What Do You Call a Country that “Puts Down” Its Sick Workers Rather Than Treating Them?

[McCamy Taylor]

Intro. Back to the (Reactionary) Past

In 1880, many Chinese lived in Hop Alley, Denver's Chinatown. In October of that year an anti-Chinese riot resulted in the lynching of a Chinese man and the injuring of many others. A mob of approximately 3000 people had gathered in Hop Alley, consisting of “illegal voters, Irishmen and some Negroes.” Only 8 Policemen were on duty at the outbreak of the riot. Firemen brought in to disperse the crowd hosed them with water but this only made them angrier. The mob began to destroy Chinese businesses, to loot Chinese homes and to injure many Chinese. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the Chinese quarter was “gutted as completely as though a cyclone had come in one door and passed out the rear. There was nothing left...whole.” During this vicious mob attack, a man named Look Young, was dragged down Denver's 19th Street by rioters. According to a physician, he died “from compression of the brain, caused by being beaten and kicked.” Look was twenty-eight years old and employed at the Sing Lee Laundry. He left behind a wife, father, and mother in China, who were wholly dependent upon him for support.

http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-old.html

The majority of Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Whether we were triaged through Ellis Island or brought over on British slave ships or imported to work on the railroads, we all came to this country for a reason----to fill the need for workers in the rapidly expanding United States. Our ancestors worked and paid taxes and sent their children to schools where they could be acculturated. With every new wave of immigrants, there was a new backlash. Irish, Italians, Chinese---they all had their storms to weather in the New World. But eventually, they were all accepted.

You would think that we would learn from history how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Mistakes like the massively popular anti-Black, anti-Catholic immigrant movement that was at the core of the KKK of the 1920s. The Great Depression and the war against fascism (aka WWII) soured Americans against right wing hate groups…for a while. But now the country has taken a sharp turns towards the most intolerant, ugly kind of reactionary thinking. Thinking that once lead our ancestors to pose proudly beside the corpses of lynching victims.

By ten o’clock, a crowd of thousands was gathered by the Parish Jail, with many of them shouting, “Yes, yes, hang the dagoes!” The prison was soon attacked by a carefully selected band culled by the mobs’ leaders comprised of about twenty-five well-armed men. With battering rams ringing in their ears, the prisoners were both trapped and doomed. In the prison yard where several Italians were clustered together at one end, the hit squad of lynchers opened fire from about twenty feet away. More than a hundred rifle shots and shotgun blasts were fired into six helpless men, tearing their bodies apart. When the firing stopped, the squad inspected their victims. A man saw Pietro Monasterio’s hand twitch and yelled, “Hey, this one’s alive!” “Give him another load, “ another gunman answered. “Can’t, I ain’t got the heart.” Then one of the men walked up to the body, aimed a shotgun point-blank, and literally blew the top of Monasterio’s head away. Someone laughed. There were two or three cheers. One or two men turned their faces away, looking sick.... Several of the men’s corpses were displayed to the mob outside the prison and hung on lampposts for all to see. Witnesses said that the cheers were nearly deafening.

http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-old.html

We All Agree That It is Wrong to Lynch, and Yet Many of Us, Even Democrats….


…think nothing of denying immigrants in this country necessary medical care, even when that care is needed to save lives.

Uninsured dialysis patients who could be cut off from their life-sustaining care lost a court challenge on Friday when a judge ruled that Grady Memorial Hospital could close its outpatient dialysis clinic….Grady will continue to assist the indigent patients, many of them illegal immigrants, in seeking care in their home countries or in other states where they may qualify for emergency Medicaid coverage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/health/policy/26grady.html?_r=1&ref=health

In recent years, southern states like Georgia have welcomed undocumented workers from south of the border. They have replaced the poor Black workers of the past in low paying, no benefit jobs. They pick the crops. The pluck the chickens. And, when they or their parents get sick, they are kicked to the curb----or to another state.

Where is the Democratic Party outrage on behalf of the largest minority group in the U.S., people who traditionally vote Democratic? Where is the compassion for the crippled child of the man who cuts our grass? What about the aged mother of the woman who sews our clothes? This country has tacitly welcomed the young, healthy workers who keep our factories in the black. But we have no qualms about letting the family members of our most cost effective workers die like animals.

One of the negotiators, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said that after Obama's speech the group revisited its illegal immigrant provisions to make sure legislative language would enforce requirements for people to have valid Social Security numbers before getting government-subsidized coverage.
"What we are trying to prevent is anyone who is here illegally from getting any federal benefit," Conrad told reporters. He didn't specify whether illegal immigrants would be allowed into the exchange, but Friday evening, a Democratic Finance Committee aide said that although nothing was finalized, the committee was expected to follow the White House's lead and bar illegal immigrants from the exchange.

http://apnews.myway.com//article/20090912/D9ALJQHG0.html

Undocumented workers benefited the federal government to the tune of $5 billion in federal income taxes in 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/nyregion/16immig.html

And that is not counting sales taxes and state taxes. But it is considered politically correct to say that we do not want a single cent of federal dollars to benefit our undocumented workers. Seems to me that the relationship between immigrants and the rest of us is all take, take, take and no give.

I am not going to go into the public health disaster that is just waiting to happen if a huge portion of our workforce is denied necessary health care for themselves and their (legal U.S. citizen) children. I am not going to talk dollars and cents---even though it makes sense to keep our workers healthy so that they can stay of their jobs. I am not even going to discuss the possible ramifications for legal American workers if employers are forced to pay for health insurance for their documented workers but not for illegals.

I am going to talk justice. Is it just to create a porous border with Mexico that encourages workers to move north so that they can fill industry and agriculture’s low paying jobs without providing those workers with the basics necessary for living? Is it right to keep these workers in legal limbo, deliberately so that they will continue to work for less? Is it moral to tell them “The Wife and Husband can stay, but the child with the heart defect---he has to go”? In what way is that last scenario different from Nazi attempts to weed out illness in the German workforce by killing those with disabilities? You know, the Final Solution was the not the solution of choice for Nazi Germany. First, they tried to exile their “undesirables” to other countries---only no one else would take them.

Go ahead. Tell me that undocumented immigrants aka illegal aliens are not like us . They do not have the same values, the same hopes, the same needs. That is the excuse our country has uses time and again when it kills people from other cultures----

And make no mistake. What Grady Hospital in Atlanta and what the nation’s elected lawmakers (including Democrats) plan to do is murder . 51 dialysis patients who can die for all the state of Georgia cares, even as it exploits cheap immigrant labor for the profit of its businessmen. A generation of U.S. citizens will grow up suffering from obesity, hypertension and diabetes that will kill them at an early age, because their “illegal” (but oh so economically valuable) parents were not allowed to participate in our supposedly public health insurance.

And why the hell not? Immigrants can purchase private insurance right now, regardless of their immigration status. How does it hurt our country if they are allowed to contribute money towards a public health insurance program, the same way that any other American worker can? Keep in mind that immigrant workers tend to be younger and healthier than the average American. It is not as if they will break the bank. And they pay taxes, both on their salaries and in the form of sale tax. They buy homes and cars. Why can’t they pool a portion of their wages with the rest of us in a huge public health insurance program? Does anyone here think that immigrants will flock to our country for health care that they can already get in their countries of origins for a fraction of the cost? Hell, white Americans head south to Mexico to get medical treatment all the time.

Morally, feeding industry’s need for low wage workers while denying necessary care to immigrants who get sick is no different from culling livestock of the weak and frail to keep the herd healthy. It is eugenics. It is wrong.

What My Eyes Have Seen

Forget the abstracts for a moment. Let’s talk specifics. Take the woman with the (probably) malignant breast mass who can not find anyone to biopsy and remove it, because she is not a citizen and does not have private insurance. She has raised children who are productive workers in this country. If any of them got a cancerous breast mass, it would be in a specimen jar tomorrow, thanks to their employer sponsored health insurance. But they have to scramble to find the care their mother needs. Sending her back to her “own country” is not an option. She is a political refugee. This is her country, love it or leave it---but we do not show much love for her.

What about the young woman with a gallbladder full of stones? Health care reform, as it is currently envisioned, will not give her the surgery she needs to live. Sooner or later, she will end up in a hospital emergency room in need of a stat cholecystectomy, ten times sicker than she is now. She might even die, leaving her children orphaned.

And then there is the middle aged worker, healthy except for a pair of cataracts that have made him almost blind. He can not get a job, because he can not see. He has no money, so he can not get the cataract surgery that would allow him to see (and work) again. The nation’s public health safety network slams the door in his face. It was set up to take care of the medical needs of native born poor folks. He built our roads and schools and we repay him by kicking him out onto the street when he can no longer do the work that he was invited into this country to do. Like a warn out horse carted off to the glue factory.

Right now, there is a very fragile safety net of private charities which attempt to meet the medical needs of immigrants like these. However, with the economy floundering, their resources are stretched thin. And, once we have the illusion of “health care for all”, will there be any public support for programs designed specifically for those left out of the solution, the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants?

http://www.gcir.org/immigration/facts/statistics

It gets worse. We pay private contractors a bundle to jail detained "illegals" into for-profit prisons (hey, it's another way to make money off immigrants). But we deny them the health care that every citizen criminal--rapist, mass murderer, you name it--- in this country is entitled to.

Castaneda, 36, from El Salvador died in February at his Los Angeles-area home a year after doctors amputated his penis to try to stop the spread of the cancer that had developed while he was in custody. He testified in October 2007 to a congressional committee looking into complaints of shoddy care and preventable deaths at centers that hold tens of thousands of immigrants during deportation proceedings.

http://www.medindia.net/news/Family-of-Illegal-Immigrant-Who-Died-for-Lack-of-Treatment-can-Sue-Govt-Officials-US-Court-Rules-42598-1.htm

Yusif Osman was a U.S. legal resident from Ghana and had been living in Los Angeles for five years. After a companion carrying false ID landed him in immigration detention, Osman was facing deportation on smuggling charges, an allegation he denied. While at an immigration detention center outside San Diego, he died suddenly. His story highlights the poor care some immigrants have received in the scores of immigration facilities across the United States.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d1p1.html

Hiu Lui Ng, a 34-year-old computer engineer, was swept into the immigration detention system in July 2007. His wife, Linn, a naturalized United States citizen who had petitioned for him to receive a green card, was left to care for their two American-born sons alone.

Relatives struggled to pay legal costs of his fight against deportation and to meet the mortgage on the house he had just bought in Queens.

Then Mr. Ng, who had come to the United States at age 17 with his parents and overstayed a visa years earlier, died on Aug. 6 in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, of complications of cancer and a fractured spine, both of which had not been detected until five days before his death, despite his complaints of extreme back pain and a progressive inability to walk.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/aftermath-of-an-immigrants-death-in-detention/

Eugenics is Eugenics is Eugenics

Members of the "great race," i.e., people of northern and western European backgrounds (with the noteworthy exception of Irish Catholics), were threatened by the proliferation of those, in the words of University of Wisconsin sociologist E.A. Ross, "whom evolution has left behind." But, how could the less fit possibly endanger the more fit? Wasn't the story of evolution "the survival of the fittest"? No, according to eugenicists. They based that "no" on two sorts of arguments. One began with the interference of humans in the workings of natural selection. Advanced societies no longer allowed the less fit to die. Instead charitable organizations and the state intervened to protect those with various disabilities with the consequence that the less fit could successfully reproduce.

http://www1.assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/eugenics/default.html

Those determined to place immigrant workers in the role of bogey-man will say that policies which lead to the premature death of noncitizens are good for our safety and our economic well being. They could not be more wrong. When you teach your children that one group of human beings does not have to be treated with respect or dignity, you tell them that they can abuse any human being---as long as it profits them in some way. All they have to do is declare something about those people---say, for instance, their sexual orientation--"illegal". You spread the message that we are not one human family. Once this fallacy is firmly implanted into a young mind, it is very easy to decide that anyone who is slightly different----say a member of a different religion----can be exploited. Because they are not one of us . And therefore, we can treat them like animals—who get put down when they are sick---- rather than people, who get treated with care.

Oh, and the answer to my title question is easy. You call that country “The United States of America.”

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Emma Lazarus is probably spinning in her grave.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

—Emma Lazarus, 1883

Now we just use 'em, hate 'em and throw them away -- or use them as political footballs.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

7. I think you intended to respond to the OP. I just posted a poem.

Nevertheless, I don't think your answer that "life is just unfair" is adequate. In fact, it is inhumane (and typically Ayn Randian). In a country with our resources no one should be kicked out of a hospital to die on the street because they have no money and/or are undocumented. Health care is not a commodity, or it shouldn't be. It's a human right. Everyone, no matter who they are, should have access to at least some base line of medical treatment.

And in states that have instituted tort reform, insurance premiums have not dropped by a nickel. All tort reform does is prevent the victims of medical malpractice -- and there's a lot of that -- from receiving adequate compensation for their injuries.

[sfwriter]

9. Lookup what we spend per capita....

And compare it to ANY other industrial nation/ Cross reference that with life expectancy and get back to me.

Saying we can't do it assumes we are less competent that 40 other nations on Earth who have worked out how to provide health care for everyone.

It isn't free, nut it isn't rationed either. The young and the well pay for the care of the old and infirm, just like any functioning insurance system. What we have in this country isn't a lack of resources, it is a grossly dysfunctional health Insurance market.

Welcome to DU.

[gateley]

10. It appears to be economically impossible to keep our current

system.

The other (all of them, except us!) Western countries in the world are doing just fine with their health care systems.

[gleaner]

11. While you ponder ...

the economic impossibility of caring for sick and dying human beings, please calculate for me what you think your life is worth? I happen to think human lives are more important than greed and adding profits to someone's bottom line.

One way to pay for food, shelter and health care is to tax the rich fairly instead of making the middle class finance everything. As I have said before, I don't mind helping the poor, but I resent like hell subsidizing the rich.

I do love your statement that life is "unfair for many." Ya think so? So do I but I believe very strongly that any community needs to help out those in need. Tort reform is a joke. We need single payer insurance like medicare for everyone and fewer people who can watch people suffer and die with nothing more than an, "Oh well." What goes around does come around. Anyone can go from a place of relative prosperity to living on the streets. All it takes is one bad illness, severe injury, unemployment or natural disaster to lose anything. If you are ever reduced to having nothing I wonder if your views might change to reflect a modicum of compassion, because you sure seem to lack any empathy for others now. Do you maybe work for a health insurance company? If not you might want to go apply. You would fit into the current system perfectly.

[midnight]

13. I had no idea who wrote that. It is beautiful. And Emma is probably

spinning.

[BlooInBloo]

2. "Where is the Democratic Party outrage on behalf of the largest minority group in the U.S...."...

We're busy waiting for all the facts to come in.

I think there's some benefit of the doubt yet to be handed out as well.

[zbdent]

4. a bit of the problem is that the families of the "undocumented workers" would likely not be

dying here, had the business owners not HIRED THE UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS ...

and as soon as a Dem shows compassion to the families of the undocumented workers ... Repugs go onto damn near every "liberal media" outlet and say "look! Democrats are spending the taxpayer dollars to cover people in this country illegally!" ...

[ixion]

3. The Soviet Union.

as per Animal Farm.

[Bette Noir]

5. Dayum.

I'd like to see this in the Washington Post, or the NY Times, so folks outside our little leftie ghetto could see it. I'd like to give it about 10,000 recommendations.

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. Deleted by jcm.

[Demeter]

12. I Try Very Hard Not to Hate My Fellow Americans

but damn, it's getting harder with every new selfish stupidity that comes down the pike...

[gtar100]

14. Compassion

Here are its antonyms: cruelty, harshness, hatred, indifference, meanness, mercilessness, tyranny

We reap that which we sow. Why is that so hard for so many people to understand?