Crying in the Wilderness
As an officially retired person, on Social Security and Medicare because of arthritis, I believe it is my duty to get up every morning at dawn and go for a walk. I also believe it is my duty to express my opinion, because I haven’t survived 63 years as of April 26 without gaining some experience. Whether I have learned anything useful in that time is an open question. I will leave it to you, the lonely reader, to decide.
First, I feel obliged to enter an opinion on the subject that is on everyone’s lips and trending on Twitter, namely, Don the Con. Need I say more?
Second, I will say that I get it– the majority of the people in the rural, white, uneducated portion of this country are all for Don. Why? Because of propaganda, partly Russian propaganda, and nothing else.
Third, I will say that although I fortunately live in a blue state (in a depressed red county), I understand that the voters in this state are not much more educated than those in the red states. They just didn’t get as much propaganda because the Republicans didn’t bother to waste their money on a solidly blue state that happens to be minority white. They didn’t even bother to saturate my county, a red county, with propaganda because they knew it wouldn’t matter in a blue state.
As a long-term issue, however, I believe that Democrats need a strategy. They must first adopt the exact same methods (those used by Cambridge Analytica) and tailor their campaigns to get the most effective microtargeting of propaganda. And they must have good propaganda, 30-second spots that are punchy, truthful, and put the Democrats in a good light with the Republicans as the (not so terrible) villains.
The most long-term strategy, however, is a what-if: what if the Republicans manage to call a Constitutional Convention? They are only a couple of states short of having the votes already. If so, the Democrats must be prepared with a plan to demand new elections prior to the convention, based on new rules that emphasize one-man, one-vote, no gerrymandering, and universal participation. It is essential that we have 100% of the people voting in the convention– the 50% participation rate in presidential elections is unacceptable for purely democratic reasons. The Convention must be fully televised with multiple live streams.
Democrats should stand for a platform that includes the retention of virtually all of the original Constitution and allows for a few additions and revisions but essentially no deletions. None of the freedoms in the Bill of Rights can be touched (Sorry, folks, that includes the Second Amendment; the advocates of this one are in the minority, but they are armed, and I don’t think you want to argue with them.) The powers of Congress should be redefined to include matters that involve more than one state (as well as interstate commerce). An Inspector General and inspector’s office should be included in every department. Whistleblowers should be constitutionally protected. Adequate but not excessive regulation, checks and balances, should be understood to be the price for allowing capitalism as a monetary system (remember that our original constitution makes no mention of capitalism.) A progressive income tax should be enshrined in the Constitution, to pay for all those things that everyone depends on, and to substitute for regressive sales taxes and property taxes at the state level. Research and science have to have preservation by Constitutional wording (remember that God is not mentioned in the Constitution and we should resist all attempts to add His name as a sop to religious conservatives who will use it to drive a wedge through our society.)
These are things that an old man thinks about for the future. Oh yeah, and unions need support too, because they vote. Democrats must always support the majority of the people while preserving the civil rights of the minority. Republicans can say that they hold better opinions than Democrats, but if they’re truthfully in the minority (the way Don the Con is, by 3 million legitimate votes), they’re going to have to compromise on Democratic terms.
By the way, Don the Con has fulfilled one of his promises. He has set up a committee to investigate voter fraud, led by an advocate of strict Voter ID’s. Let’s see if they really investigate, and if they do, what they will turn up. Attorney General Sessions has tried this before, on a state level as a prosecutor, and he turned up a few prosecutions –all of black people– that were all shot down by juries. Doesn’t reality suck, Mr. Sessions?
This comment appeared in the New York Times attached to an editorial about Russian connections already known: (the sale of the Palm Beach mansion at a 171% profit in 2008 is especially noteworthy, because the sale occurred during a real estate crash known as the Great Recession. In addition, Don the Con’s positive comments about Russia date back to this time.)
David Parsons
San Francisco CA
Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for almost $95 million in 2008, right in the middle of a global real estate and financial crisis.
The transaction made headlines because he paid almost $60 million more than Trump had, a return of 171% in just 4 years.
Dmitry Rybolovlev is the largest shareholder of the Bank of Cyprus, the same bank Paul Manafort used to bank his 12.7 million slush fund from Putin.
Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross bought into the bank 3 years ago and was the Vice Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.
In 2015 Ross sold the bank’s Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetisyan, who had ties to both the Russian president and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank.
At the time, Sberbank was under US and EU sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
After the election, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, met with the CEO of Russia’s state-owned Vnesheconombank in December 2016 to obtain financing for his building 666 5th Avenue.
Follow the money, follow the cyber-hacking, follow the disinformation.
For the President to fire the Head of the independent FBI during the middle of his investigation is a Constitutional crisis.
KM
SF, CA
Conservatives have been conducting a slow motion “coup d’etat” over the past 30 years. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. Judicial manipulation. Propaganda programs to misinform and confuse large swaths of the voting public. The removal of Comey in the midst of of crucial investigation of the President and his enablers is one more step towards the inevitable: the perversion and ultimate destruction of democracy in the US leading to permanent conservative control of the country. This will not end well.
This is just thrown together off the top of my head, based on a thought I had while drinking tea on the porch.
The eventual subject of this essay is already obvious, but I will digress a bit if you will allow me.
Historically, there have been several instances of mental or physical/mental illness that adversely affected the operation of the Executive Branch of our government.
Arbitrarily starting at a hundred years ago, we have the example of Woodrow Wilson, a vastly learned and thoughtful man, who kept us out of WW I as long as possible so that we would have time to prepare. The result was a spectacular victory spearheaded by our bravest young men, the end of a war that cost at least 11 million soldiers and 7 million civilians their lives (Google.) Unfortunately, after the war and while touring the country to push a fatally flawed treaty in a hopeless attempt to get the Senate to agree to join the League of Nations Wilson suffered a disabling stroke that left him helpless for the rest of his presidency. The stroke was dated October 2, 1919, although Wilson had numerous “mini-strokes” during September. Wilson continued in office until March 20, 1921.
Wilson’s wife, a much younger woman who had taken over after his first wife died, took over the exercise of the executive power to the extent that she was able, with the assistance of Colonel House. For the next year and a half, Wilson’s illness was hidden from the press and the public. Incredibly, Wilson thought he still had the vigor to serve a third term (which was legal in those days.) News of the president’s stroke began to leak to the papers in February of 1920. At that time, there was no legal mechanism to “retire” a president who had suffered a disabling illness but was till alive– and who refused to admit that he was, in fact, disabled. The 25th Amendment, which provided clearer legal guidance, was not ratified until 1967.
President John F. Kennedy had Addison’s Disease and had to take replacement doses of cortisone to substitute for his body’s inability to produce this essential hormone. Cortisone, especially in high doses, can cause psychotic symptoms, but there is no evidence that occurred in Kennedy’s case. Instead, the more popular drugs of the time such as dextroamphetamine, barbituates, and other wonder drugs did un-noticed damage to his decision-making ability. He was relatively young, however, and there is no evidence of psychic disturbance.
President Johnson, on the other hand, became increasingly paranoid during the latter part of his second term. He was known to carry lists of people he felt were “against him.” He also had, on paper, inaccurate or simply false data about the course of the war that he thought represented the true state of affairs. It is fortunate for the country that he gave up and announced on national television that he was not running for another term
President Nixon is famous for his drunken late-night reveries in which he spun out his paranoid fantasies to trusted staff members. From the time that Nixon fired his special prosecutor to the time he resigned, the executive office was simply paralyzed. Nixon wandered about the White House late at night, drinking and delusional. Shortly after he resigned, he suffered a life-threatening illness (phlebitis) partly due to his alcoholism and inactivity. He never expressed any contrition or even admitted that he had committed a criminal act, and only apologized (after he was pardoned) for “not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate…”
Our current president, unlike any previous cases, was already showing florid signs of mental disorder even before he was elected. A debate has grown up among mental health professionals over whether it is appropriate to actually come out and say that Don the Con is sick. There is rule, called the Goldwater Rule, which was instituted among almost all mental health professional associations after the election of 1964, in which there was public speculation by some psychiatrists that Goldwater was “megalomaniac”, “paranoid”, “grossly psychotic”, and so on. The psychiatrists were responding to a poll mailed to them by a muckraking journalist, Ralph Ginzburg, who later lost a libel suit by Goldwater– and had to pay the equivalent of half a million dollars in today’s money.
Because of the potential for “libel” and more importantly, to protect the patient’s privacy, the rule requires a mental health professional to personally examine a patient and get their express consent before publicly making any statements about that patient’s mental health or diagnosis. Matters of general psychiatric interest to the public can be freely discussed, but one cannot speculate about a specific person’s mental health without examining them.
Unfortunately, this rule falls afoul of two other rules. The first over-riding rule is the duty to warn. This rule requires a mental health professional to warn potential victims of a dangerous patient if they have been informed of a threat or serious dangerous situations. The usual scenario in which this rule comes in play is when a patient reveals in the course of therapy that they have violent intentions towards another person that the therapist knows. In this case, the threat is that Don the Con will cause the deaths of thousands of Americans by taking away their health insurance. There are other threats that he has made, but this is probably the most urgent.
The second over-riding rule is more complex. It relates to the fact that Don the Con lies with such apparent facility. This makes it necessary to interview or at least read the assessments of others who, we hope, will be more truthful about what he intends. In addition, it is also informative to consider Don the Con’s past behavior as it has been recorded in the news media and by eyewitnesses. Thus, the rule makes it essential to consult other sources rather than examining him directly.
Therefore, it is ethically appropriate to warn Don the Con’s potential victims (and there are many) of his diagnosis and the extent of his dangerousness to them. Thus, making statements in a newspaper article about Don the Con are permissible, if they are qualified and do not simply repeat the obvious extent of paranoia, delusions, and narcissistic orientation– these signs are almost universal among politicians (although they are more extreme in this case) and do not readily translate into public disapproval. What matters are his sociopathic behaviors and his threatening speech about those whom he perceives to be enemies. It is not just the petty insults– it is the threats to use the powers of government to oppress those whom he believes to have disapproved of him.
Thus, we must state clearly that when Don the Con makes threats to use his presidential powers in unconstitutional ways this is unacceptable regardless of his mental health or lack of it. Combined with his self-dealing and pervasive corruption, it is more than enough to justify impeachment, and after removal from office, criminal prosecution. The twenty-five million dollar fine imposed on Don the Con in the Trump University case is not enough to make clear to him that he is violating the norms of society. Sending him to jail and confiscating his wealth are the only fit remedies for his behavior.
This quote from Warren Buffet’s annual meeting with investors in his company Berkshire Hathaway, sums it all up as reported by the NYT:
He also said rising health care costs, rather than high taxes, were the biggest drag on American businesses.
“Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness,” he said.
What he means is that American business is less competitive than in other countries because health care costs in the US are twice as high as in other industrialized countries. Costs are too high because of the excessive power and political influence of insurance companies and drug companies, and to some extent the American Medical Association and hospital associations. Insurance companies add 30% to costs simply by dividing people up and determining who is eligible for what coverage– a cost that universal health care systems simply don’t have to pay. Brand-name drug companies push prices up by their stranglehold on the generic drug industry. And so on.
In his meeting, which he held as usual in Omaha and which attracted thousands of investors as usual, he condemned the Republican health insurance bill as a “giveaway to wealthy individuals like himself.” Buffet is, of course, a Democrat, and he was a major supporter of Barack Obama.
It’s likely that Warren Buffet dispensed other, equally valuable advice, but his talk (with his partner Charles Munger) lasted 6-1/2 hours, so it would be difficult to digest the entire transcript. Since Buffet is 86 and Munger is 93, they have designated successors to carry on after them, but Buffet says he plans to keep going as long as he can.
By now, everyone has heard that Don the Con has celebrated a great victory: passing a bill in the House that will destroy the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. This bill simultaneously eliminates the 3.8% tax on the wealthy that pays for the insurance subsidies of poor people, eliminates the requirement to buy insurance, destroys the minimum coverage requirements, and defunds Planned Parenthood (the program upon which 2.4 million poor women depend for gynecological care, not for abortions (for which they have to pay cash.))
Don’s supporters (the wealthy) are happy because it eliminates a small tax which annoyed them. Don’s supporters (poor and foolish people) are happy because it eliminates the requirement to buy insurance, which sounded to them like government coercion (it is, but in a good way.) Don’s supporters (religious fanatics) are happy because it defunds Planned Parenthood’s gyne care for poor people.
The majority of people, who are not Don supporters, will be deeply hurt by this bill if it passes the Senate. The pressure on a few wavering Republican senators will be intense, relentless, and possibly unstoppable. Anyone who, in his heart of hearts, thinks that taking health insurance away from 24 million (or more) Americans is a bad idea because it hurts people, shouldn’t be a Republican anyway.
Don the Con has been lying his face off to cover up the truly misanthropic contents of this bill. He keeps saying that it will lower premiums and provide insurance to more people for less money. Obviously he has not read the bill nor has he read any of the studies already done by the General Accounting Office of the previous bill. The new bill, which was pushed through too fast to allow the GAO to examine, doubles down on the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. The Republicans repeatedly claimed that the Affordable Care Act was “rushed” through Congress before they had a chance to destroy it; now they are moving so fast on “repealing Obamacare” that the GAO hasn’t even had time to look at it.
The last hope of the 24 million poor people who are going to lose their health care is that the Senate will reject this bill.
Here’s a comment, with a critical point on the definition of “insurance”, on the New York Times editorial about the bill:
Doctor A
Canada
People will continue to be confused as long as every part of this is referred to as “insurance”
Insurance involves risk: a certain probability of getting a problem (disease, house fire, car accident, premature death etc) multiplied by the price of getting it. The sum of all those risks multiplied by price is what you pay in premiums for insurance (plus a bit extra for administration and profit).
But in the case of many pre-existing conditions, it is a near certainty that expenses will exceed premiums. And for healthy people, the reverse is true: premiums will almost always exceed benefits. In these circumstance, one should refer not to insurance, but to publicly funded health care.
Failing to understand this distinction causes many people to intuitively oppose so-called mandatory “insurance”.
According to a post in yesterday’s Guardian, Don the Con has invited Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for a visit to the White House. Duterte is notorious for the 7,000-plus killings committed by vigilantes and police since he took office ten months ago. Most of those killed were claimed to be drug dealers and users. Duterte has also called for the public to kill drug users.
Other new friends of Don’s include Recep Erdogan of Turkey, who just pushed through a referendum giving himself dictatorial powers and abrogating portions of the Constitution. Erdogan is also notorious for his crackdown after a failed coup last year, in which hundreds of thousands of people were jailed or lost their government positions.
Then there’s military dictator al-Sisi of Egypt, who took power in a coup and ousted the first democratically elected leader of Egypt. He is said to have ordered the massacre of over eight hundred Islamist protesters when he gained power. al-Sisi decimated the Muslim Brotherhood, which had won a plurality of Egyptian voters.
Don the Con has reached out to the military dictator of Thailand, prime minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha; this man is little known in the West. He took power in a coup in 2014; he has promised elections “soon” but they have been repeatedly delayed. The prime minister is a royalist who has used the country’s laws against criticism of the king to suppress dissent. The police regularly orders the press not to discuss issues it deems inappropriate for “national security” reasons.
In the case of the Philippines, Don the Con has a conflict of interest because his “family brand” is opening a skyscraper in Manila. There are likely to be government considerations that need to be dealt with in the operation of a large building, and favors to the Trump administration are likely to be forthcoming from the Duterte administration. Silence about the human rights record of the Philippines will be rewarded by good deals for Don the Con’s companies.
Yale Psychiatrists Announce Don the Con has a “Dangerous Mental Illness”– US News Media Ignore It.
Here’s another news item that has not been reported in the US: a group of psychiatrists held a conference at Yale and announced that Don the Con is “paranoid and delusional” and not fit to be president. Oddly, this announcement was not covered in any US papers, at least not according to a Google search. Only the Independent and the Daily Mail, British newspapers, reported this on April 21. The absence of any US newspaper’s reporting on this conference is suggestive of “self-censorship” by American news media.
Perhaps the title of the Daily Mail piece explains the lack of American coverage:
“Republicans hit out at ‘unethical’ psychiatrists who claim Donald Trump has a ‘dangerous mental illness'”
Of course, “ethical standards” prohibit a psychiatrist (or any doctor) from making a diagnosis without first having a face-to-face consultation with the patient, but this situation demands more outreach because the “patient” is unlikely to submit to examination. This “ethical standard” is known as the “Goldwater Rule” after psychiatrists came out with a remote diagnosis of presidential candidate Goldwater during the 1964 election season.
However, in this case the psychiatrists involved say that the “Duty to Warn” trumps the “Goldwater Rule”– no pun intended. The “Duty to Warn” states that whenever a doctor perceives a patient to be dangerous to others, he or she is required to warn the potential or actual victims. It seems that Don the Con is extremely dangerous to many people, and the “Duty to Warn” plainly makes it imperative for those who know what is going on with him to tell people.
The Daily Mail article goes into some detail with regard to the ethical issues. One doctor who advocates warning others states that a one-on-one personal interview would be deceptive in this case because Don the Con is very good at hiding his dangerousness when interacting with individuals in person. It is primarily when he speaks to large groups or makes Twitter statements that he reveals his true nature.
So we have an individual who displays certain signs typical of paranoid, delusional, anti-social, and narcissistic personalities– he is not necessarily mentally ill but he is extremely dangerous nonetheless.
Don the Con’s Little-Noticed Appointments
I know I said yesterday that this stuff is making me sick, but when there is no news media coverage, I feel compelled to try to spread the sad tidings. There has been no mainstream news coverage of one of Don the Con’s appointments to a government position created by the 21st Century Cures Act (passed in 2015 with wording here), but I found this in a blog run by mental health activists:
The White House announced this past Friday, April 21st, 2017, that President Donald Trump has, for a pivotal mental health position, appointed a psychiatrist who openly speaks out for involuntary psychiatric drugging of people living outside of institutions, even in their own homes.
. . .
President Trump has appointed Dr. Ellie McCance-Katz for a high-level position created by the 21st Century Cures Act. Dr. McCance-Katz would become the first Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse (SAMHSA) inside the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
In an essay published last year by the Psychiatric Times, Dr. McCance-Katz was highly critical of SAMHSA, especially its sub-agency Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), headed by Paolo Delvecchio, who has long identified himself as an individual who has used psychiatric treatment. Many mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors know Paolo because of his work in this field for decades.
In her essay in Psychiatric Times, Dr. McCance-Katz:
- Endorses federal funding of AOT (or IOC).
- Criticizes SAMHSA for allegedly being critical of psychiatric drugs.
- Challenges the support for “recovery” in mental health, a term used by many consumer/survivors as a rallying point for hope and empowerment.
- Calls for mental health care, which appears to be led by psychiatric drugs, for more than three million Americans.
The blog is called “Mad in America” and the writer of this post was David W. Oaks on April 27, 2017. Mr. Oaks identifies himself as one who was treated for mental illness: “After the mental health system abused David with forced psychiatric drugs and labels of schizophrenia and bipolar, David worked as a psychiatric survivor activist for decades.”
Thus Mr. Oaks has a point of view, and he doesn’t like the idea of forced medication– which frequently involves injections of long-acting neuroleptics that cause weight gain and involuntary twitching. He presents evidence that forced outpatient treatment has failed in a Cochrane efficacy study, as well as other comprehensive analyses. Apparently, this Dr. McCance-Katz favors non-evidence based treatments such as coerced long-term medication– not a pretty sight.
There was a mention of this appointment in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, with the headline “Representative Murphy blasts Trump’s pick for Mental Health Post”– Murphy being a Republican Congressman, who uncharacteristically criticized Don the Con’s appointment. There are also a few mentions of her appointment in blogs such as pscyhnews.org, peteearly.com, and psychiatry.org.
Here’s another mention of the appointment, this time positive, from mentalillnesspolicy.org.
What we have here is an unheralded act by the master of the con– who is distracting everyone with his outrageous tweets and odd behavior when meeting world leaders. Don the Con is doing so many outrageous things that no-one notices the really dangerous changes that he is making.
In case you missed it, refer to this article in New York magazine for a rundown on Don the Con’s outrageous behavior during the last month. I’m sick and tired of scanning the news every day to see what ugly, vicious, racist, nationalist, or just plain stupid thing Don the Con has done today. I tried it for a couple of weeks, and it really made me ill. There are professional journalists who are paid to do this. I don’t see why I should do it for free and get sick into the bargain.
