The Irish Widow and the Liberian Fiancé: Ebola, CEO Disease, and the Public Good

Outbreak

The Ebola crisis highlights the absurdity of pretending that a private, for-profit health system can do what a real public healthcare system must.

Remember the deadly-Ebola-like-virus movie where Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo and Morgan Freeman and a whole state-of-the-art medical team, along with a small army (There’s always an army!) swoops in to quarantine the sick, catch the monkey, whip up a vaccine, and save the country?

Keep dreaming. That’s a fantasy. In reality, there is no public healthcare system. There is no serious publicly-funded and publicly-managed infrastructure, institution, or set of resources devoted to healthcare as a public good.

As the Washington Post said: “The hospital that treated Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan had to learn on the fly how to control the deadly virus.” The CDC? It runs a web site and holds press conferences. The medical professionals are all in private hospitals, now mostly folded into large private healthcare conglomerates, that do whatever the MBAs who manage them dictate—which is what the MBAs who manage the private for-profit health insurance companies are willing to pay for. As Rob Urie points out: “Missing from this ‘process’ that now finds Mr. Duncan dead, two nurses who attended him with Ebola themselves, the American health care system revealed as wholly unprepared to deal with what at present seems a moderately communicable disease, is any notion of a public interest.”

Here’s Juan González, talking to Karen Higgins, to co-president of National Nurses United:

The executive director of your union, RoseAnn DeMoro …, specifically raised the fact the CDC has no control over these individual hospitals, that in the privatized hospital system that we operate in here in the United States, the CDC can only offer guidelines, and it’s up to individual hospitals whether they’re going to enforce those guidelines, practice those guidelines. And, in fact, the CDC said yesterday…that they have no plans to investigate what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian, that that’s the responsibility of the local Department of Health in Texas. 

Karen Higgins: I think, you know—unfortunately, I think she’s right, as far as what powers the CDC has. … And what happens is then CDC makes recommendations, guidelines, and then it falls apart, because what you do with it as an individual hospital, because every hospital is pretty much individual, is where it starts to fall apart.

The New Privateers:Civil Forfeiture, Police Piracy, and the Third-Worldization of America

I know you're already mad about various injustices, but when you read Sarah Stillman’s recent New Yorker article, “Taken,” your blood will boil. It’s about the laws and practices – developed over the last 15-20 years as part of the "war on drugs" and the general encroachment of police-state tactics – regarding what is called “civil forfeiture.” And it’s about a lot more than that.

Forfeiture laws are touted as effective tools for destroying the empires of crime lords by seizing all the ill-gotten gains of their criminal activity. Criminal forfeiture laws – which are applied following conviction of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, before a judge, with legal representation and such – can, used reasonably (the problems here are another issue), provide for just that.  Civil forfeiture, on the other hand, is based on the legal theory that property does not have the rights of a person, and that therefore actions against property can be taken on the basis of mere suspicion or “probable cause,” with no need to prove a crime. So the cases will have goofy names like, “United States v. One Pearl Necklace.” Another feature of the pre-crime police-state paradigm, civil forfeiture laws make suspicious (property) presumptively criminal (activity), without having to prove any actual, you know, crime. They authorize the police to steal your cash, car, jewelry, home, whatever, without even asserting that a crime has been committed.

[Do you hear the echoes in how suspicion of terrorism becomes terrorism itself? In how I don’t have to prove American citizens Awlaki, father and son, are “terrorists” (whatever that is) before drone-killing them, because my suspicion that they might be is good enough? (We won’t even get into how suspicion=guilt regarding other little stuff, like, oh, chemical weapons.) Do you see how years of putting up with pre-crime tactics for the “war on drugs” has been training in compliance for the more radical presumptive-guilt tactics of the “war on terror”? Constantly selling “war”-inflected frameworks of legal exceptionalism, the state has used various opportunistic bogeymen – “communists,” “drug dealers,” “pedophiles,” terrorists” (Who cares about them?) – to lure citizens into accepting a creeping radical authoritarianism.  Preemptive forfeiture today, preemptive detention tomorrow too.]

The insidious wrinkle in all this, which makes civil forfeiture not only creepily authoritarian but also painfully, infuriatingly, predatory, is that state and federal civil-forfeiture laws have allowed the police forces and prosecutors who seize “suspicious” property to keep all of it, and, in many cases, to use it any way they see fit, including personal perks and bonuses. As Stillman points out, we’re talking everything from “Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations,…credit-card late fees, [and] poultry-festival supplies,” to “a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation…. important to [the District Attorney’s] reelection,“ to “a twenty-one-thousand-dollar drug-prevention beach party,” to “a city marshal’s ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus” and another officer’s “total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.”  Stillman reports: “In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary.” In other words, the real practice of civil forfeiture has become a lucrative system of “policing for profit,” a system that has literally legalized highway robbery and turned police into pirates.