$40 in damages

$40 million obviously but Griesa's cash award to the SWP was not much bigger.

This article will be a political assessment of Stephen F. Cohen, who died of lung cancer two days ago rather than an obit. I am including the NY Times obit at the end in order to put my remarks into context. My advice is to read the NYT obit first since it overlaps to some extent with my own attempt to assess his contribution to Marxist scholarship and the left.

In 1980 or thereabouts, when I had some on my hands, I attended the deliberations of the SWP’s suit against the FBI. Because of Watergate and outrage over FBI harassment, the party filed suit against the FBI for $40 in damages and an end to Cointelpro, which caught a small fish like me in its net. Cointelpro, which was short for Counterintelligence Program, was used to disrupt socialist and other radical organizing efforts. Supposedly, the government was trying to forestall the violent overthrow of the government but the real intention was to weaken civil rights, antiwar and other social struggles.

full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/09/20/notes-on-the-passing-of-stephen-f-cohen/

NY Times, Sunday Book Review, Sept. 20, 2020
America Has Mistreated Its Coal Miners. Here’s Their Fight for Justice.
By Héctor Tobar

SOUL FULL OF COAL DUST
A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia
By Chris Hamby
435 pp. Little, Brown. $30.

The ailing coal miners in Chris Hamby’s “Soul Full of Coal Dust” are a tough bunch of men, even though they may no longer look the part. After decades working underground in the sooty air of coal mines, many are severely disabled. They get winded after walking up just a few stairs, and some can only breathe with oxygen tanks feeding their lungs, day and night. X-rays show grainy masses in their chests, and they regularly spit up black phlegm, symptoms of pneumoconiosis, more commonly known as black lung disease.

Thanks to a federal law dating back to the 1960s, miners who contract the disease are due monthly disability checks (usually less than $700) and coverage of all their medical expenses — unless the company that hired them argues the miners aren’t really sick at all.

In “Soul Full of Coal Dust” we meet miners who have been fighting their employers 20 years or longer for those payments. They argue their cases before administrative law judges, or are represented by low-budget attorneys who are overmatched in endless legal sparring with coal companies and their powerful lawyers. And yet, their Appalachian fortitude is such that they keep up the fight, even as death approaches.

The key for them is finding incontrovertible medical evidence of their disease. “Given his age and poor health, undergoing a lung biopsy would likely be too risky,” Hamby writes of 66-year-old Steve Day, denied the benefits by his mining company. “That left one other way,” Hamby writes. He’d repeatedly told his wife to have an autopsy performed on him if he died.

After Day’s passing, a tissue sample sliced out of his lungs offered the final proof: His job had killed him.

Class conflict in the United States is a largely private and domestic drama these days. In the mountain towns of Appalachia, as elsewhere, ordinary people battle corporate power reluctantly, and most often these struggles don’t involve the drama of the picket line, but rather reams of paperwork. In “Soul Full of Coal Dust,” Hamby, a journalist at The Times, employs dogged investigative work and a deep well of empathy for his subjects to painstakingly bring this private pathos to life. After following a long and miserable paper trail, we finally begin to see a larger picture: how a corporate and political power structure conspired to crush the bodies of the men who faithfully served the coal industry.

Most of the book is set in West Virginia, where 68 percent of voters backed Trump in 2016, more than any other state. Today, the coal-mining industry is a favored-child of the Trump Administration, which has loosened environmental restrictions on Big Coal, even as the world chokes on greenhouse gasses. In 2017, a group of miners joined Trump at a White House ceremony for one of his first acts as president — signing into law a bill to roll back environmental regulations for coal mines.

It’s easy to forget that the men and women who labor to produce coal were once a reliably Democratic constituency. The laws designed to protect coal miners from the black dust that saturates the air underground were born in that long ago blue-state era, as Hamby reminds us. In the first chapters of “Soul Full of Coal Dust” the open class warfare that defined Appalachian history in the 20th century — with miners in a leading role — comes back to life again.

The pivotal moment was the 1968 disaster at a Farmington, W.Va. mine; 78 men were killed. Before Farmington, Hamby tells us, the lung ailments that struck miners were shrouded in mystery, disinformation and folklore. After Farmington, underground working conditions became a cause célèbre. The physician I.E. Buff and other activist doctors spread use of the term of “black lung” as a way of dramatizing the plight.

“You all have black lung, and you’re all gonna die!” Buff would yell at gatherings of miners.

A coalition of miners, physicians and activists known as the Black Lung Association began pressing for comprehensive reforms, including new programs for workers’ compensation. Miners carried signs at legislative hearings proclaiming “NO LAW, NO WORK.” Soon the movement reached into the mines themselves, with a 1969 strike of 200 workers in Raleigh County, in southern West Virginia.

“The news quickly spread, and within just a few days, more than 10,000 miners in neighboring counties had joined the protest,” Hamby writes. “It was a wildcat strike; the United Mine Workers leadership didn’t approve.” Some 40,000 more workers across West Virginia soon took part in what Hamby calls “the largest political strike in U.S. history.”

As a result of the “black lung uprising,” West Virginia passed its first workers’ compensation laws related to the disease; Kentucky and Ohio soon followed. In 1969, Congress passed a comprehensive reform that attacked black lung at its source by requiring companies to sharply reduce (and to continually monitor) coal dust. Richard Nixon quietly signed it into law; unlike Trump he didn’t invite coal miners to the signing ceremony, because he didn’t have one.

The reforms were supposed to eradicate black lung, consigning it to coal mining’s primitive past. But putting the laws into practice was another, slower and much less visible fight. By the dawn of the new century, black lung was on the rise again, while coal miners had collectively assimilated a red state view of the world. Describing this new reality takes up most of Hamby’s book.

At first, the new generation of black-lung sufferers saw their ailment as “the way of the world.” As one miner tells Hamby: “If you wanted to keep your job, you worked when and how the company told you and didn’t complain.” And another: “If you was lucky enough to get a job and you had a family to feed, you done what you had to do to feed your family, sacrifice your body.”

Hamby is not an elegant or emotional writer, but he does manage to capture the inner turmoil of his subjects as they get sick and realize the coal mining companies and their high-power attorneys are getting the best of them. Mostly, he accomplishes this with a blow-by-blow description of repeated doctor visits and proceedings before administrative law judges.

“We weren’t lawyers. Didn’t know anything about the law,” Mary Fox, the wife of the miner Gary Fox says, remembering the couple’s first, unaided attempts to get black lung payments. “We had never seen a courtroom before.” An advocate stepped in to help the Foxes: John Cline. After several frustrating years working at a rural medical clinic, and seeing lawyers get the best of West Virginia miners again and again, Cline had gone to law school himself, at the age of 53, just so that he could represent them.

Through the eyes of Cline, Fox and others, we begin to see how the system is stacked: Coal companies rig the tests that are supposed to monitor the coal dust underground; and the company’s lawyers contract pliant doctors to do the industry’s bidding, including one at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital, Paul Wheeler.

As a journalist first drawn to the black lung saga, Hamby constructed a database with more than 3,400 X-rays examined by Wheeler, who rejected the black lung claims of each of the more than 1,500 miners whose medical histories he examined. Hamby’s work discredited Wheeler, and eventually earned the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. As an author, Hamby applies that same relentlessness to the chapters in which he details Cline’s failed attempts to prove one West Virginia law firm engaged in “fraud on the court” — the firm’s lawyers had systematically hidden X-rays and doctor reports showing evidence of the disease.

By the end of “Soul Full of Coal Dust,” we’ve read as many profiles of attorneys, doctors and judges as we have of miners. Not all of this makes for exciting reading. But the larger story of coal miner fortitude and company malfeasance is a timeless one. With thorough reporting, and boundless concern for his subjects, Hamby has created a powerful document of this drama, one that is unfolding, largely unseen, in the hills and valleys of West Virginia.

Hector Tobar is the author of “Deep Down Dark” and a contributing writer for The New York Times opinion pages.

(This article hits home. Five years before she went into the geriatrics ward in the Catskill Regional Hospital, my mother sold me her house for $5. This meant when she was on Medicaid when hospitalized rather than Medicare. With Medicare, the house would have been sold with the proceeds going to pay for her care. Fortunately, she was in full possession of her senses until her death so the hospital didn't have any excuses to discharge her. In fact, the place was pretty damned good to the patients unlike these fucked up nursing homes that are mostly warehouses for old people in the way that mental hospitals were for the mentally ill. I generally have little use for WSWS.org but they covered these matters quite well: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/25/nurs-a25.html)

NY Times, Sept. 20, 2020
Nursing Homes Oust Unwanted Patients With Claims of Psychosis
By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Rachel Abrams

In a New York nursing home, a resident hurled a bingo chip. At a home in Georgia, a 46-year-old woman, paralyzed from the waist down, repeatedly complained that no one had changed her diaper. In a California facility, a patient threw tableware.

In all three cases, the nursing homes cited the incidents as a reason to send the residents to hospitals for psychiatric evaluations — and then to bar them from returning.

Across the United States, nursing homes are looking to get rid of unprofitable patients — primarily those who are poor and require extra care — and pouncing on minor outbursts to justify evicting them to emergency rooms or psychiatric hospitals. After the hospitals discharge the patients, often in a matter of hours, the nursing homes refuse them re-entry, according to court filings, government-funded watchdogs in 16 states, and more than 60 lawyers, nursing home employees and doctors.

The practice at times violates federal laws that restrict nursing homes from abruptly evicting patients.

“Even before the pandemic, there was tremendous pressure to get rid of Medicaid patients, especially those that need high levels of staffing,” said Mike Wasserman, a former chief executive of Rockport Healthcare Services, which manages California’s largest chain of for-profit nursing homes. “The pandemic has basically supercharged that.” He said homes often take advantage of fits of anger to oust patients, claiming they need psychiatric care.

About 70 percent of American nursing homes are for profit. The most lucrative patients are those on short-term rehabilitation stints paid for by private insurers or Medicare, the federal program that insures seniors and people with disabilities. Poor people on longer-term stays are covered by Medicaid, which reimburses nursing homes at a much lower rate than Medicare.

The financial incentive to have more Medicare or privately insured patients, and fewer on Medicaid, becomes more pronounced when the Medicaid patients have illnesses, like dementia, that require extra care from staff.

Nursing homes have faced acute staff shortages as the coronavirus has left employees sick or afraid to go in to work. Workers said they faced increased pressure from their employers during the pandemic to get rid of the most expensive, least lucrative patients.

Invoking psychiatric problems is a popular tool. Nursing homes routinely admit patients with dementia, Alzheimer’s or similar illnesses, and angry outbursts are common.

In March, the Rehabilitation Center of Santa Monica, Calif., sent Joan Rivers, who suffered from dementia and was on Medicaid, to the emergency room at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital. The nursing home’s staff said Ms. Rivers, 87, had tossed aside her chair, scaring other residents, according to her daughter, Evon Smith, and a government-funded watchdog.

Ms. Smith said that she had repeatedly asked the Rehabilitation Center to take her mother back, but that it had refused. A social worker at Verdugo Hills said she, too, had tried unsuccessfully to get the nursing home to readmit Ms. Rivers.

Linda Taetz, the chief compliance officer at Mariner Health Care, which operates the Rehabilitation Center and 19 other nursing homes in California, said the center hadn’t known that Ms. Rivers wanted to return.

Ms. Rivers eventually was admitted to the Colonial Care Center nursing home in Long Beach, Calif. There, she contracted Covid-19. She died on July 20.

Federal law requires nursing homes to follow strict guidelines when they intend to evict someone: They must give 30 days’ notice and come up with a plan to transfer the resident to a facility that can meet his or her needs. If a resident goes to a hospital, the facility must hold the bed for a week.

But nursing homes frequently flout these rules, according to employees and state-funded ombudsmen who help oversee the industry. The New York Times reported in July that nursing homes were evicting an increasing number of low-income — and therefore low-profitability — residents into homeless shelters and run-down motels, apparently in violation of federal law.

There is no national data on nursing home evictions. The Times contacted ombudsmen in all 50 states. Some said they had not seen nursing homes dumping patients in hospitals during the pandemic. But in 16 states, including California, Texas and New York, ombudsmen said the problem was continuing. Some said they believed it was getting worse.

“We have been seeing these kinds of illegal discharges all the time, because nursing homes seem to have figured out that they will rarely, if ever, be penalized,” said Alison Hirschel, senior legal counsel to the Michigan ombudsman program. “It’s devastating for residents and their families all the time, but especially horrible and dangerous during a pandemic.”

Medicaid patients who require lots of staff attention “have a target on their back,” she said.

The problem predates the pandemic.

Gloria Single was a resident of the Pioneer House nursing home in Sacramento. She had dementia and pulmonary disease and was on California’s version of Medicaid. Pioneer House was receiving about $400 a day for her care.

In 2017, Ms. Single got upset and threw utensils, according to a lawsuit against Pioneer House filed in state court by Ms. Single’s lawyer. The nursing home called 911, and Ms. Single was taken to a hospital for an involuntary psychiatric hold, in which patients are held until they are determined not to be a danger to themselves or others. The hospital determined later that day that there was nothing wrong with Ms. Single aside from her pre-existing dementia.

But Pioneer House would not let her return. The California Department of Health Care Services concluded that Pioneer House had violated the law and ordered it to let her go back. The home still refused. After about five months at the hospital, Ms. Single was moved to another nursing home. She died last year.

“You can get $1,000 extra a day by getting rid of the Gloria Singles of the world and replacing them with someone on Medicare,” said Matthew Borden, Ms. Single’s lawyer.

John Supple, a lawyer for the Retirement Housing Foundation, which operates Pioneer House, said that its medical director had deemed the home unsuitable for Ms. Single’s medical needs and that Pioneer House had never received the medical records it needed to readmit her. (Ms. Single’s lawyer disputes that. The lawsuit is ongoing.) Mr. Supple said Pioneer House had held Ms. Single’s bed for months and had not replaced her with a Medicare patient.

During the pandemic, nursing homes in Illinois and Michigan have repeatedly sent elderly and disabled Medicaid patients to NeuroBehavioral Hospital in Crown Point, Ind., said Kimberly Jackson, a discharge planner at the psychiatric hospital. In one case, a resident who yelled at a staff member was branded as being violent and having a psychotic break.

“The homes seem to be purposely taking symptoms of dementia as evidence of psychosis,” Ms. Jackson said. (Christy Gilbert, the chief operating officer of the hospital’s parent company, said instances when nursing homes dumped patients in her company’s hospitals were “very few and far between.”)

In June, Life Care Center of Plainwell, Mich., sent Nicki Safapour, a Medicaid patient who needs a wheelchair, to NeuroBehavioral Hospital. Because of a developmental disability, Mr. Safapour, 55, has the mental capacity of a 5-year-old, according to his brother John, who is his legal guardian. He said Life Care had told him that Mr. Safapour assaulted an employee and another resident.

A state health inspector later determined that the discharge was illegal, according to a copy of the inspector’s report reviewed by The Times.

“It seemed like they were just trying to get rid of Nicki,” John Safapour said. “He took up a lot of staff time.”

A spokesman for Life Care, Davis Lundy, said that privacy rules prohibited him from discussing Mr. Safapour’s case, but that Life Care had a significant number of residents on Medicaid and that “we never discharge patients based on their payer source.”

The families of some evicted patients have had to take them into their homes, although they lack the training or equipment to care for them.

In June, Connie Rodina got a phone call from the Richmond Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Richmond, Kan. Her 63-year-old brother, Jon Fowler, who suffers from mental illness and dementia, had hit another resident. Ms. Rodina, her brother’s guardian, was told that she needed to pick him up immediately.

By the time Ms. Rodina arrived, Mr. Fowler was already being transported to an emergency room. The hospital was ready to discharge him a couple of days later, after treating him for a urinary tract infection. Ms. Rodina said Richmond Healthcare wouldn’t take him back.

“You can’t just put somebody out like that,” said Camille Russell, a regional ombudsman who filed a complaint against the facility with the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services. The complaint is pending, she said.

Ms. Rodina couldn’t find another nursing home that would admit Mr. Fowler, who needs near-constant care. After her brother had been in the hospital for weeks, she reluctantly moved him into her home.

“It’s basically taken my life away from me,” Ms. Rodina said. “It’s impossible for me to care for him.”

Representatives of Richmond Healthcare didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In some cases, nursing homes have ignored orders from regulators to take back patients they sent to emergency rooms or psychiatric hospitals.

Charles Borden, a stroke victim with dementia, had been staying at the skilled nursing facility at Tahoe Forest Hospital in Truckee, Calif. Medicaid was covering his long-term stay. But in April, after Mr. Borden elbowed a nursing assistant and cursed at her, the nursing home sent him to the hospital’s emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.

Within hours, the emergency room cleared Mr. Borden to return to the nursing home. But it wouldn’t take him back, according to court records. (While the nursing home and the main Tahoe Forest hospital share a campus and are owned by the same organization, the nursing home is financially independent from the hospital.)

Later that day, the nursing home dropped off all of Mr. Borden’s possessions at the E.R. and moved another resident into the room that Mr. Borden had shared with his wife, Beverly.

Two days later, on April 22, Mr. Borden’s son appealed the decision to California’s health care agency. It determined that the nursing home was legally required to take Mr. Borden back. The nursing home refused.

The state agency said it had no authority to force the nursing home to let Mr. Borden return, aside from fining it $50 for every day it refused.

Matt Mushet, a lawyer for the nursing home, said it “is committed to the optimal safety of all patients and team members.” He said that he couldn’t comment on Mr. Borden’s case but that “it’s important for the public to understand there is more than one side to this story.”

Mr. Borden has spent the past five months marooned in the hospital. His dementia makes it hard for him to understand what is going on, his son said, but Mr. Borden asks every day to see his wife.

Photography is my thing. 

 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23128732

 

LAURIE ANN DOYLE: She Votes celebrates over 200 years of the fight for women’s rights in the United States, profiling women such as Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and poet Audre Lorde. How did you decide which particular women and specific events to depict?

BRIDGET QUINN: I wanted to run two parallel — and intersecting — stories. One, the “usual suspects” of more mainstream history (read: white), running from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the mid-19th century, through Alice Paul and the Silent Sentinels leading up to ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, and onward. But the other thread is that of underknown and underappreciated stories, of less acknowledged players in the struggle. For example, the many contributions of Native women, from Haudenosaunee women in Upstate New York, to Native basketball players from Montana, to Wilma Mankiller, the first principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, to contemporary poets like Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, and Natalie Diaz. Or the powerful voices and action of Black activists from Sojourner Truth to Ida B. Wells to Audre Lorde. And then my own idiosyncratic interests are also in play — art, sports, the American West.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-untold-suffragists-an-conversation-with-bridget-quinn/

A new British fantasy novel, Mordew by Alex Pheby, promises to reignite the transatlantic leftist fantasy imaginary, departing from midcentury predecessors in tone and political aim, but not in magisterial literary work and inventive quality. More Gormenghast than Lord of the Rings, and indeed with a Peakean second sense for crumbling architectonic and fleshly horrors alike, Mordew is a book with a map in the front that doesn’t reinscribe the hierarchies innate to the Lewis-Tolkien legacy in import fantasy and its perceived “Englishness.” In an opening that feels eerily prescient, young Nathan Treeves faces pressure as his father dies of a lung disease that primarily effects the working class. On the outskirts of a glittering urban core to which he has little access, Nathan’s father coughs up lungworms in vividly material Dickensian poverty, “a writhing black mass of them, hundreds, glistening in there.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mordew-and-the-new-leftist-imaginary/