Military Resistance 12F1
[Thanks to SSG N (ret’d) who sent this in. She writes: “Celebrities always go to the front of the line.”]
Want To End Secret Wait Lists? Staff The VA!
“Cleaning House In The VA’s Executive Ranks Will Only Treat The Symptom”
“Until We Fill Thousands Of Vacant Positions, Open Closed Hospital Beds And Provide More Dollars For Building And Maintaining Medical Facilities, We Will Never Heal What Ails The VA”
“There Isn’t Enough Time In The Day For The Available Doctors To Treat Every Veteran Who Is Seeking Care In A Timely Fashion”
When they have sounded the alarm, our members have faced retaliation and intimidation time and time again.
Employees shouldn’t feel afraid to speak up when they see managers more concerned with securing bonuses than providing patients with timely access to care for critical medical conditions.
May 28, 2014Union Veterans Council, AFL-CIO. Posted by: Ben Chitty, Veterans For Peace
The public’s outrage over excessive wait times and rigged recordkeeping at Veterans Affairs hospitals is more than justified.
As a former VA nurse, I understand all too well that depriving veterans of timely access to care is a disservice to them and their sacrifice to this nation.
But cleaning house in the VA’s executive ranks will only treat the symptom.
The disease plaguing the VA healthcare system is chronic understaffing of physicians and other frontline providers.
Until we fill thousands of vacant positions, open closed hospital beds and provide more dollars for building and maintaining medical facilities, we will never heal what ails the VA.
Physicians are dealing with excessive caseloads and insufficient support staff. Since 2009, 2 million veterans entered the VA health care system for a net increase of 1.4 million new patients.
Each physician should be responsible for no more than 1,200 patients at a given time, according to the VA’s own guidelines, yet many VA doctors are treating upwards of 2,000 patients each.
Simply put, there isn’t enough time in the day for the available doctors to treat every veteran who is seeking care in a timely fashion.
Compounding matters is a performance system that sets unrealistic goals and incentivizes managers to increase the number of patients served, instead of improving the quality of care.
Rather than face the understaffing issue head-on and risk poor ratings, many managers have taken the easy way out and have cooked the books to mask the wait times.
But blaming those managers for a performance system that was doomed from the start won’t help our veterans get the care they seek any faster.
Truth be told, there is nothing wrong with the VA that can’t be healed by what is right with the VA: the frontline providers who care for our veterans every day.
No one is complaining about the quality of care our veterans receive.
That’s because the federal employees who look after our nation’s heroes work hard each and every day to provide them with world-class service.
Unfortunately, those same employees have lived in fear of speaking out about the problems they witness due to an established history of retaliation, including loss of duties and unfounded disciplinary actions.
Our members have paid a heavy price for voicing concerns, submitting letters to agency leaders, raising issues in labor management meetings, and testifying before Congress on wait time issues and veterans’ access to care.
When they have sounded the alarm, our members have faced retaliation and intimidation time and time again.
Employees shouldn’t feel afraid to speak up when they see managers more concerned with securing bonuses than providing patients with timely access to care for critical medical conditions.
In fact, they should be encouraged to bring up these issues so they can be rectified before more veterans go without the treatment they so desperately need.
The waitlist and understaffing issues are one and the same.
Until Congress gives the VA the resources to hire enough frontline clinicians to meet demand, our veterans will continue to face long waits.
And to be clear, sending veterans to expensive health care providers outside the VA system on a massive scale will not fix the underlying resource deficiencies plaguing our veterans medical centers.
According to the Independent Budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs, developed each year by leading veterans groups, the Veterans Health Administration is facing a $2 billion funding shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year and another $500 million shortfall for fiscal 2016.
As the nation prepares to honor our fallen soldiers this Memorial Day, there is no better time to strengthen our support for the health care system that treats those veterans who made it home.
It’s time for the VA to get back to basics and focus on improving access to care for our nation’s veterans.
The agency must cut excess management layers and use those resources to boost frontline staffing of doctors, nurses and others directly involved in patient care.
The growth of middle management positions within the agency has ballooned to unprecedented levels, from fewer than 300 in 1995 to more than 1,700 by a recent count, costing taxpayers $203 million annually.
The VA long has been held up as a model healthcare delivery system that all other hospitals should emulate.
The care our veterans receive is second to none, but that only counts when our veterans actually are treated.
MORE:
VA: Please Hold. You Should Hang Up And Just Watch Cat Videos Instead
May 18, 2014 by Dick Scuttlebutt, The Duffle Blog
We appreciate you holding. The VA is experiencing a higher-than-average volume of calls this week. Calls are answered in the order they are received. Someone should be able to assist you in [ONE] minutes.
From the lakes of Minnesota … to the hills of Tennessee …
Did you know that you can check the status of your claim by going online? Point your browser to w-w-w dot claims dot veterans dot medical dot va dot gov, forward-slash medical, forward-slash veterans, forward-slash claims, forward-slash 404 dot vagov dot current, forward-slash aspx dot com, forward-slash va.gov, forward-slash 404.html##.
Across the plains of Texas! From sea to shining sea …
Your call is important to us. Someone should be able to assist you in [ONE] minutes with your call about [INVALID MENU ENTRY].
From Detroit down to Houston … from New York to L.A. …
A claims representative should be with you [SHORTLY]. Your call is important to us. Just hang up and kill yourself. Someone should be able to assist you in [ONE] minutes.
Well there’s pride in every American heart, and it’s time we stand and saaaaaay…
You selected menu option [INVALID MENU ENTRY]. Please have your claim number and social security number on hand when you speak with the claims representative.
You should just hang up and watch cat videos and leave us alone. Your call is very important to us. Someone should be able to assist you in [ONE] minutes.
And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free …
We appreciate you holding.
Did you know you can check the status of your claim by presenting yourself in person to your local VA claims center? Just hang up, go to your local VA claims center, and sit in our waiting room. Current in-person wait time is approximately [DEATH] hours.
And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me …
Your call is extremely important to us. If this is an emergency or if you are having suicidal thoughts, please hang up and dial 911.
Make sure you have your claim number, your social security number, and a sharp paring knife on hand while you wait for a suicide prevention specialist. Someone should be able to assist you in [ONE] minutes.
And I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today …
We appreciate you holding off killing yourself. The VA is experiencing a higher-than-average it’s hopeless, just end it all this week. Calls are answered in the order they are sweet release of death. Someone should be able to assist you in [ONE] minutes.
Cause they’re ain’t no doubt I love this land…God bless the U.S.A…
FORWARD OBSERVATIONS
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.
“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.
“We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”
Frederick Douglass, 1852
Nothing has more revolutionary effect, and nothing undermines more the foundations of all state power, than the continuation of that wretched and brainless régime, which has the strength merely to cling to its positions but no longer the slightest power to rule or to steer the state ship on a definite course.
-- Karl Kautsky; ‘The Consequences of the Japanese Victory and Social Democracy’
Godzilla: King Of The Monsters?
“Edwards’ Film Actually Undercuts Some Of The Strength Of The Anti-Nuclear Metaphor Of The Original”
“If You Want To Be Wowed By Some Very Cool Monsters And Kaiju Battle Scenes, Overlook The Plot And Give The Newest Godzilla A Shot”
May 22, 2014 by Nicole Colson, Socialist Worker
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
John Carpenter, the director of The Thing, once famously stated, “Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on.”
“Kaiju” (literally “strange creature” in Japanese) are perhaps the most iconic expression of this. From the time Godzilla--or “Gojira” (a combination of the Japanese words for “gorilla” and “whale”)--first rose out of the ocean to stomp on Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 movie, the monster has served as a not-so-subtle metaphor about the horrors of atomic war.
References to the atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are prominent in the original Japanese film.
Japanese audiences in 1954 watching Gojira and seeing images of fleeing refugees and fires, explosions and panic, would have had the real-life experiences of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to compare. As Peter Wynn Kirby explained in the New York Times in 2011, “Far from the heavily edited and jingoistic, shoot’em-up, stomp’em-down flick that moviegoers saw in the United States, Japanese audiences reportedly watched Gojira in somber silence, broken by periodic weeping.”
Also present in the minds of the audience at Gojira’s November 1954 opening was the horror that befell the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (“Lucky Dragon 5”)--a Japanese fishing boat whose crew was poisoned with radiation in March 1954 after being caught in the fallout from a 15-megaton H-bomb the U.S. detonated near Bikini Atoll. Six crew later died, and more than 400,000 Japanese citizens turned out for the funeral of the ship’s radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, that year.
In the original film, early scenes in which Gojira first rises from the sea directly invoke this nuclear menace.
As Tim Martin describes the original film in the Telegraph:
“Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror.
“Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.”
At another point in the 1954 film, a woman on a train complains, “First contaminated tuna...and now Godzilla.” (Following the detonation of the U.S. bomb in Bikini Atoll, the Japanese tuna market bottomed out as a result of radiation contamination, and the Emperor Hirohito was said to have removed seafood from his diet as a result.)
For director Ishiro Honda and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, Gojira was meant both as an homage to great Hollywood monsters in movies like 1933’s King Kong, as well as an explicit warning about nuclear dangers.
Tanaka later commented that the allegory of the film was that “Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind.”
When it opened in Japan, Gojira was the most expensive movie to have been made in the country--and it shattered box office records. Ever since, in over 50 movies--and with the creation of hoards of kaiju allies and enemies from Mothra to Ghidorah (the three-headed monster) to Mechagodzilla (a giant robo-Godzilla controlled by evil aliens)--Godzilla has been presented as both foe and friend to the Japanese people, reflecting his shifting status from monstrous parable to pop-culture icon in the country, in movies that run the gamut from the interesting to the ridiculous (but mainly ridiculous).
As science fiction website IO9’s Annalee Newitz recently commented:
“In his time, Godzilla has represented nuclear bombs, natural disasters, military science run amok, and genetic experiments gone wrong. He’s fought aliens, terrorists, natural forces, other monsters, and time travelers who wanted to undermine Japan’s economic power. After 50 years, Godzilla was no longer truly a friend to Japan, nor to humanity. But somehow humanity came up with weapons--including other monsters--to contain him.”
Godzilla 2014
Godzilla heads toward San Francisco
It’s too bad then that with such meat to work with, the newest, Hollywood-produced Godzilla misses living up to its full potential.
The story that is, not the monster.
Don’t get me wrong--the latest version of the monster is indeed incredible to behold, a behemoth of special effects that lives up to the hype and may alone be worth the price of a 3-D ticket.
Wisely, director Gareth Edwards takes a “tell don’t show” approach with the monster until well into the film’s second half, revealing just tantalizing glimpses of the kaiju’s enormity to the audience early on. (One scene, in which a small glimpse of Godzilla’s back is seen wending its way under naval vessels as it heads toward the San Francisco Bay, called to mind Jaws: “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”)
Opening in 1999 in the fictional Japanese city of Janjira, the film introduces us to nuclear engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche). Before Brody can even properly raise the alarm about strange new seismic activity he’s been noticing, the nuclear plant is destroyed and the local populace evacuated, in a clear nod to the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in 2011.
Fifteen years later, the action picks up in modern-day Janjira, as Brody’s now-grown son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a naval officer just returned from combat duty, tries in vain to talk his father out of his idea that officials are hiding a major secret. Turns out that Joe Brody is right, of course (and Cranston has some fun doing “middle-aged white guy rage” as only he can), but it’s too late.
The “massive unidentified terrestrial organism” (or, MUTO) that officials have been keeping from the public has finished sucking the plant’s nuclear reactors dry of its radioactive “food,” and the creature has awakened to wreak havoc as it makes its way toward an egg-carrying mate that has lain long-dormant in the Nevada desert.
What follows is primarily an action thriller--monsters fighting and the military efforts to stop them.
This action is interspersed with shots of “serious-looking people” in small rooms, including scientist Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Admiral William Stenz (David Strathairn), debating how best to prevent the MUTOs from destroying large swaths of the U.S. even as Godzilla, whose existence has been known to the military since 1954, begins its own lumbering rise from the depths of the Pacific.
What happens next is no surprise--the military advocates the use of nuclear weapons as bait for the MUTOs while Serizawa warns against such plans, arguing that the military should let nature (Godzilla) take its course.