This Can't Be Happening!

This is the final part of a series on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s fight for appropriate health care for himself and for over 2 million prison inmates across the country. (Click here for Part I, here for Part II, or here for Part IIIa)

In Abu-Jamal’s case, most of the legal and media discussion has focused on the denial of hepatitis treatment to him and inmates across the country. And while that alone is malpractice, what is even more appalling was the failure to diagnose and then treat his diabetes. Diabetes care is a cornerstone of basic healthcare. Abu-Jamal’s case illustrates that inmates are denied not only expensive medical treatments but also widely available, inexpensive treatments. Moreover, it demonstrates a failure of correctional healthcare systems to provide even the most basic health care for its patients.

Abu-Jamal, nearly a year ago tested positive for diabetes while imprisoned, and yet his case was intentionally left untreated. In his medical records, blood tests taken on March 8, 2015 showed a glucose level of 419, well exceeding the diabetic level of 200.

There are two major forms of Diabetes. Type 1 Diabetes is the kind that frequently presents young in life. While it is very common for this form of diabetes to be initially diagnosed in a crisis setting (coma, severe dehydration, electrolyte disturbances), Type 2 Diabetes, the form that typically starts in adulthood and the form that Abu-Jamal has, very rarely gets to that point because it develops more slowly and is discovered early before it ever reaches that level of severity.

In his chart, someone circled the blood sugar value and wrote by it “on steroids.” What this note suggests is that the provider felt that since there was an explanation for his high blood sugar, there was no need to treat it. That lack of action is equivalent to looking at a patient whose pneumonia is so severe that they need a breathing machine and then saying, “We know why they’re not breathing well. They have pneumonia.” Just because you know the cause of a finding doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be treated.

Lab results from Abu-Jamal's medical record

Standard of care for a blood sugar that high is to immediately give medication to lower it, or at least monitor three times a day. One of the main medications for the treatment of diabetes is metformin. It costs $4 a month. But because prison doctors didn’t provide any treatment, his sugars climbed to levels so toxic that his brain stopped functioning and he went into a diabetic coma.

Countrywide epidemic of neglectful healthcare

Sadly, Abu-Jamal’s healthcare is not an exception. It’s an example of the poor healthcare that is rampant in prisons and jails across the country. Cases of this felonious level of healthcare are so numerous that it would be impossible to list them in their entirety. However a few examples illustrate the severity of the negligence.

Someone should have warned tHillary Clinton and the goon squad at the Democratic National Committee that old-fashioned red-baiting isn’t going to cut it in today’s United States. It’s not the 1950s anymore and the Soviet Union and Comtern are ancient history.

With the latest batch of polls showing Bernie Sanders, in the wake of his feisty showing in Sunday’s debate against Clinton in Charleston, SC, gaining on her in both early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and nationally, the Clinton campaign and the leadership in the Democratic Party seem to have lost both their minds and whatever principles they may have had.

According to one poll, by CNN/WMUR, conducted just days after the debate, Sanders is now ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire by a blow-out 60% to 33%. That’s nearly triple the margin the prior CNN/WMUR poll found in December when the numbers were Sanders 50% and Clinton 40%.

Meanwhile, the latest CNN/ORC Iowa poll, just released Friday, shows Sanders leading Clinton among likely caucus-goers in that state by 8 percentage points 51% to 43%. That is a big turnaround from the same poll done in December, which showed Clinton ahead 54% to 36% for Sanders. Even if there are other polls showing Clinton still marginally ahead in Iowa, the trend has been clear of voters moving from Clinton to Sanders, especially over the past two weeks.

Hence the Clinton campaign’s panicky response, which has been to start having surrogates go out and paint Sanders as a “red.”

Her campaign in trouble in Iowa and New Hampshire, and her poll numbers falling nationally, Hillary has turned to Sen. McCarthy for inspiration (Joe, not Gene)
 

They don’t actually call him a commie, but they do the next closest thing, warning that if Sanders were to win the Democratic nomination, he would then be attacked by whoever is the Republican nominee, who would “surely” call him a communist.

How, actually, does this differ from Hillary herself just calling him a commie? Well, it doesn’t. Her campaign is calling him a red.

London — In a rational world where the rules of arithmetic apply it just doesn’t add up to declare that 40,000 is mathematically more significant than 500,000.

But in the fact-free world of Donald Trump 40,000 counts more than 500,000…at least that is Republican Trump’s new math as it applies to people in the United Kingdom.

Bad Trump (this incisive drawing was contributed to ThisCantBeHappening by two young artists, Amelia, 5, and Makayla, 8)
 

Over 500,000 Brits have signed a petition to ban Trump from entering the U.K. because of his hateful declarations, particularly his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States. That ban-Trump petition had 577,023 signatures as of Jan. 20 -– a figure that keeps increasing.

Yet, typical of Trump, he saw more significance in the 40,000-plus British signatures on a petition opposing any blocking of his entry.

Trump insisted he has “many more fans than naysayers” across the U.K. when he responded to a British reporter at a campaign stop in Iowa hours after the U.K.’s Parliament concluded it’s Monday January 18th debate on those ban/no-ban petitions.

And in The Donald’s fact-free world it never computed in his mind that the Parliamentary debate began with an announcement that 30,000 of the 42,898 signatures on the don’t-ban-Trump petition had been removed because there was serious suspicion that those 30,000 signatures were not valid. That announcement in Parliament about removal of the questioned signatures stated those deleted signatures appeared to have originated from a single source.

Of course The Donald probably sees the ban-him petition as being trumped by British poll results stating 24 percent of Brits support his ban Muslim entry idea.

Trump saw big pluses in the Parliament debate about him despite the unflattering descriptions of him which were a core feature of that debate. These included members of parliament calling Trump as a buffoon, corrosive, an idiot, poisonous and a xenophobe, all appellations that flowed from both supporters and opponents of the ban petition.

Trump told the British reporter in Iowa that he saw it as a “great honor” to have ben the focus of a Parliament debate. Trump told that reporter that he was “very happy” with what happened in Parliament – presumably what didn’t happen: significant support for the ban.

Parliament took no official action on the ban or not-ban petitions because the authority in the U.K. to ban entry rests not with Parliament but with the the U.K. Home Secretary — the equivalent of the US Secretary of the Interior. The ban Trump petition has garnered more signatures than any public petition sent to Parliament it was announced during the debate.

Even the U.K’s ruling conservative government voiced opposition to Trump’s ban-Muslims posture. The U.K. government’s official statement, read into the record during that Parliament debate, stated in part: “The Prime Minister has made clear that he completely disagrees with Donald Trump’s remarks. The Home Secretary has said that Donald Trump’s remarks in relation to Muslims are divisive, unhelpful and wrong.”

I admit I’ve been slow to warm up to the idea of supporting Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s because I publicly backed Barack Obama in 2008 and quickly came to rue that decision after he took office.

But I have decided Bernie Sanders is different.

It’s too facile to simply label him another “hope-and-change” Obama, or just another Bill Clinton liberal poseur, put in the Democratic race to lure left-leaning voters. When I wrote that I backed Obama, back in ’08, I said that it would be important for people on the left to stay organized and to press Obama, after election, to live up to his promises on health care reform, labor law reform and other issues. There will be no need to push Sanders on his issues if he wins. Unlike Obama, who after all was pretty much selected and groomed by elements of the Democratic Party leadership and the Wall Street crowd to run for them and their agenda, in the outsider Sanders’ case these issues have been the driving force of his political life since he was in college or maybe earlier. The party establishment is terrified that he might win.

As Sanders demonstrated in Sunday’s debate, and as he has been demonstrating on the campaign trail with his full-throated call for a single-payer national health care program and a trust-busting break-up of the giant banks whose assets (the six largest banks combined) are equal to a staggering and totally unconscionable 60% of the nation’s economy (the US GDP), and particularly as he has demonstrated by resolutely refusing to take corporate money to fund his campaign, while denouncing the buying of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, by the financial and the pharmaceutical industries, Sanders is out to make change, not promise to make it.

Let’s start there. Sanders is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill left liberal political candidate. When is the last time that you’ve heard a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination jump into a question posed on national television by the high-priced corporate news “talent” about whether he’s a “democratic socialist” and answer, “Yes, I am.”

We can debate what that means, as opposed to being a socialist or a social democrat, but the point remains — Sanders wears and has worn the label “socialist” with not just pride but with a refreshing in-your-face assertiveness. And yet he is threatening to upend the presumed front-runner in this race — an avowed capitalist. Why? Because most Americans are fed up with the rapacity and inherent corruption of American capitalism.

During its coverage of the debate, NBC flashed on its screen the results of a Seltzer & Co. poll of likely voters planning to attend Iowa’s Democratic caucuses on Feb. 1. They had been asked whether they considered themselves capitalists or socialists. The surprise result: 38% said they were capitalist, and 43% said they identified themselves as socialist.

My complaint, and that of many on the left, regarding Sanders has been his record over the years since he became a member of Congress in 1990, of supporting US military actions abroad, as well as other imperialist policies, such as the deadly 1990s embargo of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which reportedly led to the death by disease of as many as half a million Iraqi children who had to drink untreated water because of the resulting unavailability of chlorine.

Bernie Sanders blasts Hillary Clinton during the Jan. 17 debate for using the “Republican charge” of lying that his Medicare for All plan would “dismantle” Obamacare (Clinton and Republicans conveniently forget to mention that while many would see their taxes go up to fund universal healthcare, there would be no more private insurance premiums, for either individuals and families or employers).
 

The so-called music in this café would be very good for murdering giant lizards in hell. Then gutting them and eating their organs raw, and smearing yourself with their cold reptilian blood. While being flogged by Satan.

Other than that, it’s okay.

Which is to say, go and see Cooder-Skaggs-White. Hurry. It is music as good, or good as music. Well, it’s good music. It’s what music used to do, is supposed to do, for you. Not a murdered lizard in sight, no fires, no pitchforks. You know, like a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie. It is no bit of careless whimsy that the tour is billed, “For the Good People.” Me, I wasn’t sure there were any “good people” left in this country, but that’s beside the point. If you build it, they will come. . .maybe that’s the idea here.

Yes, that’s Ry Cooder, the six-time Grammy-winning, musically peripatetic champion of Cuban, African, Indian, Hawaiian, Mexican music, and blues, jazz, norteno, folk, various fare too conveniently summed up as “roots music.” Now, at 68, he is delving into an archaeology of tunes from a bygone era called the 20th century. From a country even more out of reach than Cuba was, because it no longer exists. Think you know what American music is? You might, but then again, you might not.

Among the repertory: The Delmore Brothers, Flat & Scruggs, The Louvin Brothers, Kitty Wells, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Bill Carlisle, Merle Travis, Hank Snow, Blind Alfred Reed, Ralph Stanley. Among the tunes: “The Family that Prays,” “Take Me to Your Lifeboat,” “Sweet Temptation,” “Mansion on the Hill,” “On My Mind,” “Cold Jordan,” “Daniel Prayed,” “Hold What You Got,” “Pan American Boogie,” “A Fool Such as I,” “Above and Beyond,” “No One Will Ever Know,” “Gone Home,” “Wait a Little Longer,” “No Doubt About It,” “Wait A Little Longer, Please, Jesus,” “Pan-American Boogie,” “Unload,” “Above Yer Raisin,” “Reunion.”
Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White and Ry Cooder diggin' down to the roots (for a sample of the music, click here)
 

New to you? Hie thee to hear it. Old to you? Hie thee to hear it. Not your favorite kind of music? All the more reason to go. I did, a couple months ago in Santa Barbara, Calif., not quite knowing what to expect. Wound up with an education, and no socks. Fields of clover spread before me as I walked out of theater.

The rising fortunes of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist US senator from Vermont, in the Democratic presidential primaries, provides a unique opportunity for organizing a new radical movement around key political goals including a national health care program for all Americans, not just the elderly and disabled, and a national retirement program that people can actually live on.

The elements are there already. Sen. Sanders is calling, on the stump, for expanded Social Security benefits, which with the collapse of employee pensions and the destruction of retiree savings in the Great Recession and the ensuing “lost decade” of the stock market, is badly needed. He is also calling for expanding and enhancing the Medicare program to cover everyone from birth to death, much as is done in Canada and in every other modern nation on the globe except the US.

The key here is to build a movement around these two programs that might work in parallel with the Sanders presidential campaign, but that would remain separate from it so that, when the election is over, win or lose, that movement will continue. If Sanders were to win the presidency, as is looking increasingly possible if polls can be believed, and if, as some polls also suggest, his win were to help Democrats to retake both the Senate and the House, then having an independent movement in place would be critical. Such a movement militantly demanding Medicare for all and enhanced Social Security benefits would put intense pressure on both a President Sanders and a new Democratic congress to deliver. Meanwhile, if Sanders were to lose, then a having a strong, well organized movement in defense of both programs would become even more urgently important.

Bernie Sanders is calling for enhanced Social Security benefits and expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Now we need a independent mass people’s movement to fight for the same thing
 

Better yet, Sanders is a movement veteran, not just someone like Obama who supposedly did a little stint as a “community organizer.” Sanders’ entire political life dating back to his college days has been about fighting for more income equality, and improved lives for the poor, minorities and working people. One can criticize his record of support as a member of congress for most of the US government’s imperial policies abroad, and even for most of its illegal wars, but domestically, at least, his record of support for fairness and for more racial and economic equality, for worker rights and for women’s equality is pretty much unassailable.

What this means is that as long as he is running — which looks like it could be right through to November — then win or lose he will be pressing for those issues of strengthening Social Security and for replacing Obamacare — that huge, cumbersome gift to the insurance industry — with an expanded and universal version of government-run Medicare. If a movement built around those two issues were to organize marches and rallies and Occupy-style actions in Washington, DC and around the nation, a candidate Sanders could be counted on to appear at them and to support them as he looks to build voter support.

Last week, T-Mobile’s CEO John Lagere publicly asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation a straightforward question: “Who the f*** are you anyway, EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble and who pays you?”

The question, delivered in a short podcast by the telephone mogul, was in response to a question EFF had asked T-Mobile: Doesn’t your latest video product, called Binge On, violate both the letter and spirit of the Net Neutrality laws?

That attack on EFF was the second part of Lagere’s response. Most commentators agree that it was just a dumb rant. The first part of his response was that Binge On’s software, which selects the best available data-stream for the user, doesn’t violate any Net Neutrality laws at all. That, the EFF says, is a lie.

John Lagere

In the resulting dust-up, T-Mobile has suffered a significant public relations hit and many technology analysts are now aggressively debating whether the company not only violated FCC rules but misled its customers in the process.

But the real question is whether this is actually illegal. If it isn’t, T-Mobile’s new product may be the first step taken by a telecommunications company in a dance several cellphone giants are about to join. Everyone in this industry is looking for a way around the FCC’s Net Neutrality decision and some say T-Mobile may have found one. It’s another round in the fight to keep the Internet alive.

Much has been written and broadcast over the past few weeks in the financial media and the business pages of general-interest newspapers debating the wisdom of the decision in December by Fed Chair Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade.

On one side of this debate are people who say that the Fed needs to do this to prevent inflation from taking off. On the other side are people who warn that pushing up interest rates at a time when unemployment is still at a historically high level (and when real unemployment is more than double the official 5% rate) risks making things worse.

The increase of 0.25% in the Federal Reserve’s benchmark federal funds rate — the rate banks charge each other for holding short-term funds — was pretty minimal, but the arguments for raising the rate at all are absurd on their face.

The New York Times quoted Yellen as saying interest rates needed to be pushed up lest the economy begin “overheating”! As she put it, had rates not been raised last month, “”We would likely end up having to tighten policy (meaning raising rates) relatively abruptly to prevent the economy from overheating,” which she said could then throw the US back into recession.

What planet, or more specifically, what national economy does Yellen inhabit?

The US is so far from being an “overheating” economy it’s not funny. Official unemployment has remained stalled at 5.1% for three months now, but that is really a bogus number created during the Clinton administration when the Labor Department obligingly eliminated longer-term unemployed people who had given up trying to find a job from the tally of the unemployed, so their numbers wouldn’t embarrass the administration. The real unemployment rate — called the U-6 rate by the Labor Dept.– which includes discouraged workers who have temporarily stopped trying to find nonexistent jobs, as well as people who are involuntarily working at part-time jobs but who want to return to full-time employment, is actually still above 10%. And if people who have simply left the labor market because there is no work for them, are added in, as they really should be, the the real jobless raterises to 22.9%, or almost one in four working-age Americans.

Anyone who thinks an economy with that much slack in its labor force is in danger of imminent “overheating”, as defined by rising pressures on wages and rising prices due to increased demand for goods and services, is nuts.

Raising interest rates in a economy that's still in a funk makes no sense…unless you think the economy’s about to tank and you are stuck at a 0% with nowhere to drop rates as a stimulus
 

Scranton — One of the most astonishing things to come out of a three-day hearing in federal court in this gritty played-out coal town, where noted prisoner-for-life Mumia Abu-Jamal was last month seeking an injunction to force the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to provide him with medication to treat his raging Hepatitis-C infection was the discovery that the state has been withholding that life-saving treatment not just from him but from almost all of the 6-7000 inmates in state prisons who have active Hep-C cases, and that the state’s doing this not just for medical reasons, but as punishment for prisoners found guilty of “misconduct” or suffering from any “addiction.”

Word of this medieval and sadistic approach to medical care for prisoners in a state that as a colony and later as a young state in the new nation of the United States of America had pioneered humane punishment came late in the hearing when the attorney for the DOC, Laura Neal, admitted that she had at her desk in the courtroom a copy of a “protocol” for treatment of Hep-C.

At first, Neal was not even going to admit that there was such a protocol. In fact, under cross-examination by Abu-Jamal’s attorneys, a DOC witness testified that the state had until 22 months earlier been at least offering some infected inmates treatment with the then best medical option — interferon — but that even this had been halted because of medical studies concluding that it wasn’t very effective and that the side-effects could be worse than the cure.

This was, it turned out, only half the story, though. The actual national medical guidelines in question had said to stop using interferon all right, but the other part of those new guidelines said the reason for dropping interferon treatments was precisely because by 2013 there were several new medications available that have few side effects and that offer cure rates for Hep-C as high as 95% of those treated.

The Pennsylvania DOC, however, simply stopped treating prisoners at all, and didn’t offer the new medicines.

Once she had conceded that she had in her possession a new November 2015 DOC protocol for treating Hep-C, Atty. Neal told Federal District Judge Robert Mariani she didn’t want to have it placed into evidence, except if it were sealed from public view. She said she was only planning to use it in questioning the state’s expert witness, and didn’t intend it to be entered into evidence in the case.

Pressed further about her reason for wanting to keep the protocol secret, Neal admitted she didn’t want it “getting into the hands” of a legal team that has filed a class-action suit in western Pennsylvania seeking to compel the DOC to provide the new medication to all infected prisoners in its facilities, where, as in the US prison system nationwide, there now is a raging Hep-C epidemic.

The judge was not sympathetic to this argument and ordered her to provide the protocol to the court, unsealed.

Section of the Pennsylvania DOC’s treatment protocol detailing administrative reasons for denying Hep-C medical treatment to prisoners
 

 
 
What are we doing?
What have we done?
Do you remember me?
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Can it wait?
What time is it?
Do you want a time machine?
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Could I come with you?
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Before I can let you go
But if you have had enough, just ask,
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