We have been discussing how mean=spirited and nasty the presidential campaign has already become on both sides. With Republicans called Obama a socialist and a Muslim, Democrats are saying Romney would not have killed Bin Laden . . . and now that he is vampiric.
The new ad, “Steel” describes GS Technologies, a steel mill in Kansas City, Mo., that was bought by Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital. One former mill worker says “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer, a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us.” “Mitt the Job Destroyer” is still better than “Vlad the Impaler” but they seem to be saying that he is both.
The question is how strong the anti-vampire vote is. After all, Obama is no Buffy The Vampire Slayer himself, but then again who is?
Before the Republicans denounce the ad, they should consider that there could be some positive aspects to an undead president for the GOP:
1. They work nights.
2. They truly can take the bite out of crime.
3. They are always taking the pulse of voters.
5. One meeting of the Group of Eight would leave a group of one.
6. The GOP would finally secure the Goth vote.
7. We would finally have a president who is all bite and no bark.
8. Republicans can re-use those “Drill, Baby, Drill” signs.
9. No one is more anti-evolution than a vampire.
10. Perfect for the slogan, “Better Undead than Red.”
Source: Washington Post
@Bron: So your solution is apparently to rely on the kindness of strangers to give up the money you legally owe them because they feel sorry for you.
Which is not a solution; your own philosophy makes that a choice, not a requirement, and what is truly funny is how you think everybody else is out to rip you off: So why would YOU be kind to a stranger.
An actual solution does not depend on whether the people in power LIKE you or not. That allows discrimination and oppression of the people they do NOT like, and the point of government is to eliminate such favoritism and ensure people are treated fairly when it comes to major issues, such as life and death and financial servitude.
The point of government is NOT to give the hospital the gun to legally rob people of their lives and fortunes. That is what YOU advocate, let them charge whatever they want in life and death situations and then arbitrarily discriminate as much as they want in who actually has to pay and who gets their favors and who gets bankrupted. That is truly an appalling, sick philosophy.
Gene H:
Do you understand government tyranny and coercion?
Apparently not.
“That bill will be upheld by a court, and may cause a man to lose his house.”
I have had 20 years of close contact with the medical profession, that may be true that the court upholds the charge but people make payment arrangements all the time to pay off bills like that. And a good amount of the time the medical profession just writes the entire bill off.
A woman we know had a stroke, had no insurance but was taken care of exactly the same as if she had insurance, she even got rehab care. She owed $500,000 and is paying a small amount per month, I am talking less than $100.00. I know our doctors have given us thousands of dollars of free service because the insurance wouldnt cover it because we were out of network.
And our insurance companies [we have had at least 4 different ones over the past 20 years] have all been great and given us just about everything that the doctors have ordered. They have done it graciously and without rancor. In every case they have met their contractual obligations and we are an expensive family.
I have been denied some things which would have helped me but the insurance company is not obligated to provide the exact service I wanted. So I found someone to do it for me. I can tell you the insurance companies are paying way too much for medical services. What the provider charges $175 per hour for and I have had the same service at a hospital which charged $450/hour for I am getting privately for $50/hour.
A piece of equipment which is nothing but an engine block lift which you can purchase from Northern Hydraulics for $450 costs $1,500.00 and the list goes on and on. Batteries which cost $200 at retail are billed to the insurance company at $480.
The problem with the medical care in this country is that someone else pays for the bill. We dont pay near enough out of our own pockets. If we had to pay $50 bucks for a co-pay and more [relative to what we pay now] for medication it would cause 2 things to happen; we would go to the doctor less and the cost of prescription medication would come down due to supply and demand.
And dont get me started on all the scumbag doctors who take advantage of the elderly to feed at the trough of Medicare/Medicaid. It is horrendous what they are doing. They are lining their pockets at the tax payers expense, it is a wealth transfer alright, from my pocket to a another mans pocket all made possible by government.
I am being tyrannized by the nanny state but I have yet to be tyrannized by private industry [except for the Chalupa]. And since there are so many choices available to me, I can switch insurance company, restaurant, car maker, trash service, Internet provider, book seller, grass cutter, architect, doctor, lawyer, baker, etc. any time I want for whatever reason.
Tyranny and coercion indeed, on the part of bad people who use government to further their delusional collective dreams of every man his brother’s keeper and to each according to his needs from each according to his abilities.
Nothing like blaming the victim for the problem and then pronouncing the criminal can fix the problem.
If you have a job, hug a rich person and be thankful he/she didnt give up in the face of government tyranny and coercion.
@Gene: That’s hilarious!
Man, now I miss New Orleans….
Why would lawyers study abroad? Not enough law at home? Better equipment for law-related experimentation?
Tony,
Excellent example and it brings to mind one of the funnier episodes I recall from law school. It was a class on media law and the topic was the then evolving rules on local media ownership. The topic of local cable monopolies came up and the Professor (one of my favorites – I had him for several classes and went on a study abroad program he organized) made the unfortunate mistake of saying the following about the local cable market: “In larger metropolitan areas the problem isn’t so bad because competition arose simply because of the sheer size of the areas when cable was an emergent technology, but in medium and many large cities, there is an effective monopoly on providing cable services which translates into a monopoly on determining content. For example, if you want cable in New Orleans, you pretty much have to play with Cox.” Needless to say, much hilarity ensued. To his credit, I could tell by the look on his face that he knew exactly how badly he had screwed up the instant the words were uttered. Given that only fifteen minutes of class was left and the laughter was no where near coming under control, he wisely called it a day.
Tony, that is the best example of the problem I have seen recently. Well said. Choice is to sign on the line or else. That is not exactly freedom of choice.
I think you are correct Gene.
@Bron: Taco Bell is selling something you do not really need.
If you have a heart attack and spend two nights in a hospital, the bill to you can be $60,000. That is an actual bill for a man with a recent heart attack, two months ago.
That bill will be upheld by a court, and may cause a man to lose his house. That is one form of economic duress. When the choice is a burrito, you can walk away. You can literally stay alive for months on half a cup of Crisco every day. You do not NEED a burrito to stay alive.
What you do need to stay alive is emergency medical care, when you do not have time to bargain, and need to be transported to the NEAREST hospital, pronto, preferably by professionals that are trained to keep you alive until you get there. You do not have time to bargain, and you cannot arrange prices in advance because the world doesn’t WORK that way, no doctor NEEDS your business, because emergency medicine is a seller’s market: People will pay ANYTHING to stay alive, not bleed to death, not lose a limb, not die from a stroke, not die from a heart attack, not die from accidental poisoning, or just NOT DIE. They will agree to pay, they will sign without looking, because the alternative is catastrophe.
And that is when economic duress comes in, when the service, job, or product is catastrophically important. Because when that happens, the market is no longer free. It is no longer bargaining when the alternative is catastrophe or literally death, it is robbery. It is the Mafia style “offer you can’t refuse,” you are the guy in the empty warehouse, handed a pen with a gun to your head, and you sign over everything you have ever worked for, or you die there. How does the movie line go? “In sixty seconds, either your signature will be on that paper, or your brains will.”
That is your “choice” and what is meant by economic distress. Not whether pepperoni on a pizza starts costing fifty cents more.
Hey Bron, I believe someone once sued Taco Bell for serving him a beef burrito when he asked for a bean burrito and he was a vegetarian for religious reasons (cannot remember which religion). It was a real case. And I think it was a pretty big one, too. I think it was a reported case, went up on appeal!
Bron,
Do you even understand the concept of economic tyranny?
Apparently not.
spoken by someone who thinks voluntary associations between 2 consenting adults are coercive.
I have never been tyrannized by Taco Bell, well that isnt exactly true, I did get the runs from a Chalupa one Friday night in high school.
If Taco Bell forced me to buy the Bean Burrito then you might have a point but then that would be a proper function of government-to protect me from a forced Burrito.
The idea that Taco Bell could tyrannize me is laughable. And that damn dog, he is coercive but only if you are David Berkowitz. Do dogs talk to you and make you do things Gene H?
It is very hard for a private company to coerce and tyrannize an individual. That is typically a function of out of control government.
But back to Milgram, the setting was controlled with an authority figure, people were getting paid to participate in an experiment. Were they students or people from the community? Secondarily if you did this at the mall with volunteers who were being paid nothing would you get the same results? Would you get the same results if you gave the teacher the higher shock level.
It is rather interesting that the worst examples of government coercion and tyranny have been perpetrated by governments with centrally controlled economic systems. I would think that is what you might call a clue.
Bron,
Spoken like someone who has no concept of the scope of the term “coercion” or how it relates to the term “tyranny”.
Milgram Experiments on obedience to authority, hmmmm.
You mean like the authority of government?
Government is the one with the gun, not the private sector.
Shano:
Pawn shops screw the poor hard. If you are poor and need money and pawn a ring or a gold coin, you are never going to get it back. They charge huge interest rates and storage fees and you cannot pay the principal off in installments it has to be a lump sum.
So I would say if you are poor and need money just sell the ring or coin out right because you will pay interest in the amount of the object anyway.
I dont know how these people say they are providing a valuable service to the poor with a straight face. Now for a person who has a temporary cash flow problem and can pay it back in a month or 2 it isnt a bad way to go. Better than a bank in cases where you only need a few thousand dollars for a few weeks.
Poor people should stay away from them like the plague or just sell the object outright and be done with it. I guess they fill a need but man the terms are harsh.
It would be interesting to know the other side of the story, how much do they make, what kinds of regulations do they deal with which makes it harder for them to do business, etc.
Aquifers don’t get contaminated by e-coli. The water is filtered by the ground before it gets to the aquifer and the cold water that far down kills the bacteria.
The tax gap in the United States is estimated at $400 billion. That is probably conservative. Why do you think the 99% don’t want to pay their taxes? They’re telling the 1% to piss off. According to Leona Helmsley, “only little people pay taxes.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20358637/ns/business-us_business/t/queen-mean-leona-helmsley-dies/#.T7VmvcVXlkw
@Matt: It is most commonly spelt “fracking,” but it is short for “fracturing.”
@shano: I assumed e-coli is a common contaminant on the grounds that rainwater washes animal (and human camper) feces in the wild into rivers, lakes and aquifers; and septic tanks and outhouses are not always sealed.
I could be wrong about that, I am not an expert on aquifer health, but I know there are tons of wild bird and animal excretions over aquifers, plus more tons of grazing cows, sheep, horses, and pig and chicken excrement. Heck, even fish in the rivers eliminate waste. un-sterilized manure is still a legal fertilizer, to my knowledge.
I assumed any prudent consumption of wild water would employ some filtration or sterilization against waste-borne pathogens.
Tony, while I love to read your most excellent posts, you are wrong about e-coli in aquifers. Once an aquifer is contaminated by e-coli, it is impossible to clean up. Water from wells that are contaminated can cause abortions in pregnant women and outright kill the very young and elderly.
We certainly should stop sucking the blood out of the poor in this nation: http://truth-out.org/news/item/9198-preying-on-the-poor-how-government-and-corporations-use-the-poor-as-piggy-banks
You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.
These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributesabout $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.
http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/fracking-fracing-or-fraccing
Sometimes fraccing (it that’s spelled correctly) causes earthquakes. They’ve been drilling holes through the aquifer from Texas to South Dakota. Do you want that in your drinking water? Of course it’s completely harmless. Just ask T. Boone Pickens.
@Bron: Like putting e-coli in a communal aquifer by spreading tainted fertilizer.
E-coli is common, we can deal with that. But some extremely effective pesticides contain strong chemical carcinogens that are unchanged by disinfectants, and sometimes those pesticides are the only thing known that could save a crop. So let us suppose you use one, and the carcinogens end up in the communal aquifer. Please tell me how, when I realize a year after you infected the communal aquifer that I have cancer, I am supposed to prove that you, specifically, are responsible for the carcinogens in the communal water, AND that those carcinogens specifically are responsible for my cancer, and not something else, like a stray gamma ray from outer space.
By the time the carcinogens are in the water, and the aquifer is ruined, it is too late to prove who is responsible, and even if we could, the damage done is so great you cannot pay for it, even with the rest of your life. An aquifer can serve a million people, will you be paying the cancer medical bills of a million people?
The only practical solution is to prohibit the damage in the first place, by restricting what you are allowed to use on your crops in the first place. That is called “regulation,” and MOST actions of business have ramifications on customers, employees, investors and the environment, well beyond your simplistic mental model that never considers any side-effects of anything, and apparently assumes nobody can cause greater damage than they could ever pay for.