Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus
Have you heard of this? It's spread throughout the mid-west "hog belt" - vast, factories for hog breeding, fattening, and slaughtering - they actually call it "hog confinement operations" or some such thing. Apparently it affects piglets, and is said not to provide any "health hazard," but decimates herds and profits... Yet, the price of live hogs is (and has always been, for decades) about 50 cents a pound. And they are drugged to the gills with all sort of antibiotics, hormones, etc. In many counties, their by-products are the single largest source of point pollution, even with lagoons, cesspools, etc. which often leak or overflow. It isn't even fit to be spread on the land as fertilizer.
If there's any issue I would want to follow, it's the negative consequences of swine confinement operations in Montana. The Hutterites are some of the biggest producers (along with ducks, turkeys, chickens, etc.), but they probably do it a little more humanely and cleanly. Unfortunately, they're part of that larger corporate food chain, and often swindled by the agri-biz con artists. I've urged people to work with them on this, and I think AERO and some others have done so. They do produce healthier food in most cases, and most importantly, it's local, thus avoiding wasting more energy in bulk transport over thousands of miles.
Anyway, when this story appeared on the Noon News today (not the infomercial Northern Ag Broadcasting segment, but in the main newscast), I was astonished. Apparently, it's been happening since last April, and a law passed last year actually prevents the Montana Department of Agriculture from releasing the location of the outbreak! [Go for it, public interest lawyers.] I follow most of the Montana press and media fairly closely, and this was absolutely the first I'd heard of it.
Barber, barber, shave a pig.
How many hairs
to make a wig?
Four and twenty
should be enough
nd give the poor barber
a pinch of snuff."
- nursery rhyme
Right after the pork story, there was a story on state crop insurance, and the massive losses last year because of climate change (although they certainly didn't mention climate change as the cause - that would probably be grounds for immediate firing at MTN news).
Here is another case where the word "insurance" is totally corrupted to mean "corporate welfare". Real insurance is risk-pooling. It's a very good - even necessary - strategy for a farmer if being hailed out (flooded, wind erosion, or whatever) would put you out of business. Since the chances of a major loss are only maybe 5% (one year out of 20 equivalent), then an insurance company can take the 5% each year, and in effect, capitalize it so that in the 10-year average before a claim is made, it can invest the money and make a handsome profit. That is how insurance companies came to dominate the economy.
When hail insurance was strictly private, I believe they charged about 10% of the value insured , but many were "mutual" insurance companies, too - real co-ops where the profits stayed with the insured. It's hard to tell, but from this report, the state hail insurance fund may be just that - and not relying on taxpayers to subsidize risk. But that is not usually the case, or what I am objecting to, here.
"Health insurance" has nothing to do with real insurance or risk-sharing. Health care isn't a "risk" - it's a public service, and perhaps the most vital one. By turning this into someone's "profit center," the whole idea of insurance (and medicine, itself) is violated. Insurance is what people buy to protect themselves or their heirs from loss. The illness is a loss, which happens whether we are insured, or not. And the monetary compensation goes, not to you, who suffer the accident or illness, but to the "health insurance" racket, and the predatory, criminal "medical industry" riddled with every kind of graft and fraud - even from its most "respectable" elements - the senior doctors, hospitals and established clinics.
You can almost depend on primary care to prescribe extra tests, X-rays, etc. to "protect themselves from law-suits," they might tell you (at your, the patient's, expense). Or, in my case, recently, "because I am a smoker" (which I will never admit to, again). Often, they have a financial interest in the local lab or diagnostic center, for which "services" they often charge from 4-10 times an actual competitive, cost-based price. The same is true for "patent medicines" - prescriptions, which are monopoly products. They charge whatever they can get to maximize revenues and profits.
Even when the generics come out, major pharmacies (like Target, in a recent "60 Minutes" segment) still continue to bill at whatever price they think they can get, and "rely" on customers to challenge their price with competing stores. Target is happy to match a lower price shown to them, but you have to make a point of asking, and most people just assume they (or their "coverage") are being charged a fair price, which in fact hardly ever happens.
Thus, our present health care system is often involved in "cultivating illness" just as agribiz corporations "farm" the government (or taxpayers-consumers) rather than the soil. Just listen to the ag-promotion shows - even on public television, from most Land Grant colleges, anyway. Monsanto is off the table (or rather, just assumed to be a normal, public-spirited business), along with factory farming in general. Our station ran Food Inc. all of once, I think, and it was a year or more delayed. And yet, all the rest of the world is most concerned, and blocking US food imports at every turn - the main reason for the TPP and other "free trade" agreements, incidentally, and why Baucus and Tester support it. GMO's and Monsanto, itself, have been completely banned in several countries, and the evidence is mounting that this is the only way to "fix" this world's worst corporation.
By making hail insurance or the ACA a mandatory federal program, and calling it "insurance," everyone is defrauded. It isn't insurance; it's corporate welfare. Instead of government looking out for the well-being of the people, it enables corporate criminals to exploit them - even mandating and fining people for not participating (How did this ever stand?). Instead (and in both case, above), the government provides nothing for the people - least of all, healthy food produced locally and sustainably to maximize health, wealth, and good government.
Surely this is one of the most perfect extortion rackets ever imagined. Even though most people can easily be shown that we are paying at least twice as much for healthcare as any other country (with taxpayers already providing half the money) with a system that ranks 23rd in the world, or some such thing - behind many "developing" or "emerging market" countries - they seem to think that they are obligated by some sort of coercion of social expectations to partake of it.
This is Max Baucus's real legacy - subsidizing (and even making compulsory! No shame!) private, profit-making insurance companies, and forcing every citizen to buy their fraudulent policies, whether or not we want or need one. As Senate Finance Committee Chair, he was also criminally responsible for Medicare Part D (some $50 billion/year more to the corporate drug cartels), most of the Bankster bailouts (in cahoots with his buddies at Goldman, Sachs and the FED) which many place at $20 trillion or more exposure of US taxpayers to these racketeers.
Of course he was forced to do it, manipulated, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, and otherwise made to sell out Montana and the rest of the country - not to say the planet. We can't hold him accountable because he is a "no-account" - he "counts no costs", as Atticus Finch says in "To Kill a Mockingbird." He's like the bag-man. He uses the power we have given him, with our votes and recognition, to enrich some gangsters. It's a familiar story, and as long as we continue to vote for such people, that is what we will get.
THAT is the real flaw in "democratic" government - the more power that is concentrated in a few hands (or a "strong central government" with permanent wars and domestic police state), the more easily it can be corrupted and made to serve evil purposes.
Never forget - we spend more on weapons, prisons, and the police state apparatus than most other countries, combined. (NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, etc. Only the Secret Service (and regular military, as well as state militias) is constitutional, and their powers are strictly limited). We must hold those "Representatives" and "Senators" responsible for the many calamities we face. They were informed, warned, cajoled, and pleaded to all the way.
And what have they advocated and supported with their (our) sacred votes? More military spending, more wars, more attacks on civilians and allied countries. More drugs, more corporate domination of the world. More surveillance, more prisons, more torture and assassinations.
Fewer independent farmers. No independent thinking or media. ("Stamp it out, before it gets established.") The reduction of education and health-care standards to the lowest in the world among "developed" countries, while paying far more than any other country. Just look at us. And thank the Bushes, Baucus's, and other "old money" and "noblesse oblige," as well as the professional crooks and liars who make it all possible. The academics, the planners, the strategists, the media stars ("presstitutes, " as Paul Craig Roberts says - I'll stick with "mediawhores"), even the Holy Gurus who rarely say anything wrong, but whose lives and actions are the worst possible example for people wanting to be sane, free, and independent thinkers in an independent economy and culture.
It's the Twilight of the Wine God! Time to sober up. I don't think the Chinese will be fooled.
