Death of Detroit & Obamacare

@plainoldme,

Quote:

Rightwing opponents fought as hard to block this legislation as they would have against a Medicare for all plan. As more Americans recognize the bill does not resemble the distortions peddled by the right, and become disappointed by their rising medical bills and ongoing fights with insurers for needed care, there will be new opportunity to press the case for real reform. Next time, let's get it done right.

Right-wing opponents fought this thing and will continue to fight it because it creates a gigantic government bureaucracy and because it appears not only plausibly but highly likely to serve as an enabling act similar to that which Hitler created. One thing which the bill did NOT omit or neglect is a provision for Obama's basic wet dream of an acorn army:

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/pages/conspiracy_theory_101.htm

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=nss&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22shall+be+in+the+Service+a+commissioned+Regular+Corps+and+a+Ready+Reserve%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Quote:

H. R. 3590-496 (Page 496) SEC. 5210. ESTABLISHING A READY RESERVE CORPS.
Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 204) is amended to read as follows: "SEC. 203. COMMISSIONED CORPS AND READY RESERVE CORPS. "(a) ESTABLISHMENT.-
"(1) IN GENERAL.-There shall be in the Service a commissioned Regular Corps and a Ready Reserve Corps for service in time of national emergency.
"(2) REQUIREMENT.-All commissioned officers shall be citizens of the United States and shall be appointed without regard to the civil-service laws and compensated without regard to the Classification Act of 1923, as amended.
"(3) APPOINTMENT.-Commissioned officers of the Ready Reserve Corps shall be appointed by the President and commissioned officers of the Regular Corps shall be appointed by the President with
the advice and consent of the Senate.
"(4) ACTIVE DUTY.-Commissioned officers of the Ready Reserve Corps shall at all times be subject
to call to active duty by the Surgeon General, including active duty for the purpose of training.

Now, I ask you...currently we have the regular Army, the Marines, The Navy, the Air Force, the
National Guard, state and local police, state troopers, first responders, firefighters, EMT, rescue workers of all kinds and in all locations, plus we have the Federal Emergency Management Agency, otherwise known as FEMA. So what exactly does Mr. Obama need a private "ready reserve corps"
who are hand-picked by him and report directly to him for? Let's go on with Section 5210 - .......

I say again, the healthcare reform we actually need is vastly simpler than all this **** and would look like the following:

1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice.

2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.

3. Elimination of the various games which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability.

4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses.

All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring for the truly indigent, but the need would be far less than at present.

By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.

1 Reply

@Irishk,

Sounds about right... Laughing

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@panzade,

I write of "Detroit," the city, not "Detroit," the center of American auto manufacturers.

The two are, of course connected, but the city was a cesspit long before the auto manufacturers declined.

In any case the best one can make of your counter-argument is that the long, long line of Social Democrat control of the city was simply incompetent.

That they were infamously corrupt as well is a fact, but I guess it had nothing to do with Detroit's current state.

It was all about corporate governance, not city governance --- yeah, right.

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@gungasnake,

Silly boy! Hitler was on the right. The Tea Totalitarians are on the right.

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@plainoldme,

Hitler's party called itself 'National Socialists', not 'National Capitalists'...

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@gungasnake,

The US is no longer a capitalist nation. It is not a socialist and the same people who run advertising agencies are busy convincing you and your ilk that Obama is a socialist. Those who know what socialism is are those unfooled by the Republicans and Madison Ave.

What goes on here is not capitalism because so many companies exist without competition or by wiping out competition.

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

Hitler's party called itself 'National Socialists', not 'National Capitalists'...

And you call yourself "sane".

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@plainoldme,

Quote:

What goes on here is not capitalism because so many companies exist without competition or by wiping out competition.

it is capitalism, but a juvenile form of it. We have degraded back to robber-Barron capitalism. Instead of fixing this, promoting a better form, our elected officials have become stooges for the robber Barron's. Politics was corrupted with money by the thieves with the purpose of forcing the politicians to support the heist or at least look the other way.

We the people let it all happen though, at the end of the day it is our fault.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

..... the city was a cesspit long before the auto manufacturers declined. ....In any case the best one can make of your counter-argument is that the long, long line of Social Democrat control of the city was simply incompetent. ....

I saw the Ren Cen towers rise up, and watched their slow, painful, decline as whites fled to the suburbs after the 1967 riots. In the 1960's the auto industry was booming both in Detroit (city center) and Windsor, across the water in Canada. But Windsor didn't evolve like this >

http://images.asc.ohio-state.edu/is/image/eHistory/origins/images/2-8-map461.jpg?wid=150&qlt=100

http://images.asc.ohio-state.edu/is/image/eHistory/origins/images/2-8-chart462.jpg?wid=150&qlt=100

http://images.asc.ohio-state.edu/is/image/eHistory/origins/images/2-8-chart463.jpg?wid=150&qlt=100

> even though the Canadian subcontractors to the US car manufacturers suffered greatly. Big brown-red stain spreading on graphs (source: OSU) represents % of blacks in downtown: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/images.cfm?articleid=26

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@hawkeye10,

Point well taken.

I know of people who found companies simply to be taken over by existing firms, at a huge personal profit. These companies range from doughnut shops to high tech firms which were never meant to produce anything.

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@High Seas,

I left 1975, prior to the opening of Renaissance Center. I remember people saying it was a misguided effort: that putting that much money into a big, splashy project was exactly the opposite of what would help the city.

As a person who had committed herself to living in the city and who clung to the hope that Detroit would become another CHicago, a midwestern center for culture, fashion, imagination, and, yes, business but business on a small scale, I had to agree with those opinions.

It is easier for a city to thrive if citizens can access grocery stores, dry cleaners, pharmacies, laundromats, coffee shops and restaurants, movie theatres and other forms of recreation in their own neighborhoods.

Not long after I married and moved to New England, my exhusband and I went to pick up his nephew, a recent college graduate, who was taking a year or two to think over law school and who was working as a stock broker. He had rented an apt in Cambridge, MA. The neighborhood was rather typical of the sort that young people live in when they have just landed their first job. However, there was a difference. Not far from his apartment was a shopping center that included a now defunct store called Caldor, a KMart type discount store, with a supermarket next door, and a drycleaners as well as a pharmacy on the other side. I remarked to my husband that this was something that would be missing from a similar neighborhood in Detroit . . . a place to buy the basics (from socks to housepaint) and a place to buy food . . . accessible by foot, bus and car, not just by car.

While Caldor went out of business, that neighborhood is still flourishing. It is gentrified, but gentrification is not a bad thing.

When I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 and saw how bad Flint looks and saw the recruiters from which ever service branch it was, acting like members of 17th C British impressment corps, I thought that both the Republicans and Democrats are to blame.

And here's the irony. Gunga would probably agree that both were to blame, but then, he would condemn all government while I say that we need government to act as government should act.

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@plainoldme,

I don't claim omniscience or to have a general theory about Detroit.

Government clearly hasn't done Detroit much good and quite obviously the democrat party hasn't done Detroit much good.

Our founding fathers were brilliant men. They recognized the idea that optimal government would be that which governed the least ("that govt. is best which governs the least"). The Japanese recognize the same idea of efficiency in sports like judo ("maximum efficiency with minimum effort", Jigoro Kano). The idea would be to devise solutions and policies which did the most good for some place like Detroit with the minimum possible government involvement.

Aside from everything else, a lot of the problem is that cars are now largely made by robots and machines and even if the UAW didn't exist, car makers would still have a natural incentive to want out of the cold weather problems involved with Detroit.

That's even if we weren't in the second or third year of a second little ice age which we likely are and I hope to God somebody can prove me wrong on that one, of all the theories I believe in that's the one I'd like to be wrong somehow or other, NOBODY I know of will profit or benefit from a second little ice age.

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

This one favors the democrats' core constituencies, and probably not you.
People who work for a living do not have time to sit in waiting rooms for ten or twelve hours.

That is so true.

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

Silly boy! Hitler was on the right. The Tea Totalitarians are on the right.

If "right" implies conservative, then Hitler was not conservative, in my opinion, since I believe he was "radical." His new world order was based on the radical concept that made the old paradigm of slave labor acceptable, and ethnic cleansing acceptable where it was deemed preferable, and the supremacy of those that were deemed Aryan. The Tea Totalitarians (as you put it) are conservative, since they do not want the changes the current administration is advocating. So, it is not "right" versus "left," in my opinion, but conservative versus liberal (aka, progressive). It might be more correct to say that Germany moved to the right from Bismarck, to the Kaiser, to Hitler. "Right" may be an accurate term for the macro-history from the late nineteenth century to the 1930's.

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@gungasnake,

I have to tell you that I always thought Detroit's MBAs who made decisions for the company made lots of wrong decisions and I agree totally that they ought to have made smaller cars and that they could have made more fuel efficient cars years and years ago.

My 86 year old father who left school in the 8th grade always said that Michigan would pay for having a single branched economy.

But, the demise of Detroit is not the fault of government and could be laid directly at the feet of the people who run the businesses. I was there with black and white people working to make Detroit a shining city on the banks of the river.

Oh, it was the left wing students at WSU who believed that teachers should major in what they want to teach and not in education . . . and that we could bring back the seven liberal arts . . . and that we could rebuild the city from within.

As I remember the right wing students, they were more interested in getting drunk.

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@Foofie,

Are you aware that many if not most of the right wingers are called radicals by political scientists?

Of course, you are aware that what you wrote here is your opinion: you wrote as much. But, are you aware that it matches nothing scholarly? The fascists were always the right . . . the Tea Baggers are the right . . . the blue dog Democrats lean mostly to the right.

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

Are you aware that many if not most of the right wingers are called radicals by political scientists?

Of course, you are aware that what you wrote here is your opinion: you wrote as much. But, are you aware that it matches nothing scholarly? The fascists were always the right . . . the Tea Baggers are the right . . . the blue dog Democrats lean mostly to the right.

Many political scientists could be left, so I would not be surprised if right wingers are branded "radicals." And, left wingers were called radicals in the 1950's. So, radical might just be name calling by the opposition.

What really does right wing mean? It might correlate to a degree of conservatism that made the U.S. a superpower that faced down the expansionist aims of the Soviet Union. It might correlate to a degree of conservatism that made this country a 3,000 mile wide nation. It might correlate to a degree of conservatism that made the U.S. not isolationist during WWII. I am conservative; calling me a right winger is just so much name calling, since no one but myself knows on what topics I am conservative. "Right wing" is just branding someone with a broad brush that does not allow for the nuances of one's actual conservative beliefs.

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@Foofie,

That's a paranoid rant and I just spent 2 and 1/2 hours watching this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VebOTc-7shU

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@Finn dAbuzz,

If you want to make it about Detroit, the city, fine.
If you want to make it about city governance, fine.
In Detroit it's always been about race. Motown makes the South look like pikers.

The first 67 years of the 20th century were just a foretaste of the '67 riots when H Rap Brown said: "If Motown don't turn around, we are going to burn you down."

Quote:

The origins of urban unrest in Detroit were rooted in a multitude of political, economic, and social factors including police abuse, lack of affordable housing, urban renewal projects, economic inequality, black militancy, and rapid demographic change.

It's just not as simple as saying,"the governance was too liberal"

http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/d_index.htm

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@Foofie,

These labels seem to be decreasingly useful these days.

The really meaningful dialectic as I see it is populism versus misanthropy.

At least one wing of the pubbie party is represented by populists like Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, George Allen, Mike Huckabee, and others like that. These people want to improve the lives of their fellow man.

Today's democrats are misanthropes. They're into doing things like shutting down 12% of America's agricultural production to save a "delta smelt(TM)", killing 100,000,000 people by demonizing and banning DDT, shutting the US off from every sort of energy exploration and/or refinement capability to the extent their powers permit, and things of that nature.

1 Reply

Death of Detroit & Obamacare

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