Debt Rattle December 5 2018
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Wassily Kandinsky Painting with Houses 1909 (clikc for background) • Don’t Blame Trump The Tariff Man, The Fed Crashed The Market Today (F.) •
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle December 5 2018]“Your call is important to us,” says the telephone robot at the hospital billing office dunning you to fork over $7,000 for the three stitches Little Skippy got when his best friend flew the drone into his forehead.
KunstlerIn 2002 I cut my thumb bad enough to go to the hospital emergency; about an hour later I walked out with 4 stitches and an $800 bill.
Needless to say I was stunned…and, I was also unemployed at that time…
The exploitive healthcare racket has gotten much worse, lo these 16 years later…Worse? You have no idea. We were just discussing with a $4,000 – 6,000 deductible — and that’s WITH company-paid health insurance — we employees cannot seek health care in the 4th quarter. Why? Because if it can wait — even if it’s cancer — our odds are better if we start racking up that deductible in January, so we have any chance of reaching $4,000 before it resets again in December. So duct tape that chopped finger, peasant! Put some butter on it and walk it off.
This is in addition to paying any rational world’s cash price JUST IN DEDUCTIBLE, like $800 for an hour’s hosptial time. So why pay $1,000/month in insurance when you’re already paying all your health care in cash? …Oh, that’s for catastrophic, and it won’t cover it all either, as the insurers will bill you randomly for things that weren’t done, aren’t priced, and no one can remember what they were. …But you are informed of the dispute by the collection agency, as you were not forwarded a bill. Kafka could not have created a less plausible system.
…Just another service we provide, from government getting involved and helping, by refusing to enforce anti-trust or any other laws, on the medical industry, since 1988.
Dr D
I refused to pay the $800. First, I didn’t have the money, not even close. In the end, I never paid that insane bill; they wrote it off most likely…
Usian’s need to look to the French; they’ve got it exactly correct!
Revolt!
Liberté, égalité, fraternité…
Short of that; all is lost…Kunstler-inspired posts this morning. Medical racket is absolutely true, but it is strange to expect for one field to restrain itself in the society money grab is the sport. Troubled youth, turned actor in Hollywood can earn entire life of income of a real medical professional playing the one. Let that sink in.
AFP art of covert smear of “Yellow vests”: writing about the subject as a friendly side note, aka – not that they have no reason to protest but look who are those people. I could not finish reading the garbage so I do not know if tone had changed at the end.
Kandinsky 110 years ago! No wonder that he thought of a paint brush as a tool to play the musical instrument. Not elitist but fair warning: the ones who does not see (or better yet sense) the “musical notes” if you will, on this painting pretty much have no idea what the painting art is.I picked the Kandinsky today because of the story (I did say click for background). Also stolen, like most of what our museums display (though seeing it happen in a modern arts museum is rare). Stories recently of the British Museum being asked to return items from Easter Island, the Maasai people and of course the neverending Parthenon Marbles tale. Time that shit finally ends. It’s all the sordid memories of empire, slavery and holocaust. But yeah, you have to wonder what’ll be left in the British Museum once you take away everything that’s only there on account of rape and pillage.
Who felt the 3-4% dip?
Since the elites make up the majority of the players of the stock market,
Since the blue collar workers are the majority of those with no savings,
Since the majority of people don’t play in the big casino
I ask who lost their bubble?• Dow Plunges Nearly 800 Points On Rising Fears Of An Economic Slowdown (CNBC)
• French History Has Never Seen A Protest Like The Yellow Vest Movement (Qz)
“…. the yellow vests began as an organic, grassroots movement, born of the frustration of a small group of individuals who organized the protests entirely on Facebook. Tartakowsky says that’s one way in which these protests are unique. ?
Now, everyone knows how to organize protests.
Giving the people cake to eat is passé
Gov. will try to stop protests by jamming the airwavesTo RIM
I always “click”, the habit that acquired from the “Shorpy days” on this site.
I am aware of all that you’ve mentioned (another “elitist” note: there is no such a thing as a week end or twice a year lover of art – or anything else what that matter), and as the history shows, one who is stronger will keep the art.“The lack of institutional framework is one of the things that sets the yellow vests apart from previous political movements and give them independence from any particular party, politician, or political leaning. That is one of their strengths… But it is also a major weakness, since the movement suffers from a lack of coherent message and leadership. …
… the yellow vest movement … demands have since grown to encompass all sorts of grievances against the government of president Emmanuel Macron… These factors have made it difficult for the government to engage in dialogue with the yellow vests.”
This is nonsense. What, have we completely lost all memory of the Occupy movement, not only in the U.S., but globally? As a participant in that movement, and as legal counsel for a (successful) federal lawsuit against state authorities seeking to silence the movement, I can tell you that the same criticisms were asserted ad nauseam against Occupy. “Your message isn’t coherent,” detractors whined. “Your leaders say different things,” they moaned. As many times as I encountered someone referring to me as a “leader,” I explained that they misunderstood “leadership” in a consensus-based association. I was no leader, but rather, one participant doing what I could to advance what the entire group had decided to do. We once went into a mediation conducted by a federal magistrate with our local quorum of 35 people. Those 35 souls, in concert, made far quicker and far more rational decisions than the two state “leaders” and their legal counsel, and while the mediation was ultimately unsuccessful due to the intransigence of the state, the federal declaratory judgment and permanent injunction achieved against the state vindicated the efficacy of the model and the importance of the method and message.
Occupy was heavily influenced, significantly constituted, and lent coherence by anarchist thought, participation and methodologies. That said, the majority of the membership I knew were not themselves anarchist. We met in general assembly with a Tea Party delegation, a conservative and dissident biker group, and many, many individuals of dichromatic (blue-red) vision, and reached substantial points of agreement regarding financial repression, governmental corruption and unaccountability, and corporate oligarchic criminality.
Alas, our grueling and rewarding occupation of public space, one of the world’s longest (11/5/11 – 6/8/12), gained us merely the sanction of the federal court that we had a right to say what we were in the way we sought to say it (encampment and public engagement), and said nothing of the message(s) we sought to convey. When French officials whine that it is “difficult for the government to engage in dialogue with the yellow vests,” their motives are transparently not for dialogue, but for submission. As with Occupy, they care not what the yellow vests have to say, for business will continue as usual for so long as it is permitted to survive. Sure, they may throw out a bone here or there (i.e., repeal of diesel taxes) to mitigate the backlash, but the machine will do everything in its power to crush substantive dissent of its central modus operandi: theft and destruction of the commons writ large.
The yellow vests are a reverberation, not a unique movement. The oligarchs are still in power, the people remain crushed and ignored, and this too will ultimately end. They will never listen, but I think we need to render it impossible for them to listen. The Bastille indeed.
I found this article some hours after I posted my earlier comment:
Stone Lodge
Thanks for the link.
The French protests should resonate with the Usians, but probably won’t in any meaningful way.
I’ve never seen Usians so beaten down and without hope.
What I saw in 2001 (Afghanistan), 2003 (Iraq), and continuing through today, gives me no reason to think anything will change…
As to France? We’ll see…Seeing 2 elderly parents thru numerous health crises currently and over the past 5 years in Canada, it never ceases to amaze me how horrible health care is in the United States compared to our socialized, government-run, health care in Canada. While there most certainly are gaps in our Canadian system (which I am well aware of due to my spouse having worked in health care for 20 years), for the average non-wealthy person you would hands-down be better off in Canada. Nothing I am hearing about the American system has convinced me otherwise. The money you folks have to pay for health procedures gives me nightmares.
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