<https://www.michiganlottery.com/games/212-lucky-7s-tripler>
Winners and losers which one am I,
Is it the same under the sky?
Black motorcycles and the will to survive
Losers and winners low and high
Winners and losers which one am I,
Is it the same under the sky?
Black motorcycles and the will to survive
Losers and winners low and high
Iggy Pop, "Winners & Losers"
<i.>
<i.>
My health insurance experience is over, at least for now. After nearly two years, the state of Michigan has pulled the plug, apparently because I make way too much money for their blood to support it. In simple terms, I exceeded the official income cutoff limits that allowed me to keep my coverage, which officially expired on June 1.
If you saw my tax return from last year, you'd realize that the assumption doesn't hold water. Once my deductions kicked in, I cleared just over $11,000, hardly a superfluous amount by any standard. Like most people right now, I scrimp and skimp wherever I can, however I can, to make the math work out from week to week, to varying degrees of success.
But none of these rhetorical talking points can paper over the anxiety I feel about going without insurance, yet again, after a 10-year drought. It's a symptom of how public agencies operate -- once your head finally inches above water, their automatic reflex is to shove it back down, either by cutting back on something (like your food allowance), or yanking it completely (sorry, kid, no more healthcare for now).
But wait, there's a silver lining, I tell myself. I'm safe from those damned work requirements that they're slapping on Medicaid recipients. At least for now.
For all the yammering our political class does about those "bums on welfare," they have yet to get the memo as I've laid it out it here. Why should I have to choose between earning more money, or covering my meds? Why should women have to choose between working some crappy $8-10 an hour job, or risk losing benefits, because they can't afford daycare, or a car that runs?
A couple of years ago, I attended a public forum with our state legislators, where several nursing home operators bemoaned their struggles to find (and keep) aides. They wondered how they'd make any headway in a system that "incentivizes people not to work," as one employer put it. Folks, I told myself, there's an old saying here: You get what you pay for.
For all too many people, the die was cast long ago. American life increasingly resembles a Stability Lottery. Those who get some high-powered job, and keep it -- in some well-paying sector, like big tech, finance, government, or healthcare -- experience life's richest pageant, with the battleship-sized benefits, cars, and homes to prove it. Hovering just a notch or two under the oft-criticized 1% of our society, these are the fortunate few, whose lives will largely without the peaks and valley that await the rest of us.
I got a vivid reminder of this reality while embarking on a late night search to see what happened to several high school classmates. Guess what? This one became a doctor, that one became a CFO and visiting professor of accounting. After three or four instances, I got so annoyed, I stopped. I haven't gone to any reunions before, and I sure as hell don't plan on going now.
Oh, yeah, what about the rest? For further reference, crank up "What Do I Get?", via The Buzzcocks, and you'll get the drift quickly enough: "For you things seem to turn out right/I wish they'd only happen to me instead/What do I get, oh-oh, what do I get?/What do I get, oh-oh/What do I get?"
While Pete Shelley and his merry men were confronting fractured romance here, it's not hard to apply the above lines to the punishment that's constantly dished out to the great majority -- a life battered by benefit cuts, endless outsourcing, flat wages, food insecurity, housing shortages, lack of healthcare, and mind-numbing McJobs that can go belly up any time. No future for you indeed, eh? You didn't win The Stability Lottery, so that's all you get. Your shop didn't come in, simple as that. "Againsters" need not apply.
But wait, there's a silver lining, I tell myself. I'm safe from those damned work requirements that they're slapping on Medicaid recipients. At least for now.
For all the yammering our political class does about those "bums on welfare," they have yet to get the memo as I've laid it out it here. Why should I have to choose between earning more money, or covering my meds? Why should women have to choose between working some crappy $8-10 an hour job, or risk losing benefits, because they can't afford daycare, or a car that runs?
A couple of years ago, I attended a public forum with our state legislators, where several nursing home operators bemoaned their struggles to find (and keep) aides. They wondered how they'd make any headway in a system that "incentivizes people not to work," as one employer put it. Folks, I told myself, there's an old saying here: You get what you pay for.
For all too many people, the die was cast long ago. American life increasingly resembles a Stability Lottery. Those who get some high-powered job, and keep it -- in some well-paying sector, like big tech, finance, government, or healthcare -- experience life's richest pageant, with the battleship-sized benefits, cars, and homes to prove it. Hovering just a notch or two under the oft-criticized 1% of our society, these are the fortunate few, whose lives will largely without the peaks and valley that await the rest of us.
I got a vivid reminder of this reality while embarking on a late night search to see what happened to several high school classmates. Guess what? This one became a doctor, that one became a CFO and visiting professor of accounting. After three or four instances, I got so annoyed, I stopped. I haven't gone to any reunions before, and I sure as hell don't plan on going now.
Oh, yeah, what about the rest? For further reference, crank up "What Do I Get?", via The Buzzcocks, and you'll get the drift quickly enough: "For you things seem to turn out right/I wish they'd only happen to me instead/What do I get, oh-oh, what do I get?/What do I get, oh-oh/What do I get?"
While Pete Shelley and his merry men were confronting fractured romance here, it's not hard to apply the above lines to the punishment that's constantly dished out to the great majority -- a life battered by benefit cuts, endless outsourcing, flat wages, food insecurity, housing shortages, lack of healthcare, and mind-numbing McJobs that can go belly up any time. No future for you indeed, eh? You didn't win The Stability Lottery, so that's all you get. Your shop didn't come in, simple as that. "Againsters" need not apply.
No
Santa Claus no happy elves
In
this smoking gun existence
It
gets harder to unwind
I'll
just eat my breakfast
Iggy Pop, "Winners & Losers"
<ii.>
For the past four months now, I've struggled to put my revulsion over Joe Biden's candidacy into words. Initially, I just wanted to build on the rhetorical groundwork that I've laid out in previous broadsides, like "A Cure For Political Codependency (The Hillary-Bernie Endgame)," and "What Accepting The Lesser Of Two Evils Got Me," hit cut, print, and call it a day.
Ironically, that task is proving more difficult than I'd anticipated, simply because of all the unforced errors that the so-called Democratic frontrunner is already racking up. Whether it's romanticizing the joys of working with hardcore racist boil weevils -- like the late Senators Herman Talmadge, and James Eastland, who called blacks "an inferior race" -- or telling the deep-pocketed donor classes how great they really are, straight after speaking at a poor people's march (!), Biden's reputation as The Gaffe Machine remains proudly and perversely intact. If he didn't exist, comedians would have to invent him ("No one's standard of living will change," indeed).
Naturally, all these foot in mouth disease acrobatics have left Biden's neoliberal backers wringing their hands aloud, and sweating a few more bullets than usual. For those of us who witnessed Biden's train wreck campaigns of 1988 and 2008, it's par for the course. We nod our heads at one another, and wink: See? Yup. Uh-huh. He just stepped into it again. Deeper this time. As hardened Biden watchers, we form a peculiar brotherhood, indeed.
Still, what makes great late night comedy fodder isn't so great for the nation. But I've finally figured out what turns my stomach most about Biden, as he sleepwalks from gaffe to gaffe, and that's the brittle defensiveness he often exhibits. We saw that tendency yet again this weekend, when he finally acknowledged that gushing like a teenage boy about rolling up his sleeves with Eastland and Talmadge wasn't the most adept way of pushing out the nostalgic bipartisan narrative that forms the centerpiece of his campaign.
Even so, Biden being Biden, he couldn't apologize without slipping in a belligerent reminder about his civil rights bona fides, that didn't stop President Obama from running with him: "I was vetted by him and selected by him. I will take his judgment of my record, my character, and my ability to handle the job over anyone else's."
As Biden noted, the U.S. Senate that he joined in 1972 looked (and felt) like a different universe. That's a fair point, at first glance. However, in celebrating wastes of sperm and egg like Eastland and Talmadge as Bipartisan Exhibits A and B, Biden left the barn door open for rivals like Kamala Harris to take him down a peg, as she did so effectively during last month's Democratic debate.
For those who want to write in, and issue dire warnings against valuing purity over power, I get it -- so don't bother. Nobody wants to miss an opportunity to vote against the Grifter In Chief next year. But we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger goals that we're trying to advance.
As I've already told a few Biden backers, I understand how the political environment doesn't always favor big ideas. Timing is everything: that's why heavy rock bands learned to love touring Europe and Japan during the late '70s, when disco music and rolling mirror balls mesmerized the American masses.
Even so, now that ideas like universal health coverage -- and the potential dismantling of student debt -- are finally back on the table, we shouldn't let up on our demands that the political classes do something to make life better for the majority who sweat and strain at the bit every day. That's why we should pursue a multi-pronged approach at the state, federal and local levels.
Winning the Presidency might feel great, especially after the Great Electoral College Screwover of 2016. However, it will only feel like a consolation prize if the Republicans keep the U.S. Senate, so that Mitch McConnell can finish his pet project of getting enough right-wing judicial activists in place to transform America into apartheid-era South Africa, where a tyrannical minority can enforce its will indefinitely, unchecked by such nettlesome inconveniences as public pushback.
But I do hope, however faintly, that Biden can actually grow beyond the weary pragmatism that he espouses, between the lines: Hey, kid, it ain't a perfect world. The best we can do is rerun 2008 -- free trade for the masses, "I feel your pain, so here's a plan" for the losers. it's a game of inches. We settle for what we can get.
Yet this narrative, coupled with the "lesser evil" logic, also makes extreme politics more attractive to people, and hence, more likely to capture their imaginations. That's surely what leaders like Heinrich Brüning discovered during the early 1930s, as Germany's Weimar Republic stumbled into its final death spiral, you can only tell people to keep starving for so long, because their rainbow is just around the corner. And we all know how well that turned out, don't we? --The Reckoner
Ironically, that task is proving more difficult than I'd anticipated, simply because of all the unforced errors that the so-called Democratic frontrunner is already racking up. Whether it's romanticizing the joys of working with hardcore racist boil weevils -- like the late Senators Herman Talmadge, and James Eastland, who called blacks "an inferior race" -- or telling the deep-pocketed donor classes how great they really are, straight after speaking at a poor people's march (!), Biden's reputation as The Gaffe Machine remains proudly and perversely intact. If he didn't exist, comedians would have to invent him ("No one's standard of living will change," indeed).
Naturally, all these foot in mouth disease acrobatics have left Biden's neoliberal backers wringing their hands aloud, and sweating a few more bullets than usual. For those of us who witnessed Biden's train wreck campaigns of 1988 and 2008, it's par for the course. We nod our heads at one another, and wink: See? Yup. Uh-huh. He just stepped into it again. Deeper this time. As hardened Biden watchers, we form a peculiar brotherhood, indeed.
Still, what makes great late night comedy fodder isn't so great for the nation. But I've finally figured out what turns my stomach most about Biden, as he sleepwalks from gaffe to gaffe, and that's the brittle defensiveness he often exhibits. We saw that tendency yet again this weekend, when he finally acknowledged that gushing like a teenage boy about rolling up his sleeves with Eastland and Talmadge wasn't the most adept way of pushing out the nostalgic bipartisan narrative that forms the centerpiece of his campaign.
Even so, Biden being Biden, he couldn't apologize without slipping in a belligerent reminder about his civil rights bona fides, that didn't stop President Obama from running with him: "I was vetted by him and selected by him. I will take his judgment of my record, my character, and my ability to handle the job over anyone else's."
As Biden noted, the U.S. Senate that he joined in 1972 looked (and felt) like a different universe. That's a fair point, at first glance. However, in celebrating wastes of sperm and egg like Eastland and Talmadge as Bipartisan Exhibits A and B, Biden left the barn door open for rivals like Kamala Harris to take him down a peg, as she did so effectively during last month's Democratic debate.
For those who want to write in, and issue dire warnings against valuing purity over power, I get it -- so don't bother. Nobody wants to miss an opportunity to vote against the Grifter In Chief next year. But we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger goals that we're trying to advance.
As I've already told a few Biden backers, I understand how the political environment doesn't always favor big ideas. Timing is everything: that's why heavy rock bands learned to love touring Europe and Japan during the late '70s, when disco music and rolling mirror balls mesmerized the American masses.
Even so, now that ideas like universal health coverage -- and the potential dismantling of student debt -- are finally back on the table, we shouldn't let up on our demands that the political classes do something to make life better for the majority who sweat and strain at the bit every day. That's why we should pursue a multi-pronged approach at the state, federal and local levels.
Winning the Presidency might feel great, especially after the Great Electoral College Screwover of 2016. However, it will only feel like a consolation prize if the Republicans keep the U.S. Senate, so that Mitch McConnell can finish his pet project of getting enough right-wing judicial activists in place to transform America into apartheid-era South Africa, where a tyrannical minority can enforce its will indefinitely, unchecked by such nettlesome inconveniences as public pushback.
But I do hope, however faintly, that Biden can actually grow beyond the weary pragmatism that he espouses, between the lines: Hey, kid, it ain't a perfect world. The best we can do is rerun 2008 -- free trade for the masses, "I feel your pain, so here's a plan" for the losers. it's a game of inches. We settle for what we can get.
Yet this narrative, coupled with the "lesser evil" logic, also makes extreme politics more attractive to people, and hence, more likely to capture their imaginations. That's surely what leaders like Heinrich Brüning discovered during the early 1930s, as Germany's Weimar Republic stumbled into its final death spiral, you can only tell people to keep starving for so long, because their rainbow is just around the corner. And we all know how well that turned out, don't we? --The Reckoner
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