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MAKING MONEY ON MISERY: MURPHY'S LAW, MITT ROMNEY, AND MAMMON

8/17/2012

 
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                  Making Money on Misery:
         
Murphy’s Law, Mitt Romney, and Mammon
    “If something can go wrong it will,” That’s  Murphy’s Law, and it extends in all directions. If cheating, stealing, and lying are possible, people cheat, steal, and lie. Which is why certain activities should never be allowed to tempt them, including for-profit education, armies, jails, and medicine.
    For-profit colleges make false promises of jobs, award worthless degrees, drain scholarship funds, and leave students with nothing.  
    Mercenary soldiers, “Hessians,” fought Americans in the Revolutionary War. The most famous mercenaries are likely the French Foreign Legion. The U.S.A has never had mercenaries, although a case can be made that Blackwater USA, hired under G.W. Bush, was exactly that.
    American jails started being privatized about 30 years ago. Today we have the jail business. Judges hand out long sentences for minor crimes like possessing a “joint.” The jails turn a profit and in one way or another, the judges get theirs. The next big expose will be women prisoners whose wombs are rented out for surrogate pregnancy. You read it here.
    The hottest big business is the for-profit hospital. The engineered financial crisis of traditional hospitals is helping it flourish. Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital generated billions in profits from its holdings in HCA (Hospital Corporation of America), a for-profit chain that has learned to extract profits by milking Medicare, Medicade, HMOs, and private insurance while scaling back patient care. Romney would say this means that the hospital business is superior to the Hippocratic oath. A page one expose in the NY Times, Wednesday, August 16, A Giant Hospital Chain Is Blazing A Profit Trail, lays out in sickening detail heartless reductions in patient care and changes in billing codes to suck more out of Medicare. Results range from patients turned away, to poor care, to death.
    The lust for profits that characterizes Republicans now seeking office is open worship of Mammon. If this depraved gang gains power in the next election, the America of our Founding Fathers will go the way of the Dodo. One can only hope what results is a nadir, which means low point, followed by recovery. But maybe there is no nadir. If we sink so low that humanity regresses to the sub-human, is it a point of no return? And at that point, will anything matter?
    A link to the NY Times expose, Sickness for Profit


CH
8/20/2012 06:16:14 am

Some call the "jail business" the prison industrial complex. Some call hospitals the medical industrial complex. Some call schools the education industrial complex. And when non-profits beciome institutionalized, focused more on contracts and funding then on their missions they can become the non-profit industrial complex. See Andrea Smith's "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded."

Ives Lawyer link
6/27/2013 09:28:33 pm

A lot of it depends on the kind of lawyer we choose and how many have experience of similar cases.

Stacy link
8/27/2013 09:17:20 am

Thanks for a great read.


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    Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

    Being 90 years in this world,  with great kids,  great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
                                   Stuart Hodes

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           With my friend, Nero.
                   April, 2012.
        Photo by Ray Madrigal

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