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~~ posted for dmorista with introduction by dmorista ~~
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58980/
~~ posted for collectivist ~~
https://hartmannreport.com/p/time-to-end-the-medicare-advantage
The simple solution to the Medicare Advantage problem is to kill off the program. It was just a Trojan horse to privatize Medicare
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Over 100 Democratic lawmakers last week introduced legislation to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60. There is one small problem that needs fixing, though: so-called “Medicare Advantage.”
This week my new book, The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich is officially available in bookstores nationwide and online. Here’s a chapter excerpt I think you’ll find interesting, particularly after all those awful TV ads with former football and sitcom stars we’ve had to endure the past few years…
The “Advantage” War against Medicare
Medicare Advantage is a massive, trillion-dollar rip-off, of the federal government and of taxpayers, and of many of the people buying the so-called Advantage plans.
It’s also one of the most effective ways that insurance companies could try to kill Medicare For All, since about a third of all people who think they’re on Medicare are actually on these privatized plans instead.
Nearly from its beginning, Medicare has allowed private companies to offer plans that essentially compete with it, but they were an obscure corner of the market and didn’t really take off until the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress rolled out the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. This was the GOP’s (and a few corporatist Democrats’) big chance to finally privatize Medicare, albeit one bite at a time.
That law created a brand known as Medicare Advantage under the Medicare Part C provision, and a year later it phased in what are known as risk-adjusted large-batch payments to insurance companies offering Advantage plans.
Medicare Advantage plans are not Medicare. They’re private health insurance most often offered by the big for-profit insurance companies (although some nonprofits participate, particularly the larger HMOs), and the rules they must live by are considerably looser than those for Medicare.
Even more consequential, they don’t get reimbursed directly on a person-by-person, procedure-by-procedure basis. Instead, every year, Advantage providers submit a summary to the federal government of the aggregate risk score of all their customers and, practically speaking, are paid in a massive lump sum.
The higher their risk score, the larger the payment. A plan with mostly very ill people in it will get much larger reimbursements than a plan with mostly healthy people. After all, the former will be costly to keep alive and healthy, while the latter won’t cost much at all.
Profit-seeking insurance companies, being the predators that they are, have found a number of ways to raise their risk scores without raising their expenses. The classical strategies of tying people to in-network providers, denying procedures routinely during first-pass authorization attempts, and having very high out-of-pocket caps are carried over from regular health insurance systems to keep costs low and profits high.
But with Medicare Advantage, the big insurance companies have invented a whole new way to rip us all off while padding their bottom lines.
For example, many Medicare Advantage plans promote an annual home visit by a nurse or physician’s assistant as a “benefit” of the plan. What the companies are doing, though, is trying to upcode their customers to make them seem sicker than they are to increase their overall Medicare reimbursement risk score.
“Heart failure,” for example, can be a severe and expensive condition to treat . . . or a barely perceptible tic on an EKG that represents little or no threat to a person for years or even decades. Depression is similarly variable; if it lasts less than two weeks, there’s no reimbursement; if it lasts longer than two weeks, it’s called a “major depressive episode” and rapidly jacks up a risk score.
The home health visits are designed more to look for illnesses or codings that can increase risk scores than to find conditions that require medical intervention. They’re so profitable that an entire industry has sprung up of companies that send nurses out on behalf of the smaller insurance companies.
In summer 2014, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published an in-depth investigative report titled Why Medicare Advantage Costs Taxpayers Billions More Than It Should.
They found, among other things, that one of the most common scams companies were running involved that very scoring of their customers as being sicker than they actually were, so that their reimbursements were way above the cost of caring for those people.
Here are a few quotes from the report:
“Risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare.”
“In more than 200 of these counties, the cost of some Medicare Advantage plans was at least 25 percent higher than the cost of providing standard Medicare coverage.”
The report documents how risk scores rose twice as fast for people who joined a Medicare Advantage health plan as for those who didn’t.
Patients, the report lays out, never know how their health is rated because neither the health plan nor Medicare shares risk scores with them—and the process itself is so arcane and secretive that it remains unfathomable to many health professionals.
“By 2009, government officials were estimating that just over 15 percent of total Medicare Advantage payments were inaccurate, about $12 billion that year.”
Based on its own sampling of data from health plans, the report shows how CMS has estimated that faulty risk scores triggered nearly $70 billion in what officials deemed “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013.
CMS decided, according to the report, not to chase after overcharges from 2008 through 2010 even though the agency estimated through sampling that it made more than $32 billion in “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans over those three years. CMS did not explain its reasoning.
The report documents how Medicare expects to pay the health plans more than $150 billion this year [2014, the year the study was published].
Companies are almost never nailed for these overcharges, and when they are, they usually pay back pennies on the dollar.
For example, when the Office of Inspector General, Health and Human Services (which oversees Medicare), audited six out of the hundreds of plans on the market in 2007, they found that just those six companies “had been overpaid by an estimated $650 million” for that one year. As the Center for Public Integrity states, “CMS settled five of the six audits for a total repayment of just over $1.3 million.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also, in 2012, decided to audit only 30 plans a year going forward. As CPI noted, “At that rate, it would take CMS more than 15 years to review the hundreds of Medicare Advantage contracts now in force.” And that’s 15 years to audit just one year’s activity!
Things haven’t improved since that 2014 investigative report from CPI. In September 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and five Democratic colleagues sent a letter to President Donald Trump’s CMS administrator, Seema Verma.
“The recent HHS Payment Accuracy Report exposes that taxpayers have overpaid Medicare Advantage plans more than $30 billion dollars over the last three years,” Brown wrote. “This report comes on the heels of a 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report and a 2013 GAO report on [Medicare Advantage] plan overcharges and the failure of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to recoup billions of dollars of improper payments from MA plans.”
Meanwhile, during the four years of the Trump administration, CMS went out of their way to illegally promote Medicare Advantage plans (which typically cost CMS far more than a regular Medicare plan).
A February 2020 report in the New York Times stated, “Under President Trump, some critics contend, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, has become a cheerleader for Advantage plans at the expense of original Medicare.”
The report pointed to the draft release of the 2019 Medicare & You handbook, which is mailed every year to all enrollees and posted online. “Advocates and some lawmakers criticized language describing Advantage as a less expensive alternative to original Medicare.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) compared Medicare Advantage with traditional Medicare and found the Advantage programs to be mind-bogglingly profitable: “MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending for enrollees in MA is 25 percent lower than for enrollees in [traditional Medicare] in the same county and [with the same] risk score.”
At the same time, Medicare Advantage often screws its customers. According to the NBER study, people with Medicare Advantage got 15 percent fewer colon cancer screening tests, 24 percent fewer diagnostic tests, and 38 percent fewer flu shots.
Speculation is rife as to why CMS would allow—much less promote—privatized plans that cost Medicare far more than original Medicare to rip off taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars a month.
One possibility is regulatory capture—people working in CMS know that if they go along and get along, very well-paid jobs are waiting for them at for-profit insurance companies after a few years of government service. This is a chronic problem at other regulatory agencies, particularly those overseeing pollution, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and banking.
Another answer is that the Bush administration—where Medicare Advantage started—was so enamored of the idea of privatizing Medicare to eventually destroy the program (George W. Bush campaigned extensively from the late 1970s through his presidency to privatize both Social Security and Medicare) that they turned a blind eye to abuses.
The Obama administration had other priorities, as they were trying to push through the Affordable Care Act and didn’t want to upset the apple cart. And when Trump came into power, his folks saw anything that drained resources out of Medicare and into the pockets of multimillionaire health insurance executives—a group notoriously generous when it comes to making political contributions—as a plus.
You Are Locked in to Medicare Advantage
A fellow I’d known decades ago recently bubbled back into conversation among a few of us who’d hung out together in New York back in the 1970s. Sam, I’ll call him, had turned 65 and hadn’t had employer-provided health insurance in years. He spent a few hours trying to figure out how to sign up for Medicare and then gave up, totally confused, figuring he’d try again in a few months.
Unfortunately, his prostate intervened. When Sam started experiencing pain urinating, he visited a local “doc in a box” urgent care clinic, where they gave him a PSA test. The result was shocking: his PSA was so high that it was a virtual certainty he had prostate cancer, and possibly it had even metastasized, a situation that is the second-leading cause of cancer death in American men.
Telling him that he’d be facing hefty doctor and hospital bills regardless of the outcome, the urgent care clinic signed him up for a Medicare Advantage plan offered by an affiliate that almost certainly paid them a commission for the sign-up. Sam was excited, though, because he now had insurance, and it was a “no dollar” plan that didn’t cost him a penny.
Sam then got on the phone to find a urologist who specialized in cancer. He found that the best worked out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and, telling them he was “on Medicare,” he made an appointment to see one of their top docs. A month later, when his appointment finally opened up, the person who was checking him into the system told him that he’d have to pay cash because his Advantage plan didn’t include Sloan Kettering.
In fact, more than a third of all Medicare Advantage plans nationwide do not include any of the National Cancer Institute centers, and none of the Advantage plans offered in the New York City area include the nation’s most famous one, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Shocked, Sam contacted Medicare to see if he could transfer from Medicare Advantage to regular Medicare. This all happened in fall 2020, so they told him that he could make the change during the “open enrollment period” of October 15 to December 7. He made the change and called Sloan Kettering back.
This time, they wanted to know what Medigap policy he’d signed up for to fill in the 20 percent of billing that Medicare doesn’t cover. That sent Sam back to the internet and, ultimately, to an insurance agent, who told him that while Medigap plans can’t refuse you because of preexisting conditions when you first sign up when you turn 65, if you shift from Medicare Advantage back to traditional Medicare after that first enrollment, particularly if you’re older or sick, they can simply refuse to cover you.
Reporter Mark Miller wrote for the New York Times in February 2020 about Ed Stein, a 72-year-old man with bladder cancer and a Medicare Advantage plan that didn’t cover the cancer docs in his area who specialized in his type of cancer. He tried to shift back to traditional Medicare to cover what promised to be complex and expensive surgery and chemotherapy. As Miller wrote, “That was when he ran up against one of the least understood implications of selecting Advantage when you enroll in Medicare: The decision is effectively irrevocable.”
As of this writing (November 2020), my friend Sam still hasn’t seen a doctor. This is the state of healthcare in America as it’s been sliced and diced by the multibillion-dollar insurance industry.
Meanwhile, every fall, Americans are inundated with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of TV, direct mail, and internet advertising for Medicare Advantage plans. And where does the money come from to pay for that advertising?
It comes from the same place that provided over $1 billion in wealth to the former CEO of United Healthcare, and over $100 million a month in compensation to senior executives in the largest health insurance companies: denying claims while collecting risk adjustment claims from your tax dollars and mine.
The simple solution to the Medicare Advantage problem is to kill off the program. It was just a Trojan horse to privatize Medicare, and its presence will make Medicare for All even harder to implement. At the same time, the 20 percent hole that the GOP insisted on for skin in the game with real Medicare needs to go, too.
A comprehensive Medicare for All program will eliminate both of these problems.
https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/state-secrets
This is Boondoggle, the newsletter about corporations ripping off our states and cities. If you’re not currently a subscriber, please click the green button below to sign up. Thanks!
The Fort Wayne, Indiana, city council is going to vote on a 10-year property tax break for a new warehouse, which will be worth $16 million to the beneficiary. There’s an issue, though, beyond the potential loss of public money.
The city council doesn’t know who that beneficiary is.
It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. "I'm sure it's probably something that's going to be very exciting. They say up to a thousand jobs, you know, all these things coming. The taxpayers and the citizens, though, will be on us to make sure we specifically know what we're voting for," said one council member.
The city council doesn’t know which corporation it might be subsidizing because the few officials who have been let in on the secret — including the mayor — have signed non-disclosure agreements preventing them from divulging the corporation’s identity. Rumor has it that the warehouse will belong to Amazon, but no one will confirm it.
This is a great example of the pernicious use of non-disclosure agreements in economic development deals and how it corrupts local democracy.
There’s no national data on how prevalent these agreements are, but once you start looking, examples pop up everywhere. I’ve covered one here: The city council of Gallatin, Tennessee, approved nearly $20 million in tax breaks for “Project Woolhawk,” which turned out to be Facebook. Council members claimed they didn’t know Facebook was the beneficiary until after they voted. These agreements have been employed in New York, Minnesota, Ohio, and Maryland, too. Amazon, in particular, seems to make them a part of its standard operating procedure everywhere it goes.
And they cover more than just local economic development office officials or city council members and mayors. Amazon forced non-disclosure agreement for its HQ2 search onto university researchers, urban planners, the waitstaff at a restaurant where the local chamber of commerce met to discuss their city’s bid, and a hotel concierge.
These agreements generally prevent officials from discussing anything about the state of negotiations between the government and the corporation, other than vague details about the type of project and maybe the overall cost, and most of the time they only allow officials to publicly release information once the deal is done and confirmed.
Why do corporations insist on all this secrecy? To prevent pushback from the public.
In correspondence with a local official in San Jose, Google confirmed that the goal of the agreements was to prevent public relations problems in the community that might arise once word got out that Google would benefit from subsidies. A random tech project with a silly name isn’t as outrage inducing as Facebook, specifically, so corporations would prefer the former be the subject of debate.
Corporations push these agreements so often, in fact, that local officials just accept them as a matter of course. “It’s customary now, when mega-Fortune 500 companies come, that they prefer that you not divulge what they’re doing,” said the manager of the Village of University Park, an Illinois community that gave subsidies to Amazon. “It happens all the time.”
Even the Fort Wayne council members aren’t questioning the existence of the non-disclosure agreements, just that they weren’t also pulled into the loop and asked to sign one in exchange for receiving information before any vote occurs. “I'm happy to sign a non-disclosure, but either way, I don't want to be put in a position where I'm asked to make a decision without knowing what I'm deciding," said one council member.
But these agreements are an outrageous assault on the public’s right to know what’s being done in their name. Nobody is asking for these corporations or officials to divulge trade secrets or sensitive personal info on their employees; this is literally about whether and how public resources will be distributed, and what sort of negotiating stance public officials take when faced with a powerful corporation asking for money and other favors.
The use of these agreements is ultimately about power: Corporations want the power to extract concessions from elected officials without the countervailing power of public scrutiny being applied.
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution to this problem: States and cities can just ban non-disclosure agreements in economic development deals (and more widely, too, of course). Illinois Rep. Michael Halpin has a bill to do so in his state, and New York Sen. Michael Gianaris had one to do the same after the Amazon HQ2 debacle. Several New York City council members have proposed one there too.
Elected leaders can simply cut this strategy off at the knees with legislation that is just a couple of pages long. If any enterprising Indiana lawmakers who happen to read this newsletter want to introduce a bill, that’d be great. I’ll even email you the language if you want.
It’s impossible for citizens to effectively engage with their government if that government won’t even disclose the names of the entities with which it is doing business. Concerned voters are left fighting ghosts and vagueries instead of real institutions and specific policy choices.
Corporate leaders, of course, like it that way, but there’s no reason the rest of us have to put up with it. Call or email your state and local officials and tell them to ban these things today.
ONE MORE THING: Dr. Emily Erickson at Alabama A&M University put together a really fantastic report on how corporate tax giveaways have failed one Alabama community. She surveyed workers in Anniston, Alabama, and found them toiling away in dangerous jobs for bad pay, while “Anniston’s public services — parks, playgrounds, libraries, public safety, schools, and others — are underfunded in part because of the public subsidies (some call it “corporate welfare” or “corporate giveaways”) given to these large multinational corporations to entice them to locate in Anniston.”
Seriously, give it a read. It’s a great distillation of why the sort of stuff covered in this newsletter matters to real communities.
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https://mronline.org/2021/09/09/we-are-scientists-calling-for-a-climate-revolution
~~ posted for collectivist ~~
The climate and ecological crises threaten every aspect of human civilisation. Despite decades of warnings from scientists and others, greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures continue to soar. A domino effect of climate tipping points threatens to push the Earth into a state that is alien and inhospitable to human civilisation.
Still, mega-corporations ransack the natural world with support from their servants in public office. Governments who stray from protecting corporate interest in favour of human need are attacked and delegitimised in the billionaire press, face the prospect of international capital flight, and of political or military coups. This corruption of democracy sits at the heart of climate inaction.
Billions are threatened with starvation, displacement, drought and inundation within the next few decades. Scientists know business as usual cannot continue: it’s time to put our bodies where our mouths are and resist, for truth and life.
Human industrial activity has impacted the world as severely as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs. 70% of the mammals, fish, birds, plants, amphibians, reptiles, and around half of the insects annihilated. Greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures soaring faster than at perhaps any point in Earth’s history. Climate tipping points being crossed – like the melting of the Arctic – accelerating heating and stripping humanity of meaningful control over our future.
We are heading toward a world at least 4°C hotter this century. The effects will be catastrophic. Even 2°C – which we are set to burn through by 2050 – means billions without enough food and water, hundreds of millions of refugees, historic natural disasters virtually every year, war, disease. Without political and economic revolution we face a nightmare from which we cannot wake. Scientists know this, and we are starting to resist.
Scientists have spent decades writing papers, advising government, briefing the press: all have failed. What is the point in documenting in ever greater detail the catastrophe we face, if we are not willing to do anything about it?
Academics are perfectly placed to wage a rebellion: we exist in rich hubs of knowledge and expertise; we are well connected across the world, and to decision-makers; we have large platforms from which to inform, educate and rally others all over the world; and we have implicit authority and legitimacy, which is the basis of political power. We can make a difference. We must do what we can to halt the greatest destruction in human history.
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58808/
~~ posted for collectivist ~~
There is no doubt that the climate catastrophe threatens the future of life on the planet. A massive mobilization of the working class will be needed to combat this threat.
But, as Hurricane Ida and the associated flooding revealed, this is not just a threat to future generations — climate change is already a killer. Not only have dozens of people drowned in the hurricane’s wake, but hundreds are dead from the heat wave in the Northwest.
Structural failures under capitalism are compounding the climate catastrophe for the working class. As the Sept. 3 New York Times admitted, “Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming planet.”
We see a clear lack of preparedness in the richest country in the world. There is no regard for poor, oppressed and working-class people, who get no evacuation assistance in a life-threatening situation and are basically left to their own devices.
The trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed by Congress “includes $150 billion for clean energy and climate change protections. Tens of billions would also be utilized to fight extreme weather like drought, wildfire, flooding and erosion.” (PBS, Aug. 5)
Tens of billions is woefully inadequate.
Consider, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, how Louisiana and Mississippi were devastated, their governments still not fully prepared for another major weather event. One million people remain without power and with little gas and water during the worst heat of the summer.
Floods devastated New York City. Here, Harlem subway station.
Throughout New York’s five boroughs and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, people were trapped, some dying in flooded basement apartments, others unable to commute to work or do essential tasks due to collapsed roadways and bridges, totaled vehicles and flooded subways and expressways.
Lack of money isn’t the problem. There is incredible wealth concentrated in New York City and the surrounding areas, yet workers who produce that wealth were helpless in the rush of floodwaters. If the financial fortunes in Wall St. alone were taxed at the same rate as an average worker, funds could be used to prevent many of these tragic deaths.
Manhattan is an island of asphalt, with too little exposed soil to absorb floodwaters. The land was stolen from Indigenous people and then built up to serve the interests of finance capital — people and the environment be damned. As with every major urban center, money in the city budget — needed for infrastructure repairs and improvements — instead goes to city bondholders. Big Wall Street banks extort bloated interest payments from New York and other cash-strapped cities.
Time for ‘system change, not climate change’
“The pattern of damage reflects the relationship between climate exposure and racial inequality; impacts were more apparent in low-income communities of color, which, because of historic inequalities, are more prone to flooding, receive less maintenance from city services and frequently experience lax housing code enforcement,” the New York Times acknowledges.
Environmental terrorism and environmental racism in the U.S. are part of the legacy of capitalist development.
And the situation is far worse in the colonized Global South.
But socialist Cuba, with far fewer resources than the U.S., has created a model for hurricane evacuation that looks out for every human being — and even pets and livestock. The whole population is mobilized, and no one is left to fend for themselves.
A program of working-class demands is necessary to meet the twin crises of global warming and faulty or woefully inadequate infrastructure: Money for flood protection and relief, not for war! Money for cooling centers in a heat wave, not for tax breaks to the rich! Money for green jobs, not interest to the banks! People and the planet before profits; make the fossil fuel industry pay to clean up the messes it made!
This is just a start. It will take a monumental struggle to win climate justice.
But rebellion is inevitable. Ida is the storm of wind and rain before the coming storm of protest. The challenge is to carry future waves of resistance through to their essential conclusion: a workers’ revolution for the abolition of capitalist wage-slavery.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in 1848, said the workers “have a world to win.”
Photograph Source: Brian Snelson – CC BY 2.0
So much we are supposed to forget or not know and/or care about, so little we are supposed to remember.
“We must never forget” 9/11, when “America was attacked” (when, as cannot be said without sounding “controversial,” the United States Middle East policy blew back on the nation’s financial and political capitals).
You must always remember that atrocity, good Americans: sear it in your minds forever. Never forget. Never stop caring. Never stop honoring the 9/11 victims and the “brave soldiers” who fought, died, and killed halfway across the world – causing massively more casualties than they suffered – in its wake. Never stop mourning (and avenging) that holy day of inherently “good” and “exceptional” America’s unjust martyrdom: 9/11/2001.
But we are supposed to always forget or better yet not know and/or care about:
+ Two and a half centuries of North American Black chattel slavery, the foundation for the United States’ rise to capitalist economic power in the world system.
+ The murderous Middle Passage, wherein millions of chained Black humans died en route to the Americas from Africa.
+ The white owner and overseer rape of untold masses of Black slave females and the constant breaking of Black families.
+ A century of Jim Crow terror, replete with the violent imposition of Black slavery by a new name, the disenfranchisement of Black Americans, the night rides of the neo-Confederate Ku Klux Klan, dozens of race pogroms (including the savage white leveling of much of Black Tulsa in May of 1921), the late 19th and 20th Century explosion of Sundown Towns (where “no negro better show his face after dark”) all over the US (northern states included), and thousands of barbarian white power lynchings of Black men (often attended by cheering white crowds) across the former slave states.
+ Mass northern Black ghettoization, enforced by restrictive covenants, bombings, police terrorism, white gang violence (look up the 1919 Chicago race riot), redlining, and more.
+ The slaughter of dozens of Black inmates at New York’s Attica state prison, ordered by New York’s racist governor (to the great delight of America’s racist president Richard Nixon) on September 13, 1971.
+ The ongoing racist campaigns of mass arrest, mass incarceration, felony branding, criminal supervision, and police murder, justified in the name of the racist “War on Drugs.”
+ The genocidal removal and murder of Native Americans, re-enacted over and over again with such horrific, blood-curdling incidents as the Mystic River Massacre the Sullivan Expedition (ordered by the nation’s first president, who the Iroquois named “Town Destroyer”), the Trail of Tears (blood-drenched Indian killer and slaver Andrew Jackson’s savage long march ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee Nation), the so-called “Battle of Bad Axe” (when US troops thanked God for helping them dispatch “devils” as they butchered Sauk women and children in western Wisconsin), the Sand Creek Massacre, and the Wounded Knee Massacre (to mention just a handful of the relevant white American slaughters of the country’s original inhabitants).
+ The murder of the Molly Maguires, the so-called Battle of the Viaduct (when American soldiers brought in from the Indian-killing Dakota frontier slaughtered white proletarian “savages” in Chicago during the Great Labor Upheaval of 1877), the rigged trial and sadistic, short-rope hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs, the Ludlow Massacre, the Bisbee deportation, and the Memorial Day Massacre, to mention some of the bloodier worker suppression episodes from America’s incredibly gory labor history.
+ The police state executions of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fred Hampton, the Jackson State killings, the Attica prison slaughter, the murder of MOVE, and the murderous federal police state war on the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, and the New Left.
+ The bloody racist and openly imperialist theft of the current Southwestern United States from Mexico in the so-called Mexican American War.
+ The mass-murderous and racist US occupation and pacification of the Philippines, where US troops, many of them veteran “Indian-fighters,” slaughtered Filipino “niggers” and “Apaches” en masse.
+ The bloody US the seizure and neo-colonization of Cuba and Puerto Rico.
+ The recurrent bloody US invasions and occupations of Central America.
+ The unspeakable and unnecessary crimes of Hiroshima and (even worse) Nagasaki
+ The genocidal US bombing of Korean cities in the early 1950s.
+ The No Gun Ri Massacre: the murder of at least 400 Korean civilians by the US military in July of 1950.
+ The monumental US Superpower crucifixion of mostly peasant-based Southeast Asia, leading to the death of 2 to 5 million people between 1962 and 1975 and including dozens of My Lai massacres, Operation Tiger Force (a rolling US campaign of rape, torture, and murder in Vietnam’s Central Highlands between November 1965 and November 1967); and the savage carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia.
+ The US funding and equipping of Third Word fascist death squad regimes (including fascist governments in Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina) and right-wing terrorist forces in post-WWII Latin and Central America.
+ The US greenlighting of Indonesia’s genocidal invasion of East Timor in 1975.
+ US support of South African apartheid and other Third World fascist regimes (e.g., Indonesia’s mass-murderous Suharto government) across the world during the Cold War.
+ The US-backed Latin American 9/11 (the Washington-supported coup in Chile on that day in 1973).
+ The ferocious “Highway of Death,” when US warplanes risked mid-air collisions in their rush to mercilessly slaughter thousands of surrendered Iraq troops retreating from Kuwait in 1991.
+ US economic sanctions that killed at least half a million Iraqi children (“a price worth paying,” according to Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright) by the mid-1990s.
+ US funding and equipping of extremist Islamic-fundamentalist forces (for Cold War, anti-Soviet purposes) in Afghanistan starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, creating the very forces that would “attack America” in 2001.
+ US support and cover for apartheid Israel’s ongoing Zionist-fascist murder and torture of the Palestinian people.
+ US support for the savage absolutist be-header regime in Saudi Arabia (possibly the most reactionary government on Earth), the vicious monarchy that has murdered Yemen with American weapons.
+ The criminal and racist US regime change invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the cause of certainly more than 100,000 deaths there. The invasion was a lawless and unjust response to 9/11, a terrorist attack conducted mainly by Saudis and planned in Germany. It followed Washington’s absurd refusal of the Afghan Taliban government’s offer to hand Osama bin Laden over to the US.
+ The astonishingly evil and Orwellian use of 9/11 and the myths of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the equally big lies of democratic intentions and a supposed alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to “justify” the racist, monumentally mass-murderous, and petro-imperialist US regime change invasion, occupation, and breaking of Iraq – the cause of well more than a million deaths there. Highlights of that noble invasion and occupation include the sadistic US siege of Fallujah, an operation that included the use of radioactive ordnance that generated a local epidemic of childhood leukemia.
+ The central US airpower contribution to the regime change destruction of Libya, a bloody disaster both within that country and across North Africa in 2011 (another of so many “thanks, Obama” moments).
+ The drone murder (involving direct presidential target selection in Obama’s sick case) of thousands and the drone terrorization of the Muslim world in the ironic name of “the global war on terror.”
+ The ramping up and legitimization of imperial torture (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and numerous “black sites” set up by the US in collaboration with “foreign partners”) also in the ironic name of anti-terrorism.
Forget, forget, forget, forget, forget, remember, forget, forget, forget. Better yet never know or care enough about our crimes to forget in the first place.
Watching the US media’s coverage of America’s recent final military retreat from Afghanistan, one would – if they didn’t know any better – think that the Taliban was the only bad actor in Afghanistan, that the US had never helped create the Taliban, and that the US had never murdered masses of ordinary Afghans during an unjustified two-decade imperial occupation. Like in the Afghan village of Bola Boluk in May of 2009, when Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton absurdly blamed “Taliban grenades” for a US bombing attack that killed more than 130 civilians, including small children whose body parts weeping villagers collected in wheelbarrows.
I could go on and on with lists and names of American crimes and atrocities within and beyond North America. They are largely unknown or forgotten in the heart of the imperial beast because their very disproportionately non-white victims are considered without sufficient merit and significance here. That is a great accomplishment of the nation’s dominant ideological institutions, whose role is to “manufacture consent” to American Empire and Inequality at home and abroad. Those on the wrong side of US forts, guns, bombsites, drone screens, and policies are “unworthy victims,” unlike the mostly white Americans who died on 9/11 and unlike the US troops who perish in the nation’s supposed noble military actions abroad. As John Pilger has written, the logic of this forgetting, ignorance, indifference, and selective memory is simple “a crime is only a crime if the perpetrators are ‘them’ and not ‘us.’” It is for this reason, as Harold Pinter noted in 2005, that Soviet crimes were well known in West while Washington’s epic imperial transgressions were just “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged. America had killed and was killing millions but in much of the world,” Pinter observed, “you wouldn’t know it. It never happened…Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter, it was of no interest.”
As Noam Chomsky likes to point out, it’s not really a “double standard,” it’s an imperial and nationalist “single standard”: “we” are inherently “good”, and “they” are bad. By definition.
Hence it is, for example, that Chomsky, perhaps the world’s leading public intellectual in the late 20th and early 21st Century, has lived in the United States but has long been essentially banned from its leading media outlets. He has always committed an unpardonable imperial sin: recording, documenting, acknowledging, and criticizing America’s crimes at home along with its intimately related wrongdoings at home – and the domestic institutional and social structural oppression system that has created those overlapping transgressions against democracy and the common good.
Readers interested in more documentation and details on the officially forgotten and disappeared crimes I listed above are welcome to read these two previously published essays of mine:
Paul Street, “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” Common Dreams, February 22, 2018.
Paul Street, “Uncle Sam Was Born Lethal,” Counterpunch, August 16, 2019.
For what it’s worth, since I had already long studied US foreign policy both through primary sources and in the magisterial writings of such incisive and brilliant scholars as William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, and Gabriel Kolko, I felt little basic surprise on 9/11/2001. While I knew nothing about the despicable tactic of hijacking passenger jets and flying them into buildings (I was expecting something along the lines of a “suitcase” nuclear assault), I had long been thinking that a major Islamo-fundamentalist “blowback” attack on the United States’ financial and/or political capital(s) was overdue and imminent. When the grisly, visually spectacular attack came, I said to myself and others “here’s the big imperial blowback Uncle Sam will use as its ‘New Pearl Harbor’ excuse to murder untold masses of Arab and Muslim people and try to boost fading US hegemony by putting its boot down harder on the Middle Eastern oil spigot.” That’s exactly what happened, easy to predict for those “in the know” – that is, for those, willing to step outside doctrinal parameters and nationalist norms to examine actual history.
