What happens when the cops are the bad guys? You get arrested.

So, I think everyone can agree that peaceful protests are better than the rioting and looting that lead to innocent people being hurt, having their property damaged, and a loss of income.

Well, everyone that is except the government.

These days the government has two jobs, and neither of them involve serving the people or the constitution. Their first directive is to serve their corporate masters (or sponsors, if you're feeling kind). The second is to cover their asses.

So with that second point in mind, lets think about Mike Brown and Eric Garner. So those two deaths have sparked protests across the country. Civic unrest is bad for the government. It causes all sorts of problems. When people start to rise up like that they challenge the status quo. The government needs to be able to put people back in their place. They have to force the quiet. Noise has the potential to disrupt the status quo.

When people protest they risk letting other people know what's going on. When that happens it's like a snowball downhill. Getting bigger, gathering momentum, eventually becoming something that can't help but crush everything in its path.If that were to happen? The government would lose control, radical change would be forced through. That change would cause the corporate puppet masters to lose their unmitigated control of the country.

So what happens when the people start pushing at those restraints? When people start protesting? Start crying out? Start risking others finding their voices?

Over the past several weeks undercover officers in Oakland began infiltrating a group of protesters. The officers weren't part of Oakland Police Department. They were part of an outside organization that has yet to be disclosed. During a peaceful protest last night those officers attempted to incite the crowd to looting and rioting. When the cops were outed, one of them drew a gun on the crowd. There are conflicting reports. If you listen to the protesters one of the cops was assaulted after his partner drew the gun. If you listen to the cops he was assaulted before his partner drew the gun.

That's going to be the story. The story is going to be that one cop was assaulted and the other drew his weapon. Regardless of whether the gun was drawn before or after a police officer was assaulted the assault of a cop and another cop drawing his gun shouldn't be the story. The story, the real story, is two cops trying to incite looting and rioting. The reason that the assault and gun are going to be the story is because the realization that cops were trying to incite looting and rioting would have horrific consequences.

So why would the police be using undercover cops to incite looting and rioting? Simple. Discredit the protesters, shift the story away from the wrong doings of the police and make the story about violent protesters destroying private property. Turn the protesters into something that no one will listen to. Turn the protesters into the enemy. The massed voice of the people is the only thing the government has to fear. The gathering of those voices is what casting the protesters in the role of the villains is meant to prevent.

Your government is lying to you. Your government is trying to deceive you. Your media is working with them. Inform yourself. Don't believe anything they tell you. Educate yourself. Your country is falling to the sharks. It is being taken over, and taken from you. Your constitution is being destroyed and reimagined as something to oppress you. Corporations are being given more power. police are being used to turn us against one another. If nothing else that is enough reason to start distrusting everything your media tells you.

The Fight For $15, #blacklivesmatter, and how they're the same protest.

The other day someone posted a picture I saw. It was a history lesson to white people on how black people learned violence from us. My first instinct was to start checking the veracity of the entire post. Fact checking is something I believe in heavily. However, after my initial reaction, before I had time to act on it, I realized I was falling prey to the same stuff everyone else has.

The thing is, it isn't a black problem. It isn't a white problem. It isn't a white versus black problem. This is a class warfare problem. Let's face it cops kill white folk too. Difference is, when it happens to a white person it gets half as much media attention because when it happens to a non-white it becomes a racism story.

Here's a sad truth about racism: It sells. You put a story in your news paper, or on your late night news that involves racism and people are gonna watch, they're gonna buy. They wanna see how it plays out. The racists want to see that those they hate got what they "deserved." Non-racists want to see justice done and equality achieved.

What they don't get into in these stories is the income level of the various victims. You see more police violence against blacks than whites because, even today, you have a larger number of African-American households living in poverty than you do white. (27.4% of African-American households, 26.6% of Hispanic households, and just 9.9% of white households).

Here's the thing... when poor people die no one cares! We've worked out a system where we don't have to provide adequate healthcare for poor people. We don't force employers to provide living wages for poor people. We give employers an incentive to cut hours for poor people (because, now, if you give them too many hours, you have to give them healthcare). We have done everything we can over the last 35 years to work towards taking more and more away from the poorest people out there. Now we've started killing them, and not punishing those people responsible. It doesn't matter if the victim is white or black, Hispanic or Asian. If you're poor, you've got a target on you, and no one is going to care.

We need, all of us, to stop making it a race issue. When we do that, and when we allow the media to dictate that we look at it in those terms, we only empower those people who would work to continue to oppress everyone in the name of larger profits. Make them pay you a living wage, and you can start to make people notice. Continue fighting for separate causes, and no one will care.

Healthcare, Obamacare, Single Pay, and the American Dream

You probably don't know the name Tim Alsip. Back in 2013 he did something kind of amazing, and stupid, and brilliant. The man walked into a bank, and handed the teller a note saying "This is a holdup. Give me a dollar." After the teller complied, he calmly went and sat down in the lobby and waited for the police to arrive. He went with them quietly, after all, his goal was to get arrested.

Prisoners get free health care, they get three meals a day, and they get a warm place to sleep at night. Alsip was a poor homeless man. He needed health care. He had even tried calling 911 a few times hoping to get emergency medical care that way. The thing is, emergency care, whether in the form of paramedics or going to the emergency room, only has to see to it that you're stabilized, and in no immediate danger. So if you've got a persistent problem that needs treatment, or surgery, or medication, but which is no immediate threat to your life, the emergency room doctors are going to refer you to someone who can help, and turn you out.

The sad thing is, Alsip isn't the first person to go that route. In just the few years preceding that several others had the same idea. Going to prison is the price some folks have had to pay in order to get decent medical care. Alsip was 50, and had some mental health issues. This guy James Verone in 2011 started this trend. He was 59 years old, he'd lost his job of 17 years as a delivery driver, he needed surgery on his back, he had a pain in his foot, he had some lump in his chest that needed diagnosing. He was desperate. He had nothing to lose.

What has our society come to when going to jail is an improvement for some people?

All the ails of society would make for a much larger blog entry than I think reasonable. As it is, this one, focusing on healthcare is going to be so large most people wouldn't read it. So I'll stay focused on that for the moment.

We're rated 38th by the World Health Organization in healthcare. Many Single Payer countries coming ahead of us. While we're 38th in healthcare, we're #1 in spending per capita. So per person we spend more than countries with Universal Health Care, still end up falling behind the pack. We're 34th in life expectancy. Why is that? We're a rich country, we've got medical technological marvels, we've got amazing doctors, we spend more than anyone else on health care. Why don't we have a better life expectancy? Is it because we're fat?

Okay, obesity is a problem, but did you know however that we smoke less and drink less than our contemporaries? Maybe that balances, maybe it doesn't. However, just like you can't simply say that smoking less and drinking less doesn't necessarily balance the obesity you also can't simply blame the entire healthcare problem in America on obesity.

So where does it start? I'll be honest. I'm in favor of a Single Payer system. I'm going to give you two reasons. One reason is economic, the other is humanitarian.

Everyone understands negotiating leverage and buying power. Under the current system, a hospital, or network of hospitals is negotiating using the buying power of that single system of hospitals. Those hospitals with their patients. Single Pay increases your buying power by an order of magnitude. You're running your dinky little hospital with your million or so patient visits each year. When you negotiate you're negotiating with your million or so patient visits each year. A Single Payer system would mean that you're negotiating for 1.2 billion hospital visits each year.

So you've got artificial knees, and you've got your million patients a year, you're gonna get a price, but it's not gonna be the same price as when you can say you've got more than a billion patients a year. At a billion patient visits a year you go to all the companies that make artificial knees and tell them that every fucking knee replacement in the country is going to go to the company that provides the best knee at the best price. You want an economic reason to go single pay? Right now we pay more for everything because we don't have any negotiating leverage.

So how about a humanitarian reason? Well, you've got Tim Alsip and James Verone, but lets say that's not enough. People talk about the long wait times for procedures in Single Pay countries. The first thing to do is dispel that long wait time myth. Some single payer countries have long wait times, some others don't. Here in the U.S. we have relatively short wait times for medical procedures. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of the most obvious is that Americans don't go to the hospital. Here in the United States we have so many people who lack health care coverage, who who have health care coverage that is inadequate that going to the hospital is a last resort for many.

So you've got this guy, and he's got a scratchy little cough in the back of his throat. It could be nothing, it's probably nothing, or maybe it's allergies. So a week goes by, maybe a couple weeks, the scratchy cough is there. guy goes out, he buys some allergy tablets, and hey, that cough still doesn't go away. It gets worse. We don't go to the hospital. We don't go because we can't afford it. We don't go because we can't miss the time from work. We don't go because if we do we'll be paying it off for the rest of our lives, because we don't have health insurance, or the health insurance we have is inadequate. So after six months this guy is coughing so often and so violently that something in the back of his throat rips. Now he's coughing blood. Now he goes to the hospital.

That's when he finds out he has cancer. if he had gone in five months ago they could have simply cut out a little tumor growing along the esophagus. Chances of survival would have been pretty high. If he had come in three months ago it would have been slightly riskier as the tumor would be larger, but chances of survival would still have been pretty high. At this point however the cancer has spread. There is no surgery. There's drugs and chemo, radiation and prayers. The doctors give him a year, eighteen months at the most.

We don't have a shorter line for medical care, here in the United States, we just step over a bunch of dead bodies to get to the front of the line.

Obamacare wasn't the answer, it was a huge mistake. Tying employment and healthcare together has done nothing but push employers into the idea of having no full time employees, and instead having nothing but people working under 30 hours in order to avoid having to provide them with healthcare. The only good thing about Obamacare was this: Someone tried to do something. That's a change, and it's a good change. Someone pretended to give half a shit for five minutes. Sure, the way they tried to carry out that attempt to make things better was all sorts of wrong, but someone finally did something in an attempt to have a positive impact on the American Healthcare system. That has to count for something.

In the end, maybe the two reasons I give aren't enough to make you think that a single payer system is worthwhile, maybe you need more reasons, and there are plenty of other reasons out there. For me though the amount of money that American's could save on health care, and the number of lives that could be saved, for me that's enough reason. I don't mind standing behind someone in line for healthcare, if it means I'm not stepping over all those corpses anymore.

Big Clout, Big Media, Mike Brown, Eric Garner

You know, I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to start this. I keep thinking of just listing a bunch of stuff that has happened recently that is bad, or symptomatic of the larger problem. The problem there is what actually heads the list? What actually makes the list? What makes the cut? Does Mike Brown make the cut? I’m not sure, I've looked at a lot of the stuff available, and I don’t think he’d make the cut. On the other hand, the press coverage of that would probably make the cut, so in its own way his story would make the cut. Did you know that Eric Garner was a black man who was killed in Staten Island? The M.E. declared the death a homicide.

Here’s the story. He and some others were standing out on a sidewalk. The cops approached him. He’d helped to break up a fight, and that was the reason the police were there in the first place. He had previously been arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes. There’s a bunch of video of it. Supposedly he was once again selling untaxed cigarettes. Did he resist arrest? He pulled his arm away from the officer and told him not to touch him. That qualifies. Did he VIOLENTLY resist arrest? No. However, one of the cops decided to jump on his back and put him in a choke hold. Back in 1993 the state of New York banned the use of choke holds when attempting to detain a suspect. Mostly because there was too much chance of accidental death.

In the case of Eric Garner, that’s exactly what happened. There were other contributing factors, Garner was overweight, had heart problems (from his obesity), and asthma. Here’s the thing, Eric Garner got ten out of his fifteen minutes of fame, because right on the heels of that (less than a month later) Mike Brown happened. Here’s where just one symptom of a much bigger problem comes in. Big Media. Big Media is part of Big Clout. Big Clout… well you've got Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma… They’re all part of this vast machine that works against everyone who isn't them, or anything that might have a negative impact on their profits.

So you’ve got Garner, he’s no angel, but if you watch the videos taken while he was being killed, you can’t help but say, “That shit is just wrong.” Here’s a fact for you, people realizing that they’re part of a society that is helping to oppress them is bad for profits, and seeing Garner’s video could do nothing but remind people that they don’t even rate as high as a cog in the machine. So Mike Brown goes out and gets himself shot, and that’s good for Big Clout. Suddenly the focus is shifted. We’re not talking about Garner anymore. We’re talking about a thug who robbed a convenience store, assaulted a cop, and got himself shot.

You wanna know why poor white trash getting shot doesn't make the news? Because as long as Big Clout can make it a Black problem, we’re divided. If we can make the Black problem about a black guy who may have just partaken in criminal activity and maybe even did something to bring that on himself instead of the black guy standing on the sidewalk peacefully, it’s a Thug problem. If we can use that thug to distract people from all the other examples, well, it’s not my problem.

People don’t understand. Big Clout has used Big Media to turn us against each other. This isn't a white versus black issue. There is an us and a them. If you’re living in the shrinking middle class, or even the upper middle class, if you’re living in poverty, or on the edge of poverty, or if you’re having to work two jobs or more just to get by, or if you’re living in a household where more than 60 hours of work each week is the norm, you’re us. The part that hurts the most is that the media has worked so hard to brainwash people for the last thirty years that most of us hate us and disagree with us and work against their own self interests.

Whether you agree with anything I said about Brown or Garner, the fact is that Media and Big Clout have worked against the people.