Jim Hightower's Lowdown

“The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven” is a classic bluegrass song recounting a spectacular train crash in 1903, caused by the company’s demand that the engineer speed down a dangerous track to deliver cargo on time. One hundred twenty years later we have the “Wreck of the Norfolk Southern” – a devastating crash caused by the corporate demand that it be allowed to run an ill-equipped, understaffed, largely-unregulated, 1.7 mile train carrying flammable, cancer-causing toxics through communities, putting profit over people and public safety. This rolling bomb of a train was hardly unique, for the handful of multibillion-dollar railroad giants that control the industry also control lawmakers and regulators who’re supposed to protect the public from public-be-damned profiteers.  A measure of their arrogance came just two years ago, when an Ohio legislative committee dared to consider a modest proposal for just a bit more rail safety. Norfolk Southern executives squawked like Chicken Little, asserting a plutocratic doctrine of corporate supremacy on such decisions. They even imperiously proclaimed that state lawmakers have no right to interfere in safety matters. Ohio’s Chamber of Commerce dutifully echoed Norfolk’s concern for profit over people, testifying that “Ohio’s business climate would be negatively impacted” by the bill. Never mind that Ohio’s public safety climate can literally be “negatively impacted” by train wrecks! Plunging deeper down the autocratic rabbit hole, the Chamber insisted that corporate control over workers is sacrosanct. It postulated that a crew-safety provision in the Ohio bill is illegal because it “would interfere with the employment relationship between employers and their employees.” Yes, that’s a corporate claim that executives have an inalienable right to endanger workers. Sure enough, bowing to the corporate powers, Ohio lawmakers rejected the 2021 safety bill. And that, boys and girls, is why train catastrophes keep happening.

Stuff happens, right? I mean, who could’ve thought that in these modern times of digital monitoring of everything, something as massive as a freight train could become a toxic fireball rolling undetected and unslowed into an Ohio town? But a Norfolk Southern train did just that, derailing in East Palestine and contaminating the air, water, land, and families with tons of cancer-causing chemicals. Gosh exclaimed Norfolk Southern’s CEO; gosh exclaimed the Ohio Governor; gosh exclaimed the US transportation chief; gosh exclaimed the GOP chair of the rail transportation committee – this is a terrible, unexpected accident, and we’re all appalled by it! Only… all of these officials knew full-well that this disaster would happen (though they didn’t know exactly where). Indeed, far from unexpected, there are more than 1,000 preventable train derailments in the US every year (Norfolk Southern had another only days after the one in Ohio). And these things don’t just happen – they are causedby the profiteering greed of the monopolistic industry’s top executives and rich investors. While Norfolk’s boardroom elites have been pocketing record profits in recent years, they’ve used armies of lobbyists and multimillion-dollar political donations to kill safety protections that would prevent such a disastrous record. To cut costs and jack-up profits, railroad bosses have rigged the rules to run trains that are absurdly long, go too fast, carry ever-heavier loads of undisclosed toxics in weak tanker cars, have no fire detectors, use outmoded braking systems – and have as few as one crew member on board. One! This is Jim Hightower saying… Norfolk’s derailed train was made to derail. It pulled 149 cars, stretching nearly two miles down the track, and it was unequipped to detect fires and other problems. This disaster was not an “accident” – it (and those that will come next) was mandated by the corporate and government officials now professing outrage.

Your doctor is out and unable to see you now. Not out for lunch or out on vacation -- but out of medical practice. America’s perverse health care system, which sublimates care to the profiteering demands of Wall Street speculators who essentially own today’s system, has been driving out hordes of nurses, pharmacists… and now doctors. These practitioners take their Hippocratic Oath seriously: “First, do no harm.” Yet, again and again they see corporate managers of hospital chains, physician clinics, etc. doing severe harm, routinely slashing staffing levels, eliminating services, rejecting low-income patients… and raising prices. All to prop-up the profits of rich, absentee investors. A prominent physician recently wrote that in 2021 alone four times more doctors quit the profession than joined. He says his colleagues are demoralized by “the diseased systems for which we work. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/doctors-universal-health-care.html]” The disease is money. The primary measure of “care” is now how much profit the system generates for its uncaring corporate owners, so one’s health is largely dependent on one’s wealth. The morally abominable result is that hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths are occurring each year. Yes, profit-based health care is a killer. This is Jim Hightower saying… It’s time to be blunt: For-profit health care is the creation of profiteers and the politicians they buy. It’s insane to let their greed dictate the allocation and quality of this essential human need. Luckily, a better way is right in front of us: Medicare. This enormously-popular public program of universal coverage for each and every American over 65 has proven to be an effective and fair system that is far cheaper and much, much more caring than Wall Street’s privatized scheme. So, let’s eliminate the profiteers by extending Medicare to all of us – every woman, man, and child in our society. To help go to: ourrevolution.com/issues [https://ourrevolution.com/2021/06/05/m4a/].

No one needs another outrage to worry about, but here’s one that could literally be your last worry. Our hospitals are killing us. Not that the staffers are going room to room snuffing our patients, of course, but hospital owners and top executives are nonetheless killing thousands of ill Americans entrusted to their care. They are doing by deliberately short-staffing their facilities and shortchanging sick and injured people they’re richly paid to serve. At the core of this outrage is a fatal structural flaw in our healthcare system, namely that these are no longer “our” hospitals. Instead of being public or non-profit entities for the Common Good, focused squarely on patients, hospitals today tend to be private operations controlled by corporate profiteers. Pitting patients against profits is no way to run a hospital, for it means money will ultimately rule over health (and over life itself). Ask a nurse. These dedicated professionals are the solid pillars of American health. More than doctors and way more than administrators, nurses make a hospital function, providing the primary care and constant, on-site monitoring that are the essence of an ethical, healthy system. Yet, thousands have already fled the work they love, another third plan to leave this year – and thousands more are going on strike. Why? Because the profit system demands massive staff cuts, leaving way too few nurses to meet the basic needs of patients, causing burnout among nurses… and unnecessary deaths of the people they care for. A damning 2021 study revealed that forcing fewer nurses to tend to an ever-larger caseload effectively killed more than 4,000 New York hospital patients in the previous two years alone. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/opinion/nurses-strike-pay-staffing-ratios.html]This is Jim Hightower saying… Yet, the corporate powers insist on treating nurses just as a cost to be cut, arguing that hospitals must have “staffing flexibility.” In other words: Cut nurses/Raise profits.

There are industries that occasionally do something rotten. And there are industries like Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco – that persistently do rotten things. Then there is the nursing home industry – where rottenness has become a core business principle. The end-of-life “experience” can be rotten enough on its own, with an assortment of natural indignities bedeviling us, and good nursing homes help gentle this time. In the past couple of decades, though, an entirely unnatural force has come to dominate the delivery of aged care: Profiteering corporate chains and Wall Street speculators. The very fact that this essential and sensitive social function, which ought to be the domain of health professionals and charitable enterprises, is now called an “industry” reflects a total perversion of its purpose. Some 70 percent of nursing homes are now corporate operations run by absentee executives who have no experience in nursing homes and who’re guided by the market imperative of maximizing investor profits. They constantly demand “efficiencies” from their facilities, which invariably means reducing the number of nurses, which invariably reduces care, which means more injuries, illness… and deaths. As one nursing expert rightly says, “It’s criminal.” But it’s not against the law, since the industry’s lobbying front – a major donor to congressional campaigns – effectively writes the laws, which allows corporate hustlers to provide only one nurse on duty, no matter how many patients are in the facility. When a humane nurse-staffing requirement was proposed last year, the lobby group furiously opposed it… and congress dutifully bowed to industry profits over grandma’s decent end-time. After all, granny doesn’t make campaign donations. So, as a health policy analyst bluntly puts it, “The only kind of groups that seem to be interested in investing in nursing homes are bad actors.” To help push for better, contact TheConsumerVoice.org.