Please includeAccessibility and ASL info in your events! And if your action is ‘child friendly’These are JUSTICE issues!!
***ASL interpretation – Let me know if your event needs this service .***
Articles are in two sections – 2nd section a few other articles
ARTICLES on Palestine / Israel:
See Petitions # 1 & 2
See Events # 1, 2, 3. 4 & 5
A. BREAKING: Compelling video evidence points to Israeli AIR BURST bomb striking al-Ahli hospital grounds, killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians as they slept on courtyard grounds adjacent to the parking lot – October 19, 2023
Arab Cultural and Comminity Center in San Francisco.
Friday, October 20
2. Friday, 1:00pm – 2:00pm, Revolutionary Friday: STOP THE GENOCIDE OF PALESTINE! END THE OCCUPATION!
Israeli Consulate (Outside) 456 Montgomery St. SF
All are welcomed to join the Revolutionary Workers Front and Mothers On The March in front of the Israeli Consulate to demand an end to the continued genocide, illegal occupation and apartheid inflicted on Palestinians by the Zionist Israeli government.
On Tuesday, October 17th, Israel bombed Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, the “Palestinian Health Ministry says at least 500 people have been killed in an attack on a hospital in central Gaza.”
Thursday, October 19th GAZA UPDATE: “From Defense for Children International – Palestine : At least 1,524 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health, about 40% of the total death toll since Israeli forces began bombarding the Gaza Strip on October 7.” Many more remain trapped under the rubble.
Today, Israel continues to bomb Gaza and its borders.
Even with continued massive global demonstrations, US mainstream media / US politicians, the United Nations and heads of states in Europe still are supporting Israel.
RESISTANCE is important to support the people of Palestine.
You are welcomed to bring your own homemade messages. We have banners, chalk for your sidewalk messaging.
Stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine!
WE CALL FOR:
· AN END TO ALL U.S. MILITARY AID AND WEAPONS TO ISRAEL
· AN END TO THE BLOCKADE OF PALESTINE
· A CEASEFIRE
· BOYCOTT, DIVEST AND SANCTION ISRAEL
· END THE APARTHEID / COLONIALIZATION OF PALESTINE
5. Saturday, 12Noon, Stop The Wars Abroad-Win The War At Home Rally At Travis AFB Stop The War On Gaza
Guest Center California Travis AFB Air Base Parkway & Parker Rd, Fairfield
Global Day of Action, Stop the War on Gaza Abolish NATO, Shutdown 800 Bases Around the World
While millions in the US are without healthcare and hundreds of thousands of poor and working people are living in tents or on the streets, the US politicians from the Democrats and Republicans want to put billions more into the US war machine in Israel and Ukraine. The US supports these wars like it provoked the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan. The US is now shipping billions more for the war against Palestinians by Israel. The AFL-CIO and all of labor need to oppose these wars and the war machine. We need labor boycotts and strikes to end these wars abroad.
While we do not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this war has been engineered to create a war hysteria and more war spending which is already ap- proaching $1 trillion.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of workers from the UAW to SAG AFTRA are fighting for living wages and against contracting out, elimination of jobs through AI/Robotics and union busting. These struggles are what working people need to organize to win NOW for all people and the threat to shutdown the government should be met with a real national general strike to bust the union busters. The rise of fascism as well is a real danger and it is growing.
The main enemy is not the Russians, Chinese, or other countries, but the war criminals running the Congress & US government. This is the business of war which benefits the profiteers of the military industrial complex which own the Congress and Biden.
As part of an International Day of Action, from Italy to Turkey, Argentina and Japan, actions will take place around the world at US military bases. Travis AFB handles more cargo and passengers than any other military air terminal in the United States.
Endorsed by: United Front Committee For A Labor Party, Revolutionary Workers Front, Party of Communists
6. Saturday, 3:00pm – 5:00pm, Stand with HAITI! Featuring Madame Mildred Aristide
First Presbyterian Church – Oakland 2619 Broadway Oakland
Mme. Mildred Aristide, the former First Lady of Haiti and a member of the Board of Administration of the University of the Dr. Aristide Foundation (UNIFA), will be coming soon to the Bay Area to discuss the remarkable work of UNIFA amidst the deepening crisis in Haiti.
As always, Haitians continue to persevere in the face of the most daunting challenges. One shining example is the ongoing work of the University of the Dr. Aristide Foundation, which now has over 5,000 students and faculties in Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Physical Therapy, Law, Architecture, Economics, Education, and Agriculture, and just opened a new teaching hospital. UNIFA embodies the spirit of the new Haiti being built under the most trying conditions.
SPONSORED BY THE HAITI EMERGENCY RELIEF FUND AND HAITI ACTION COMMITTEE To help support the vital work of UNIFA and its teaching hospital at this critical time, please donate at haitiemergencyrelief.org
Saturday, 6:00pm – 7:00pm, Monthly Gathering at Alex Nieto’s Altar
Alex’s Altar Bernal Hill S
All are welcomed to join Alex’s parents Refugio and Elvira Nieto as they remember Alex and their call for justice.
On March 21, 2014, Alex was murdered by SFPD officers Jason Sawyer, Richard Schiff, Nathan Chew, and Roger Morse, with 59 bullets.
DA Gacon (at the time) declined to file criminal charges against the officers.
There is still no justice for Alex nor other victims of police terror in SF!
Sunday, October 22
7. Sunday, 12Noon, Sacramento 022
Southside Park 2115 6th St. Sacramento
Join us for the 28th National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation in Sacramento, CA.
Sacramento, we will have a rally where we will uplift the impacted families, then we will march together in solidarity with those across the nation who will be protesting on this day!
Please help us share and get the word out.
Thank you to the families, groups, and supporters who are collaborating with us on this National Day of Protest
“A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast.” — The Prince, chapter XVII
Political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) considered Niccolò Machiavelli a “fallen angel” of realpolitik. “To recognize the diabolical character of Machiavelli’s thought,” Strauss wrote in his 1958 Thoughts on Machiavelli, “would mean to recognize it as a perverted nobility of a very high order.”
Machiavelli himself may have issued a preemptive rejoinder, noting in the final chapter of The Prince: “God will not do everything himself.” The philosopher extolled human agency, whether flawed or refined, as a matter of “free will” and a proper means of securing “such share of glory as belongs to us.” Although Machiavelli leaned safely on the religious vocabulary of his Renaissance era, it is no stretch to call him a humanist.
Since its posthumous publication in 1532, Machiavelli’s treatise on claiming and holding power has been synonymous with deception, ruthlessness, and even brutality. For centuries, “Machiavellian” has connoted cunning amorality. I have inveighed against recent popular works such as The 48 Laws of Power, which endorse morally neutral, sneaky, or manipulative methods of personal advancement.
How, then, can I justify reconsidering The Prince, a book considered the urtext of reptilian attainment?
A fresh look often reveals the unexpected. Machiavelli imbued The Prince with a greater sense of purpose and ethics than is commonly understood. Although Machiavelli unquestionably endorses absolutist and, at times, ultimate ways of dealing with adversaries, he repeatedly notes that these are last resorts when civic governance proves unworkable. He justifies deception or faithlessness only as a defense against the depravity of men, who shift alliances like the winds. This logic by no means approaches Christ’s dictum to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” but it belies the general notion that Machiavelli was a one-note schemer.
Moreover, the philosopher emphasizes rewarding merit (not family, sycophants or hacks); leaving the public to its own devices as much as possible (the essential ingredient, he writes, to developing culture and economy); trusting subjects enough to allow them to bear arms — and even arming them yourself if confident in their loyalty (as a good leader should be, he says); surrounding oneself with wise counselors (the true measure of a ruler’s ability); rejecting and not exploiting civic divisions (which weaken the whole nation); and striving to ensure the public’s general satisfaction.
One of the most striking parts of The Prince for me is when Machiavelli expounds on the best kind of intellect among leaders:
There are three scales of intelligence, one which understands by itself, a second which understands what it is shown by others, and a third, which understands neither by itself nor by the showing of others, the first of which is most excellent, the second good, but the third worthless.
This has always been my favorite passage of Machiavelli’s. To add a further wrinkle to his observation, here is an alternate translation — I challenge you to consider what place you occupy on its scale:
There exist three kinds of intellects: that belonging to the one who can do the thing itself, that belonging to the one who can judge the thing, and that belonging to the one who can neither do nor judge. The first is excellent, the second is good, and the third is worthless.
For these reasons and more, some modern critics suggest that The Prince is actually a satire or subversion of monarchy: that under the guise of writing a guide to bloody knuckled politics, Machiavelli instead sends up the actions of absolute rulers and covertly calls for more republican forms of government while laying traps for tyrants. [1] I think that assessment stretches matters. But it is equally mistaken to conclude that Machiavelli was a narrow-eyed courtier. On balance, Machiavelli was a pragmatic tutor — sometimes morally conflicted and counseling of graduated application of his principles in the interest of promoting the unity, stability, and integrity of nation states, chiefly his own Italy, in a Europe that lacked cohesive civics and reliable international treaties. His harsher ideas were then considered acceptable quivers in the bow of statecraft; in reading him, you will also detect his efforts to leaven sword-thrusts with insights about the vicissitudes of human nature, fate, and virtue.
These latter themes appear more fully in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, posthumously published in 1531, one year prior to his better-known Prince. Discourses is the more epic and ambitious of the two works and at least as quotable.
Lest I paint too mild a picture of the strategist of statecraft, however, let me add this passage from Book I, chapter XVI, of Discourses in which the author references the semi-legendary founder of the Roman Republic, Lucius Junius Brutus (d. circa 509 B.C.), who condemned his two sons to death for supporting monarchism: “Now, to meet these difficulties and their attendant disorders, there is no more potent, effectual, wholesome, and necessary remedy than to slay the sons of Brutus.” (Emphasis in the original, translated in 1883 by N.H. Thomson.) And from Book II, chapter XIII: “…the Romans, from the time they first began to extend their power, were not unfamiliar with the art of deceiving, an art always necessary for those who would mount to great heights from low beginnings; and which is the less to be condemned when, as in the case of the Romans, it is skillfully concealed.”
Due to the controversial nature of his writings on power and his direct appeal to rulers, Machiavelli saw just one of his political and strategic books published during his lifetime: Art of War (1521), a Socratic-style dialogue on conflict. That effort shares some correspondences with the Ancient Chinese work of the same title — not yet known in the West — particularly in Machiavelli’s observations: “In war, discipline can do more than fury” and “To know in war how to recognize an opportunity and seize it is better than anything else. [2] For parallel study, see my The Art of War: Landmark Edition (G&D Media, 2021).
Although Machiavelli was considered amorally ruthless in matters of shaping and breaking alliances, he used The Prince to inveigh against needless divisiveness and animus: “I do not believe that divisions purposely caused can ever lead to good…” He extolled excellence in government — and the leader who fosters it:
The choice of Ministers is a matter of no small moment to a Prince. Whether they shall be good or not depends on his prudence, so that the readiest conjecture we can form of the character and sagacity of a Prince is from seeing what sort of men he has about him. When they are at once capable and faithful, we may always account him wise, since he has known to recognize their merit and to retain their fidelity. But if they be otherwise, we must pronounce unfavorably of him, since he has committed a first fault in making this selection.
Machiavelli held that the finest rulers retain power not by sneakiness but intelligence, tough-mindedness, and refinement through personal trial: “They who come to the Princedom…by virtuous paths, acquire with difficulty, but keep with ease.”
I advise experiencing The Prince through the lens of your own ethical sights and inner truths; sifting among its practical lessons; taking in its tough observations about human weaknesses; and using it as a guide to the realities — and foibles — of human nature.
Read by everyone from the humanist Voltaire (who opposed Machiavellianism) to the monster Stalin, The Prince has developed a mystique rivaling any modern work. Toward the end of his life, hip hop artist Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) adopted the name Makaveli after reading the Italian philosopher’s work. The rapper explained in an interview: “That’s what got me here, my reading. It’s not like I idolize this one guy Machiavelli. I idolize that type of thinking where you do whatever’s gonna make you achieve your goal.” [3] That accounting probably captures some aspect of the motives of many contemporary readers of Machiavelli.
That said, I believe that some who encounter The Prince today will recognize subtleties missing from the value-free rationalism prominent in some precincts of our culture. To use spiritual language, I personally see Machiavelli as a voice of the Left-Hand Path. In a philosophical sense, the term left-hand is rooted in the Vedic Sanskrit vamachara for “left-handed attainment.” The Left-Hand Path is an ethical and spiritual outlook that might be described as, “My Will Be Done.” This concept could be seen as a more honest philosophical antonym to The Lord’s Prayer invocation, “Thy Will Be Done,” which is often invoked with the same meaning covertly or, just as often, unconsciously. And, of course, to really evince will — versus automatized drives that lead the individual as magnetism does filaments — requires a measure of search rarely encountered today.
Again Leo Strauss from his Thoughts on Machiavelli: “Paganism is characterized by satisfaction with the present, with the world and its glory…” I think Abrahamic religion has been too contented to dismiss rather than integrate this attainment-based current, which is equally universal, on both intimate and macro scales, as religion’s salvational one. Within the work of Machiavelli it is possible to detect a bridge between the two: glory and realization.
Finally, I offer a lesson from The Prince suggested in its pages but made plainer in the life of its author: apparent failure may conceal lasting victory. The work that eventually transformed Machiavelli into a near-household name would probably never have been written were the author and statesman not summarily fired, imprisoned, and banished following the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1512 and subsequent return of the aristocratic Medici family. Machiavelli, considered a loyalist of the deposed regime, was exiled to near-poverty on his family farm in southeast Italy. The former diplomat, a man who previously enjoyed entry to Europe’s royal courts, struggled beneath twin burdens of boredom and obscurity.
Resorting to his pen, Machiavelli sought to demonstrate his continued relevance and even indispensability by writing Discourses and The Prince, dedicating the latter to the “magnificent” Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (even as his treatise condemned flatterers) in hopes the new ruler or his successors would restore the author’s position. Although the Vatican enlisted Machiavelli for a few political consultations before his death in 1527, the statesman’s rehabilitation never fully occurred. But the literary productivity of exile granted the philosopher what no official appointment could: posterity.
In that vein, consider Machiavelli’s note in chapter VI of The Prince, when referencing Rome’s legendary founder Romulus who was said to be cast out on a rock as an infant with his twin brother Remus and raised by a she-wolf: “It was fortunate for Romulus that he found no home in Alba, but was exposed at the time of his birth, to the end that he might become king and founder of the City of Rome.” As with Machiavelli and Romulus, fortune often hides within seeming reversals.
Not all of Machiavelli’s advice remains pertinent or possible in today’s world; nor, I venture, would most readers wish to act on all of it. But his overarching principles warrant careful scrutiny and evaluation. As alluded, their relevance and applicability rest with the reader’s discretion.
Notes
[1] E.g. see “How Machiavelli Trolled Europe’s Princes: Machiavelli’s advice for rulers was ruthless and pragmatic — and he may have intended for it to secretly destroy them” by Erica Benner, The Daily Beast, May 6, 2017.
[2] Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli, translated, edited, and with a commentary by Christopher Lynch (The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
[3] “Why Tupac Changed his Name to Makaveli,” TupacUncensored.com, November 4, 2022.
But an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll released Tuesday offered an early prediction: Biden would beat Trump by 7 percentage points when Kennedy is factored in.
If the election were held today, Biden would snag 44% of the vote to Trump’s 37%, followed by Kennedy’s 16% with 3% undecided, according to the survey.
Kennedy, whose anti-vaccine views appeal to some conservatives, is simply siphoning off more votes from Trump than Biden.
With the political scion on the ballot, Biden loses 5 percentage points among Democrats while Trump loses 10 points among Republicans, according to the poll.
Kennedy, who’s gotten significant air time on Fox News and other conservative outlets, has been denounced by his own family, but come November 2024, he might just end up a darling for Democrats anyway.
“Although it’s always tricky to assess the impact of a third-party candidate, right now Kennedy alters the equation in Biden’s favor,” Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said. “What this does speak to, however, is that about one in six voters are looking for another option, especially independents.”
The poll, conducted Oct. 11 among 1,313 American adults, shows Biden leading Trump by 3 percentage points in a head-to-head contest.
By Tessa McLean Updated Oct 18, 2023 9:06 a.m. (SFGate.com)
FILE – Aerial view of San Francisco.heyengel/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Each TikTok video starts the same. There’s a sweeping shot of an iconic landmark that places you in a city or neighborhood. Then comes clip after clip of vacant storefronts.
Cody Casillas has posted nearly 50 videos just like this on the social media platform, but none has garnered more views than his video of vacant downtown shops in San Francisco.
It has 2.8 million views as of this writing and it helped spur Casillas into turning his account into what he calls a certain type of “nostalgia content,” where he documents once-bustling commercial strips.
It all started in early September when the 30-year-old fashion merchandiser was visiting a formerly busy commercial district in Santa Monica near where he lives in Los Angeles. He filmed a video to show his friends how dire things looked for retail, overlaying names of the shops that closed as his camera scanned empty restaurants and stores. The video, which was only his second video on the account, quickly garnered more than 100,000 views. So he made another one. The second, an overview of papered-over windows and “for lease” signs in the Beverly Hills shopping district, quickly racked up more than 700,000 views.
After that video got a mention by the New York Post, he knew he had something he could run with. “I thought, this is a thing,” Casillas said. “I just kept going. I travel a lot for work so while I’m [in different cities] I go and see what’s there.”
His videos now include neighborhoods and towns in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego and Arizona and he said he has plenty of footage he still needs to compile into new videos. Each video takes a few hours to make, including the research to figure out which stores closed at each address. Once a video is posted, he tries to monitor the comments the best he can, as they often can get combative and wade into users’ political views.
“At first I was trying to manage the comments, but at a certain point it grows and grows and I can’t keep up,” Casillas said.
If he’s responding to comments too rapidly, TikTok will stop allowing him to comment temporarily while they review the activity, he said. He understands that the social media platform has to monitor the platform, but it’s “a little frustrating I can’t respond to everyone.”
Casillas said he thinks the depressed downtown San Francisco video went viral because it’s the most scrutinized city in the media right now, even though it’s clear most retail sectors are struggling. He pays particular attention to retail as his job is in the luxury fashion industry and he believes the rise in vacancies is due to a lot of factors — smash and grab crime, high rents, a lack of policies to help small businesses and the rise in online shopping. Still, he’s not posting the videos with pessimism. “I heard in the ‘80s it was similar and it all came back and I have hope in that regard,” he said. “It’s saddest to see a lot of these small businesses [closed].
As for the music, he said he tries his best to “match the vibe of the neighborhood” and often asks for help from a friend. He said “throwback songs” pair with the nostalgia element best, and he knows TikTok’s algorithm also favors more popular songs.
Hundreds gathered at Dolores Park Tuesday evening for a candlelight vigil demanding a cease-fire in Gaza after a blast in Gaza City today at a hospital reportedly killed at least 500 people.
Palestinians, Gaza health authorities and Arab leaders said that the explosion was the result of an Israeli airstrike, but Israeli officials are blaming an errant Palestinian rocket. Neither version could be confirmed.
People in the crowd at the vigil held candles in their hands and stood in silence for about a minute, in memory of the dead.
Ellen Brotsky with the Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area chapter spoke publicly about anti-Semitism as well as Palestinian liberation.
“We understand that our Jewish safety from anti-Semitism comes through solidarity with all peoples, including the Palestinian people, and through our collective liberation together,” Brotsky said. She also called for the crowd to call or write to Congress and elected representatives to demand a cease-fire in Gaza.
Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip for 11 days, following an attack on Israeli civilians by the Palestinian organization Hamas. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, the death toll from the bombing has reached 3,000 so far, with 125,000 wounded.
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Yoav Gallant, Israeli defense minister, stated that Israel would allow “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” into the enclave.
The siege has brought protesters to the streets. Thousands of demonstrators marched down Market last Saturday, joining an “All Out For Gaza” rally in support of Palestinians who were trapped in Gaza amid the escalating military conflict.
On Sunday night, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins called the solidarity march “a pro-Hamas rally,” in a since-deleted post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“This weekend a pro-Hamas rally was held downtown, where ‘Death 2 Israel,’ amongst other hateful rhetoric, was graffitied across buildings,” Jenkins wrote in her post, which she deleted on Monday.
Leaders of organizations, including the Jewish Voice for Peace in the Bay Area and Arab Resource and Organizing Center, issued statements condemning Jenkins for inciting violence. They said rhetoric like Jenkins’ led to the stabbing death of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume in Chicago, Illinois. The Palestinian-American boy’s landlord has been charged with murder in an alleged anti-Muslim hate crime.
“As we fight and organize to free our people back home, to stand on the side of freedom with our people back home, we’re also fighting alongside one another to ensure that what happened in Chicago doesn’t happen in our backyard.” said Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, speaking with her 6-month old baby in her left arm and a mic in her right hand.
Lulu Azzghayer a Palestinian mother in San Francisco, spoke to the crowd about her experience in Shuafat, a mostly Palestinian Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and was shocked to learn how little people in the United States know about the lives of Palestinians.
Azzghayer shared that she was supposed to go on a college tour with her 16-year-old daughter now but instead she was here, speaking up against Israeli actions in Gaza.
After an hour and a half, the vigil approached its end. Some left, while others gathered closer and started chanting in Arabic: “With our blood, with our soul, we’re gonna save Palestine.”
Karim Aburjeila, a 28-year-old software engineer from Gaza, lingered, holding a Palestinian flag in his hand.
Aburjeila arrived in the United States alone three years ago. He said he has lost direct communication with all of his family members and friends who are currently in Gaza.
“They have destroyed the signals, everything,” Aburjeila said. “Sometimes I have to call somebody who is close to them to reach them.”
As he spoke, the crowd kept chanting.
“Free, free, Palestine!” they chanted, and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
https://videopress.com/embed/cr4HMtTh?cover=1&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=1&hd=1Vigil crowd chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Long live, Palestine”. Video by Xueer Lu.
“I have a lot of hope, and I’m hopeless at the same time,” said Somyah Abdullah, a 27-year-old Palestinian from Yemen who works as an elementary school teacher in San Francisco. “I’m heartbroken that everything is going on in Palestine right now, but I have a strong faith and belief that one day Palestine will be free. ”
Ending the vigil, organizers pointed to a 10:30 a.m. walkout on Wednesday at schools across the country in solidarity with all Palestinians in Gaza.
Xueer is a data reporter for Mission Local through the California Local News Fellowship. Xueer is a bilingual multimedia journalist fluent in Chinese and English and is passionate about data, graphics, and innovative ways of storytelling. Xueer graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a Master’s Degree in May 2023. She also loves cooking, photography, and scuba diving.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen has changed her tune on the addition of 60 tiny homes proposed for the corner of 16th and Mission streets, writing in a community newsletter today that she will be supporting the project after previously opposing it.
She said the tiny homes, which would ostensibly only be on the site for about two years before an affordable development breaks ground, would have a full-time staff member to ensure cleanliness. That addition, she wrote, changed her opinion on the proposal.
“I had prior reservations over this project, due to concerns over our city departments’ capabilities to keep conditions around Mission shelter sites clean,” she wrote in the newsletter. “I am proud to announce that the Mission will soon have a brand-new, full-time City employee dedicated to maintaining safe and clean conditions around these shelter sites and throughout the Mission.”
The homeless village could come to the corner as soon as spring 2024.
Initially proposed by the city in 2022, the tiny homes project at 1979 Mission St. had seemingly been put on hold after community members in the Mission expressed concerns regarding safety and sanitation, stating that a homeless village could expose students at the nearby Marshall Elementary School to drug-use and violence.
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The temporary nature of the project — the corner is slated to break ground for 450 units of affordable housing as soon as 2025 — had also raised questions about whether the investment of $7 million will be worth it. San Francisco’s first tiny home village at 33 Gough St. opened in 2022 at $15,000 each, but the Mission site would cost some $116,000 per cabin.
Ronen originally supported the project, but said it might be off the table in February after a community meeting indicated overwhelming opposition. “I am not going to support this project unless I can look you in the eye and say it’s safe,” she vowed at that meeting, saying she wanted the site to be properly maintained.
The tiny homes project, however, progressed quietly. It was well underway in early August, according to an email from Emily Cohen, spokesperson for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
“The reason that I was opposing it is because I wasn’t sure that the city had the capability of improving the conditions in the neighborhood rather than making them worse,” Ronen said in an interview today. “Now that we have a full-time person who will be walking by the site every day, problem-solving in realtime and this will be a priority area for the entire city.”
According to Ronen, a city employee will be available in November to field phone calls and fix problems around the tiny homes in realtime. The staff member, who will work under Sam Dodge, the director of the Healthy Streets Operations Center, “will be physically walking around the Mission District every day” and have a direct line to city staff to fix problems at a quicker pace, said Ronen.
Ronen stressed that she believes the 60 tiny homes “are one of the best types of shelters that we have” to address homelessness in the Mission and prevent encampment fires, like those on Stevenson and Julian streets.
“The only way we can get people off the streets and inside is if we have more shelter space, and there’s very, very limited shelter space available in the city. And oftentimes people choose not to use congregate shelter because they feel unsafe there,” she said.
The parcel of land, 1979 Mission St., was acquired by the city in 2021 after years of neighborhood opposition to a planned market-rate housing development at the site. It has since been designated 100 percent affordable housing and dubbed the “Marvel in the Mission” by local organizers.
The homeless village will remain on the lot in the years before the affordable housing project breaks ground. According to planning documents, the village will be made up of two-room “modular” units. In addition, two bathroom and shower trailers will be available on-site.
The Department of Homeless will host a community meeting Wednesday from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at St. John’s Episcopal Church at 1661 15th St. to discuss the project.
If everything goes forward as planned, the Department of Homelessness will break ground in November with the goal of opening in the spring of 2024 and operating as long as the parcel is available, according to Cohen.
“We will absolutely vacate in time for the affordable housing development to start,” said Cohen, who roughly estimates that the tiny-homes village will last about two years. “But we also want to use vacant, city-owned property to the fullest extent possible to help support our community.”
For people living in poverty, a guaranteed income can mean finally having the space to dream of a comfortable life. Sharing the stories of single moms who participated in a first-of-its-kind program that offered them $1,000 per month with no strings attached, poverty disrupter Aisha Nyandoro calls for us to redefine what it means to be wealthy — putting aside lavish vacations and fancy cars in favor of paid bills and a well-fed family — and to listen when people tell us what they …SHOW MORE
On October 13, the arrest of Charles Scharf was rehearsed outside his bank’s Market Street office in San Francisco.
Scharf, Chief Executive Officer of Wells Fargo, was not actually arrested, although he was invited to come out and hear the charges against him.
California’s penal code permits anyone to make a citizen’s arrest if they witness a misdemeanor or felony crime, or have reason to believe a felony has been committed. That includes white collar crimes and property crimes.
Wells Fargo CEO gets a slap on the wrist.
Climate activists in Extinction Rebellion decided Scharf’s bank loans of $316 billion to oil, gas and coal corporations since 2016 qualify him for arrest, as his financing of fossil fuel projects leads to excessive planet warming, floods, wildfires, death, and destruction. (War profiteering by defense industry corporations also merits some arrests; but Extinction Rebellion isn’t taking that on right now.)
A warrant server outside Wells Fargo headquarters initiated Scharf’s arrest for climate crimes. Through a megaphone, the citizen from Extinction Rebellion called for the bank CEO to surrender. A megaphone was needed because security guards inside the building refused to let activists deliver a warrant in person. (I know this because I stood at the front entrance and asked a guard to let me in.)
Anticipating Scharf’s reluctance to participate in the event, Extinction Rebellion activists had an actor ready to portray the CEO outside his building. Scharf’s stand-in surrendered, but not before he argued that “everything our bank does is for the good of the country, to secure energy independence, freedom from want, the American dream.” Then he called for his lawyer.
Surrender, CEO!
Another actor claiming to be Scharf’s lawyer defended the CEO as “too big to fail, too big to go to prison or even go to trial.” That did not prevent me from handcuffing the actor portraying Scharf, who after some consultation with his lawyer agreed to accept a slap on the wrist.
Before he could exit, the Scharf stand-in was confronted by two women from Extinction Rebellion who spoke on behalf of future generations, including a toddler wearing a judge’s robe and wig. The kid smiled and said “Hi,” or maybe it was “Hee,” a friendly judgment in any case.
A startling, ten-foot tall, ornate cloth puppet, an earth mother (or was she Mother Earth?) with the faces of six children in her folds stood with two other women as they told Scharf’s stand-in he should take a time out and stop harming the planet.
The Extinction Rebellion delegation warned Scharf that while only an actor, not the CEO himself, had been arrested during this performance, the banker should take notice. The time has come to stop arresting peaceful protesters and start arresting climate criminals instead.
Telling the CEO to take a time out.
It’s not unusual these days to hear an elected official in Washington DC dismiss an opponent’s impassioned speech by saying: “It was only political theatre.” Extinction Rebellion’s street theatre ought not to be dismissed, although it is theatre; it’s also a rehearsal for the prosecution of criminals. Those who profit by financing climate chaos—bank CEOs and others—should be held accountable for their felonious misconduct. Let the citizen’s arrests begin.
Joel Schechter, professor emeritus of San Francisco State University’s School of Theatre and Dance, participated in several Extinction Rebellion performances, including “The Citizen’s Arrest of a Climate Criminal” described here. A brief film version of the arrest scene can be watched online here.
America’s healthcare system is bonkers. And the way it handles prescription drugs is one of its most insane corners—a fact that two recent examples really drove home.
If you watch much TV, you can’t avoid commercials for prescription drugs. The one that most annoys me—admittedly, it’s a tough competition—is the ad for Jardiance that blanketed a number of channels this summer and early fall. If, like me, you regularly watch Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, you’ve probably seen it dozens of times at least.
In the ad, a cheerful young woman surrounded by dancers sings exuberantly, “I have type 2 diabetes but I manage it well/It’s a little pill with a big story to tell.” She spends a full minute singing and dancing about her medicine, ending with the carefully considered medical opinion that “Jardiance is really swell.”
This is obnoxious on so many levels that I barely know where to start. For one, it trivializes type 2 diabetes, a serious, complex disease with potentially life-threatening consequences. The message in essence is, “Just pop our little (very expensive) pill and you don’t have to worry.”
A song and dance doesn’t make people healthier.
In fact, per the CDC, while drugs like Jardiance can often play a role, there’s a lot more involved in managing type 2 diabetes, including diet and monitoring of blood sugar levels. Meanwhile, the required list of scary and potentially deadly drug side effects is, as usual in such ads, blitzed through as quickly as possible by a monotone-voiced narrator who’s clearly been instructed to make this information as uninteresting as possible.
Is this sort of commercial the best way to handle tricky and expensive prescription medicines? Most countries don’t think so. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that allow direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. I’m old enough to remember when the US didn’t permit it either, allowing ads directed at healthcare professionals only.
Big Pharma spends lots of money advertising a relative handful of high-priced drugs. In 2022, Jardiance ranked number five on the list, with $145 million spent on TV ads alone. That’s less than half of what was spent pushing the number one drug, Rinvoq—an anti-inflammatory used to treat eczema, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and other conditions—which racked up over $315 million in TV spending.
Drug companies don’t spend that sort of money promoting cheap medications with low profit margins. They push newer, pricier drugs on which they can make a killing.
Per Jardiance manufacturer Boehringer-Ingelheim, this “little pill with a big story to tell” lists for $570.48 for one month’s supply. That’s brutal for those without insurance and represents a potentially huge cost for insurers, given that more than 37 million Americans have type 2 diabetes. Even those with insurance could be stuck with a whopping copay. (Meanwhile those with type 1 diabetes, who generally need to take insulin every day, will get no immediate help from California—Gov. Gavin Newsom recently vetoed legislation that would have capped insulin copays at $35.)
But Jardiance is cheap compared to Rinvoq, the most advertised drug. Rinvoq lists for $6124.96 for a one-month supply, per drugmaker AbbVie.
All of this might make sense if the most heavily advertised drugs were the most effective for the conditions they’re designed to treat, but recent research suggests they’re not. In one study published earlier this year, researchers from Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth found, “Fewer than one-third of the most common drugs featured in direct-to-consumer television advertising were rated as having high therapeutic value, defined as providing at least moderate improvement in clinical outcomes compared with existing therapies. Manufacturers’ television advertising spending on included products rated as low therapeutic value was $15.9 billion from 2015 to 2021.”
A second recent study, out of Johns Hopkins, reported similar results: “…a higher proportion of promotional spending allocated to direct-to-consumer advertising was associated with drugs rated as having lower added clinical benefit than for those having higher added clinical benefit.”
Meanwhile, Big Pharma is suing to block Medicare from negotiating lower prices for a handful of widely-used drugs, a long-overdue effort authorized by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Generic drugs get crazy, too
Drug pricing madness is not limited to fancy, brand-name drugs. It can get seriously weird with generics as well. As regular 48hills readers may remember, I’ve been dealing for over a year with peripheral neuropathy—painful nerve damage—caused by COVID-19. There are no great treatments for this, but a couple drugs seem to help some people.
Lately, I’ve been taking one of them, called pregabalin—brand name Lyrica. Since there are generic versions available, that’s what I’ve gotten. But the pricing is downright demented.
My initial prescription was for a 30-day supply of 75 milligram capsules. My Medicare drug plan, run by a company called Wellcare (don’t get me started on the Republican madness that led to Medicare prescription drug coverage being handled by private insurers), informed me that the price of the drug was $130, of which they would pay $17.98 and I would be charged $112.02.
Ouch.
That dose didn’t really help, so my neurologist suggested upping it to 150 mg. I was frightened to contemplate what that might cost, but when the news came, I got a pleasant surprise: The price for a 30-day supply of 150 mg. capsules was $65, of which I’d only have to pay $44.
That’s not a typo. The same number of capsules with double the dose is cheaper. Lots cheaper. Both are generics, packaged similarly, so… WTF?
I called WellCare, spending over half an hour on the phone with a rep. She managed to explain that my higher copay for the lower dose was because I hadn’t yet met my deductible for the year, a one-time situation until the new year starts. But she had no explanation why the drug itself cost twice as much for half the dose.
So next I emailed the pharmacy that had handled both prescriptions, CVS/Caremark. Perhaps they could explain why half the dose cost twice as much. Here is their initial response:
We understand your concern. A lot of factors go in to [sic] the pricing, the demand for the medication, cost to make the medication, sometimes pharmacies may get a limited number of drugs at a lower cost and may be required to limit what they charge. For further information regarding plan design, please contact WellCare with the phone number on the back of your member id card.
I wrote back, this time specifying that I planned to write about this situation in an article on drug pricing and suggesting that if they wanted to give a more substantive response, this would be a good time. No luck. Their second response simply indicated that the price indicated was “the contracted rate” for each dose and added, “The actual drug cost is determined by the drug’s manufacturer and may increase/decrease at any time.” CVS/Caremark did confirm that if I ordered the 75 mg. capsules again this year, my copay would be $44, not $112.
It appears that the two doses of pregabalin came from different manufacturers: The 75 mg. was produced by Cipla Limited and the 150 mg. capsules came from Rising Pharmaceuticals. That’s a puzzle because Drugs.com indicates that both companies make both the 75 and 150 mg. sizes, along with several others.
So what’s going on? I still don’t know. Having spent many years covering healthcare regularly, I can guarantee that a call to the companies themselves would just produce more unverifiable boilerplate. That’s all you ever get from drug companies when you ask them to explain their pricing, and no law or regulation requires fuller disclosure. I may never know why half as much pregabalin costs twice as much.
The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have a national, single-payer healthcare system…
Former Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton is struggling to pay her medical bills and has opened up a GoFundMe page to collect donations. How can this be happening in the wealthiest nation in the world?
America is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right, the only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare, and the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, continuously enslaved and legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.
These things are connected.
Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.[i]
Yet copays and deductibles when a person gets sick averaged $1,318 in 2015, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans, up from $548 just 10 years earlier.[ii] This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.
The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.
At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system—or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans—were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.
Frederick Ludwig Hoffman Makes a Discovery
Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, as does every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.
And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.
In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”[iii]
From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.
He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920, he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.
In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.
From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).
In 1913, Hoffman wrote a seminal paper on the relationship between workplace pollution and cancer, which led him to cofound the American Society for the Control of Cancer (known today as the American Cancer Society). In 1937, he extended his research beyond the workplace and published Cancer and Diet: With Facts and Observations on Related Subjects, a book correctly pointing out the correlation between poor nutrition and cancer that is still in print at a dense 767 pages, mostly of statistical analysis between dietary habits and rates of disease.
His cancer research was so extensive and detailed (he concluded that diets heavy in processed foods and animal products produced higher cancer rates) that Adelle Davis—whose books were my mother’s nutrition guru in the 1950s and ’60s—became an early “convert” and “a devotee of Frederick Hoffman.”[iv]
But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.
On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States.[v] It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.[vi]
This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country. The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).
However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking the protective womb of slavery, would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was inferior to whites.
Corson acknowledged the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s “Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.”[vii]
While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”
Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”
The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.
Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro
In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”[viii]
In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.
Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”[ix]
In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.
And it was all because of their race, Hoffman noted:
“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”
And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.
The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”
Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.
“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”
But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”
While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”
At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:
“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”
And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:
“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”
For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman (and his colleagues, including the Prudential Life Insurance Company) had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.
From Scientific Racism to Libertarianism
In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.
In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.
In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.
White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.” The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”
Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:
“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”
But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.
It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.
“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”
White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.
“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”
And it’s not just charity.
“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.
“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”
Free education—as any Libertarian can tell you—is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.
Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:
“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”
And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race”:
“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”
This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.
From Scientific Racism to “No Compulsory Healthcare!”
The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.
But workers wanted both.
The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).
Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.
Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts.
A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself—and was, in a very real way—a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.
A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.[x] Rodgers wrote:
“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers—more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”
Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being considered or adopted in Europe).
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”
Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.[xi]
Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.
What finally blew up Hoffman’s support of the AALL apparently had to do with a system of insurance that had started in the late 17th century in the United Kingdom to cover fire losses and had gradually grown to include other forms of protection.
It was called mutual insurance and was unique from Prudential’s model in that the companies were owned by their policyholders instead of traditional corporate stockholders.
In this regard, mutual insurance companies ran much like employee-owned co-ops and lived in the nonprofit world both practically and philosophically. They also had lower operating costs, as they didn’t have to shovel wheelbarrows of cash to their stockholders and senior executives.
America had a tradition of mutual insurance that started in 1752 with a company known as “the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses From Loss by Fire.” Its founder was Benjamin Franklin and it still exists; the idea of mutual property and casualty insurance companies grew from there across the states and around the world.[xii]
In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.
Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.”[xiii] He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop nonprofit, state-funded health insurance.
Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:
“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds including fire.”[xiv]
The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.
Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.
Prudential Helps Kill America’s First Healthcare for All Campaign
Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.
Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”[xv]
They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.
In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.
His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”[xvi]
His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.
Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”[xvii]
Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:
“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”[xviii]
Lawmakers and the public, Hoffman wrote as America was fighting Germany during World War I, were supporting state-funded health insurance, “which is unnecessary, and as essentially a product ‘made in Germany’ as any legislative panacea brought forward for the alleged good of the people during a generation or more. The propaganda had its origin in the program laid down by the International Association for Labor Legislation, which held its first meeting in Baste, Switzerland.”[xix]
Hoffman went on to say:
“The proposed legislation strikes one more blow at self-dependence and initiative and makes your citizen a subject, whether of king or of commission matters little. Self-dependence and initiative, virtues only permitted to a few favored individuals in older forms of government, are again to be taken away from a large number of citizens, in return for a mess of pottage, and the normal cycle of human stupidity becomes obvious. The Constitution promised liberty and happiness, not supervision and comfort; that is, the guarantees were moral, not material.”
Citing a 1917 report from the New Jersey Commission on Old Age, Insurance and Pensions, Hoffman wrote:
“Under any and every system of social insurance the development of autocratic and arbitrary methods of interference with personal rights and liberties is a foregone conclusion.”
Quoting the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hoffman wrote:
“[T]he State should concentrate its efforts on preventive work rather than on the attempt to cure diseases through insurance; in that the Workmen’s Compensation Act had already taken some of the liberties away from the individual wage-earner, and that health insurance would take more; that the tendency of health insurance would be to pauperize the workers; that health insurance was not suited to American needs; that health insurance abroad was economically unsuccessful; that its cost was prohibitive; that it was an encouragement of malingering, and that self-respecting labor did not desire it.”[xx]
Toward the end of the pamphlet, once again warning of the dangers to America of adopting anything resembling Bismarck’s single-payer national health insurance system, Hoffman summarized:
“The German experiment in paternalism and coercion sounds the most convincing note of warning to other industrial countries, where under free institutions, under conditions of voluntary service, savings and self-sacrifice, infinitely better and more lasting results have been achieved.
“It is devoutly to be hoped that the warning will be heeded by the American people and that they will develop a strong and thoroughly effective opposition to any and every tendency towards autocracy, paternalism and coercion, under the plea of Social Insurance as inherently hostile and fatal to our traditional conceptions of personal and political liberty in a democracy.”[xxi]
Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.
In 1918, John R. Commons—one of the AALL’s cofounders—wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”[xxii]
Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.
He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”[xxiii]
Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote, “His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”
In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.
While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.
Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).
In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”[xxiv]
Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.[xxv]
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[iii] Beatrix Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State: Frederick L. Hoffman’s Transatlantic Journey,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 2 (2003): 150–90, accessed May 17, 2020, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25144326.
[iv] James S. Olson, Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer, and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 155.
[v] Eugene R. Corson, The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States (Norderstedt, Germany: Hansebooks, 2019).
[vii] Herbert Spencer, “Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” Westminster Review, LVII (1852): 468–501, cited by John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986, 1st ed.), 47–48.
[viii] Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: Macmillan Company, 1896).
[x] Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 256.
[xi] Anne-Emanuelle Birn, ScD, Theodore M. Brown, PhD, Elizabeth Fee, PhD, and Walter J. Lear, MD, “Struggles for National Health Reform in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 1 (January 2003): 86–91, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447697/.
[xvi] Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 256.
[xvii] Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State.”
[xviii] Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance (Miami, FL: HardPress, 2017, Kindle edition; orig. pub. Prudential Press, 1920).
[xx] “Bulletin No. 250 of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics on ‘Welfare Work for Employees in Industrial Establishments,’” Washington, DC, 1919, quoted in Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance,60.
[xxi] Hoffman, More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, 185.
[xxii] John R. Commons, “Health Insurance,” Wisconsin Medical Journal 17 (1918): 222; quoted in Numbers, Almost Persuaded, 78, quoted in Beatrix Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State.” [[Not clear—is this a quote within a quote within a quote? YES – Hoffman quoted the Numbers which quoted the WMJ. That’s the best I can do.]]
[xxiii] Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State.”
[xxv] Scott J. Paltrow, “Past Due: In Relic of ’50s and ’60s, Blacks Still Pay More for a Type of Insurance,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2000, quoted in Beatrix Hoffman, “Scientific Racism, Insurance, and Opposition to the Welfare State.”
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