The Almighty Buck

You don’t have to be in politics or even care about it to be bombarded by the ferocious ads for the upcoming Midterm elections of 2022 and the struggle for control of Congress and perhaps more importantly, by the effort of what has become the essence of the Republican Party to control the outcome of the election process

There’s a good deal of media about the impending loss of our democracy as the Republican Party goes far right extremist with leaders begging for Trump voters and as the Democratic Party bends to the ideologue progressives and seems to have no leadership at all.

But there is something deeper and longer lasting that has been subverting the idea of America for years…and it is getting worse.

Money is the ultimate God, the absolute value system overwhelming all else.

So this is not about politics, it is about the politics of money.

Money makes the World go around. Money is the root of all evil. Money talks. Money buys power. Money buys government

And what it enriches, it too often also destroys.

When the corporate drive for money overwhelms and becomes stealing, the endless promise of America fades.

SYSTEMIC DECLINE

America’s systems are its operational foundation: education, healthcare, criminal justice, etc. As the influence of money subverts them, what remains has been diminished.

We look here at education and healthcare as examples of the worst.

Recently New York University fired Maitland Jones, Jr. an acclaimed professor of organic chemistry, who had spent a splendid career at Princeton, had written THE organic chemistry textbook, all 1,500 pages. and had retired

When he felt the desire to return to the classroom NYU brought him back on an annual contract basis…not as a tenured professor. As with most major colleges and universities, NYU no longer wants to pay the price of tenured professors. In the current higher education environment making money seems to be the whole idea.

Now here’s the thing to know about organic chemistry. If you want a career in medicine, dentistry or most areas of science, you must take and pass organic chemistry.

And last Spring no one in Mr. Jones’ classes passed the course…few even came close. There were single digit scores and even zeroes.

And the students complained. Loud and clear.

82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him complaining that the course was too difficult and that he made no effort to provide additional assistance; that he was aloof and cold and unforgiving.

The evidence proved otherwise. Jones and some of his colleagues – the entire chemistry department supported him – created special videos explaining the most difficult areas….and made certain they were available to his students.

But that didn’t seem to matter.

As the NYU administration dealt with the problem, the complaining students let it be known that if they couldn’t gain passing grades they would leave NYU and enroll in another college. Their goals were graduate schools. College was just a road to them.

The loss of that money and the threat to their ratings meant something big…too big to ignore.

Mr. Jones was fired.

What does college mean anymore?

In today’s post-pandemic work environment, jobs are available to young people without a college degree because those with a degree expect instant promotions and raises or they leave. Whatever they learned in college paled against what they’d received at home — maturity was not at the head of the list.

But this is about money and nowhere has money and higher education failed more egregiously than in the area pf student loans.

As a college degree came to mean financial success, competition among colleges became more ferocious. Where once departmental standing and prize-winning professors mattered most in the decision process, suddenly it was about fancy dormitories, new gyms and bringing fast food chains onto campus.

As with everything else demand increased cost.

The whole idea of the Federal Government getting involved in helping make college financially possible began after World War II when the GI Bill of Rights provided every veteran who wanted it a free college education. By 1958 the government began providing loans but it wasn’t until President George H.K. Bush instituted a program in 1983 that we find colleges, banks and the Federal Government working together to make money instantly available.

If an application, a visit and a meeting with the college administration worked for everybody, the college had the name of a bank and banker available right down the road.

The deal they conjured established the most unfair, one-sided and restrictive loan agreement ever implemented in the history of this country.

Late payment increased debt. Skipped payment, increased debt. Moratorium on payment, increased debt.

Does this sound like an attempt to educate Americans or just another way to make money?

Today 43 million people owe 1.8 trillion dollars to the Federal Government. The government took over what had been bank loans in 2010 when the rules and regulations produced so much debt that the banks could no longer handle it.

The figures indicate that although millions have repaid their original student loan they still owe significant money because of the restrictions.

The Biden Administration’s attempt to relieve some of that debt awaits the results of the midterm elections. Should Republicans gain control of Congress, that attempt will be lost.

There is no evidence that all of that money improved the quality of a college education. It made no attempt to do so.

As for education in New York City, with an annual budget of $38 billion, larger than many US cities, only one-quarter of graduating high school students are able to enter a college or find a good job. The rest must get remedial help or face an uncertain future.

Just released national test scores after the pandemic indicate the worst results in history for math scores and the worst in reading in more than 30 years as more than one-third of students in 4th and 8th grade cannot actually do the work despite the almost exclusive effort to teach these subjects.

Billions of federal dollars have been allocated to help students make up two lost years. Few schools have any such program and that money is being spent elsewhere.

Money has not enriched education in America; misspent, it has diminished it.

Can anyone believe that our public education system works anymore?

In healthcare, lets talk about Medicare Advantage Plans. You know the heavily advertised plans featuring Joe Namath, Jimmy “Dynomite” Walker, William Devane and Bill Shatner asking you to call a specific number to find out if you are entitled to all kinds of special advantages including money back in your social security account.

Congress, stunned at the steadily rising cost of Medicare, and unable to get the votes to diminish coverage, decided to turn a major portion of those funds to the major private companies who had the money and staff to help people lead healthier lives. Funds would be available if they could prove just that. The companies opened offices upstairs in buildings and opened gyms and soon were essentially treating healthy people. Costs kept going up.

So the government changed course and decided to pay to get sick people well.

Now five of the largest ten private insurance companies (Kaiser Permanente, Elevance Health, Humana, United Health Group and CVS Health which owns Aetna) are under Federal indictment for criminally falsifying reports of patients who do not exist and for elevating the illnesses of patients who do.

Physicians who cooperated with them were given bonuses and other indications of appreciation.

While Americans win Nobel Prizes in medicine and the sciences, our healthcare program is considered no better than 28th among developed nations.

It is the most expensive in the World. It along with the pharmaceutical industry owns government– committed to astonishing lobbying fees and extensive campaign contributions to continue to get what it wants.

And what it wants is wealth.

The actual work and support activities of the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is financed by the pharmaceutical industry, the very industry it is supposed to regulate.

What it wants is control that produces wealth.

And there seems to be no bottom to this pit.

Hospitals across the country, including a Shriner’s Hospital in Nebraska are closing pediatric wards because they can make more money with an adult in a bed than a child.

But perhaps the clearest day to day scam in all of healthcare is a program where the Federal Government permits community hospitals in America’s poorest neighborhoods to buy prescription drugs at such a bargain that they can use the profits to build up hospital facilities.

But they don’t. They feed those profits to hospitals which control them while those larger facilities bleed the smaller community hospitals in every way possible.

The profits add up to billions.

We can hope that the upcoming elections manages to result in a forward looking government willing and able to create and pass legislation which make America stronger and Americans more positive about the future.

By then we look at the future and see a continuation of money meaning everything.

It has been said that once thoroughly bamboozled we lose the power to know the truth, to admit that we don’t and then to care whether we do our not.

Well said.