Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a groundbreaking paper back in the 1960s about the alleged weaknesses of often female-headed African-American families. He described a culture of loose morals and indulgent self-destructive behavior which the right successfully demagogued into a decades long, thinly veiled racist attack on government welfare programs. The common wisdom was that welfare institutionalized and rewarded failure leading to an immoral social order. Throughout the period there were sustained conservative attacks on those who defended such programs and participated in the vast cultural transformation of the era, characterizing these behaviors as "moral depravity."
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So, while marriage and kids are still popular enough that the allegedly decadent gay community clamors for the right to have a normal bourgeois family (and ironically are being fought every step of the way by those who claim to be concerned about family's demise!), we hear nothing from the culture warriors about this particular kind of moral depravity:
One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.
Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed ...
The bonuses were disclosed at an arbitration hearing in a lawsuit brought by Patsy Bates, a Gardena hairdresser whose coverage was rescinded by Health Net in the middle of chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer.
Every day in the news we have horror stories about average Americans who happen to get sick and are forced to deal with a byzantine health care system designed to prevent them, if at all possible, from getting the care they need, while conservative presidential candidates declare:
"I don't like mandating health care. I don't like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country -- the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We've got to let people make choices. We've got to let them take the risk-do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because ultimately, if they don't, well, then, they may not be taken care of."
Unsurprisingly, we also have the decadent business elite, awash in cash and privilege during this second gilded age, being lavishly rewarded time after time for risky behavior. People like Merril Lynch's Stanley O'Neill who, after being fired for overseeing the loss of 8 billion dollars the company invested in sub-prime loans, was forced to settle for a mere 160 million dollar golden parachute -- on top of his 48 million dollar salary.
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Meanwhile, you have the e. coli conservatives making huge profits selling lead toys to your kids (when they're not accidentally dosing them with date rape drugs), enabling mine-owners to take shortcuts that end up killing their workers, and simply pretending that threats such a global warming don't exist. The stories of war profiteering in Iraq are so appalling and grotesque that it's almost impossible to absorb. And then, of course, there's is torture.
Read the full article here:
http://www.alternet.org/story/68378/?page=entire
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