PODCAST: The Week in Crime
Boy, do Democrats love criminals!
Your link to the Friday podcast on Ricochet.
DA Bragg’s insane prosecution of Daniel Penny: WHAT TOOK THE JURY SO LONG?
Liberal heart throb Luigi Mangione
“Moderate Democrat” Biden commutes sentences of 1,500 criminals - the most ever in a single day.
(Plus a few genius moves by “DemsRrealRacists” Republicans, like Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Kevin Stitt, and Mike Huckabee.)
The truth about Biden’s 1994 crime bill that allegedly led to “mass incarceration” for “nonviolent” drug crimes. (Entirely, laughably false.)
And here’s the NYT’s crack crime reporter, Zolan Kanno-Youngs:
Thank you Ann for the link to Ricochet and the crime blotter. Godspeed to President Trump.
It’s pretty disingenuous to discuss the Jordan Neely case without mentioning the failed leadership of Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan in shuttering institutions that housed and helped the mentally ill. This is what conservatives wanted: to abandon the poor, the indigent, and the ill, leaving them in the hands of the private pharmaceutical industry that promised it could supplant institutions—without any of the safeguards they provided. It's all about saving money and propping up corporations until the suffering of the least comes back to affect everyone else. Maybe this could be a wake-up call to stop offering everything up to private industry. Yes, some asylums were terrible, but they varied throughout history. None of them have to be terrible today, and the streets are a de facto terrible asylum. There's only room for improvement.
SKF, the manufacturer of Thorazine, first advertised the drug not just as a way to improve symptoms but as a means to shorten hospital stays—back in the 1950s. The ads were not aimed at patients or doctors alone but also at policymakers. The appeal to policymakers was clear: save money. It also created a steady revenue stream for drug manufacturers, as they could charge outpatients more than they could charge hospitals that had leverage over prices.
While medications are helpful, they're only helpful if taken consistently. The therapeutic milieu is also important, but drug manufacturers changed the narrative around mental illness, framing it as an entirely biological problem.
This is from The New Yorker:
<<In 1954, the F.D.A., for the first time, approved a drug as a treatment for a mental disorder: the antipsychotic chlorpromazine (marketed with the brand name Thorazine). The pharmaceutical industry vigorously promoted it as a biological solution to a chemical problem. One ad claimed that Thorazine 'reduces or eliminates the need for restraint and seclusion; improves ward morale; speeds release of hospitalized patients; reduces destruction of personal and hospital property.' By 1964, some fifty million prescriptions had been filled. The income of its maker—Smith, Kline & French—increased eightfold in a period of fifteen years.>>
Emphasis: "speeds release of hospitalized patients"
While the medications were and are helpful, the emphasis shifted to a solely biological perspective with input from private corporations.
Even if you accept that faulty premise of an exclusively biological model, putting the onus on people whose very disease is being out of touch with reality to continually take the medication as prescribed under their own volition makes you wonder—who is the one with disorganized thinking, really?
Psychotropics should have made institutions more humane and salubrious, not shuttered them.
A vigilante Marine is not the solution. First of all, it's inhumane to the person with the disease that makes them unable to have insight to give meaningfully informed refusal of treatment that could have prevented them from being in the situation. Second, even if it were somehow "humanistic," it would be a game of whack-a-mole.
This instinct toward privatization and giving corporations a taste of every aspect of life that doesn't need to be a market or industry is the same issue with health insurance. It led to a sclerotic political/corporate system that people have railed against since I was a child. (I remember Roseanne episodes from the 1980s where coverage was denied in emergency medical situations, leading to frustration.)
To suggest that Luigi Mangione was suffering from delusions that just happened to lead him to target someone who brought the country together more than anything I've seen since 9/11 is a huge reach. People with delusions are out of sync with reality. He tapped into something that deeply resonated, and all the writings from him I've seen so far are coherent. I'm not condoning his actions, but he seems more rational than U.S. foreign policy, which takes out strongman despots without even leading to the possibility of improvement. Assisting with the overthrow of, say, Gaddafi—what did that lead to? What was so rational about that?
At the very least, this is a symbolic attack on an industry that doesn't have a reason to exist. Insurance makes sense when the vast majority of people never need to make a claim. But health insurance is like having insurance for food—where you'd have to call your insurance company at the grocery store to get your staples covered. Coverage would vary depending on your job, your income, whether you're poor enough for Medicaid, whether you're in a state that opted out of Medicaid expansion (leaving you too poor for marketplace subsidies but not eligible for Medicaid), or whether you served in the military, and so on. You could argue healthcare should be like grocery stores, but healthcare is inherently expensive (a lot of reasons why, including the AMA limiting residency slots, avarice all around), but to quote Donald Trump, "I won't let people die on the streets."
Even if you believe in an Ayn Rand-style world, you’re going to have worse outcomes for the "top" in an unequal system. No one in the U.S. is motivated to practice primary, preventative care. And even those who "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and "make it big" are not wealthy over a lifetime. Persistent preventative care, along with entreaties to take care of one's health and access to the resources to do so, over a lifetime, is what results in longer lifespans.
Countries with universal healthcare—whether through a single-payer system or a single-employer model like the NHS—do fewer interventions and diagnostic tests. They aren't exhaustive at the end of life. They are utilitarian. But that means, in general, they have better quality years over a longer lifespan. The exact type of care—focusing on health rather than chasing disease—that people like RFK talk about.
Privatization works better for heroic measures—the Hail Mary medical interventions, which are, not incidentally, more necessary after a lifetime of lacking persistent preventative care. Maybe you could reserve that for the private sector somehow.
I digress.
Jordan Neely was mentally ill and should, many lifetimes ago, have been in a public institution. Luigi Mangione, while wantonly violent, was rational in his aims to publicize the fact that making shareholders money has zero to do with optimizing healthcare outcomes. That brings me to the same conclusion I did about Neely: Some things are better public than private.
If you can point to a country where private insurance is a panacea and where releasing the seriously mentally ill to comply with the pharmaceutical companies' offerings is working, I am all ears.