Insightfully accurate swipe at US neoliberalism — Belén Fernández — "The US is no country for old men"

26 December 2023

Not-rich Americans may appreciate . . .

. . . Belén Fernández's take on our situation:

[M]y father’s final months had merely confirmed that the US is “no country for old men”.

Counterproductive chemotherapy treatments were but one of the ways he had been milked for all he was worth, before being turned over as prey to the lucrative realm of funeral and cremation services.

And while US society specialises in oppressing a wide range of demographics – minus, of course, the elite minority that thrives on acute inequality – the treatment of the elderly is particularly cynical.

Having outlived their labour-based exploitability as cogs in the capitalist machine, older people become decaying objects from which profit must continue to be extracted until the very last minute.

According to the results of a West Health-Gallup survey published in 2022, approximately one in four Americans aged 65 and older and three in 10 Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 said they had sacrificed basic needs, such as food, to pay for healthcare.

The study found that older women and Black Americans were disproportionately affected and that punitive health care costs constituted a significant source of stress in the daily lives of older Americans, with stress naturally only exacerbating existing medical issues.

Add vampire-like insurance companies to the mix, and the panorama becomes ever more morbid.

In a previous publication

Fernández noted (more generally) that — here, with my italicized emphasis added:

[W]hile depression, anxiety and despair are completely rational reactions to an inhuman environment . . . US drug companies have pushed pathologising psychological turmoil as an individual defect rather than a result of societal context.

Relatedly, the arms industry, another pillar of US capitalism, perpetuates its own vicious cycle of lucrative catastrophe, devastating communities at home and abroad as it wages war on human empathy.

What a superbly accurate turn of phrase.

The moral? — Outsiders recognize the Demon

Yet we Americans — snared by non-stop propaganda — continue to sleep sheepy-brained, deluded dreams.

Meanwhile, the American Death Machine arms and finances Zionist Israel's quasi-genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Do you still think that Belén Fernández is wrong?

Pass me the Prozac?

Or would awareness, a stiffened spine — and an actually functioning soul — accomplish more?

Awaken and rise.

PeteFree.com

Insightfully accurate swipe at US neoliberalism — Belén Fernández — "The US is no country for old men"