospitals routinely falsify the number of Covid-19 deaths in order to get reimbursed more money by the government.”

A moment to think, and the answer below.

Answer: Did you get it? It’s right at the very beginning. Hospitals cannot falsify deaths or fill out any reports at all. They’re inanimate objects, often made of brick or steel. They can’t sign a name, make a diagnosis on a virus infection, or fly a kite. Doctors are the ones that would hypothetically falsify a death in order to get reimbursements from the national Medicare program. And why is this distinction important in light of this recent phony scandal (among so many others) being thrown around by right-wing media? Because this new leap implies that a doctor would actually be the one to incur huge fines for falsifying records to Medicare-- and doing so in motive to have more money paid out-- to his or her employer. How many co-workers at your job risk major penalties to get more money that doesn’t go to them?

Hospitals do get paid more money for Covid-19 cases. They also get more for conditions such as diabetes, low sodium, and high blood pressure. Have they previously been lying about those conditions also? And the money they get for Covid patients is for medical notes, not death records (also illegal to falsify), so this would seem to be another bogus element of this claim. Public confusion seems to be the goal-- a game of Whack-a-mole with easily-disprovable claims but disconcerting enough if you simply keep them coming, feeding into preexisting biases and fears.

The U.S. holds 4.25% of the world’s population but 30% of the deaths from this pandemic, which was not thought to have even originated in this hemisphere. It’s been a public failure of historic proportion, a national embarrassment. No other nation is loosening lock-downs and social-distancing measures while deaths are still increasing. Not only has the science been lost to us, the battle with reasoning has been lost. The president makes statements that suggest he has no functioning brain matter whatsoever, such as the following about a positive diagnosis within his White House inner circle, “She tested very good for a long period of time. And then all of a sudden today she tested positive. So, she tested positive out of the blue… This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily, right, the tests are perfect but something can happen between a test where it’s good and then something happens and then all of a sudden-- she was tested very recently and tested negative.”

That’s a mystery all right. Meanwhile, he boasts about taking a drug that his own Food and Drug Administration says could kill him, one that supposedly our health care-for-massive-profit industry is keeping hidden from desperate, dying patients.

The economy isn’t preparing to rebound. The market is principally-based on confidence and that isn’t likely to pick up when you have poor leadership and bad decisions. This crisis is a massive public health failure that is tied into our economy, but not in the way people think. It was caused by our hyper-capitalist economy. The Church of Reagan led Trump to defund the program designed to combat global pandemics. The surviving system is not built to survive even modest challenges. This breakdown is about the market failure of supply shortages, the crony capitalism of the severely unqualified Trumps and Kushners and DeVoses at the highest levels of government, emergency bailouts for billionaires within mere days of the longest Bull Market in history coming to an end. It’s about sentient animals being tortured and exterminated and then not even prepared for the table while simultaneously panicked Americans are hoarding frozen cuts of meat captured from the stores. It’s about corporate health care falling flat on its fat ass-- unable to provide the most basic services it promises, forcing millions of both symptomatic and asymptomatic people to avoid hospitals and clinics like the proverbial-- and literal-- plague because they wouldn’t be able to foot the bill if they ventured to go-- and even as the hospitals and their "health systems" post record profits.

Our local paper ran a story this week talking to likely presidential voters, and one nitwit remarked that she was voting for President Trump because, her words, “He’s a businessman, not a politician. And this country is a business.” Now, I’m not normally one that looks to the divine for signals, but what more do you need than this coronavirus to prove to you, at last, that the United States is not a business? And should not be operated as if it is one? And that its leaders should not be there upon the resume of "businessman"? Are you waiting for writing on stone tablets? He’s the head of a dunce cult.

South Korea had its first reported case of the virus on the exact same day the U.S. did. They have had fewer than 300 deaths from the virus since. The U.S. total climbed above 100,000 this week. Shelter-at-home policies were put in place too late, if they ever were at all-- then lifted prematurely. The attempts at information manipulation are stark. Blame China-- blame the World Health Organization-- blame previous presidential administrations. We were told that our leaders acted quickly-- but they still haven’t acted. The message for each new day has been whatever sounds good that day, whether it be contradictory from the previous, denials, misinformation, crazy cures. It’s created a mental fatigue that’s being collectively shared by much of the nation, and it’s willful. It’s trivializing the deaths, creating a callous outlook that simultaneously says the virus is threatening enough that we must shut down our borders and upset our electoral process, but that we can somehow have college football games played in front of half-full or completely full stadia in the fall even while the students on these same campuses study from home. We've gone numb. One death is a tragedy, the saying goes, a million deaths are a statistic.

Our president has met his match. It doesn’t seem that Joe Biden is much up to a fight. But Covid-19 has Trump wobbling on the ropes. He can’t insult it or intimidate it. He can’t bend it to his reality. The more you test for it, the more of it you find. The data is a plot against him. We already had administration admissions of their “alternative facts.” That was years ago. Now when he’s confronted with his enemy-- reality, we get lines like, “You know, when you say ‘per capita’ there’s many per capitas.”

The empire’s collapse is easy for all to see. It didn’t start in 2016 for sure, but there’s been a massive acceleration. It’s all crystallized in this current challenge. First we ignored the science, skipped the warning signs because they were bad for the bottom line and because we’re skeptical of pointy-headed “experts.” Then our me-first instincts kicked in-- stockpiling kitchen and bath supplies that sometimes weren’t even applicable to the crisis-- perhaps just to exploit others, if worse came to worst. Trillion dollar companies and their government simply shrugged at the exploitation of their merchandise. We broke down into 50 different jurisdictions so that we could have 50 different responses, and virtually all the warnings could be ignored in any case.

Racism is prevalent in this too. You can mark the White House’s turnaround on keeping the country “closed” to almost the precise day that the stats started to reveal that the black and brown citizens of the nation were a disproportionately-outsized number of the casualties. The elderly-- the weak-- were sacrificed as well, in exchange for an extended summer vacation for the kids. In mid-March, the coronva-virus became, according to the White House, the China-virus, and over 1,100 anti-Asian and anti-Chinese attacks followed in the next month. A one-time stimulus package was agreed to, but it wasn’t in the form of health care as a human right or rent or mortgage protection, it was a $1200/per person one-time gift to each one of us (barring the undocumented or their spouses) with the president’s signature—and a letter—that, in most cases, instantly became a giveaway to mortgage companies and landlords. The jailed are ignored completely. So are the homeless. We get apple slices and the billionaires get the orchard.

This is where we are because this is who we are. Two parties, both paralyzed, divided by the insipid narratives of our complicit media. “The best” of anything is just “the best available option.” We’re gun-toting idiots standing on the steps of statehouses where, inside, the lawmakers do nothing at all about the problem of white supremacist cops. Tyranny now is being told you need to wear a mask over your nose and mouth when you go into someone’s store, and freedom is having my opinion on public health being worth just as much as that of somebody that has actually studied it. It’s only selfishness. What’s in it for me? And aren’t we still so exceptional?

posted by CM @ 8:53 AM