By No Bullshit
AUGUST 23, 2019
In a recently issued ruling U.S. District Judge William M. Conley writes that Medicaid, the publicly funded insurance that covers 65.7 million poor people, cannot deny the medical treatment needs of those suffering from “gender dysphoria.” Officials estimate it will cost up to $1.2 million annually to provide transgender Medicaid recipients in the Badger State with treatments such as “gender confirmation” surgery, including elective mastectomies, hysterectomies, genital reconstruction and breast augmentation. The intricate operations are typically done by plastic surgeons.
The ruling culminates a lawsuit filed more than a year ago by two transgender Wisconsinites, who accuse the federal and state-funded insurance program of providing them with disparate and inferior health care on the basis of sex. Cody Flack of Green Bay and Sara Makenzie of Baraboo say they suffer from severe gender dysphoria that requires costly surgery. Flack, a woman, claims to be ashamed of her breasts and wants to have them surgically removed as she transitions into a man’s body. To make a case for the government to pay for her surgery, she claims that she engages in “binding,” which flattens her breasts and causes sores, skin irritation and respiratory distress. Flack also has difficulty binding her breasts due to a disability, according to court documents. Makenzie, a man who legally changed his name to Sara and wears women’s clothing, says his “male-appearing genitalia” causes him “great distress” and negatively affects his sexuality and social life. Showering and seeing his body in a mirror is “painful,” court records state, and Makenzie fears someone will be able to see his “male genitals” through his clothing.
Last summer Judge Conley issued a preliminary injunction ordering Wisconsin to cover sex reassignment surgery for Flack and Makenzie while state health officials appealed. The permanent ruling directing the state-federal insurance for the poor to pay for all gender confirmation operations in the state was issued last week. To lay the foundation, Conley writes in the injunction that gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition, which if left untreated can cause adverse symptoms. “As a group, transgender individuals have been subjected to harassment and discrimination in virtually every aspect of their lives, including in housing, employment, education, and health care,” according to the document. “Their own families, acquaintances and larger communities can be sources of harassment. For some transgender individuals, though certainly not all, the dissonance between their gender identity and their naturally assigned sex can manifest itself in the form of gender dysphoria, a serious medical condition recognized by both sides’ experts and the larger medical community as a whole.”
Though Medicaid initially denied Flack’s chest reconstructive surgery, it was eventually completed at taxpayer expense after the judge’s injunction. A plastic surgeon performed a double mastectomy and male chest construction last fall. “Following the surgery, Cody’s gender dysphoria was greatly diminished,” according to Conley’s final ruling, because his “outward appearance matched his male gender” and he “would no longer be misgendered because of his breasts.” Makenzie got a bilateral orchiectomy and vaginoplasty to create “female appearing external genitalia” after the judge determined that the surgeries are medically necessary. Because Medicaid refused to cover chest reconstruction surgery prior to the lawsuit, Makenzie obtained a personal loan to pay a plastic surgeon at the University of Wisconsin Hospital for the operation in 2016. Court documents say Makenzie contends that the surgery helped alleviate his gender dysphoria.
In his decision, Judge Conley cites guidelines issued by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health to treat transsexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people. Treatments include psychotherapy, hormone therapy and “a number of surgical procedures” to eliminate the development of unwanted secondary sex characteristics of the assigned sex, develop secondary sex characteristics of the sex associated with the patient’s gender identity and enhance the patient’s ability to “pass” as the sex associated with the patient’s gender identity to decrease harassment, mistreatment and other forms of discrimination.
You are a centrist government in a democratic Western country. You want to be seen to be taking action on the environment, but you believe in consumer capitalism, and therefore wouldn’t dare to dismantle the profit-making machinery that actually contributes most of the CO2 within your economy. You praise the ideals of the Green New Deal, only because you know it will never become reality.
Your target must be insignificant economically, yet high-profile in its symbolic value. Meat works perfectly. Eating it already has an aura of hedonistic licentiousness, and restricting consumption covers several bases – animal cruelty, public health, and most importantly, climate change resulting from intensive livestock farming. You will get years of headlines, just as when you banned plastic bags or forced people to pay deposits on plastic bottles.
From brat to wurst? Germany proposes beefing up meat tax to battle climate change
But you can’t just ban meat. Or ration it to 200 grams a week for every citizen. Because that would be considered an authoritarian intrusion that fundamentally violates your people’s freedom.
You try to turn it into a just cause. Activist organizations have been lobbying for this longer than you have been in power, and PETA will have the factory farming pictures. Scientists will supply the studies (take only the ones that support your view). You leverage entirely hypothetical but impressive sounding research such as the 2016 Oxford University one that claimed that going vegetarian would save 8 million lives and $1.5 trillion, or one that alleges that meat “kills” 2.4 million people a year around the world, or the one that says that the US going vegetarian would be the same as taking 60 million cars off the road.
Yet, even after the publicity campaign, you still can’t ban meat. This is the time for the moment of genius, the clever solution that squares the circle between a free populace and their paternalistic-minded rulers.
You put a tax on it. Not a declared one, but a stealth tax. Perhaps merely drop the VAT rebate that it enjoys, as was proposed in Germany, which currently taxes meat at 7 percent VAT, but is contemplating moving the levy to 19. You can have more meat – as much as you want – but you will pay more for the luxury, and there is a fairness to it too – the more schnitzel you consume the more dosh you dish out. Does the money go into environmental causes? Probably not – there is currently no way to separate meat VAT from others – but at least people will be nudged into the correct behaviors.
The fruits of your labors will be evident within months.
Being a wealthy lawmaker you will eat as much or as little meat as before, as food makes up a small proportion of your monthly budget. Your constituents – that is a different matter. Perhaps some will get the message, and eat more vegetables instead. Or perhaps, instead of buying organic, cruelty-free, carbon-neutral meat, they will now buy more factory-farmed meat. Or perhaps they will spend the money on a decent steak but will not be able to afford to repair their car, or take that holiday to the Balearics. Though I guess that could be a result in itself – after all, as a rule, the poorer someone is in the West, the less CO2 they emit. Some might be so deprived, however, that they will eat no meat at all. Their remaining money will now go to other, cheaper and more harmful high-calorie processed foods, like cakes or oven-fried chips. While your farmers will simply find it more profitable to export the food abroad, over longer distances, increasing their emissions. Is this what you wanted?
Oh, sin taxes, they used to be so simple when you were targeting the universally agreed-upon harms, such as smoking, with the aim of their complete eradication. But this is getting more nuanced now. Meat has been eaten by the homo sapiens since its emergence, and played an important role in its evolution. It still remains a key source of protein for your population. Ethically too, eating it is a source of legitimate pleasure to the sensory organs of millions. Is it the job of the government to strip its citizens of their daily pleasures, to literally deny adults the full choice of food for their dinner? What’s the morally correct trade-off between seven-course feasts of imported ostrich and elk and government-mandated buckwheat three times a day?
Let them sail yachts: Why Greta Thunberg and the environmental elite hate you
You, the politicians, will complain that you are only using the tools at your disposal – that you can’t charge a poor person less at the meat counter, that you cannot ban a farmer from exporting his carcasses, or a supermarket from opting for cheaper transatlantic chicken over homegrown beef. But then is your clever solution any better than rationing books and Iron Curtain-style central planning?
You will say that at least it is better to be doing something.
And indeed you are right – it is the “something” that matters, not the specific results. After all if there is one thing that Greta Thunberg and Nigel Lawson can agree on is that creating a meat tax in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, the three countries that have shown the greatest appetite for this policy, will make almost no difference to global emissions. For example, even if every resident of the United States, the country with the highest consumption of meat per capita, stopped eating meat tomorrow, that would only slice 2.6 percent off its emissions. Meanwhile, a Chinese person now eats five times as much meat as they did in the 1980s, and still only half as much as Americans – so he wants more. And the world population will likely double by the end of the century. Germans eating two fewer sausages a week was never going to be more than a gesture, and everyone knows it.
Though bearing in mind other environmental policy perversities – like banning nuclear to rely on dirty coal, or incentivizing biofuels and, in the process, rainforest destruction – perhaps “negligible” is the best effect we can all hope for. And you get to enjoy your steak guilt-free.
By Igor Ogorodnev
By Chris Menahan
Published on Jun 26, 2019
“All of you on stage support a women’s right to abortion. You all support some version of a government health-care option. Would your plan cover abortion, Mr. Secretary?” asked MSNBC debate moderator Lester Holt.
“Yes it would. I don’t believe only in reproductive freedom, I believe in reproductive justice. And what that means is just because a woman, or let’s also not forget someone in the trans community — a trans female — is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exercise that right to choose. So I absolutely would cover that right to have an abortion,” Castro said.
By Neil Munro
“We have to shut down that facility and shut it down now,” Warren told supporters, according to a tweet by a Washington Post reporter. The crowd enthusiastically chanted, “Shut it down!”
Warren’s gambit highlights the growing number of progressives who emotionally oppose the federal agencies’ efforts to identify — although not actually stop — the huge wave of Central American migrants and their children who are walking into Americans’ blue-collar workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.
Amid the emotion, and its use by Democratic politicians, only about ten percent of adult migrants are being blocked at the border. The vast majority are quickly being released precisely because they bring young children on the dangerous journey solely to trigger the catch-and-release laws that are supported by Democrats.
Also, another huge wave of more than 56,000 children and teenagers — who claim to be unaccompanied — have surrendered to border officials since October. Roughly 2,500 of those teenagers are being temporarily sheltered at the center in Homestead, Florida, run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Washington Post did not report where Warren thinks the Homestead youths should be sent if the HHS center is closed.
These youths at the Homestead shelter are legally dubbed “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) because they told border agents that they were not traveling with their parents.
Most of the UAC teenagers at the center will be quickly sent to “sponsors” after officials have checked the potential sponsors for possible criminality, such as forced labor, prostitution, drug selling, and MS-13 links. The average stay is just 36 days, according to a June 19 HHS report.
But the vast majority of the sponsors are either the parents or the in-laws of the UAC teenagers, and many sponsors are also illegal migrants who have paid cartel-linked coyotes to deliver their teenagers to the Homestead camp, via the border agencies.
This UAC-smuggling strategy is dubbed the “UAC pipeline,” and it has been used since at least 2013. So far, the cartels earned a fortune by delivering a huge share of the 270,000 children and youths who have passed through the federally-operated pipeline since 2009.
In March, Democrats included a clause in the 2019 spending bill to hinder federal agencies from narrowing the UAC pipeline by deporting sponsors who are illegal migrants
Warren’s TV-ready visit to Homestead will happen the day of the first of two Democratic debates in Miami, Florida. The Homestead center is just 30 miles down the road.
Warren’s promised visit — which will likely be accompanied by a cheering crowd of pro-migration activists — is part of an escalating race by Democrats to out-do each other in promising to open the borders to poor migrants.
For example, Beto O’Rourke pledged to dismantle the border wall, Julian Castro promised to decriminalize illegal migration, and Joe Biden wants to welcome migrants from Venezuela and also “streamline and strengthen” the asylum laws being used by 100,000 economic migrants each month to get into the United States.
Warren, however, is keeping pace.
On June 21, for example, she promised to end the use of company-run prisons for holdingmigrants. That goal has long been sought by pro-migration groups because it would force the border agencies to expand the catch-and-release policy. In turn, the expanded catch-and-release policy would allow the cartel-linked traffickers to quickly recoup the cost of smuggling migrants into the U.S. blue-collar labor market and so stimulate the labor trafficking business that is pressuring down Americans’ salaries.
On June 25, Warren escalated again, saying she prefers to decriminalize illegal migration by letting “mamas and babies” into the United States.
“We should not be criminalizing mamas and babies trying to flee violence at home or trying to build a better future,” Warren told the Huffington Post. “We must pass comprehensive immigration reform that is in line with our values, creates a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants including our DREAMers, and protects our borders.”
A June 19 statement by HHS described operations at the center:
Due to the crisis on the southern border, ORR is facing a dramatic spike in referrals of UAC. As of June 10, DHS has referred over 52,000 UAC to HHS this fiscal year (FY), an increase of over 60 percent from FY 2018. Preliminary information shows over 9,000 referrals in May- one of the highest monthly totals in the history of the program. If these numbers continue, this fiscal year HHS will care for the largest number of UAC in the program’s history. Based on the anticipated growth pattern in referrals of UAC from DHS to HHS, HHS is preparing for the need for high bed capacity to continue.
HHS has expanded bed capacity at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for UAC in Homestead, Florida to 2,470 based on need resulting from a current increase in UAC referrals from DHS. Family separations that resulted from the Zero Tolerance Policy that ended in 2018 are not driving the continuing operation of Homestead. In addition, no children at Homestead are there due to the Zero Tolerance Policy.
Since opening in March 2018 over 13,300 UAC have been placed at the site and more than 10,800 have been discharged to a suitable sponsor.
Immigration by the Numbers
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
Flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
By Shane Trejo
The latest mind-boggling trend in California cities plagued with crime is actually paying gang members not to commit violent crimes.
After a 3-2 vote at Thursday’s city council meeting, the local government of Fresno is set to authorize city leaders such as Mayor Lee Brand and Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer to determine whether the Advance Peace program should be implemented.
If city officials determine that the program is viable, they could be budgeted up to $200,000 in taxpayer dollars to dole out to gang members as a supposed deterrent against committing shootings and other violent crimes. They hope to raise private funding as well to further pay off these thugs.
“I don’t think we should be spending $200,000 or $300,000 over the next five years on a program that certainly has value, but we have a lot of needs in the city of Fresno, it always comes down to priorities,” said Councilmember Garry Bredefeld, who voted against the proposal.
This measure was proposed by Councilmember Miguel Arias, who believes that tax revenue from the increased “cannabis activity” going on within the city following the legalization of marijuana would help pay for the costs of the program.
“In essence, Advanced Peace identifies the most active shooters in Fresno and enrolls them into a prevention program to help them with mentorship and job placement,” Arias said.
Chief Dyer points to the Mayor’s Gang Prevention Initiative and Operation Ceasefire as initiatives that are already in place that make this program unnecessary.
“I am philosophically opposed to giving money to any gang member,” Dyer said.
Fresno would not be the first city in California to implement such a program. The city of Richmond is where the Advance Peace program debuted, and it has since spread to Sacramento and Stockton.
Richmond gives gang members who claim they have given up violence stipends ranging from $300 to $1,000 per month. Sacramento is pumping $1.5 million into their version of the program, with Advance Peace matching that total in privately raised capital.
There is no data showing these programs are effective in combating crime, but that hasn’t stopped liberal cities throughout California from pushing them anyway. Fresno may be the latest city to initiate a program that very well may subsidize violent gang activity in their communities.
By Victor Davis Hanson
What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives?
Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists.
What are the popular gripes against them?
One, illegal immigration and open borders have led to chaos. Lax immigration policies have taxed social services and fueled multicultural identity politics, often to the benefit of boutique leftist political agendas.
Two, globalization enriched the cosmopolitan elites who found worldwide markets for their various services. New global markets and commerce meant Western nations outsourced, offshored and ignored their own industries and manufacturing (or anything dependent on muscular labor that could be replaced by cheaper workers abroad).
Three, unelected bureaucrats multiplied and vastly increased their power over private citizens. The targeted middle classes lacked the resources to fight back against the royal armies of tenured regulators, planners, auditors, inspectors and adjusters who could not be fired and were never accountable.
Four, the new global media reached billions and indoctrinated rather than reported.
Five, academia, rather than focusing on education, became politicized as a shrill agent of cultural transformation — while charging more for less learning.
Six, utopian social planning increased housing, energy, and transportation costs.
One common gripe framed all these diverse issues: The wealthy had the means and influence not to be bothered by higher taxes and fees, or to avoid them altogether. Not so much the middle classes, who lacked the clout of the virtue-signaling rich and the romance of the distant poor.
In other words, elites never suffered the firsthand consequences of their own ideological fiats.
Green policies were aimed at raising fees on, and restricting the use of, carbon-based fuels. But proposed green belt-tightening among the hoi polloi was not matched by cutbacks in their second and third homes, overseas vacations, luxury cars, private jets and high-tech appurtenances.
In education, government directives and academic hectoring about admissions quotas and ideological indoctrination likewise targeted the middle classes but not the elite. The micromanagers of Western public schools and universities often preferred private academies and rigorous traditional training for their own children.
Elites relied on old-boy networks to get their own kids into colleges. Diversity administrators multiplied at universities while indebted students borrowed more money to pay for them.
In matters of immigration, the story was much the same. Western elites encouraged the migration of indigent, unskilled and often poorly educated foreign nationals who would ensure that government social programs — and the power of the elites themselves — grew.
The champions of open borders made sure that such influxes did not materially affect their own neighborhoods, schools and privileged way of life.
Elites masked their hypocrisy by virtue-signaling their disdain for the supposedly xenophobic, racist or nativist middle classes. Yet the non-elite have experienced firsthand the impact on social programs, schools and safety from sudden, massive and often illegal immigration from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia into their communities.
As for trade, few still believe in “free” trade when it remains so unfair. Why didn’t elites extend to China their same tough-love lectures about global warming or about breaking the rules of trade, copyrights and patents?
The middle classes became nauseated by elites’ constant trashing of their culture, history and traditions, including the tearing down of statues, the Trotskyizing of past heroes, the renaming of public buildings and streets and, for some, the tired and empty whining about “white privilege.”
If Western nations were really so bad, and so flawed at their founding, why were millions of non-Westerners risking their lives to reach Western soil?
How was it that elites themselves had made so much money, had gained so much influence and had enjoyed such material bounty and leisure from such a supposedly toxic system — benefits that they were unwilling to give up despite their tired moralizing about selfishness and privilege?
In the next few years, expect more grass-roots demands for the restoration of the value of citizenship. There will be fewer middle-class apologies for patriotism and nationalism. The non-elite will become angrier about illegal immigration, demanding a return to the idea of measured, meritocratic, diverse and legal immigration.
Because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up — or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a nondemocratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.
By John Binder
On Tuesday, every House Democrat and seven House Republicans voted to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living across the United States so long as the nationals claim they arrived in the country as children.
The vote came as illegal immigration levels at the southern border have hit a two-decade high for the month of May. More than one to 1.5 million illegal aliens are expected to be added to the U.S. population this year alone.
The Koch brothers, who serve as mega-donors to the Republican establishment, praised House Democrats’ mass amnesty effort through their various economic libertarian organizations like the Libre Initiative and Americans for Prosperity.
“Today’s vote to provide a path to permanent legal status for the Dreamers and TPS recipients is a positive step,” Libre Initiative president Daniel Garza said in a statement:
The Dreamers know no other home than the United States. Every day they contribute to our economy and communities, but there is one big thing holding them back: the uncertainty around their status. Until and unless the law changes – giving them a way to remain legally in the United States – they remain limited in contributing to America’s success. [Emphasis added]
We are hopeful that this vote sets the stage for discussions among leaders in both parties, in both the House and Senate. Given the extraordinary level of support for the Dreamers among the American people, this can’t be the end of the discussion. It has to be a new beginning – the start of a discussion about how to move legislation through the House and Senate and have it signed by the president. We are thankful to lawmakers who support this important effort. [Emphasis added]
The Koch network’s economic libertarian, anti-populist agenda of free trade, mass legal immigration, and entitlement reform has little-to-no support among the American electorate. The economic libertarian agenda, once fronted by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, failed to sway voters in the 2018 midterm elections.
The Kochs and their network have opposed any reductions to legal immigration to raise American workers’ wages; reforms to save U.S. taxpayers billions by ending welfare-dependent legal immigration; and an end to the country’s birthright citizenship policy that rewards illegal aliens’ U.S.-born children with American citizenship.
Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million immigrants, with the vast majority coming from family-based chain migration whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. In 2016, the legal and illegal immigrant population reached a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population.
Published on Jun 6, 2019
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