This Can't Be Happening!

With this article, ThisCantBeHappening! welcomes Dr. Jess Guh to our collective. You can read about her background by clicking on the “Who, and What, Are We?” button above, just below our masthead.
 

Going to the doctor is like going to the car mechanic. It falls right between “trip to DMV” and “post office during the holidays” on the list of errands that we all hate doing. Just like the car mechanic, it can be expensive and even if they don’t fix the problem, you still have to pay. When they do find something wrong, you have to take their word for it and assume that whatever course of treatment they suggest is best. If you try to go against their recommendation they give a condescending stare and then ominously warn, “OK, it’s your life do whatever you want, but it really isn’t safe.”

But at least some people know something about cars that can give some advice. We all have a friend who spends the weekend with their buddies fixing cars. I don’t know anyone who sits around on a Sunday with friends working on each other’s hypertension.

Whether it’s your health or your transportation, it’s disconcerting to have such critical parts of your life in a black box of decision making. You don’t know how physicians are making their decisions. Surely they are thinking about what will make the best health impact, but what else are they considering? Cost? Pharmaceutical advertisements? Convenience? What about race?

In a time where white supremacy is no longer acceptable, a far more insidious form of racism is at play: unconscious bias. Implicit bias and microaggressions are difficult to describe and almost uniformly unintentional, but their impact is tremendous. Because medical decision-making is far more ambiguous than most people realize and involves the evaluation of subjective and incomplete data, it’s particularly prone to unconscious bias.

The CDC estimates that two thirds of adult Americans have either hypertension or pre-hypertension. Deciding the best way to treat this disease impacts over 70 million people. So when the Joint National Committee, a panel of experts on hypertension, released their updated guidelines at the end of 2014, it caused quite a controversy. While the guidelines included a plethora of recommendations, the debate has largely surrounded their recommendation that patients over the age of 60 have a more relaxed blood pressure goal of 150/90 instead of 140/90.

It’s been over a year since the new guidelines were released, but the debate continues. What’s so baffling to me is not that we keep discussing the 150/90 thing, I agree it is important, but that in all this time the most controversial part of the guidelines hasn’t been mentioned in public debate or the media: that physicians should treat black patients and non-black patients differently.

Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within 30 years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the state.
                    - Bertrand Russell

An epidemic of unhappiness is spreading across the planet, while capital absolutism is asserting its right to unfettered control of our lives.
                    - Franco “Bifo” Berardi
 

First there was Paris. Then Colorado Springs. Then San Bernadino. A great discussion was raised in the land over which of the killers were terrorists and which were just lunatics. Police and FBI frantically went through apartments, hard-drives and cellphones to find out who had radicalized whom. Well paid corporate TV anchors salivated as police cordoned off crime scenes and politicos huddled in secret situation rooms to get their stories straight so they could release an official story to an eager and fearful public. They no doubt kept many important details to themselves.

Media covers focused on America's problem with murder/suicide

Beyond the radicalizing question, there isn’t much interest why these people — versus other people — did what they did. Motivation comes down to: Who made them do it? The words alienation and despair are rarely seen, except maybe in the marginalized columns of the left. The problems of alienation and despair disappeared from the national discussion about the time Jimmy Carter’s malaise was overwhelmed by Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill and the rigors of 21st century “neoliberal” financial capitalism took the driver’s seat in America.

The Right emphatically pointed at ISIS and the Muslim threat. Utilizing sophisticated social media skills, a monstrous, growing caliphate had declared war on America and was seducing people living among us to kill us. America needed to respond with unrestrained lethal force, so America could be great again. In cases like the Planned Parenthood killings and the Charleston killings, the Left pointed at rightwing media bullhorns like Bill O’Reilly for relentlessly demonizing Planned Parenthood and the Black Lives Matters movement. O’Reilly vociferously denied on-air that he had “radicalized” anyone; he was not responsible for armed lunatics. The National Rifle Association stood firm: Any controls on citizen access to military assault rifles was the work of the Devil.

The latest in a series of troubling mishaps at the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant a week ago Saturday prompted a shutdown or “trip” of one of the two operating reactor units on the site and the dispatch of inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office made the announcement that the reactor was “forced to shut down,” but New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., which owns the plant, claimed there was no release of radiation or chemicals from the incident. The company said magnets holding control rods failed when power was lost, causing the rods to sink into the reactor vessel as designed and shutting down the nuclear reaction. Control rods, which absorb the radiation that occurs during fission chain reactions are a critical feature of nuclear reactors that allow the nuclear reaction to be adjusted or shut down altogether.

Coincidentally, at the time of the incident, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Stephen Burns was visiting the plant. The NRC reported on Monday that the power loss was caused by a short circuit in a roof fan. Cuomo, who has been calling for closure of the 40-year old plant, said that he had “directed the Department of Public Service to investigate and monitor the situation.”

The second of the two working nuclear generating units at Indian Point was not effected and remains on line. Burns was met on his visit by a demonstration on Monday at a hotel in Tarrytown, NY where he was holding meetings. The protesters are opposed to construction of a natural gas pipeline that is intended to pass near the nuclear plant. The pipeline has been approved and construction will begun in March. Protesters say they fear a potential gas explosion might threaten the nuclear plant.

This is the second incident at Indian Point this year. In May an electrical transformer exploded releasing 3000 gallons of oil into the Hudson River. The catastrophic failure ignited the oil and black smoke billowing from the fire was visible for miles. A report by the NRC released earlier this month said that the transformer fire itself was never a threat, but the subsequent flooding of an electrical switching room may have caused a loss of power to the reactor.

Thing could have been worse: The giant nuke power plant Con Ed once planned to build right in New York City, fortunately cancelled
 

 
 
How short or long is a life lived —
In minutes, hours, days?
And in the ways we move with it —
How can it not amaze!
 
Just how we grow from seed to old
And find ourselves grown wise,
Almost in spite of ourselves,
Sunrise to sunrise.
 
And at what age do we conquer?
At what age do we relent?
At what age do we accept our fate?
At what age repent?
 
At what age do we stop dead
And contemplate our doubt?
At what age do we whisper?
At what age do we shout?
 
At what age do we stand
Upon a cliff beyond all fences,
And stare into the distance,
And come into our senses?
 
At what age do we smile
An inward sort of smile,
Because we’ve signed on
To walk the full mile.
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

Scientists have for decades recognized climate change as an existential crisis facing mankind, but the US media, hamstrung by a self-inflicted obsession with presenting “both sides” of every story even when there is only one, have only begun recognizing its gravity. And a huge barrier still prevents climate change from being honestly reported.

That barrier is a mainstream journalistic inability to address the central role global capitalism plays in propelling climate change, and to expose the determined, collaborative and usually carefully hidden, role it plays in stymying the profound government actions needed to prevent or at least fend off catastrophe.

We see plenty of heartening news reports in the mass media about companies becoming “greener,” investing in “sustainable” production technologies like solar panels on rooftops or geothermal heating systems, for example. We learn that some tycoons like Bill Gates plan to pour billions of dollars into research on carbon-free energy alternatives. But wholly missing are stories about how economic growth and marketing-driven consumer demand guarantee increased carbon emissions and enhanced global warming that will swamp any such baby steps.

Consider Newsweek’s annual list of America’s Greenest Companies. It includes many financial corporations which produce nothing but paper, and whose greenhouse gas contribution is limited to their office buildings. Look closer, though, and it’s clear that sustainable or not, such companies don’t belong on any “green” list. Case in point: Topping the list’s financial companies are two insurance firms — Metlife and Aflac Inc. — followed by that arch-villian of the 2008 Fiscal Crisis, Goldman Sachs. All three financial giants, while perhaps running green offices, invest heavily in industries that contribute massively to climate change. Metlife, for example, is one of the country’s largest institutional investors, with almost half a trillion dollars invested worldwide. The company touts its goal of becoming carbon neutral in its global operations, but says nothing about running a carbon-neutral investment portfolio, and that’s because it does not run one. The same is true of Aflac.

Investment policies aren’t even considered by the compilers of the Newsweek list.

Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, was the 11th-largest global coal-fired power plant investor in 2011, according to a Banktrack report. This top-ranked Newsweek “green” bank isn’t alone; all the biggest US banks are big on coal. A few have started to back away in the past year, but that’s mainly because coal company stocks are falling, largely due to the temporarily increased availability of relatively cheap natural gas and oil, not because of any climate change concerns.

Companies can say they run green offices so they're “green,” even as they spew ever more carbon into the atmosphere making their profits and products
 

A staggering 168 people, 12 times as many as those killed earlier this week in San Bernardino, and including a whole daycare center class of 15 little children, were killed by a crazed terrorist in the 1995 Oklahome City truck-bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. The killer, Timothy McVeigh, was a right-wing Christian fanatic who wanted to avenge the killing of a bunch of Christian cultists in Waco, Texas by federal agents two years earlier. His accomplice Terry Nichols had the same deranged goal.

Although there are plenty of right-wing and fanatic Christian nut-jobs in the US, somehow Americans get on with their lives and don’t worry over-much about being the victim of one of their attacks, though they happen often enough. Just recall the slaughter earlier this year of nine parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, who was hoping to ignite a race war, or nut-job Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people — 20 of the schoolchildren, in the Sandy Hook School massacre.

Such terrorist killings in the US are actually pretty common, sometimes involving just one victim, as in the case of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas shot point blank in the head by a Christian anti-abortion wacko as Tiller stood handing out programs in the foyer of his church. Maybe such terrorist actions are not as common as run-of-the-mill mass slayings by people who simply slip a cog when life gets too hard for them and — America being the land of the almost free gun –they grab a weapon or two and some boxes of cartridges from the local gun shop, and go out to cause mayhem en route to a suicide by cop, or by their own bloody hand. But they’re frequent enough.

Given this uniquely violent American reality, why has everyone gotten so freaked out by the San Bernardino shooting, in which only 14 people were shot, or for that matter by the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed just three people (admittedly seriously injuring dozens more)?

Awful as this latest mass killing is, and these earlier ones, let’s admit that as far American mayhem goes, they have not been particularly big deals.

No, the thing that has people, at least in the media and in the national police state, all worked up is that this time (as in the case of the Boston bombing, where one wounded kid on the loose led to a city-wide martial-law military lock-down), the killers are Muslims — and immigrant Muslims at that. Somehow that makes it much scarier, even though the San Bernardino killers (and the Boston bombers) were not nearly as proficient at killing as McVeigh and Nichols or even Roof. Hell, McVeigh researched and figured out how to make an exploding truck that was heard 50 miles away in all directions and that took down a nine-story building! Lanza slaughtered 26 people all by himself, and even the inept Roof managed to kill nine people on his own.

Tashfeen Malik, terrorist killer of fewer than 14 people, Adam Lanza, not a terrorist, killer of 26 people, including 20 small children
 

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The TCBH! Collective

ThisCantBeHappening! is happy to welcome Jess Guh to our news collective. Jess brings a passion for justice and equality, especially in the medical profession and in the delivery of health care, to our group, as well as a talent for making medical issues clear to the lay reader.

Of herself, she writtes:

Jess Guh hails from a home just outside of Philadelphia where two Taiwanese immigrants were delightfully surprised to have raised a queer, outspoken radical. She attended Stanford University where she officially majored in film and unofficially majored in activism, Ultimate Frisbee, co-op living, and consensus decision making. Deciding that medicine could be the perfect union of her nerdy self and her passion for community well being, she went to medical school at the University of Michigan.  She moved to Seattle for her residency in Family Medicine and has been living there ever since. Currently she works as a primary care physician at a community health center dedicated to serving people that the American healthcare system has traditionally ignored.

Jess Guh, physician journalist
 

Spurred by the egregious health inequities that she witnesses on a daily basis, as well as her own experiences as a minority in the medical profession, she has found her voice through writing. She has also presented nationally about the impacts of race and implicit bias on medical outcomes and consults on strategies to diversify the medical workforce.

Jess also writes at her personal blog at: www.jessguh.com

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a bold yet belated move when he fired his embattled police superintendent in the wake of a national uproar surrounding the release of a chilling video that captured the police killing of a teen–a ward of the city of Chicago.

Included in that uproar is anger over mounting evidence of a cover-up connected to the brutal and unjustified shooting graphically displayed on that video. Political and civic leaders in Chicago had demanded the removal of Chicago top cop Garry McCarthy months before Emanuel’s uproar-triggered ouster of his police superintendent.

If Mayor Emanuel is really serious about his stated desire to rebuild “public trust” he needs to do two other things and do those two things quickly.

The long-hidden video of a police murder: Two cops draw guns on unarmed youth walking in opposite lane. One cop shoots the 17-year-old ward of the city 16 times in 15 seconds, as he poses no threat to them. See puff from one bullet fired at the victim Laquan McDonald when he was lying on the ground dying (click image to see the full dash-cam video)
 

The first thing Emanuel needs to do is issue a strong public rebuke of Chicago’s top prosecutor, Anita Alvarez.

This prosecutor dragged her feet for over a year on indicting the policeman shown in that video firing 16-shots in the space of 15 seconds into Laquan McDonald. That police video clearly shows the 17-year-old McDonald walking away from police, not lurching towards officers. Chicago’s Police Department, then headed by McCarthy, along with its police union had maintained since McDonald’s fatal shooting in October 2014 that the teen was approaching the officers.

 
 
Desperate people do desperate things.


 
They flee from their homes

because they are not safe there,

or because there are no longer

any homes there,

only enemies and rumors.

They break the law 

because they are hungry

and their children are crying.

They sleep in the rain.

They risk their lives to reach lands

where they have heard

there are doctors and medicine.

They look for work.

The desperate ones wander empty roads

that go nowhere.

They are thirsty, and tired.

They have no money.

And wherever they die,

they die in a ditch.
 
Desperate people do desperate things.
 
Have you ever been that desperate?

No, I haven’t either.
 
 
—Tom Cowan
 

Tom Cowan is the author of several books on shamanism and Celtic spirituality. He lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He contributed this poem to ThisCantBeHappening!