When I'm not satisfied with my barber, I find another. If my lawyer embarrasses me in court, I can hire someone else. If my exterminator refuses to kill roaches, I can get one who will. Such is the beauty of America. We have the freedom to choose where to spend our money. That is unless we're dealing with public utilities.
In a world where corporations are people, the likes of Con Edison represents the worst of human nature. They raise rates with wanton disregard for consequences. They force you to install equipment that pulses electromagnetic waves through your skull then tell you that it improves efficiency. And they can be absurdly unprepared for a storm, leave 70,000 people in cold darkness, and - just to underscore their incompetence - not fix the problem for days. A customer’s only recourse is to publicly berate them online, hence where we find ourselves now.
Somehow, history’s most brilliant economists have been outsmarted by the relentless underachievers that run Con Ed. I
think if Adam Smith were alive today, he'd glare at his electric bill every month with contempt only to realize that even in capitalist
America, he has no other choice. Then, after freezing in his powerless home for four days after Friday's storm, he'd want to slap Con Ed in the face with an invisible hand just like the rest of us. I know the feeling.
Con Ed's excuse is that Friday's nor'easter was the fifth worst storm they've ever encountered. That's like telling your teacher that you didn’t do the homework because it was the fifth hardest assignment of your life. In no way does that validate your failure. Instead, its an example of what I call aggressive mediocrity: a concept that shines in virtually everything Con Edison does, unlike the lights in most of Westchester which didn't shine for days.
The sad thing is that lots of vulnerable people are suffering, and some even died in the storm. Yet Con Ed decided to take their sweet time getting enough crews on the ground. If this had been the fourth largest storm, maybe it would have been different.
When all is said and done, Con Ed will ultimately restore the power. They will take a public beating and likely make an excuse that somehow shifts the blame onto its own customers. And then, when we all move on, they will proceed to continue screwing us. For our part, we'll keep paying our bills and quietly fume about the fact that in a land of consumer choice, we are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship with a such an aggressively mediocre company. And it will go on like this until the next deadly storm. But I find solace in the fact that this bitter blog post will exist on the internet forever. It will be accessible for people to read anytime they like, as long as they have electricity.
Republicans and health care are like peanut butter and ketchup. They don’t go well together. The issue is so far from the ethos of the Grand Ol’ Party that it’s members never wanted to confront it in the first place… not in the 1990s, not in 2008 and — as we see with the Senate’s failure to bring a bill to a vote - I’m quite sure they’d rather not deal with it now.
The Obama administration forced Republicans, and the country, to face the painful issue of health care. But bereft of constructive political or policy suggestions, the GOP threw a seven-year anti Obamacare temper tantrum. Their strategy, if you call it that, was to sell a lowest common denominator message to their base, policy be damned. I call it, the “ignore and deplore” strategy.
The ignore part was straightforward. Republicans simply refused to participate in health reform. They snubbed President Obama’s repeated efforts to engage them in the process. They conveniently forgot that the Affordable Care Act is based on Republican ideas put into practice by a Republican governor. And they disregarded the 161 Republican amendments that the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee made to the legislation. To top it off, they wasted their almost decade-long opportunity to craft a workable healthcare plan of their own. By divorcing themselves from responsibility of health reform, Republicans let Democrats take the political risk and added nothing of value to the process.
Then came the deplore strategy, which was based more on soundbites than facts. Republicans and their Fox News foot soldiers poisoned public opinion by capitalizing on emotions about health care. Any and every reform was maligned in the strongest possible terms with words like “death,” and “killing”. It would not have mattered if Ronald Reagan wrote the bill himself. Even today, unrelated, unintended or unaddressed consequences of Obamacare are held as proof of its outright failure. It’s like blaming vaccines for causing autism. It has wide appeal to large swaths of America looking for easy answers to difficult problems. But it’s just not true.
From a short-term political standpoint, “ignore and deplore” was relatively successful, until now.
With control of Congress and the Presidency, the GOP is exposed like a naked emperor. Their voters demand repeal of Obamacare, expect not to lose health coverage, and even insist on cheaper and better insurance. In Republican voters’ minds, woes about unemployment or low wages will disappear as soon as Obamacare goes away. These unrealistic demands are the long term result of a strategy that fed them more bluster than truth.
Meanwhile many of these same constituents genuinely benefit from Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion, the prohibition of denying coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and the tax credits for private insurance are real, tangible results of the law that they’ve been told is killing them. For all its ills (and there are many), 20 million more people have insurance since Obamacare took effect.
So, Republican members of Congress have a choice. Do they forsake the health of their voters to fulfill a political prerogative of repealing Obamacare? If yes, they risk backlash from millions of angry people who’ve lost health care. Or do they do what’s best and find ways to improve the law as it exists now, perhaps even by working with Democrats? This route also leads to backlash, only this time from frothing conservatives demanding Obamacare blood.
Nevertheless, after nine years of ignore and deplore, the political risk now falls squarely on Republican shoulders. Such is the dilemma of GOP health care politics in 2017. It’s sneakily delightful for people like me to watch them try to squirm their way out of this corner — a corner into which they’ve backed themselves.
If your neighbor came knocking
Wearing no shoes
While snowing outside
What would you do?
And your neighbor's neighbor?
And that neighbor's friend?
Would you bring them inside
Or let the neighborhood end?
When the masses are huddled
And their feet are cold
Would you lend them your shoes
Or send them back to the fold?
Imagine nuclear weapons existed in Westeros. Now think about King Joffrey Lannister. Now think about President Donald Trump. Yea... it's that bad.
Suppose an abusive co-worker got a promotion and became your boss. And let's say your former boss was a mentor you greatly admired. That's how people like me felt last Friday.
It was like watching Scar and his council of hyenas take over Pride Rock from Mufasa. It's demoralizing to witness some one so undeserving achieve power. We can only hope that Simba is out there in the wilderness.
My friends on the other side likely felt the same way watching President Obama's second inauguration. I didn't dismiss their sentiments then. In fact, I understand them now more than ever. But they don't get to dismiss mine now. So guess what...this hurts. Bigly.
The good news is I sleep well knowing that pink-hat-wearing people like me stand for compassion. These days, red-hat-wearing people only seem to stand for walls, internet trolling and a rejection of facts. And they can thank Vladimir Putin for his role in delivering their messenger.
Political discussions abound since Friday. For those attempting to talk sense to right of center friends, here are my answers to frequently asked questions from Trump supporters.
I have a hard time describing my feelings while I watch the Bachelor. They are similar to watching a Donald Trump speech... a mixture of anger, disappointment in our culture and genuine disbelief. Both involve yelling at the TV followed by a sudden onset of shame that I might be part of the problem. But my eyes cannot turn away. After an hour, I am thoroughly entertained.
If I was looking for a destructive way of detaching from reality, I suppose I could use meth. Instead, I watch the Bachelor. It is the best show on TV.
You may ask why I have spent entire hours of my life participating in this spectacle. It's a fair question. The reason is that I have a sworn duty to empathize with the complex needs and emotions of my wife. With that, I join her in consuming ABC's focus-group tested, ratings-driven interpretation of true love. Every Monday. For the past four years.
I assume Roman peasants felt the same way watching enslaved gladiators slaughter each other in the Coliseum. In the end, the emperor decided who lived and died and the audience always wanted blood. In those days, they positioned their thumbs. In the Bachelor, they hand out roses. At least ABC could throw us free bread every once and a while.
So with that, here are three questions that I would like to ask producers of the Bachelor.
Santa Claus is a lie. Call me a grinch, but the holidays are over and its time to come to grips with the hard truth. If you're a kid, he's the paragon of all that is good until reality smashes your confidence like a ginger bread house in the garbage.
At 10 years old, I was in denial about the reality of Santa even after I had accepted the truth about similar shams like the Easter Bunny. Even though I noticed the obvious inconsistencies -- like the fact that he could simultaneously appear at the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Westchester Mall -- I chose to ignore them. All of the adults in my life fed me validation of his existence like a candy cane of lies. I was happy to eat it.
The reindeer came home to roost one day in school. My fifth grade self sat cross-legged on the floor and listened to a square-headed librarian read a story about a boy and his baby brother at Christmas. At the end of the story, the mother instructs the older brother not to tell the younger that Mommy and Daddy -- not Santa -- leave gifts under the tree. This was my red pill moment. I finally came face to face with confirmed proof of the truth. It was heady stuff for a fifth grader.
There was a tense silence in the classroom. One kid cried and was sent to the nurse. Some were visibly shocked, others looked like they had known all along. The librarian stood wide-eyed as if she'd accidentally melted the North Pole. Some day, I'd love to pull the NSA wiretap of the inevitable phone conversation that occurred between her and the parents of the kid who cried.
