This article was first published by Vice magazine.

It was a hot day, still 98 degrees at 6 PM, as I zoomed through gridlock on my freshly fixed 1979 Kawasaki KZ-400, squeezing between the monster trucks and lifted SUVs clogging one of Victorville’s main drags, pouring sweat into my helmet and leather jacket on my way to an anti-Obamacare “town hall” meeting at the local community college.

I thought I knew what to expect when I got there. Like everyone else in this country, I had been watching the packs of deranged tea bagger types and their astroturfing overlords dominate the healthcare reform debate like a pack of retarded howler monkeys in heat. But TV hadn’t quite prepared me for the reality of it. You can’t really appreciate how fucked this country really is until you see, as I did, hundreds of blue collar Americans sync up their primitive brains in a paranoid racist-hick seance, channeling White Power ideals through Reagan’s damned soul. (more…)

This article first appeared in Alternet

Now we know why America’s oligarchs are fighting to keep the rest of us stuck in the world’s worst health care system: the more we die, the more billions Wall Street will earn. A recent article in The New York Times exposed how Wall Street is licking its lips over a new scheme to make hundreds of billions in profits by creating financial instruments that will profit off of millions of terminally-ill Americans’ agony, desperation, and death. The only thing standing in the way of this massive new Wall Street scheme is the kind of health care reform that might allow Americans to live longer lives. Yep, this is what we spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street for: so that they can kill us for profit. (more…)

VICTORVILLE, CA—It was a clear bright day, but the desert wind was roaring, chilling the air to what felt like the freezing point, when I got to the Victorville, California, Tea Party protest. I arrived late for the noontime protest, with the goal of finding out if this thing had really grown legs after the comedy I witnessed at the Santa Monica Tea Party in February.

A crowd of roughly 150 people formed a compact semi-circle in the small yard between Victorville’s brand new court house and the city’s administration building. Battling the gusts of wind that blew dirt and dust from an unpaved lot across the street, I made my way towards the crowd. I was wearing a flimsy jacket, totally unprepared for this kind of weather on a bright sunny day in the middle of April out here in the California desert.
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