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
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
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