@snoopydawg My neighbor, living across the street, was an emergency room nurse I'd known for years--decades of experience and highly respected. She was a union steward at our local undignified Dignity Health Hospital, allegedly non-profit. Dignity used to be Catholic Hospitals West. It used to really be non-profit. Many of my friends are/were nurses. The three local Dignity Hospitals were subject of a rolling walk-out, where serially, a labor action was taken against each of the three. A fourth local hospital, not Dignity, was also subject to a labor action. Dignity tried their usual strike-breaking activities, apparently beloved of a "University" hospital (UVM). This means hiring so-called traveling nurses who would and did cost the hospital more per hour than the striking nurses, trying to break the strike. Didn't work due to labor solidarity amongst the RNs and LVNs. Needless to say the loss of pay while the walk out was in effect didn't help the strikers in the short term.

Such high remuneration for an effing administrator is outrageous but it is openly symptomatic of the capitalist, money-before-people operation of large corporations--such as hospitals. The callous refusal to adequately pay professional staff DOES COST--it costs patients' lives. Many of the nurses with whom I worked were clinically smarter and definitely more caring than some of the physicians.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Cjvw-WJsQ&frags=pl%2Cwn]

This has to be the biggest bone headed move I've seen.

"Organizational labor disputes are complex," the site says. "Continuing to provide optimal care is critical to both your stakeholders and the community. ACS works with your team to establish a contingency plan that secures your reputation and supports the lives of your patients."

Hello?

Laurie Aunchman, the president of the Vermont Federation of Nurses & Health Professionals, said it didn’t surprise her that the hospital was preparing for a strike, just as the 1,800-member union is. “We’re still going to have patients in the hospital that need to be taken care of, and the hospital has to do what it needs to do in taking care of the patients that remain,” she said.

You dumb woman. That the nurses are over-stretched and they are telling you that this is putting patient care at risk is the reason that they are striking. Of course that does it make sense to spend that money to bring in temporary nurses when you could use it for negotiating with the nurses, but then that is the point isn't it? You are telling them that no matter what they do you are not going to sit down with them and work on giving them their raises.

This has been happening in many hospitals for a long time, but it's getting worse. The fact that CEOs are being paid obscene amounts while either not paying their staff enough to keep up with cost of living or cutting them altogether and privatizing their jobs.

IMC hospital in SLC, Utah was the biggest employer in the state. Then it brought in a new CEO who was paid a huge salary and then he started firing doctors, nurses, ancillary staff including respiratory therapists, X-ray technicians and the cafeteria and janitorial staff. He then started firing people who worked in the billing and other clerical areas because he hired a private service that would do their jobs. This company though had been fined numerous times for its shady behaviors. People were given the choice to work with the company or find another job. But the company would offer lower wages, no benefits or retirement plans.

The Supreme Court just took a knife to unions, but with Trump's nomination to replace Kennedy how long until they rule that strikes will be illegal or something in that vein? The war on the American people is turning ugly. The tax cuts, the threat to the safety net, to SS, SSDI, SSI, Medicare and Medicaid are all part of the plan to make this country more of a banana republic than it currently is.

@snoopydawg

“Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers,” Wolin writes. “Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.”

From the eloquent article come so many gems. But also emanating from this is a profoundly dispiriting picture of the helplessness of an ordinary citizen or even aggregates of ordinary citizenry in altering a pervasive, truly cancerous affliction from which there is no cure other than self-destruction or catastrophic collapse of empire.

What takes the place of a collapsed Empire, assuming that humans survive? A power vacuum, filled, as in the Middle Ages, by decades or centuries of chaos in which so much beneficial progress is lost as well as the acquired totalitarian curse. What emerges from the other side? None of us will know for none of us will survive the transformation whether peaceful or not.

Sheldon Woin wrote about this in 2010, but he put the blame on Obama only when we know that he was just continuing what other presidents had done to get the USA to this point.

Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.

Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.

n a new preface, Wolin describes how the Obama administration, despite promises of change, has left the underlying dynamics of managed democracy intact.

"Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? I'm thinking that the ship has sailed what with the things congress has done and is going to do as well as what the SC will do if Trump's court pick gets on the bench. This is totally up to the democrats whether he even gets a hearing because of the procedures they can take to stop it.

This article by Hedges has been posted here a few times, but here it is again if anyone missed it or wants to read it again. This is one of his best, IMO.

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism Nov 02, 2015

@Lookout

which explains the second class status. This started back before women had the vote. So there’s your problem.

Like servants of the gilded age, they are people to be used and exploited. Perhaps because both professions serve the public, and corporations serve profit?

Last year an old high school chum came by to say he had a new job at a nearby seventh day Adventists hospital. Seems they were playing funny money and were required to investigate. Well my buddy discovered the problem...they had doctors serving in multiple roles (directors of this and that) drawing multiple salaries. He was happy to report his findings after which he was told "We don't have a problem. When can you leave?" Now it was against the law for them to fire him, but he knew they could drag him through court and make his life miserable, so he packed up and left.

I hope the nurses strike has better results. More power to them and their union!