#it is the step AFTER retirement and jorge is so resigned about it

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

oh i would also like the record to show: the ~writing weekend~ i have planned is shaping up to be hurting my own feelings with Jorge Scenes that have been tumbling around in my brain pan like aggressively sodden laundry for the past, like. six. fucking years.

[coyotescribbles]

Title: L’Ours et L’Loup Chapters: 1 Word Count: 5,143

He'd been a dragonslayer, once, fierce and skillful and widely-reknowned. Many had envied his prowess, and many, many more had paid him handsomely for exercising it.

Those days were behind him, now; he'd retired, rather than continuing to press his luck.

Now, Jorge lived a quiet, private life, raising goats and chickens and living off of the significant amount of money he'd banked over the course of his youth. It was a good life, even if he still sometimes felt that old adventurer's itch act up from time to time - the memory of dragon fire and the stench of molten metal and burnt flesh was enough to staunch it.

Peace and quiet.

At least, that particular day had started off quietly enough. He'd seen to his goats and scattered some grain for the hens before heading back inside for his own breakfast. His kettle was boiling, bacon was sizzling in the pan, birds were winging outside the window as a cool morning breeze wafted in, the goats were screaming...

...the goats were screaming.

Before he could even sit down to enjoy his meal, Jorge found himself storming back outside to see what the hell was going on.

And, smack in the middle of the goat pen, with a fat doe in its jaws, was the biggest goddamn wolf he'd ever seen.

-----

Hungry.

It was the first and foremost thought in her mind, and had been for some time now. Ever since she'd fled the sorcerer's tower, she'd had to scrounge for what little food she could find.

After all, she'd been taught how to kill, not how to hunt. And without her pack...

Grief lanced through the hunger for one brief, bright moment, and Jeanette whimpered to herself. How long had it been? She'd lost track of the days so quickly. She was certain that it had been more than a fortnight, but they'd all bled into one another once the panic had subsided and the anxiety and hunger had set in in its place.

She'd sated the latter as best as she could with kitchen scraps pilfered after nightfall, what few small animals she could catch, or a stolen chicken here or there. The deer were too quick even for her, their senses too keen, and she was too easily-worn down now to bother with them, anyway. She didn't even think she had the energy to shift back to her human form at this point...

She'd smelled the goats - and the chickens, and the cooking food - long before she'd seen the homestead. It had proven too tempting to resist, and she'd followed the scent for an hour before finding the source. The chickens she saw when she arrived would have been an easy meal, scattered about the yard as they were, but she was hungry, and the goats were much bigger, fatter, and penned in. The farmer, however, was out and about so in spite of her hunger, Jeanette had laid down in the bushes at the edge of the forest and watched for a while, until the farmer had finished his morning chores and gone back inside.

Then she'd slinked closer, watching the house more than she watched the goat pen, and when she was sure she had a window of opportunity, she'd leapt the tall fence, scrambled after the milling beasts until she'd grabbed the neck of the fattest one in her jaws-

The slamming of a door alerted her to the fact that she'd been caught, and she looked up - the bleating goat still hanging from her hungry mouth - just in time to see a literal giant of a man barreling towards her.

-----

Jorge didn't think when he saw the beast, he just reacted; he'd never had a wolf steal one of his kids before, and he would be damned if he was going to let this be the first. He'd been expecting a fight - after all, hungry wolves rarely abandoned a kill easily - but what happened next caught him off-guard.

The moment he'd thrown the gate open and stepped inside the pen, the wolf dropped the goat and bolted, making a beeline for the open escape route. It would have barreled right over him, too, if he hadn't reflexively reached out and sunk his near hand into its ruff, hauling it off its feet as easily as if it were a pup and throwing it back into the pen. But before he could pin the beast and draw his knife for the kill, it had regained its footing and leapt over the six-foot fence from a standstill like it was nothing.

"Oh, no, you don't-!" He couldn't just let it go, it had figured out where the food was, and if he didn't kill it now, it would come back again and again until he did, so he gave chase.

The wolf was quick, but he was, too - surprisingly so, for his age and size. He caught it again near the barn, seizing it by the tail and dragging it back; its sharp yelp of pain tugged at his heart, but he couldn't let it get away. Lunging forward, he caught it by the scruff once more and hauled it up, preparing to break its neck...

But something about the wolf's behavior made him pause before he could.

It was struggling, squirming and thrashing in his arms and snarling in fury and distress... he would have expected it to at least try to bite him. But it didn't.

He could feel its ribs and spine plainly now, too, even through its coat. It was starving, and yet it had abandoned an easy kill and was refraining from sinking its fangs into him.

Cursing himself, Jorge wrestled with the beast as he made his way to the barn door. Once there, he gave it a heave and, before it could get back up and run again, he hauled the heavy door shut and slammed the bolt into place - mere moments before it shook and rattled from the force of being hit from the other side. Safely locked up inside the empty building, the wolf could do no harm, and he could take the time to collect his thoughts and assess the situation.

-----

Jeanette hit the packed dirt hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs, and felt a burst of sharp pain in her shoulder where she'd landed. She ignored the pain, though, as she scrambled to her feet and ran for the door.

Only to have to slammed in her face.

She managed to turn at the last possible moment, slamming her good shoulder into it at full momentum. The door shook on its hinges, but it held, much to her great frustration. Snarling and whining, she pawed desperately at the heavy barrier, but it would not budge; on the other side, she could hear the heavy footsteps of the man as he retreated, and fresh panic welled up in her chest. He could be going to get a weapon, something he could use to finish her off - she had to get out, and quickly... but how?

The barn was small and sturdily-built, with only one door, two stalls - or, rather, one stall and one roost - and a minuscule hayloft above. She wasn't going to be able to dislodge any of the planks making up the walls, or dig under them through the hard-packed floor. But, perhaps...

Looking up, she examined the loft. Its ladder was constructed so that it hung parallel to the floor when not in use, and had to be pulled down with a hook in order to access the loft. No doubt this was to keep the goats out of the hay at night, but it wouldn't stop her. All she had to do was get up there, and then she could escape through the hatch and flee.

But getting up there would be the challenge: that was a good ten-foot jump, and with her injured shoulder she might not be able to pull herself up - or pull the ladder down, for that matter.

Gathering her haunches beneath her, Jeanette crouched low - and leapt.

She fell short, and hit the floor with a thud that jarred her aching shoulder. With a thin whine, she paced in a circle for a moment before trying again, this time giving herself a short running start. This time, she managed to get her forelegs over the edge, scrabbling and kicking at the bottom of the loft with her hind legs to try to propel herself over the edge before she fell again.

She failed in that.

Her claws dragged across the wood as she slipped and fell back to the floor, sending a fresh burst of agony through her shoulder and leaving her panting in a heap in the dirt and straw. For just a moment, she thought about trying to transform, so she could pull down the ladder, but when she actually tried the effort only left her feeling sick, dizzy, and even more drained than she'd been before.

So this was it. She'd escaped being the sorcerer's captive war dog only to meet her end, starving and exhausted, at the hands of a goat farmer.

For a long time, nothing happened. Quiet had settled outside once more as the chaos-induced panic had subsided. She didn't stir from where she'd fallen, only watched a ragged beam of dusty sunlight creep across the floor.

No sooner than she thought that it was taking the man an unusually long time to return to dispatch her, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching, and resigned herself to her fate.

-----

Jorge had spent the better part of the rest of that morning debating with himself.

The practical half of himself said that he should just kill the wolf and end the matter. The softer half, however, felt pity for the beast. It had been so terribly thin and fearful...

And he still didn't quite know what to think of its refusal to attack him.

Maybe it wasn't what it seemed - it was clearly habituated to humans in a way no proper wolf could ever be, and it was too big, too lanky, and when was the last time he'd seen a wolf so thoroughly black, or with blue eyes like that, anyway? No, it couldn't be a full-blooded wolf. Perhaps it was a half-breed - he'd heard of certain moneyed lords who had bred wolf bitches to wolfhounds to raise the resulting pups as fearsome guard dogs... and status symbols. Perhaps this was one of those, then, that had slipped its collar and run away. It wouldn't know how to hunt for itself, which would explain its sorry shape, and it would be drawn back to humans for food and companionship...

Well, there was only one way to be sure.

With a sigh of resignation, he'd returned to the kitchen to prepare another pot of porridge, into which he stirred a generous helping of diced ham, and another pan of bacon. Then, once the pot was cool enough to touch, he took a deep breath, gathered up the food, and headed back outside to the barn.

It was tricky to juggle the pot, the plate, and the heavy bolt, but in the end he managed, and opened the door just far enough to slip through. He needn't have worried, though; the wolf, while still there, simply lay in the middle of the aisle and didn't move at his appearance except to pin its ears back and utter a weak warning growl.

Jorge cautiously took a few steps closer, and it raised its head slightly, baring its teeth.

"Hey now, it's all right," he said, his voice low and soothing; "I ain't gonna hurt you..."

Another few steps, close enough now to set the pot of porridge within easy reach of the beast; it mustered up a fiercer snarl, tensing up and snapping its jaws in his direction, but he could see now that it was all for show. If it had wanted to attack him, it had had ample opportunity to do so... but he slowly backed away, regardless, not wanting to antagonize it.

Crouching down beside the door, he made himself smaller, less threatening, and just watched the wolf in the dim light of the barn.

It watched him, too, with those eerily keen blue eyes, a constant growl rumbling in its throat. But its gaze flickered between him and the porridge just a few handspans from its nose. If he hadn't known any better, he would have thought it was questioning him.

"Go on, you can eat it." He almost felt ridiculous talking to a wolf, but was it honestly any more ridiculous than talking to his goats? Or the hens? Even if it couldn't understand his words, he figured his tone might convey that it was safe.

And it seemed to work; after a few long, uncertain minutes, the wolf inched closer to the pot, stretching its neck out to sniff at the contents. Then, painfully slowly, it rose to its feet - now, Jorge could see it favoring its left front leg, and he felt a pang of guilt - and licked cautiously at the porridge.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the wolf's attention was entirely on the food as it hungrily bolted it down by the mouthful, finally licking the pot clean before rolling it onto its side and letting out a disappointed-sounding whine when it realized the porridge was entirely gone.

"Hey," Jorge clicked his tongue twice to get its attention; almost immediately, the wolf skittered away, darting into the goat stall to hide. It peered around the corner a moment later, ears back and baring its teeth again in a snarl that was even more halfhearted than the first. He was hardly fazed now.

"Hey now, I know you don't mean that," he said, picking a piece of bacon up off the plate and holding it out. "There's more, if you want it."

It just stared at him, then licked at its muzzle and laid down on its belly in the straw, resting its head on one curled-up leg. Jorge gave a slight shrug, and tossed the strip of bacon to it. watching as it landed near the wolf's muzzle, to be snapped up only a split second later.

Now it watched him even more intently, ears perking up as he held out another piece.

"See?" He coaxed, "it's food."

It took several minutes, but finally he was able to coax the wolf out of its hiding spot and closer to him - closer to the moment of truth he was seeking. Slowly, so very slowly, he drew it closer, until he was able to get it to take the bacon from his hand. It did so so gingerly that he was sure that this was no wild animal, it had to have belonged to someone before turning up in his goat pen.

Jorge held out the last piece of bacon, letting the wolf take it from his hand before slowly reaching out to rub its ears. It flinched away at first... but, notably, it didn't growl this time.

"There, see... you're no killer, are ya?" He said softly, burying his hand in the wolf's - dog's? wolf-dog's? - ruff to give its neck a scratch. This time, it leaned into the gesture with a low whine, its tail thumping weakly against the floor. "You're just lost 'n hungry, huh?"

It huffed softly, as if in reply, as it sank back down onto its belly, looking up at him with an almost pleading expression. It absolutely broke his heart.

"Well, you don't gotta worry now, you ain't lost anymore..."

-----

She'd been expecting him to kill her.

But he'd fed her.

And spoken so softly to her. And touched her so gently.

No one had ever treated her like that.

To the sorcerer, Jeanette and her pack had been tools, given the most basic upkeep and otherwise used mercilessly until they broke - or were broken by the madman himself. Their lot had been cold stone cells, cold meager rations, and ample servings of violence and the most twisted of magics.

To everyone else, she was a marauding beast, chased away with thrown rocks or sticks or even arrows whenever she was spotted.

No one had ever spared her a kind word or extended a gentle hand. Not after her mother's murder. Not until now.

It twisted something painful in her heart, and relieved it all at once.

And when he'd said "you ain't lost anymore"...

She wanted to be happy. Oh, she wanted so badly to be happy, to entertain the notion that she'd stumbled into a home - something she only dimly remembered from her very early childhood, something part of her had always ached to have again - but fear kept her from it. Fear that it was a ruse. Fear that it wasn't, but that if she revealed what she really was to him, that he would push her away, or worse.

She'd lived so long as a weapon, though... it wasn't really so much of a stretch to imagine living a while longer as a guardian, or even just a companion, was it...? It would be a quiet life. A peaceful life. She could be useful and safe and content, and he never needed to know her terrible secret.

So she'd closed her eyes with a heavy sigh and let him scratch behind her ears, murmuring soothingly - and, in spite of herself, in spite of her reluctance towards and fear of happiness... her tail thumped a soft rhythm against the hard dirt.

And when he inevitably rose to his feet to leave the barn, she got up, too, whining and grumbling softly to follow him.

The man looked down at her curiously, then shook his head and patted her back. "Well... I s'pose so. But if you get snappy again..."

Of course, Jeanette didn't have to be warned twice, and now that she had a full stomach she was on her best behavior, following at his heels, tongue lolling and tail drooping in relaxation despite her obvious limp. She could tell that he was watching her from the corner of his eye, alert to any sign of ill intentions, but he needn't have worried. She was calmer now than she'd been in weeks. She didn't even spare the chickens a passing glance.

And all it had taken was a warm meal and a little kindness.

He hesitated at the door to the house, looking back down at her once more, and she merely sat beside him, cocking her head to return the look with another soft whine... and he smiled slightly and shook his head, pushing the door open and letting her follow him inside. She indulged in a quick look around, sniffing about the kitchen and living room while he vanished through another door, returning moments later with a thick woolen blanket that he arranged in a sort of nest beside the fireplace; Jeanette looked at it curiously, then looked up at him in a silent question: What is this?

He gestured to it. "Go on, uh, lie down?" He said, not quite sounding sure of the command - but it clicked in her mind that this was for her. Another unexpected act of kindness.

Tentatively, she stepped onto the blanket, feeling her paws sink into the thick, soft material as she turned in a cautious circle. The rest of her followed suit a moment later; even as big as she was, the blanket nest felt like it could almost swallow her up. It was soft, and warm, and she couldn't remember ever feeling anything so wonderful.

With a long sigh, she sank down and closed her eyes, her ears drooping to the sides as she did.

"You just rest now, little one," the man murmured, briefly kneeling down to gently tousle her ruff before straightening up again. "Now, I gotta go outside for a bit, give the critters their lunch. You stay."

She didn't have to be told twice.

-----

It was so, so easy to settle in to the life she'd inadvertently blundered into.

The man had been cautious with her for the first few days, running through every "command" he could think of, and she played the part of a dutiful and well-trained pet perfectly.

Well... maybe not entirely perfectly. She allowed herself to "get distracted" or "pretend not to hear him" a few times, never in anything serious but enough to keep him from suspecting that she was anything more than what he thought she was. After all, even the best guard dog couldn't be perfect all of the time, right?

In the end, it was good enough. She slept by his hearth, she ate regular meals in his kitchen, she followed him about his daily routine. She healed, and grew sleeker and stronger than she'd ever been before. She guarded his home, even guarded his livestock - eventually.

She even let herself be happy, every now and then.

And once every week or so, in the darkest part of the night when the man was sound asleep, she would silently slip out, go to a spring hidden deep in the forest, and spend a few hours as a human again. She wasn't sure if she had to, but she also didn't want to risk getting stuck as a wolf, no matter how comfortable her life was. Besides, it felt nice to just soak in the cool water and the moonlight...

She would always be home again before the man awoke, and he never suspected a thing.

It was good, and quiet, and peaceful.

Summer passed, and so did the autumn; then winter came, and brought with it the cold and the snow... and the wolves.

Real wolves, born of wolves, not wolves crafted out of human flesh and sorcery. Wolves that came out from their dens in the deepest, darkest part of the forest where prey was scarce in the dead of winter. Wolves that, one day, found her home - and encountered her.

They'd come after the height of noon, just as the sun was beginning to wane. There were three of them, and their golden eyes were bright with hunger and excitement at the prospect of a feast of hen and goat.

But Jeanette, who had been watching the farmyard from the shelter of the barn, was not about to let them take even a single poult. Rising to her feet, she stepped into view - twice as big as the biggest of the three, tail and hackles raised and fangs bared in a snarl that carried across the yard. The wolves paused, ears down and heads low, their own teeth bared in uncertainty at this enormous beast that looked like a wolf and talked like a wolf and smelled like a wolf but also smelled disconcertingly like Man in a way that no mere dog could.

The leader of the trio broke the tense standoff by charging towards her, his tail flagging high as he opened snarling jaws with clear intent - and Jeanette met his charge head-on with a bellowing sound that was more of a roar than a bark.

He was big and strong, but he was also foolish to have charged ahead all alone; her jaws closed around his neck and clamped down with supernatural force. The lead wolf died with a pitiful yelp, and she promptly threw him aside to lie, limp, in the snow.

His companions were on her in the blink of an eye, dogging her flanks and snapping at her face. They were cleverer, never letting her get her fangs in them, darting in to bite before ducking away before she could retaliate. She knew she had to kill at least one of the two, and quickly, because even with her own great strength and skill she was only one, and they were two, and she only had so much blood to give.

It had only been a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity of dancing in the bloody snow before the door to the house crashed open and the man came rushing out. In his hand, he carried a great sword the likes of which she'd never seen, and over his shoulders he wore a thick bearskin cloak to ward off bites... and he was very nearly too late.

One of the interlopers had managed to get her jaws locked around Jeanette's throat. The latter's thick fur kept it from being a killing bite, but the former was doing her damnedest to inflict one, regardless. The other had torn open her shoulder and was now circling around them, looking for an opportunity to jump in and assist in the kill.

He died first, however, his head neatly severed with a single heavy blow from that shining sword.

The remaining wolf let go of Jeanette then, turning to face the man - and that was her last mistake.  Before he could strike the wild bitch down, Jeanette sank her teeth into her hindquarters and reared up on her own hind legs, flinging her over her shoulder and away from him. She landed hard and struggled to her feet, giving herself a shake before lunging for Jeanette once more, letting out an almost human-sounding shriek of rage and pain.

Her teeth lacerated Jeanette's face, narrowly missing her right eye - and Jeanette's jaws closed around her skull. Still shrieking, the wild wolf flailed at her face and neck and chest as she shook her violently.

There was an audible crunch as the interloper's neck broke, and she went limp in Jeanette's jaws.

Panting hard, she let the dead wolf fall to the ground, and turned her head to look at the man.

Her vision swam, and she staggered, briefly dropping to her elbows as she felt the toll of the fight weighing on her... then reality itself seemed to warp, panic burst in her chest, and an all-too-human sound escaped her...

-----

Jorge didn't know what to think.

Was he dreaming? Was this real?

One moment, his beloved Little One had been standing before him, bloodied but triumphant after killing two of the wolves that had attempted to raid his farm - and the next, she was gone, and in her place was a girl.

A human girl.

Or, at least, one that looked human.

His sword fell to the ground at his feet as he stared at the sight before him. She couldn't have possibly been older than sixteen, dressed in a wolf-skin tunic and bleeding from numerous open wounds. Short-cropped, mouse-brown hair framed her pale, sharp-featured face, and those keen blue eyes...

"What... are you..." he managed to choke out.

She didn't answer, only gasped out a ragged sob as tears welled up to roll down her cheeks - before lurching to her feet and bolting away, towards the forest. Jorge didn't waste time thinking it over, he simply snatched up his sword and ran after her. She was faster by far, but she was also bleeding, and he didn't have to outrun her to follow the trail she left behind in her blind flight.

Finding her was inevitable.

She'd managed to get a fair distance into the forest, and the sun was drawing near to the horizon by the time he caught up, spotting her collapsed at the brim of a spring that bubbled up from between the twisted roots of a towering oak. Her bright red blood stained the moss and snow, and formed a crimson cloud in the water where her arm lay. Her shoulders trembled from what he first thought must have been the cold, but he quickly realized that, no, she was weeping.

He could have killed her then and there - in his youth, he would have. But time and experience stayed his hand.

"Little One." His voice was quiet, but firm... and he felt a twinge in his heart at the way she cringed in on herself.

"...'m sorry..." the girl rasped out between sobs, not looking up to meet his gaze; "I'm so sorry..."

"What are you?" He repeated, struggling to keep his voice even. "Answer me."

"I am - I am what you see... this, and the wolf..." Her own voice wavered and cracked. "I am sorry..."

Every apology twisted a thorn in his chest.

And yet, he couldn't bring himself to hate the girl. She seemed so young, and even as a wolf she'd been so sweet... and hadn't she just killed two wolves to protect him and his home? Even at great cost to herself?

"...why did you lie to me?" Jorge finally asked, as his initial anger subsided. There was no malice to his words, he only wanted to know why...

She drew back from him, dragging herself across the mossy ground to huddle against the base of the tree, as if it would protect her from his wrath.

"Because - because I was afraid," she finally whispered, her eyes fixed on the surface of the pool beside her; "....because you - you were so kind to me, even after I tried to steal from you... No one has ever been so kind to me, and I feared that - that if I showed you the truth - you would be afraid of me, or worse..."

She seemed to shrink in on herself, sobbing softly.

"Kill me... or leave me... it doesn't matter. I - I just... I am sorry..."

Once more, Jorge's sword fell to the ground. This time, though, he didn't bend down to retrieve it before approaching the girl. Instead, he unfastened the heavy bearskin he wore, and draped it across her trembling shoulders as he knelt down. Her slender fingers clutched the thick hide tightly, and surprise was evident on her face, but she still could not look him in the eye.

"What's your name, little one? Your real name?"

"...Jeanette..."

He reached out to smooth her tousled hair, and felt another twinge of pity in his heart when she flinched. No, he couldn't hurt her - she was just lost and frightened, the same as she'd been when he'd met her as a wolf. He wasn't sure he understood her, but that was fine, it would come with time.

"My name's Jorge," he replied softly. "It's all right, 'm not gonna hurt you, I promise..."

Slowly, carefully, he gathered her up, bundled snugly in the warm cloak. Jeanette was tense, at first, but quickly curled against his chest, still shaking, still sobbing quietly.

"I told you, you weren't lost anymore, 'n I meant it."

He left his sword where it had fallen as he started back towards the farm; he could always come back for it later, but right now he had something much more precious to worry about.

"C'mon, now... let's go home, 'n do things right this time..."

[faithfulnews]

Papal Fiction

Papal Fiction

By Rita Ferrone

December 23, 2019

“The most glorious journey can begin with a mistake.” This is the observation made by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in the opening scene of Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes, as he preaches to throngs of poor people in a Buenos Aires slum. It signals the central themes of the film: change, reconciliation, and hope for the future. The scene, shot on location in Argentina, surges with the energy of the people and the place. A kaleidoscope of color and activity soon settles into a moment of stillness and focused attention as Bergoglio speaks. He stands in the midst of all these people: not above them, but with them. And they are listening.

But what is the mistake? The first possible answer the film offers is that Bergoglio (played by Jonathan Pryce) has decided to resign from his position at the head of the church of Buenos Aires. He is tired and weary from the direction that the church is taking, and he wants out. As his repeated letters to Pope Benedict XVI go unanswered, he plans a trip to Rome to press the pope in person to let him retire.

Little does he know that, at the same time, Pope Benedict is contemplating his own resignation. What holds Benedict back from retirement, however, is his fear that Bergoglio might succeed him. In the 2005 conclave at which Benedict was elected, Bergoglio was a serious contender. The public forgot this fact during the conclave of 2013; many presumed that Bergoglio came out of nowhere. But the prospect of Bergoglio’s rise was not lost on Benedict. He kept an eye (and a file) on him. And he didn’t like what he saw: too much willingness to bend the rules and too little respect for tradition. Benedict comes to regard Bergoglio as his nemesis, someone with whom he disagrees so fundamentally that he fears what might happen to the church should the Argentine ascend to the Chair of Peter. Benedict (played by a fine Anthony Hopkins) decides to face his fears. Just as Bergoglio prepares to head to Rome, Benedict summons him for a face-to-face meeting—for his own purposes. “He must have gotten my letter after all,” Bergoglio mutters, not realizing there’s another agenda at play.

This is the stuff of comedy. And indeed The Two Popes is full of humorous bits, arising from the clash of opposites, thwarted expectations, and unexpected convergences. (One laugh-out-loud moment: the soundtrack accompanying the solemn entrance of the cardinals into the Sistine Chapel for the 2005 conclave suddenly blares strains of Abba’s “Dancing Queen.” A hat tip to Frédéric Martel?) Yet it is also a serious affair. The meeting between Benedict and Bergoglio becomes a three-day conversation over which the central drama of the film unfolds.

The first encounter between the two men takes place in a perfectly manicured garden at the pope’s summer residence—a sharp contrast with the rollicking streets of Argentina we’ve just seen. And of course this is a setup. All the clichés concerning the differences between the two popes come tumbling out. Benedict lives in regal isolation. He is stern, even censorious. He is concerned about protecting Tradition and Truth with a capital “T.” In a reminder that the indignities of old age are upon him, Benedict receives commands from his watch to “Keep moving” every time he pauses in his walk. Yet he’s clearly a tough old bird, and his strong will is on full display. Hopkins’s elderly pope knows that change is on the horizon, but he resists it with every fiber of his being.

Pryce’s Bergoglio is the perfect foil for all this. With wit and winsomeness, and aided by an uncanny resemblance to Francis, Pryce quickly helps establish the contrast between his character and Benedict. Bergoglio eschews luxury and lives simply. A true son of Argentina, he’s passionate about soccer and dances the tango. He enjoys his food. Most of all, he enjoys being with people. (At one point, Benedict arrives on the scene and is startled to find that Bergoglio has made friends with the gardener; together they are extolling the merits of oregano.) Throughout, and just as you would expect, Bergoglio wears clunky black shoes and carries his famous, scuffed black briefcase. The briefcase holds his resignation letter, which he will push under the nose of Benedict at every opportunity—a bit of stage business that grows more hilarious each time it is repeated (and it is repeated often). His dogged persistence in carrying out his mission is an indicator of his own strength of will. He does not bend easily.

There is no evidence either that Benedict was particularly anxious about the prospect of Bergoglio stepping into his shoes.

As their encounter progresses, Benedict proceeds to challenge Bergoglio on his record, while Bergoglio puts up a lively defense of his decisions and priorities. The discussion that follows is a quick run-through of matters of philosophical principle on which the two popes are reputed to disagree, or at least to have distinctly different practical approaches. But this is treated simplistically. At no point does The Two Popes become a film of ideas; there is no attempt to chart the nuances of their viewpoints. Meirelles hews firmly to the time-tested formula of setting two opposing personalities against each other.

Yet as they spend more time together, their exchanges become more personal in nature, more intimate, and more human. We learn through flashbacks about how the young Bergoglio decided to become a Jesuit priest. At a point of decision in his life, a chance conversation with a thoughtful priest whom he had never seen before and who, as it happens, was dying of leukemia, tips the balance. Is the unexpected conversation with a kind stranger perhaps the mistake that opens onto a glorious journey?

But the journey is not so glorious. Through flashbacks, we learn about the young Bergoglio (played by the accomplished Argentinian actor Juan Minujín). There are wrenching scenes concerning events that occurred during the dictatorship. Bergoglio was indeed mentored by a communist, a woman at a food chemistry lab whom he deeply respected. Her daughter was abducted by the regime, and she herself was later arrested and killed. We see the mistakes Bergoglio makes after being appointed provincial of his order at an early age. The film depicts the true story of how he ordered two Jesuits out of their frontline ministry among the poor during the Dirty War, out of fear for their safety, and his suspension of them when they refused. What he did not anticipate was that this suspension then would be interpreted as lifting the church’s protection; the two men were soon arrested, detained, and tortured. Many years later, one of these priests forgave him; the other never did. We learn of Bergoglio’s struggle with guilt for not having done more to save those targeted by the regime. We see how he carries within himself his own consciousness of sin and unworthiness as he goes into exile in Córdoba, Argentina, where his community has sent him after a tumultuous and divisive term.

Benedict, who by now has thawed considerably, listens and attempts to console Bergoglio. He confides his own sense of spiritual loneliness, and reveals his decision to resign the papacy. At the end of the scene, Benedict is moved to confess his own sins, and asks for sacramental absolution, which Bergoglio gives him despite being deeply shocked by what he has heard.

The roles are now reversed. Bergoglio forgets about pressing Benedict to accept his resignation as archbishop and tries instead to dissuade Benedict from resigning the papacy. Why? Because tradition demands it! The reformer doesn’t want so much change after all! Meanwhile, Benedict, loses his resistance to the prospect of Bergoglio as his successor. Maybe the man from Buenos Aires is just the person the church needs as pontiff. The defender of tradition becomes the one who breaks with tradition! And so we are to understand that the two men have looked into each other’s hearts with compassion. This changes everything.

  All of this, of course, is fiction. Despite the emotionally satisfying resolution of the film, we need to remember that none of this actually happened. The conversation never took place. Confession and forgiveness were neither sought nor received. Benedict never threw his weight behind Bergoglio in the 2013 conclave (according to many journalists, he favored Angelo Scola of Milan and Marc Ouellet of Quebec), and in any case a retiring pope does not choose his successor. There is no evidence either that Benedict was particularly anxious about the prospect of Bergoglio stepping into his shoes, or that he changed his mind in the end. Although Francis has shown great kindness and solicitude toward his predecessor, the two have never become what you’d call buddies.

The most troubling fictionalization, however, is Benedict’s confession to Bergoglio. Meirelles muffles the dialogue, so we don’t actually hear what he says. But it seems we are to believe that Benedict confesses to knowingly reassigning predator priests—something not supported by his actual biography. The admission of guilt is prefaced by a vague reference to Marcial Maciel, the notorious sex abuser who founded the Legionaries of Christ. Ratzinger’s role in that case, however, was quite different from that implied by the movie. Far from enabling Maciel, Ratzinger, in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, strove to have him removed from ministry; it was John Paul II who resisted. As pope, Benedict finally got rid of Maciel, sentencing him to “a life of prayer and penance.”

Did Ratzinger perhaps reassign predator priests while he was archbishop of Munich? Anything is possible, and certainly this sort of thing happened in many dioceses. But it is not a known fact that Benedict did so, and on a topic like this, an admission of guilt is far from a harmless artistic embellishment. This stuff is radioactive.

Obviously, Meirelles wanted to dramatize a relationship in which two men acknowledge their sins and confide in one another about their feelings of unworthiness for the great office they have been called to fill. And many viewers like to see antagonists arrive at forgiveness and reconciliation. The imagined dynamic between the two men is the most engaging aspect of the film, the most hilarious, and also the most meaning-laden—and the confession scene is part of it. Yet to suggest complicity in the sex-abuse scandals without a solid anchor in fact needlessly complicates things. Wasn’t there something that Benedict actually felt remorseful about to depict instead?

Glorious journeys do unfold, despite all of our mistakes. And sometimes, tradition and progress meet—and embrace. That’s the uplifting message of The Two Popes. If only it could happen in real-life Rome.

Issue: 

January 2020

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[leftpress]

Santiago: New explosive attack claimed by Antagonistic Nuclei of the New Urban Guerrilla (Chile)

admin | 325 | March 7th 2017

At about 01:40AM on Monday, February 27, 2017, a loud explosion shook the wealthy suburb of Providencia on Suecia avenue between Cornel and Lota streets.

A fire extinguisher filled with gunpowder detonated in the Cap Ducal restaurant in front of the headquarters of the ultra-right political party UDI (Independent Democratic Union) without causing any major damage or any injuries. Immediately after the bombing, police and personnel from GOPE (Group of Special Police Operations) and LABOCAR (Criminal Laboratory of the Carabineros) arrived to inspect the area.

A leaflet was found at the scene which, according to quotations in the media, proclaimed:

“The justice of the street does not forgive nor does it forget. We are getting closer! …The real terrorists are in the Congress, the Palace and the institutions that govern the State..Take note, because we have returned. Neither Chileans, nor Argentines. Internationalists”.

The bastard secretary genera...

l of the ultra-right UDI, Pablo Terrazas said “We do not want to get used to these facts. This is not the first time that the UDI has been the victim of a bomb attack…It is unfortunate because we know that this comes from the left, who always try to silence us…I would like to see (some reaction from) the Communist Party, an announcement to the left, who are part of this government. Why do they not condemn these facts? There is always silent complicity in this (type of) attack that are always against the UDI”

The investigation of the attack, as with other attacks of this nature is in the hands of the Southern Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office.

Not long afterwards, the Teodoro Suarez Vandalism Gang from the Antagonistic Nuclei of the New Urban Guerrilla claimed responsibility for the explosive attack against the Cap Ducal restaurant. The group previously claimed an attack against the Mutual Circle of Retired Non-commissioned Officers of the Federal Police in Buenos Aires in July 2011.

******

Responsibility claim for the explosive attack against the Cap Ducal restaurant

“We warn you: be careful. In any part of the places you frequent there may be a bomb; In your homes, in your supermarkets, gyms, shops and restaurants. In short, your days of tranquility are over. Your neighbourhoods will be transformed into minefields, so take care of every step you take, because you may encounter our explosive charges.”

–Iconoclastic Caravans For Free Will–

Just like we did a couple of years ago in the territory dominated by the Argentine state, bombing its sacrificial banks (Palermo and Nación), the branches of two major airlines (American Airlines and Alitalia) and the Mutual Circle of Retired Non-commissioned Officers of the Federal Police, today we again attacked capitalist interests. This time it was the turn of the Chilean political-business mafia that stubbornly insists on believing that places like the one that we visited last night are safe.

The restaurant Cap Ducal, located at #281 Suecia Ave in the bourgeois Providencia commune was not a random target. Here the most diverse group of fascists meet. Sinister characters such as ex-DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) and former colonel, Cristian Labbe, currently prosecuted for various crimes against humanity, or the presidential candidate and daughter of the former Air Force Commander and member of the Military Junta, Fernando Matthei, Evelyn Matthei, who, like her father, played an important role during the Military Dictatorship, being the head of the AFP (Pension Funds Administration), are all recurring faces at this place. It should be noted that the disastrous pension model that this filth worked for is still to this day a headache for millions of Chileans. As you can see, the fruit never falls far from the tree, and in this case, its small and despicable daughter is no exception.

But it is not necessary to look for those responsible in the pages of the dictatorial history of this filthy country to realize that this place shelters rogues and leeches of all kinds. With that in mind it makes sense to take note of some of the endless provocations that have been realized by some of these dark characters, for example:

* Joaquín Lavín Infante: Supernumerary member of Opus Dei; Married to the daughter of former Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front member Alberto León Fuentes, one of his sons married the popular mayor of Maipú, Cathy Barriga, giving continuity to his political-economic legacy; During the dicatorship he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at the University of Concepción for being functional to the policies of Pinochet; He is a Chicago Boy and directly responsible for the implantation of neoliberal doctrines that have made Chile one of the most unequal and unjust countries in the world; Today his is mayor of Las Condes; Between 2010 and 2011 he served as Minister of Education during the government of Piñera, his resignation was demanded for having capitalist interests in this area, since he was a founding member of the fascist University of Development and, as if that wasn’t enough, he profited from it along with his dear and despicable friends from the Penta group because, apart from being the owner of a percentage of the university, he was also an active member of Ainavillo real estate, who were responsible for the ‘lease and sublease of real estate, construction or modification and exploitation, as well as the administration and management of real estate business’ for the above mentioned house of studies where he managed to avoid the legal provision that, theoretically, prevents foundations and corporations for the purposes of profit; To all of the above, as if that were not enough, it should be added that he sold the rights over water to the company Aguas Andinas SA when he was mayor of Santiago (2000-2004), giving enormous financial support to his compadre, the fascist dog Andrés Chadwick, who was, along with others, a shareholder of the company. This is Joaquín Lavín, an experienced criminal who has used his strategic positions in national politics for his own benefit; Needless to mention, in addition to all of the above, is his total adherence to the Pinochet regime.

* Jacqueline van Rysselberghe: This psychiatrist currently serves as President of the UDI; His family has a history strongly linked to the political world (Tatarabuelo – Minister of Public Works – Abuelo – Director of Municipal Works, Councillor and then Mayor of Concepción – Father – Deputy of Concepción – Brother – Councillor for Concepción). For a while she was Intendant for Biobío region and a Councillor for Concepción as well as Mayor of this commune; Member of Opus Dei; in 2000 her father’s company (Constructora Rysselberghe and Co. Ltd) faced a lawsuit for a debt with CORFO for non-payment of a mortgage loan and another loan of $514,719,516 (plus IPC adjustments) from the Municipality of Concepción for the extraction and commercialization of non-patent aggregates between 1973 and 19996. On that occasion she faced the complaint without any consequences after she was elected Mayor; in 2011, the Comptrollers Office investigated left for the municipality of Concepción left during her term, which amounted to a deficit of 3 billion pesos, in addition to 623 million pesos that were not recorded in accounting, checks drawn for 157 million without being recorded in accounting and 4,133 million pesos listed as expired cheques; Today she is being investigated for bribery in the Corpesca case, after some emails between the current Senator and Luis Felipe Moncada (former president of the Fishing Industry Association) were leaked.

* Andrés Chadwick Piñera: This fascist dog was Deputy and Senator during his tenure; He was appointed president of FEUC by the Military Regime for being a faithful hound to the dictatorship’s designs; In 1977 he participated in the meeting organized by the Youth Front of National Unity in Cerro Chacarillas. Joaquín Lavín, Patricio Melero, Julio Dittborn, Pablo Longueira, Carlos Bombal and Juan Antonio Coloma, among others, also attended this meeting; Already in power, this piece of garbage did not think of anything better than imposing his limited doctrine, trying to promulgate, along with Longueira, a law in which marriage was consecrated as exclusive for men and women; Being a shareholder of Banco Penta saw his actions fall to the ground after the tremendous scandals in which his cronies were enveloped; As a shareholder of Enersis SA and Copec SA (of the Angelini group), it was not uncommon for the Energy Minister Jorge Bunster of having a conflict of interest with his portfolio; How can we forget when this pig, trying to protect politicians linked to emblematic cases of corruption, tried to whiten them as Government Spokesperson under the command of Sebastián Piñera (his cousin-brother), saying that these little white doves could delete the investigated emails for being a part of their private lives; Nor can we forget when this coward applauded what today still terrifies thousands of poor and marginalized people in the countryside and the cities, the infamous Preventative Identity Control, which empowers the police to undo and redo in the sectors of popular origin; And not to mention when this fascist hound supported the terrorist actions of the Carabinero who violated students following the massive mobilizations of protest during an already distant year of 2011. As if this were not enough, he did whatever was humanly possible to remove his heroes of the homeland from the prisons of luxury where they were serving sentences for human rights violations, as all of Chile could hear in the Chamber of Deputies in his capacity as Minister of the Interior; This is Andrés Chadwick, a facetious dog thirsting to bite back.

* Ena von Baer Jahn: Until recently she was the vice-president of the UDI; She has been Senator of the Republic twice; She was spokesperson during the rule of Sebastián Piñera; Her grandfather was a member of the Nazi Special Forces who very bravely escaped at the end of the conflict, evading any responsibility to justice, which, by the way, now seems to be a family trait (cowardice); She has been part of the putrid Liberty and Development Institute, being the director of the Politics and Society Program, where among other topics, she had the temerity to speak about the anarchist comrades Francisco Solar and Mónica Caballero and about the peñis and lamienes who resist in militarized Wallmapu; She has taught at the elitist Adolfo Ibáñez University as well as the Development University (owned by her idol Joaquín Lavín), where she has been heard on more than one occasion to venerate dictatorial work and defend profiting from education; We also had to listen to this scum vomit their ‘pseudo-ideals’ on several Sundays in the year 2010 via the television program ‘National State’; but if all this was not enough, this snake is also being investigated in two case of corruption, after communications were leaked on December 18, 2013 where this piece of garbage asks for 100 million pesos from Carlos Alberto Délano to pay her debts from her election campaign. Subsequently extracts of the statement of the latter were leaked to the prosecutor investigating the case, where he notes that Von Baer personally went (together with Jovino Novoa) to request financial support for her candidacy.

* Jovino Novoa: Founding member of the UDI and in his time he was also its President; He was President of the Senate, during his time he was also Senator for Santiago; Under Secretary General for Pinochet between 1979 and 1982, during the time that Tucapel Jiminez was assassinated by elements of the CNI linked to the Department of Civil Organizations, which was under his command; That same year he assumed the role of publisher of informative services for the daily liar The Mercury, which did not cease in covering up the sinister assemblies of the CNI in those years; in 2003 he was involved in the Spiniak Case, being acquitted by the benevolent justice of the rich; Today he has been condemned to a ridiculously light sentence for tax crimes by the rich bourgeois justice for the Penta and SQM cases, where he received the sum of 30 million pesos to finance political campaigns in an illegal manner after recognizing that he had occupied ideologically false ballots, evaded tax and made false returns from the SII to the Pena group.

* Hernan Larrain: Like the dog Chadwick and the miserable wretch Longueira, he was instructed by his mentor, the now dead Jaime Guzmán, in Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony). In fact, this pig was a member of the Friends of Colonia Dignidad Corporation, a place known for providing various types of support for the Pinochet regime and the continuation of human rights violations; He was President of the Senate and until recently was President of the UDI; He joined the Standing Committee on Agriculture, Decentralization, Regionalization, Legislation and Justice, and taking advantage of his powers as a senator – which he still has – approved the ‘Monsanto Law’, which greatly benefits foreign capital by giving them legal coverage in the regime that regulates licences for crop farmers, promoting privatized seeds and genetically modified food to the detriment of natural biodiversity. It privatizes the seed and assigns it a code which is then paid for by the consumer, taking advantage of a loophole in the genetically modified food categorization in favor of big industry. It is also worth mentioning the strong debate regarding the generation of cancer cells following the consumption of genetically modified foods, which are incredibly harmful to people’s health. Is there any doubt as to who this pig is?

* Juan Antonio Coloma: This homophobic cockroach was Deputy from the beginning of the Transition (period between the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of bourgeois ‘democracy’) until 2002, later he became Senator, a position that he still occupies until the present day; He has been Secretary General and President of the UDI, and is currently its Vice President; in 1977 he was designated President of the FEUC (Federation of Catholic University Students) to adhere to and be functional for the regime, That same year he participated as president of the organization that chaired the meeting in Cerro Chacarillas; He was a member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture in which he voted as a parliamentarian in favor of the ‘Monsanto Law’, giving a strong economic backing to the family of ultra-fascist Senator Ena Von Baer, as his father owns a large genetically modified seed company in the south of the country.

* Pablo Longueira: This xenophobic snake began his political career during his university days as president of the Center for Engineering Students and then of the Feceh (University of Chile Student Federation, an organization which replaced the Fech – which was banned during the dictatorship), to later become one of founders and most revered members of the UDI; From the ‘democratic’ Transition until 2006 he was Deputy, to then become Senator until 2011, a position that he also left to take charge of the Ministry of the Economy under the government of Piñera; This cowardly former presidential candidate has enriched himself enormously, taking advantage of his extensive powers to try and promote various initiatives as a parliamentarian; Most well known is the famous ‘Fisheries Act’ or ‘Longueira Law’, which greatly benefited big industry to the detriment of the artisanal fishermen. In this way, this individual received – via different suppliers – no less than the sum of 730 million pesos between September 2009 and March 2015 from, among others, the Corpesca company, controlled mainly by the Angelini family as a bribe to ensure that the law would be favorable to them; But this scoundrel has not only been enriched at the cost of our ignorance, but he has also mocked us all on countless occasions. How can we forget when this opportunist pirahna to use the sensitive issue of Disappeared Detainees for his own self-benefit; Not to mention the paradoxical result of the so-called ‘Lago-Longueira Agreement’ of January 17, 2003, to modernize the state and make a politically negotiated settlement to the numerous cases of corruption that affected institutional stability; The SQM case, controlled by Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s former son-in-law, where he was also involved, only serves to corroborate the political life of a wolf dressed sheep’s clothing.

* Jaime Orpis: This shameful and cowardly bird of prey used nothing more and nothing less than the current account of his own secretary for the payment of bank credits with which he even gave to the luxury of paying up to the Yacht Club of Frutillar, funds received, by the way, with the bribes from Corpesca in exchange for voting in the Senate in favor of the interests of the fishing industry; if this were not enough, to this xenophobic parliamentarian we can attribute, in addition to the more than 235 million pesos stolen via ideologically false ballots, the responsibility for the fact that areas of Parinacota, Arica and Tarapacá are practically war zones for undocumented and illegal migrants, since that under his management as Senator of the 1st Constituency the border and security systems were strengthened. As well as being a thief and a coward, he also turns out to be a xenophobic discriminator.

All these filth are militants of the extreme right and assiduous diners at the Cap Ducal. Also, we have seen them ourselves, we have observed them at their meetings, while they eat, drink and laugh.

The Cap Ducal is not a neutral restaurant, quite the opposite. It is an entry point, of meetings, linkage, planning and support that shelters miserable politicians, many of them involved in multiple scandals. Additionally, it should be noted that the owner of this chain of hotels and restaurants is none other than Tomas de Rementaria, founder of not only these club, but also (along with Ricardo Lagos) of the PPD (Party for Democracy). It is worth pointing out that this guy besides being a prominent businessman, was Councilman of Viña del Mar and a militant of the Chilean PS (Socialist Party). After all, they are all the same, they all have lunch together, they do business, they are friends and family. Repeated cases of corruption can account for this. They shake hands, smile and pose in photographs for posterity while people are swindled.

In the face of such infamy our response is forceful! We light the dynamite of Emile Henry and we blow up their centers of power!

With this text, we claim the explosive attack that occurred before dawn on Monday (27/02) in this area. We attacked one of the dens where Chilean fascism meets disguised in suits and elegant costumes to cook the laws and decrees with which they crush civil society as a whole purely for their own benefit. And they should thank us for having the decorum – which they certainly do not deserve – to visit this place at night and not in broad daylight, since we could have done so, and of course we would not have missed. We decided on this course of action as a clear political position so as not to hurt innocent people and workers at the restaurant.

We dedicate this action to the revolutionaries of yesterday and today, Freddy Fuentevilla Saa, Marcelo Villarroel Sepúlveda and Juan Aliste Vega, unyielding prisoners who hold firm to their convictions from the High Security Prison with a dignity that is greater than the walls that enclose them, facing fascism in all its various manifestations and forms.

In conclusion, we do not want to limit our words to mere justifications for our action. We can attest that it was a great pleasure to carry out this attack. We toast the fact that we were able to operate in the commune where these gentlemen feel untouchable. We will continue to take the Social War right up to the doors of their homes.

The justice of the street does not forgive nor does it forget! We are getting closer!

The real terrorists are in the Congress, the Palace and the institutions that govern the State!

Take note, because we have returned!! Neither Chileans nor Argentines!! Internationalists!! As long as there is misery there will be rebellion!!

Teodoro Suarez Vandalism Gang Antagonistic Nuclei of the New Urban Guerrilla via Noticias de la Guerra Social, translated by Insurrection News

[healthandfitnessrecipes-blog]

Rich Buyers Are Pushing Rural Hospitals to a Controversial Practice

https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=5670

CEDARVILLE, Calif.—Beau Gertz faced a crowd of worried locals at the town senior center, hoping to sell them on his vision for their long-beloved—but now bankrupt—hospital.

In worn blue jeans and an untucked shirt, the bearded entrepreneur from Denver pledged at a town-hall meeting in March to revive the Surprise Valley Community Hospital—a place many in the audience counted on to set their broken bones, stitch up cattle-tagging cuts, and tend to aging loved ones.

Gertz said that if they voted on Tuesday to let him buy their tiny public hospital, he would retain such vital services. Better still, he said, he’d like to open a “wellness center” to attract well-heeled outsiders—one that would offer telehealth, addiction treatment, physical therapy, genetic testing, intravenous vitamin infusions, and even massages. Cedarville’s failing hospital, now at least $4 million in debt, would not just bounce back but thrive, he said.

Gertz, 34, a former weightlifter who runs clinical-lab and nutraceutical companies, unveiled his plan to pay for it: He’d use the 26-bed hospital to bill insurers for lab tests regardless of where patients lived. Through telemedicine technology, doctors working for Surprise Valley could order tests for people who’d never set foot there.

To some of the 100 or so people at the meeting that night, Gertz’s plan offered hope. To others, it sounded suspiciously familiar: Just months before, another out-of-towner had proposed a similar deal—only to disappear.

Outsiders “come in and promise the moon,” says Jeanne Goldman, 72, a retired businesswoman. “The [hospital’s] board is just so desperate with all the debt, and they pray this angel’s going to come along and fix it. If this was a shoe store in Surprise Valley, I could care less, but it’s a hospital.”

The woes of Surprise Valley Community Hospital reflect an increasingly brutal environment for America’s rural hospitals, which are disappearing by the dozens amid declining populations, economic troubles, corporate consolidation and, sometimes, self-inflicted wounds.

Nationwide, 83 of 2,375 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. These often-remote hospitals—some with 10, 15, 25 beds—have been targeted by management companies or potential buyers who promise much but often deliver little while lining their own pockets, according to allegations in court cases, a Missouri state audit, and media reports.

Enticed by such outsiders, some struggling rural hospitals around the country have embraced lab billing for faraway patients as a rescue plan. That’s because Medicare and commercial insurers tend to pay more for tests to sustain endangered rural hospitals compared with urban hospitals and especially outpatient labs. In general, this kind of remote billing is controversial and legally murky, and it recently has resulted in allegations of fraud in several states, according to government documents and media reports.

Rural hospital boards, however, tend not to have expertise in the health-care business. The president of Surprise Valley Community’s board, for instance, is a rancher. Another board member owns a local motel; a third, a construction company. That lack of experience “leaves them vulnerable in many cases,” says Terry Hill of the nonprofit National Rural Health Resource Center, based in Duluth, Minnesota.

Seeking to distinguish himself from other would-be rescuers who ran into legal trouble, Gertz described his proposal to residents as perfectly legal—a legitimate use of telemedicine, essentially remote treatment via electronic communication such as video. “If you do it correctly,” he said in an interview with Kaiser Health News, “there is a nice profit margin. There [are] extra visits you can get from telemedicine but ... it has to be billed correctly and it can’t be abused.”

Jeanne Goldman talks with Beau Gertz after the town-hall meeting. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Gertz runs several companies—founded within the last four years—including two labs, SeroDynamics and Cadira Labs, as well as a wellness company called CadiraMD.

He pledged in court documents to buy the bankrupt hospital for $4 million and cover its debts. In a public meeting, he also said he had loaned the hospital $750,000 and lined up a $4 billion New York company as a financial backer. Kaiser Health News was unable to locate the company under the name Gertz cited in the meeting, Next Genesis Development Group. He did not respond to emails seeking clarification on the issue.

Gertz, who acknowledged that he had never before run a hospital, was asked at the same gathering whether he had disclosed his “financials” to the hospital board. “As a private entity, I don’t have to show my financials and I have not provided my financials to the board,” he replied.

It was not clear whether board members had ever asked. Surprise Valley Health Care District Board President John Erquiaga declined to comment.

Surrounded by the Warner and Modoc mountains and forests in California’s northeastern corner, Surprise Valley is home to four small communities. The largest is Cedarville, population 514, at last count.

The valley, covered in sagebrush and greasewood, is part of Modoc County, one of California’s poorest, with a median income of about $30,000. The closest hospital with an emergency room is roughly 25 miles away, over a mountain pass.

One of hundreds of rural hospitals built with help from the 1946 federal Hill-Burton Act, the Surprise Valley hospital opened in 1952 to serve a thriving ranching community. But it has struggled since, closing in 1981, reopening as a health clinic in 1985, then reconverting to a hospital in 1986.

A county grand jury report in 2014-15 found that “mismanagement of the [hospital district] has been evident for at least the past five years.”

By last summer, those in charge didn’t seem up to the task of running a modern hospital. By then, it was hardly a hospital at all. Crushed by debt, it primarily offered nursing-home care, an emergency room, a volunteer ambulance service and just one acute care bed, with three others available if needed.

When state inspectors arrived last June, they found chaos. The hospital’s chief nursing officer resigned during the inspection. Staffers reported unpaid checks to vendors hidden in drawers. Inspectors learned that the hospital had sent home temporary nurses because it couldn’t pay them, according to their report.

The hospital’s then-chief administrator, Richard Cornwell—who staffers said had instructed them to hide the checks, according to the report—had taken a leave of absence and was nowhere to be found. Cornwell, a health-care accountant from Montana, was later fired and replaced with the hospital’s lab director, who in turn resigned, according to public records. Reached by Kaiser Health News, Cornwell declined to comment.

Federal regulators suspended Medicare and Medicaid payments to the hospital—a rarely invoked financial penalty—over concerns about patient care. Those payments have since been reinstated, but a follow-up state inspection in November 2017 identified more patient care concerns.

Infighting ensued, with some residents fiercely committed to keeping the hospital open and others favoring closure, perhaps replacing it with a small clinic. Jean Bilodeaux, 74, a local journalist, says board members often kept the public in the dark, failing to show up for their own meetings and sometimes making decisions outside public view.

When Bilodeaux raised questions about the hospital’s finances in the Modoc County Record, a weekly newspaper, she recalled, board members “started screaming at me,” she said. Now “I don’t even step foot in that hospital.”

Ben Zandstra, 65, a pastor in Cedarville, says that while Cornwell was in charge, he too got a chilly reception at the hospital, where he had long played guitar for patients on Christmas Eve. “I became persona non grata. It’s the most divisive thing I’ve seen in the years I’ve lived here.”

Even residents who say they have experienced poor care at Surprise Valley Community believe its continued existence in some form is crucial—for its 50 or so jobs, for its ER, and because it puts the region on the map.

Eric Shpilman, 61, a retired probation officer, says his now-deceased wife received “unspeakable” treatment at Surprise Valley. But to shut it down? “It would take out the heart of Surprise Valley, the heart out of Cedarville.”

Last summer, the board turned to an outside management company for help.

Jorge Perez, the CEO of Kansas City–based EmpowerHMS—which promises on its website to “rescue rural hospitals”—agreed to take over Surprise Valley’s debt and operate the hospital for three years, according to a management agreement with the board.

In the two months after EmpowerHMS took over management, Surprise Valley’s revenue more than doubled, according to financial documents provided by the hospital.

Then, according to hospital officials’ public statements, the company stopped making the promised payments, and they haven’t been able to contact EmpowerHMS or Perez since. In January, when Surprise Valley filed for bankruptcy, documents filed in court said EmpowerHMS had “abandoned” the hospital.

Around the time Perez took over, he and companies with which he was involved were dogged by allegations of improper laboratory billing at facilities in Mississippi, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri, according to ongoing lawsuits by insurers and others, a state audit, and media reports. Missouri’s attorney general in May opened an investigation into one of the hospitals Perez managed, and the Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri recently called for a federal investigation into lab-billing practices at one of the hospitals.

Cows roam in Cedarville, California. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Medicare rules and commercial insurance contracts, with some exceptions, require people to be treated on an inpatient or outpatient basis by the hospitals that are billing for their lab tests. But insurers have alleged in court documents that hospitals Perez was involved with billed for tests—to the tune of at least $175 million—on patients never seen at those facilities. Perez has maintained that what he is doing is legal and that it generates revenue that rural hospitals desperately need, according to Side Effects Public Media.

Experts say insurers are catching on to voluminous billing by hospitals in communities that typically have generated a tiny number of tests. At one Sonoma County district hospital not associated with Perez, an insurer recently demanded repayment for $13.5 million in suspect billings, forcing the hospital to suspend the lucrative program and put itself up for sale.

Lab tests for out-of-town patients have “been a growing scheme in the last year, slightly longer,” said Karen Weintraub, the executive vice president of Health-Care Fraud Shield, which consults for insurers. “There’s an incentive to bill for things not necessary or even services not rendered. It also may not be proper based on contracts with insurers. The dollars are getting large.”

Some residents were aware of controversy surrounding Perez and his companies and said they tried to warn the hospital district board. “All they wanted to hear was, ‘We will pay the bills,’” Bilodeaux said.

Neither Perez nor EmpowerHMS returned requests for comment. However, Michael Murtha, the president of the National Alliance for Rural Hospitals, said in an email that he was responding on behalf of Perez, who chairs the coalition’s board.

“The mission to rescue rural hospitals and set them on a path of sustainability is a difficult undertaking, and it would be a disservice to their communities to preclude struggling facilities from availing themselves of every legal and regulatory means to generate badly needed revenue,” Murtha wrote, in part.

“Such pioneering efforts are not always welcomed by those who have benefited from the status quo,” he said.

Regarding Perez’s role at Surprise Valley, Murtha wrote that Perez tried to help save the facility by “effectively” donating over $250,000 but then discovered it faced “more challenges than had been initially realized.” Murtha said Perez worked to attract others who might be better able to help the hospital.

One of those “others” in Perez’s orbit was Gertz, the Denver entrepreneur, who arrived in Surprise Valley several months ago.

The Denver executive told residents and Kaiser Health News that he operated a lab that previously performed tests for hospitals owned or managed by Perez’s companies. At one hospital board meeting, Gertz also said he had handled marketing for Perez companies for one-and-a-half years.

However, he said he had parted ways with Perez after learning of his controversial dealings in other states, and Gertz said Perez now owes him more than $14 million. (Gertz and his companies have not been named as defendants in lawsuits reviewed by Kaiser Health News involving Perez and his companies.)

“I come in with a certain guilt by association,” he told the Modoc County Board of Supervisors in April, according to a recording of the meeting. But Gertz sought to assuage any concerns, telling the supervisors he had a “passion” for rural life. He’d grown up on a farm, he said, where he “hung out with the chickens” and cleaned the stables every morning.

Gertz said his plan was different from Perez’s and legal because the hospital and one of his Denver labs, SeroDynamics, had become one business. With the hospital board’s approval earlier this year, he loaned the district $2.5 million for it to buy SeroDynamics—effectively an advance on the hospital’s purchase price of $4 million, according to bankruptcy court documents. SeroDynamics’ website now proclaims the lab a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of the Surprise Valley hospital, with “national reach.”

Robert Michel, a clinical laboratory-management consultant who learned of the terms of the transaction from a reporter, offered a critical assessment. “The essence of this arrangement is to use the hospital’s existing managed-care contracts with generous payment terms for lab tests as a vehicle to bill for claims in other states,” said Michel, the founder and president of a trade magazine for the lab industry. This arrangement “should ring all sorts of bells” for the hospital board, he said.

For now, Gertz has said, dollars are flowing in. According to the journalist Jean Bilodeaux, Gertz phoned in to a Surprise Valley hospital board meeting in May to report that the lab billing so far had netted about $300,000. According to bankruptcy court documents, 80 percent of the profits will go to his companies, 20 percent to the hospital.

Those are terms some in Surprise Valley are willing to live with.

The next step, for Gertz, is taking ownership of Surprise Valley’s entire operation. For the roughly 1,500 district residents, voting no on Tuesday almost certainly means closure, leaving taxpayers with potentially more debt, including any money they may owe Gertz.

That is good enough reason to go with the Denver entrepreneur, said the acting hospital administrator Bill Bostic.

“He’s got something we haven’t got—which is money,” Bostic said.

This post appears courtesy of Kaiser Health News.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2018/05/rural_hospital_12_preview/lead_960.jpg Credits: Original Content Source

[nancygduarteus]

The Risky Promises Remote Owners Are Making to Rural Hospitals

CEDARVILLE, Calif.—Beau Gertz faced a crowd of worried locals at the town senior center, hoping to sell them on his vision for their long-beloved—but now bankrupt—hospital.

In worn blue jeans and an untucked shirt, the bearded entrepreneur from Denver pledged at a town-hall meeting in March to revive the Surprise Valley Community Hospital—a place many in the audience counted on to set their broken bones, stitch up cattle-tagging cuts, and tend to aging loved ones.

Gertz said that if they voted on Tuesday to let him buy their tiny public hospital, he would retain such vital services. Better still, he said, he’d like to open a “wellness center” to attract well-heeled outsiders—one that would offer telehealth, addiction treatment, physical therapy, genetic testing, intravenous vitamin infusions, even massage. Cedarville’s failing hospital, now at least $4 million in debt, would not just bounce back but thrive, he said.

Gertz, 34, a former weightlifter who runs clinical-lab and nutraceutical companies, unveiled his plan to pay for it: He’d use the 26-bed hospital to bill insurers for lab tests regardless of where patients lived. Through telemedicine technology, doctors working for Surprise Valley could order tests for people who’d never set foot there.

To some of the 100 or so people at the meeting that night, Gertz’s plan offered hope. To others, it sounded suspiciously familiar: Just months before, another out-of-towner had proposed a similar deal—only to disappear.

Outsiders “come in and promise the moon,” says Jeanne Goldman, 72, a retired businesswoman. “The [hospital’s] board is just so desperate with all the debt, and they pray this angel’s going to come along and fix it. If this was a shoe store in Surprise Valley, I could care less, but it’s a hospital.”

The woes of Surprise Valley Community Hospital reflect an increasingly brutal environment for America’s rural hospitals, which are disappearing by the dozens amid declining populations, economic troubles, corporate consolidation and, sometimes, self-inflicted wounds.

Nationwide, 83 of 2,375 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. These often-remote hospitals—some with 10, 15, 25 beds—have been targeted by management companies or potential buyers who promise much but often deliver little while lining their own pockets, according to allegations in court cases, a Missouri state audit, and media reports.

Enticed by such outsiders, some struggling rural hospitals around the country have embraced lab billing for faraway patients as a rescue plan. That’s because Medicare and commercial insurers tend to pay more for tests to sustain endangered rural hospitals compared with urban hospitals and especially outpatient labs. In general, this kind of remote billing is controversial and legally murky, and it recently has resulted in allegations of fraud in several states, according to government documents and media reports.

Rural hospital boards, however, tend not to have expertise in the health-care business. The president of Surprise Valley Community’s board, for instance, is a rancher. Another board member owns a local motel; a third, a construction company. That lack of experience “leaves them vulnerable in many cases,” says Terry Hill of the nonprofit National Rural Health Resource Center, based in Duluth, Minnesota.

Seeking to distinguish himself from other would-be rescuers who ran into legal trouble, Gertz described his proposal to residents as perfectly legal—a legitimate use of telemedicine, essentially remote treatment via electronic communication such as video. “If you do it correctly,” he said in an interview with Kaiser Health News, “there is a nice profit margin. There [are] extra visits you can get from telemedicine but ... it has to be billed correctly and it can’t be abused.”

Jeanne Goldman talks with Beau Gertz after the town-hall meeting. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Gertz runs several companies—founded within the last four years—including two labs, SeroDynamics and Cadira Labs, as well as a wellness company called CadiraMD.

He pledged in court documents to buy the bankrupt hospital for $4 million and cover its debts. In a public meeting, he also said he had loaned the hospital $750,000 and lined up a $4 billion New York company as a financial backer. Kaiser Health News was unable to locate the company under the name Gertz cited in the meeting, Next Genesis Development Group. He did not respond to emails seeking clarification on the issue.

Gertz, who acknowledged that he had never before run a hospital, was asked at the same gathering whether he had disclosed his “financials” to the hospital board. “As a private entity, I don’t have to show my financials and I have not provided my financials to the board,” he replied.

It was not clear whether board members had ever asked. Surprise Valley Health Care District Board President John Erquiaga declined to comment.

Surrounded by the Warner and Modoc mountains and forests in California’s northeastern corner, Surprise Valley is home to four small communities. The largest is Cedarville, population 514, at last count.

The valley, covered in sagebrush and greasewood, is part of Modoc County, one of California’s poorest, with a median income of about $30,000. The closest hospital with an emergency room is roughly 25 miles away, over a mountain pass.

One of hundreds of rural hospitals built with help from the 1946 federal Hill-Burton Act, the Surprise Valley hospital opened in 1952 to serve a thriving ranching community. But it has struggled since, closing in 1981, reopening as a health clinic in 1985, then reconverting to a hospital in 1986.

A county grand jury report in 2014-15 found that “mismanagement of the [hospital district] has been evident for at least the past five years.”

By last summer, those in charge didn’t seem up to the task of running a modern hospital. By then, it was hardly a hospital at all. Crushed by debt, it primarily offered nursing-home care, an emergency room, a volunteer ambulance service and just one acute care bed, with three others available if needed.

When state inspectors arrived last June, they found chaos. The hospital’s chief nursing officer resigned during the inspection. Staffers reported unpaid checks to vendors hidden in drawers. Inspectors learned that the hospital had sent home temporary nurses because it couldn’t pay them, according to their report.

The hospital’s then-chief administrator, Richard Cornwell—who staffers said had instructed them to hide the checks, according to the report—had taken a leave of absence and was nowhere to be found. Cornwell, a health-care accountant from Montana, was later fired and replaced with the hospital’s lab director, who in turn resigned, according to public records. Reached by Kaiser Health News, Cornwell declined to comment.

Federal regulators suspended Medicare and Medicaid payments to the hospital—a rarely invoked financial penalty—over concerns about patient care. Those payments have since been reinstated, but a follow-up state inspection in November 2017 identified more patient care concerns.

Infighting ensued, with some residents fiercely committed to keeping the hospital open and others favoring closure, perhaps replacing it with a small clinic. Jean Bilodeaux, 74, a local journalist, says board members often kept the public in the dark, failing to show up for their own meetings and sometimes making decisions outside public view.

When Bilodeaux raised questions about the hospital’s finances in the Modoc County Record, a weekly newspaper, she recalled, board members “started screaming at me,” she said. Now “I don’t even step foot in that hospital.”

Ben Zandstra, 65, a pastor in Cedarville, says that while Cornwell was in charge, he too got a chilly reception at the hospital, where he had long played guitar for patients on Christmas Eve. “I became persona non grata. It’s the most divisive thing I’ve seen in the years I’ve lived here.”

Even residents who say they have experienced poor care at Surprise Valley Community believe its continued existence in some form is crucial—for its 50 or so jobs, for its ER, and because it puts the region on the map.

Eric Shpilman, 61, a retired probation officer, says his now-deceased wife received “unspeakable” treatment at Surprise Valley. But to shut it down? “It would take out the heart of Surprise Valley, the heart out of Cedarville.”

Last summer, the board turned to an outside management company for help.

Jorge Perez, the CEO of Kansas City–based EmpowerHMS—which promises on its website to “rescue rural hospitals”—agreed to take over Surprise Valley’s debt and operate the hospital for three years, according to a management agreement with the board.

In the two months after EmpowerHMS took over management, Surprise Valley’s revenue more than doubled, according to financial documents provided by the hospital.

Then, according to hospital officials’ public statements, the company stopped making the promised payments, and they haven’t been able to contact EmpowerHMS or Perez since. In January, when Surprise Valley filed for bankruptcy, documents filed in court said EmpowerHMS had “abandoned” the hospital.

Around the time Perez took over, he and companies with which he was involved were dogged by allegations of improper laboratory billing at facilities in Mississippi, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri, according to ongoing lawsuits by insurers and others, a state audit, and media reports. Missouri’s attorney general in May opened an investigation into one of the hospitals Perez managed, and the Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri recently called for a federal investigation into lab-billing practices at one of the hospitals.

Cows roam in Cedarville, California. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Medicare rules and commercial insurance contracts, with some exceptions, require people to be treated on an inpatient or outpatient basis by the hospitals that are billing for their lab tests. But insurers have alleged in court documents that hospitals Perez was involved with billed for tests—to the tune of at least $175 million—on patients never seen at those facilities. Perez has maintained that what he is doing is legal and that it generates revenue that rural hospitals desperately need, according to Side Effects Public Media.

Experts say insurers are catching on to voluminous billing by hospitals in communities that typically have generated a tiny number of tests. At one Sonoma County district hospital not associated with Perez, an insurer recently demanded repayment for $13.5 million in suspect billings, forcing the hospital to suspend the lucrative program and put itself up for sale.

Lab tests for out-of-town patients have “been a growing scheme in the last year, slightly longer,” said Karen Weintraub, the executive vice president of Health-Care Fraud Shield, which consults for insurers. “There’s an incentive to bill for things not necessary or even services not rendered. It also may not be proper based on contracts with insurers. The dollars are getting large.”

Some residents were aware of controversy surrounding Perez and his companies and said they tried to warn the hospital district board. “All they wanted to hear was, ‘We will pay the bills,’” Bilodeaux said.

Neither Perez nor EmpowerHMS returned requests for comment. However, Michael Murtha, the president of the National Alliance for Rural Hospitals, said in an email that he was responding on behalf of Perez, who chairs the coalition’s board.

“The mission to rescue rural hospitals and set them on a path of sustainability is a difficult undertaking, and it would be a disservice to their communities to preclude struggling facilities from availing themselves of every legal and regulatory means to generate badly needed revenue,” Murtha wrote, in part.

“Such pioneering efforts are not always welcomed by those who have benefited from the status quo,” he said.

Regarding Perez’s role at Surprise Valley, Murtha wrote that Perez tried to help save the facility by “effectively” donating over $250,000 but then discovered it faced “more challenges than had been initially realized.” Murtha said Perez worked to attract others who might be better able to help the hospital.

One of those “others” in Perez’s orbit was Gertz, the Denver entrepreneur, who arrived in Surprise Valley several months ago.

The Denver executive told residents and Kaiser Health News that he operated a lab that previously performed tests for hospitals owned or managed by Perez’s companies. At one hospital board meeting, Gertz also said he had handled marketing for Perez companies for one-and-a-half years.

However, he said he had parted ways with Perez after learning of his controversial dealings in other states, and Gertz said Perez now owes him more than $14 million. (Gertz and his companies have not been named as defendants in lawsuits reviewed by Kaiser Health News involving Perez and his companies.)

“I come in with a certain guilt by association,” he told the Modoc County Board of Supervisors in April, according to a recording of the meeting. But Gertz sought to assuage any concerns, telling the supervisors he had a “passion” for rural life. He’d grown up on a farm, he said, where he “hung out with the chickens” and cleaned the stables every morning.

Gertz said his plan was different from Perez’s and legal because the hospital and one of his Denver labs, SeroDynamics, had become one business. With the hospital board’s approval earlier this year, he loaned the district $2.5 million for it to buy SeroDynamics—effectively an advance on the hospital’s purchase price of $4 million, according to bankruptcy court documents. SeroDynamics’ website now proclaims the lab a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of the Surprise Valley hospital, with “national reach.”

Robert Michel, a clinical laboratory-management consultant who learned of the terms of the transaction from a reporter, offered a critical assessment. “The essence of this arrangement is to use the hospital’s existing managed-care contracts with generous payment terms for lab tests as a vehicle to bill for claims in other states,” said Michel, the founder and president of a trade magazine for the lab industry. This arrangement “should ring all sorts of bells” for the hospital board, he said.

For now, Gertz has said, dollars are flowing in. According to the journalist Jean Bilodeaux, Gertz phoned in to a Surprise Valley hospital board meeting in May to report that the lab billing so far had netted about $300,000. According to bankruptcy court documents, 80 percent of the profits will go to his companies, 20 percent to the hospital.

Those are terms some in Surprise Valley are willing to live with.

The next step, for Gertz, is taking ownership of Surprise Valley’s entire operation. For the roughly 1,500 district residents, voting no on Tuesday almost certainly means closure, leaving taxpayers with potentially more debt, including any money they may owe Gertz.

That is good enough reason to go with the Denver entrepreneur, said the acting hospital administrator Bill Bostic.

“He’s got something we haven’t got—which is money,” Bostic said.

This post appears courtesy of Kaiser Health News.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/06/the-risky-promises-remote-owners-are-making-to-rural-hospitals/561677/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The Risky Promises Remote Owners Are Making to Rural Hospitals

CEDARVILLE, Calif.—Beau Gertz faced a crowd of worried locals at the town senior center, hoping to sell them on his vision for their long-beloved—but now bankrupt—hospital.

In worn blue jeans and an untucked shirt, the bearded entrepreneur from Denver pledged at a town-hall meeting in March to revive the Surprise Valley Community Hospital—a place many in the audience counted on to set their broken bones, stitch up cattle-tagging cuts, and tend to aging loved ones.

Gertz said that if they voted on Tuesday to let him buy their tiny public hospital, he would retain such vital services. Better still, he said, he’d like to open a “wellness center” to attract well-heeled outsiders—one that would offer telehealth, addiction treatment, physical therapy, genetic testing, intravenous vitamin infusions, even massage. Cedarville’s failing hospital, now at least $4 million in debt, would not just bounce back but thrive, he said.

Gertz, 34, a former weightlifter who runs clinical-lab and nutraceutical companies, unveiled his plan to pay for it: He’d use the 26-bed hospital to bill insurers for lab tests regardless of where patients lived. Through telemedicine technology, doctors working for Surprise Valley could order tests for people who’d never set foot there.

To some of the 100 or so people at the meeting that night, Gertz’s plan offered hope. To others, it sounded suspiciously familiar: Just months before, another out-of-towner had proposed a similar deal—only to disappear.

Outsiders “come in and promise the moon,” says Jeanne Goldman, 72, a retired businesswoman. “The [hospital’s] board is just so desperate with all the debt, and they pray this angel’s going to come along and fix it. If this was a shoe store in Surprise Valley, I could care less, but it’s a hospital.”

The woes of Surprise Valley Community Hospital reflect an increasingly brutal environment for America’s rural hospitals, which are disappearing by the dozens amid declining populations, economic troubles, corporate consolidation and, sometimes, self-inflicted wounds.

Nationwide, 83 of 2,375 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. These often-remote hospitals—some with 10, 15, 25 beds—have been targeted by management companies or potential buyers who promise much but often deliver little while lining their own pockets, according to allegations in court cases, a Missouri state audit, and media reports.

Enticed by such outsiders, some struggling rural hospitals around the country have embraced lab billing for faraway patients as a rescue plan. That’s because Medicare and commercial insurers tend to pay more for tests to sustain endangered rural hospitals compared with urban hospitals and especially outpatient labs. In general, this kind of remote billing is controversial and legally murky, and it recently has resulted in allegations of fraud in several states, according to government documents and media reports.

Rural hospital boards, however, tend not to have expertise in the health-care business. The president of Surprise Valley Community’s board, for instance, is a rancher. Another board member owns a local motel; a third, a construction company. That lack of experience “leaves them vulnerable in many cases,” says Terry Hill of the nonprofit National Rural Health Resource Center, based in Duluth, Minnesota.

Seeking to distinguish himself from other would-be rescuers who ran into legal trouble, Gertz described his proposal to residents as perfectly legal—a legitimate use of telemedicine, essentially remote treatment via electronic communication such as video. “If you do it correctly,” he said in an interview with Kaiser Health News, “there is a nice profit margin. There [are] extra visits you can get from telemedicine but ... it has to be billed correctly and it can’t be abused.”

Jeanne Goldman talks with Beau Gertz after the town-hall meeting. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Gertz runs several companies—founded within the last four years—including two labs, SeroDynamics and Cadira Labs, as well as a wellness company called CadiraMD.

He pledged in court documents to buy the bankrupt hospital for $4 million and cover its debts. In a public meeting, he also said he had loaned the hospital $750,000 and lined up a $4 billion New York company as a financial backer. Kaiser Health News was unable to locate the company under the name Gertz cited in the meeting, Next Genesis Development Group. He did not respond to emails seeking clarification on the issue.

Gertz, who acknowledged that he had never before run a hospital, was asked at the same gathering whether he had disclosed his “financials” to the hospital board. “As a private entity, I don’t have to show my financials and I have not provided my financials to the board,” he replied.

It was not clear whether board members had ever asked. Surprise Valley Health Care District Board President John Erquiaga declined to comment.

Surrounded by the Warner and Modoc mountains and forests in California’s northeastern corner, Surprise Valley is home to four small communities. The largest is Cedarville, population 514, at last count.

The valley, covered in sagebrush and greasewood, is part of Modoc County, one of California’s poorest, with a median income of about $30,000. The closest hospital with an emergency room is roughly 25 miles away, over a mountain pass.

One of hundreds of rural hospitals built with help from the 1946 federal Hill-Burton Act, the Surprise Valley hospital opened in 1952 to serve a thriving ranching community. But it has struggled since, closing in 1981, reopening as a health clinic in 1985, then reconverting to a hospital in 1986.

A county grand jury report in 2014-15 found that “mismanagement of the [hospital district] has been evident for at least the past five years.”

By last summer, those in charge didn’t seem up to the task of running a modern hospital. By then, it was hardly a hospital at all. Crushed by debt, it primarily offered nursing-home care, an emergency room, a volunteer ambulance service and just one acute care bed, with three others available if needed.

When state inspectors arrived last June, they found chaos. The hospital’s chief nursing officer resigned during the inspection. Staffers reported unpaid checks to vendors hidden in drawers. Inspectors learned that the hospital had sent home temporary nurses because it couldn’t pay them, according to their report.

The hospital’s then-chief administrator, Richard Cornwell—who staffers said had instructed them to hide the checks, according to the report—had taken a leave of absence and was nowhere to be found. Cornwell, a health-care accountant from Montana, was later fired and replaced with the hospital’s lab director, who in turn resigned, according to public records. Reached by Kaiser Health News, Cornwell declined to comment.

Federal regulators suspended Medicare and Medicaid payments to the hospital—a rarely invoked financial penalty—over concerns about patient care. Those payments have since been reinstated, but a follow-up state inspection in November 2017 identified more patient care concerns.

Infighting ensued, with some residents fiercely committed to keeping the hospital open and others favoring closure, perhaps replacing it with a small clinic. Jean Bilodeaux, 74, a local journalist, says board members often kept the public in the dark, failing to show up for their own meetings and sometimes making decisions outside public view.

When Bilodeaux raised questions about the hospital’s finances in the Modoc County Record, a weekly newspaper, she recalled, board members “started screaming at me,” she said. Now “I don’t even step foot in that hospital.”

Ben Zandstra, 65, a pastor in Cedarville, says that while Cornwell was in charge, he too got a chilly reception at the hospital, where he had long played guitar for patients on Christmas Eve. “I became persona non grata. It’s the most divisive thing I’ve seen in the years I’ve lived here.”

Even residents who say they have experienced poor care at Surprise Valley Community believe its continued existence in some form is crucial—for its 50 or so jobs, for its ER, and because it puts the region on the map.

Eric Shpilman, 61, a retired probation officer, says his now-deceased wife received “unspeakable” treatment at Surprise Valley. But to shut it down? “It would take out the heart of Surprise Valley, the heart out of Cedarville.”

Last summer, the board turned to an outside management company for help.

Jorge Perez, the CEO of Kansas City–based EmpowerHMS—which promises on its website to “rescue rural hospitals”—agreed to take over Surprise Valley’s debt and operate the hospital for three years, according to a management agreement with the board.

In the two months after EmpowerHMS took over management, Surprise Valley’s revenue more than doubled, according to financial documents provided by the hospital.

Then, according to hospital officials’ public statements, the company stopped making the promised payments, and they haven’t been able to contact EmpowerHMS or Perez since. In January, when Surprise Valley filed for bankruptcy, documents filed in court said EmpowerHMS had “abandoned” the hospital.

Around the time Perez took over, he and companies with which he was involved were dogged by allegations of improper laboratory billing at facilities in Mississippi, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri, according to ongoing lawsuits by insurers and others, a state audit, and media reports. Missouri’s attorney general in May opened an investigation into one of the hospitals Perez managed, and the Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri recently called for a federal investigation into lab-billing practices at one of the hospitals.

Cows roam in Cedarville, California. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Medicare rules and commercial insurance contracts, with some exceptions, require people to be treated on an inpatient or outpatient basis by the hospitals that are billing for their lab tests. But insurers have alleged in court documents that hospitals Perez was involved with billed for tests—to the tune of at least $175 million—on patients never seen at those facilities. Perez has maintained that what he is doing is legal and that it generates revenue that rural hospitals desperately need, according to Side Effects Public Media.

Experts say insurers are catching on to voluminous billing by hospitals in communities that typically have generated a tiny number of tests. At one Sonoma County district hospital not associated with Perez, an insurer recently demanded repayment for $13.5 million in suspect billings, forcing the hospital to suspend the lucrative program and put itself up for sale.

Lab tests for out-of-town patients have “been a growing scheme in the last year, slightly longer,” said Karen Weintraub, the executive vice president of Health-Care Fraud Shield, which consults for insurers. “There’s an incentive to bill for things not necessary or even services not rendered. It also may not be proper based on contracts with insurers. The dollars are getting large.”

Some residents were aware of controversy surrounding Perez and his companies and said they tried to warn the hospital district board. “All they wanted to hear was, ‘We will pay the bills,’” Bilodeaux said.

Neither Perez nor EmpowerHMS returned requests for comment. However, Michael Murtha, the president of the National Alliance for Rural Hospitals, said in an email that he was responding on behalf of Perez, who chairs the coalition’s board.

“The mission to rescue rural hospitals and set them on a path of sustainability is a difficult undertaking, and it would be a disservice to their communities to preclude struggling facilities from availing themselves of every legal and regulatory means to generate badly needed revenue,” Murtha wrote, in part.

“Such pioneering efforts are not always welcomed by those who have benefited from the status quo,” he said.

Regarding Perez’s role at Surprise Valley, Murtha wrote that Perez tried to help save the facility by “effectively” donating over $250,000 but then discovered it faced “more challenges than had been initially realized.” Murtha said Perez worked to attract others who might be better able to help the hospital.

One of those “others” in Perez’s orbit was Gertz, the Denver entrepreneur, who arrived in Surprise Valley several months ago.

The Denver executive told residents and Kaiser Health News that he operated a lab that previously performed tests for hospitals owned or managed by Perez’s companies. At one hospital board meeting, Gertz also said he had handled marketing for Perez companies for one-and-a-half years.

However, he said he had parted ways with Perez after learning of his controversial dealings in other states, and Gertz said Perez now owes him more than $14 million. (Gertz and his companies have not been named as defendants in lawsuits reviewed by Kaiser Health News involving Perez and his companies.)

“I come in with a certain guilt by association,” he told the Modoc County Board of Supervisors in April, according to a recording of the meeting. But Gertz sought to assuage any concerns, telling the supervisors he had a “passion” for rural life. He’d grown up on a farm, he said, where he “hung out with the chickens” and cleaned the stables every morning.

Gertz said his plan was different from Perez’s and legal because the hospital and one of his Denver labs, SeroDynamics, had become one business. With the hospital board’s approval earlier this year, he loaned the district $2.5 million for it to buy SeroDynamics—effectively an advance on the hospital’s purchase price of $4 million, according to bankruptcy court documents. SeroDynamics’ website now proclaims the lab a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of the Surprise Valley hospital, with “national reach.”

Robert Michel, a clinical laboratory-management consultant who learned of the terms of the transaction from a reporter, offered a critical assessment. “The essence of this arrangement is to use the hospital’s existing managed-care contracts with generous payment terms for lab tests as a vehicle to bill for claims in other states,” said Michel, the founder and president of a trade magazine for the lab industry. This arrangement “should ring all sorts of bells” for the hospital board, he said.

For now, Gertz has said, dollars are flowing in. According to the journalist Jean Bilodeaux, Gertz phoned in to a Surprise Valley hospital board meeting in May to report that the lab billing so far had netted about $300,000. According to bankruptcy court documents, 80 percent of the profits will go to his companies, 20 percent to the hospital.

Those are terms some in Surprise Valley are willing to live with.

The next step, for Gertz, is taking ownership of Surprise Valley’s entire operation. For the roughly 1,500 district residents, voting no on Tuesday almost certainly means closure, leaving taxpayers with potentially more debt, including any money they may owe Gertz.

That is good enough reason to go with the Denver entrepreneur, said the acting hospital administrator Bill Bostic.

“He’s got something we haven’t got—which is money,” Bostic said.

This post appears courtesy of Kaiser Health News.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[deniscollins]

Citing ‘Crisis of Confidence,’ Academy Calls Off Nobel Literature Prize

The Swedish Academy responsible for issuing the annual Nobel Prize in Literature is immersed in a scandal that includes a member’s husband alleged to have sexually assaulted at least 18 women since 1996 and profiting by leaking information about prize winners, and the forced departure of it’s woman administrative leader over the issue, and some resignations. If you were responsible for the 2018 award, would you (1) continue with the process of issuing the award, or (2) due to the scandals postpone this year’s award until 2019 when hopefully things are more stable? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Faced with a sexual-abuse scandal, accusations of financial wrongdoing and hints of a cover-up, the Swedish Academyannounced on Friday that for the first time in 69 years it would postpone awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The decision to delay the award marked an extraordinary and seamy public reckoning for a 232-year-old cultural organization that has long been admired as one of the world’s most prestigious scholarly bodies — but also criticized as secretive, arbitrary and patriarchal.

At the center of the firestorm is a member of the academy and her husband, who is accused of groping, harassing and assaulting at least 18 women over the years. The couple ran a cultural organization in Stockholm that received sizable payments from the academy, giving him the access and leverage, accusers say, to pressure women into sex.

As revelations emerged over the past five months, the academy cut its ties to the organization; the police opened a criminal investigation; members of the academy resigned in disgust; and the first woman to lead the academy was pushed out — brought down by other members seeking to play down the scandal, her defenders say.

All along, the academy insisted that it would proceed with this year’s prize as planned, with a laureate to be announced in October. But on Friday, after unrelenting pressure from the public, the foundation that oversees the Nobel Prizes, and even Sweden’s king, the academy called off this year’s competition.

“The present decision was arrived at in view of the currently diminished academy and the reduced public confidence in the academy,” the institution said in a statement, citing “a crisis of confidence.”

This year’s award will be postponed until next year, when the academy will name two winners. The academy has deferred the prize seven times previously, most recently in 1949; that year’s prize was bestowed on William Faulkner in 1950. The academy is involved only in the literature award, so other Nobel Prizes are not affected.

An institution accustomed to weathering criticism about its literary judgments now finds itself facing the challenge of rebuilding its fundamental credibility.

“The rot that has taken hold within the academy” has been exposed, said Kjell Espmark, a historian who quit the academy in disgust. “Its high-minded goals have given way to nepotism, attempts to whitewash serious infractions, broken conflict-of-interest rules, musty macho values and arrogant bullying.”

The problems came to light in November, when the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported on a pattern of sexual misconduct by an academy member’s husband, Jean-Claude Arnault, a 71-year-old photographer, stretching over three decades.

Through his lawyer, Mr. Arnault has denied wrongdoing. But new accusations have continued to dribble out; just this week, it was reported that Mr. Arnault had groped Crown Princess Victoria, heir to Sweden’s throne.

Accusers said that Mr. Arnault used his sway in the arts world, including his connections to the academy, to pressure young women into sex, and that some of the offenses took place at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris.

One woman, the artist Anna-Karin Bylund, said she complained to the academy in 1996 that Mr. Arnault had assaulted her, but her complaint was ignored. Another woman, the novelist Gabriella Hakansson, said Mr. Arnault assaulted her at a birthday party in 2007. A third, the journalist Lena ten Hoopen, said he groped her at a book fair in the southern city of Gothenburg.

“I managed to wriggle my way out and shouted at him, and he then said, ‘With that attitude, I am going to see to it that you don’t last long in this industry,’” she told Dagens Nyheter.

Along with sexual misconduct, Mr. Arnault has also been accused of leaking information about prize winners on numerous occasions, potentially profiting bookmakers who handle bets on who will win.

Sara Danius, the first woman to be chosen as the academy’s permanent secretary, essentially its chief administrator, quickly severed its ties with Mr. Arnault and his organization, known as Forum. She also commissioned an investigation by a law firm to look into the academy’s financial and other support for Forum.

Ms. Danius was not rewarded for her efforts. Several of her allies quit in frustration, and last month her adversaries forced her out of the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. On the same day, Mr. Arnault’s wife, the poet Katarina Frostenson, also stepped down.

Ms. Danius’s demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.

With the academy depleted, and its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, the Nobel Foundation, which manages the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s legacy and oversees all of the awards, stepped in to warn that the scandal risked tarnishing the prizes as a whole.

“The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statementearly Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be given yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem “so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.”

Now humbled, the academy says it has a long way to go to rebuild trust.

“Confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year,” the acting permanent secretary, the literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, “and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize.”

Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?”

Mats Svegfors, a well-known editor and publisher, now retired, said the matter threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.

“When institutions fail, that means that gradually we will lose trust, and that means that we lose confidence in our society,” he said. “When we realized that the Swedish Academy, that the institution doesn’t work, it hurts our self perception.”

The resignations have left the academy with only 10 active members.

Academy appointments are for life, and until this week, the organization’s rules did not provide for resignations; members who quit were treated as merely inactive, but could not be replaced.

On Wednesday, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the academy’s patron, who said he had followed the matter “with great concern,” announced that he had changed the rules to allow resignations, and to allow the panel to replace any member who had been inactive for two years.

It was a rare intervention by the monarch, whose role is mostly ceremonial.

The academy has promised increased transparency and “more and better dialogue” both internally, and with the monarchy and the Nobel Foundation. It also said on Friday that “routines will be tightened regarding conflict-of-interest issues and the management of information classified as secret,” and that “internal work arrangements and external communication will be refreshed.”

The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and was designated by Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.

The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy’s own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.

The decision to award the Nobel to Bob Dylan in 2016 — the first American to be so recognized since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — was one of the most debated arts awards in recent memory.

[newestbalance]

Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature

In November, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that he had groped, harassed or assaulted at least 18 women over the years.

Accusers said that Mr. Arnault used his sway in the arts world, including his connections to the academy, to pressure young women into sex, and that some of his offenses took place at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris.

One woman, the artist Anna-Karin Bylund, says she complained about to the academy in 1996 that Mr. Arnault had assaulted her, only to be rebuffed. Another woman, the novelist Gabriella Hakansson, says Mr. Arnault assaulted her in 2007. Just this week, it was reported that Mr. Arnault had groped Crown Princess Victoria, heir to Sweden’s throne.

The police have opened an investigation; through his lawyer, Mr. Arnault has denied any wrongdoing.

Sara Danius, the first woman to be chosen as the academy’s permanent secretary (essentially, its chief administrator), severed the group’s ties with Mr. Arnault and Forum, and commissioned an investigation by a law firm. Along with sexual misconduct, Mr. Arnault has also been accused of leaking information about prize winners on numerous occasions, potentially profiting bookmakers who wage money on who will win.

Ms. Danius was not rewarded for her efforts at accountability. Several members of the academy, including some of Ms Danius’s allies, resigned in disgust over the allegations, and Ms. Danius was herself forced out from the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. (On the same day, Ms. Frostenson also stepped down.)

Ms. Danius’s demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and that Ms. Danius had been punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.

[Read more about the Swedish Academy’s crisis here.]

With the academy depleted by resignations, and its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, the Nobel Foundation, which manages the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s legacy and oversees all of the awards, stepped in to warn that the scandal risked tarnishing the prizes as a whole.

Continue reading the main story

“The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement early Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be awarded yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem “so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.”

Until Friday, the academy had insisted that it was sticking to its usual schedule, winnowing potential laureates to a shortlist by summer and anointing a prize winner in October. “But confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year,” the acting permanent secretary, the literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, “and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize.”

Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?”

Mats Svegfors, a well-known editor and publisher, now retired, said the affair threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.

“When institutions fail that means that gradually we will lose trust, and that means that we lose confidence in our society,” he said. “When we realized that the Swedish Academy, that the institution doesn’t work, it hurts our self-perception.”

Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a former high-level official in the Swedish government and at the United Nations, whose name was floated as someone who could lead an investigation into the scandal, said the academy had “no administrative management, which makes it hard to change or evolve.” She likened the academy to a train “without the locomotive.”

The resignations have left the academy with only 10 active members — too few, under its rules, to elect new ones.

Academy appointments are for life, and until this week, the organization’s rules did not provide for resignations; members who quit were treated as merely inactive, but could not be replaced.

On Wednesday, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the academy’s patron, who said he had followed the matter “with great concern,” announced that he had changed the rules to allow resignations, and to allow the panel to replace any member who had been inactive for two years. It was a rare intervention by the monarch, whose role is mostly ceremonial.

Continue reading the main story

“We are bringing in legal expertise and we are going to get better at what we do,” said Mr. Olsson, the new acting permanent secretary. “We must vote in new members, and fast.” He promised increased transparency, and “more and better dialogue” internally and with both the monarchy and the Nobel Foundation.

The academy also promised on Friday that “routines will be tightened regarding conflict-of-interest issues and the management of information classified as secret,” and that “internal work arrangements and external communication will be refreshed.”

That was not enough to quell the furor. Kjell Espmark, a historian and one of the academy members who resigned, said he would not return because a more complete purge was needed.

Events have exposed “the rot that has taken hold within the academy,” he said. “Its high-minded goals have given way to nepotism, attempts to whitewash serious infractions, broken conflict of interest rules, musty macho values and arrogant bullying.”

After meeting on Thursday, members of the academy had voiced optimism that the prize could be awarded in October, as usual. The news that the prize would, instead, be postponed prompted speculation that the academy had bowed to pressure from the Nobel Foundation.

“The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution,” Mr. Heldin, the foundation’s chairman said, “and that the academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken.”

The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and was designated by Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.

The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy’s own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.

The decision to award the Nobel to Bob Dylan in 2016 — the first American to be so recognized since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — was one of the most-debated arts awards in recent memory.

Continue reading the main story

The post Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2roBfRN via Everyday News

[cleopatrarps]

Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature

In November, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that he had groped, harassed or assaulted at least 18 women over the years.

Accusers said that Mr. Arnault used his sway in the arts world, including his connections to the academy, to pressure young women into sex, and that some of his offenses took place at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris.

One woman, the artist Anna-Karin Bylund, says she complained about to the academy in 1996 that Mr. Arnault had assaulted her, only to be rebuffed. Another woman, the novelist Gabriella Hakansson, says Mr. Arnault assaulted her in 2007. Just this week, it was reported that Mr. Arnault had groped Crown Princess Victoria, heir to Sweden’s throne.

The police have opened an investigation; through his lawyer, Mr. Arnault has denied any wrongdoing.

Sara Danius, the first woman to be chosen as the academy’s permanent secretary (essentially, its chief administrator), severed the group’s ties with Mr. Arnault and Forum, and commissioned an investigation by a law firm. Along with sexual misconduct, Mr. Arnault has also been accused of leaking information about prize winners on numerous occasions, potentially profiting bookmakers who wage money on who will win.

Ms. Danius was not rewarded for her efforts at accountability. Several members of the academy, including some of Ms Danius’s allies, resigned in disgust over the allegations, and Ms. Danius was herself forced out from the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. (On the same day, Ms. Frostenson also stepped down.)

Ms. Danius’s demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and that Ms. Danius had been punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.

[Read more about the Swedish Academy’s crisis here.]

With the academy depleted by resignations, and its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, the Nobel Foundation, which manages the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s legacy and oversees all of the awards, stepped in to warn that the scandal risked tarnishing the prizes as a whole.

Continue reading the main story

“The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement early Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be awarded yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem “so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.”

Until Friday, the academy had insisted that it was sticking to its usual schedule, winnowing potential laureates to a shortlist by summer and anointing a prize winner in October. “But confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year,” the acting permanent secretary, the literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, “and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize.”

Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?”

Mats Svegfors, a well-known editor and publisher, now retired, said the affair threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.

“When institutions fail that means that gradually we will lose trust, and that means that we lose confidence in our society,” he said. “When we realized that the Swedish Academy, that the institution doesn’t work, it hurts our self-perception.”

Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a former high-level official in the Swedish government and at the United Nations, whose name was floated as someone who could lead an investigation into the scandal, said the academy had “no administrative management, which makes it hard to change or evolve.” She likened the academy to a train “without the locomotive.”

The resignations have left the academy with only 10 active members — too few, under its rules, to elect new ones.

Academy appointments are for life, and until this week, the organization’s rules did not provide for resignations; members who quit were treated as merely inactive, but could not be replaced.

On Wednesday, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the academy’s patron, who said he had followed the matter “with great concern,” announced that he had changed the rules to allow resignations, and to allow the panel to replace any member who had been inactive for two years. It was a rare intervention by the monarch, whose role is mostly ceremonial.

Continue reading the main story

“We are bringing in legal expertise and we are going to get better at what we do,” said Mr. Olsson, the new acting permanent secretary. “We must vote in new members, and fast.” He promised increased transparency, and “more and better dialogue” internally and with both the monarchy and the Nobel Foundation.

The academy also promised on Friday that “routines will be tightened regarding conflict-of-interest issues and the management of information classified as secret,” and that “internal work arrangements and external communication will be refreshed.”

That was not enough to quell the furor. Kjell Espmark, a historian and one of the academy members who resigned, said he would not return because a more complete purge was needed.

Events have exposed “the rot that has taken hold within the academy,” he said. “Its high-minded goals have given way to nepotism, attempts to whitewash serious infractions, broken conflict of interest rules, musty macho values and arrogant bullying.”

After meeting on Thursday, members of the academy had voiced optimism that the prize could be awarded in October, as usual. The news that the prize would, instead, be postponed prompted speculation that the academy had bowed to pressure from the Nobel Foundation.

“The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution,” Mr. Heldin, the foundation’s chairman said, “and that the academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken.”

The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and was designated by Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.

The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy’s own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.

The decision to award the Nobel to Bob Dylan in 2016 — the first American to be so recognized since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — was one of the most-debated arts awards in recent memory.

Continue reading the main story

The post Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2roBfRN via News of World

[dragnews]

Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature

In November, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that he had groped, harassed or assaulted at least 18 women over the years.

Accusers said that Mr. Arnault used his sway in the arts world, including his connections to the academy, to pressure young women into sex, and that some of his offenses took place at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris.

One woman, the artist Anna-Karin Bylund, says she complained about to the academy in 1996 that Mr. Arnault had assaulted her, only to be rebuffed. Another woman, the novelist Gabriella Hakansson, says Mr. Arnault assaulted her in 2007. Just this week, it was reported that Mr. Arnault had groped Crown Princess Victoria, heir to Sweden’s throne.

The police have opened an investigation; through his lawyer, Mr. Arnault has denied any wrongdoing.

Sara Danius, the first woman to be chosen as the academy’s permanent secretary (essentially, its chief administrator), severed the group’s ties with Mr. Arnault and Forum, and commissioned an investigation by a law firm. Along with sexual misconduct, Mr. Arnault has also been accused of leaking information about prize winners on numerous occasions, potentially profiting bookmakers who wage money on who will win.

Ms. Danius was not rewarded for her efforts at accountability. Several members of the academy, including some of Ms Danius’s allies, resigned in disgust over the allegations, and Ms. Danius was herself forced out from the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. (On the same day, Ms. Frostenson also stepped down.)

Ms. Danius’s demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and that Ms. Danius had been punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.

[Read more about the Swedish Academy’s crisis here.]

With the academy depleted by resignations, and its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, the Nobel Foundation, which manages the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s legacy and oversees all of the awards, stepped in to warn that the scandal risked tarnishing the prizes as a whole.

Continue reading the main story

“The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement early Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be awarded yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem “so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.”

Until Friday, the academy had insisted that it was sticking to its usual schedule, winnowing potential laureates to a shortlist by summer and anointing a prize winner in October. “But confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year,” the acting permanent secretary, the literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, “and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize.”

Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?”

Mats Svegfors, a well-known editor and publisher, now retired, said the affair threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.

“When institutions fail that means that gradually we will lose trust, and that means that we lose confidence in our society,” he said. “When we realized that the Swedish Academy, that the institution doesn’t work, it hurts our self-perception.”

Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a former high-level official in the Swedish government and at the United Nations, whose name was floated as someone who could lead an investigation into the scandal, said the academy had “no administrative management, which makes it hard to change or evolve.” She likened the academy to a train “without the locomotive.”

The resignations have left the academy with only 10 active members — too few, under its rules, to elect new ones.

Academy appointments are for life, and until this week, the organization’s rules did not provide for resignations; members who quit were treated as merely inactive, but could not be replaced.

On Wednesday, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the academy’s patron, who said he had followed the matter “with great concern,” announced that he had changed the rules to allow resignations, and to allow the panel to replace any member who had been inactive for two years. It was a rare intervention by the monarch, whose role is mostly ceremonial.

Continue reading the main story

“We are bringing in legal expertise and we are going to get better at what we do,” said Mr. Olsson, the new acting permanent secretary. “We must vote in new members, and fast.” He promised increased transparency, and “more and better dialogue” internally and with both the monarchy and the Nobel Foundation.

The academy also promised on Friday that “routines will be tightened regarding conflict-of-interest issues and the management of information classified as secret,” and that “internal work arrangements and external communication will be refreshed.”

That was not enough to quell the furor. Kjell Espmark, a historian and one of the academy members who resigned, said he would not return because a more complete purge was needed.

Events have exposed “the rot that has taken hold within the academy,” he said. “Its high-minded goals have given way to nepotism, attempts to whitewash serious infractions, broken conflict of interest rules, musty macho values and arrogant bullying.”

After meeting on Thursday, members of the academy had voiced optimism that the prize could be awarded in October, as usual. The news that the prize would, instead, be postponed prompted speculation that the academy had bowed to pressure from the Nobel Foundation.

“The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution,” Mr. Heldin, the foundation’s chairman said, “and that the academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken.”

The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and was designated by Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.

The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy’s own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.

The decision to award the Nobel to Bob Dylan in 2016 — the first American to be so recognized since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — was one of the most-debated arts awards in recent memory.

Continue reading the main story

The post Sex Abuse Scandal’s Latest Casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2roBfRN via Today News

[viralhottopics]

Civil war in the Vatican as conservatives battle Francis for the soul of Catholicism

As the pope leaves Rome for a retreat to mark Lent, rebellion and turmoil are in the air

When Pope Francis was elected nearly four years ago, on 13 March 2013, he was escorted like every pope before him from the Sistine Chapel to the Room of Tears. It is the place where a new pope pauses for a moment and no doubt many of them do shed a few tears, thinking of the momentous responsibility upon their shoulders before stepping out on to the balcony of St Peters to greet the world as the new leader of the Roman Catholic church.

When Francis, known until then as Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, first appeared that night, he appeared remarkably sanguine, joking that the cardinals had gone to the ends of the Earth to choose the next pope. If hed had any inkling of what these last four years would be like, he would surely have wept in that Room of Tears.

While hugely popular across the globe with Catholics and non-Catholics alike, Francis has struggled against fierce opposition from the Vatican establishment to haul the Roman Catholic church into the 21st century, fought to reform its government, tried to persuade cardinals to revise their thinking on the divorced and remarried, and been openly opposed by rebel prelates.

Last week marked the start of Lent, one of the most important periods of the churchs calendar, a time when Catholics fast, give alms and reflect on humanitys sinfulness in the run-up to their commemoration of the crucifixion and of Easter. It is usually marked by quiet prayerfulness, and on Sunday the pope, along with members of the Roman Curia, will leave Rome to begin a five-day retreat. He will leave a Vatican beset by tension, turmoil and rebellion. There are even rumours that growing numbers of Vatican hands think he should quit.

On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, came a big blow, in effect caused by the popes enemies: Marie Collins, the last abuse survivor on his commission into child abuse in the church, quit, frustrated at the lack of progress and what she calls shameful lack of cooperation from the officials most concerned with cases of abuse, highlighting the intransigence of the Roman Curia, or governing body, in the Vatican the body Pope Francis wants to reform.

With Collins gone from the Commission for the Protection of Minors, set up by the pope to investigate the worldwide scandal of sexual abuse by priests and religious brothers, and the other victim representative, the Briton Peter Saunders, on indefinite leave of absence, the commission has lost a certain integrity.

When she stepped down, Collins complained that the commission had been starved of resources, progress was slow and there was cultural resistance to its work in the Vatican.

The commissions recommendation that there should be a tribunal set up to deal with bishops who had been negligent over abuse has been impeded by Roman Curia officials despite the pope himself approving it. There is an area of the Curia that has not moved into the 21st century, said Collins. It is very resistant to working with the commission. There are people who still want to cover up.

Pope Francis leads the Ash Wednesday procession and mass at Santa Sabina church in Rome. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti/Getty Images

The opposition Pope Francis is facing puts the church into uncharted territory. Massimo Faggioli, a leading theologian and Vatican-watcher, said: The Vatican status quo is behind this. It is a cultural and political opposition that was already visible a few weeks after Pope Franciss election. They are against changing the style and position of the church from a western one to a global religion.

In Franciss early days as pope, Vatican whispers focused on the financial reforms he wanted to make. Pope Benedict had resigned after a series of revelations, known as Vatileaks, which exposed financial malpractice in the Vatican, and Francis sought to end it.

But the most vocal opposition to the pope has developed over his desire for debate about marriage and divorce, gay people and the family.

After two synods on the issues in 2014 and 2015, Pope Francis produced the document Amoris Laetitia, in which in effect he told the churchs bishops to make local decisions about the divorced and remarried and their receiving of communion.

Traditional church teaching says that a Catholic who remarries after divorce can receive communion only if the church has also annulled his or her first marriage. Some bishops have seen Amoris Laetitia as a direction to compassionately welcome people without annulments to receive the eucharist.

That has outraged conservatives. A letter to Pope Francis from four cardinals hostile to change was made public. The communication took the form known as a dubia, expressing doubts, demanding yes and no answers and in effect challenging the popes authority by asking him to make points of church teaching clear on this issue and Christian life.

The four accusers included three retired cardinals, plus Cardinal Raymond Burke, an arch-conservative American canon lawyer who has gone as far as threatening to issue a correction to Pope Francis over Amoris Laetitia. Burke has been a thorn in the popes side for some time.

He was given a powerful judicial role in Rome by Benedict XVI, from which Pope Francis moved him. Last year Burke and other conservatives were ousted from the Vatican department that oversees worship. Then, earlier this year, during a row between the pope and the ancient Knights of Malta which led to the departure of the orders British leader, Matthew Festing, Cardinal Burke was sidelined in his role as envoy to the order. Within days anti-Francis posters appeared on the streets of Rome; so has fake news by way of spoof Vatican newspaper pages mocking him.

The rows are not just about personality clashes, or even divorce and communion. It goes much deeper than that. This is about the future of the church. If previous popes had enacted the wishes of the modernising Second Vatican Council, held 50 years ago, the domination of the wider church by the Vatican would have already diminished.

Now Francis is trying to move at least some decisions out to the bishops and local churches across the globe, by allowing priests and bishops to make the decisions about allowing divorcees communion. That, for the traditionalists, is the thin end of the wedge.

Christopher Lamb, Rome correspondent of the Catholic weekly the Tablet, said: The fundamental shift that Pope Francis is trying to make is for the church to be more pastoral. The Roman Curia should be serving the church universally, but Marie Collins in her resignation has exposed what is going on: a department has not even been willing to answer letters from abuse victims.

According to Tina Beattie, a British feminist theologian who organised fringe events in Rome before the 2015 synod to get womens voices heard, Pope Francis has a blind spot about women and hasnt listened enough to them, but she admires him for attempting to have some dialogue.

I dont want to say that the pope is defeated by the critics, but this is making him vulnerable. What they are doing is almost schismatic, she said.

On Sundaymorning in Rome, the pope will no doubt mark the first Sunday in Lent with a call to repent. But his critics are hardly in penitent mood; they want him to resign. There are rumours that even some of those who voted for Francis now have doubts.

It is true that some cardinals may regret their vote for him in the conclave, but I do not think they hope that he resigns, said Faggioli. They know it would be very hard to find a popular pope like him.

FLASHPOINTS: HOW CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN UPSET

Homosexuality

On the way home from his first trip abroad to Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis told journalists that he did not have a problem with an inclination to homosexuality. Who am I to judge if theyre seeking the Lord in good faith? he said.

Communion for divorced and remarriedpeople

In April 2016 the pope issued his apostolic exhortation in response to the two synods of 2014 and 2015 on marriage and the family. Footnote 351 indicated it might be possible for the divorced and remarried to receive communion and moved decisions on this to local bishops and priests. Communion is not a prize for the perfect, he said. Six months later, four of his fiercest critics, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, issued a dubia, a document challenging Francis over his thinking on communion.

Cleaning up the Curia

After being elected on a reform mandate by the College of Cardinals in March 2013, Francis immediately started his reform of the Roman Curia, the churchs bureaucracy, with efforts to clean up finances and streamline departments. In December 2016, Francis accused the leaders of the Curia of malicious and hidden resistance to reform, a resistance that was a sport that sprouts in disturbed minds.

Child protection and the sex abuse scandal

Pope Francis created a Commission for the Protection of Minors, under his close ally, Cardinal Sen OMalley of Boston. In June 2015 the commission proposed a tribunal that would hold bishops to account for failing to deal with reported cases of child sex abuse. Francis gave it his backing, but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found it had unspecified legal problems. The commission has stalled ever since.

Luther had a point

Francis went to Sweden in October 2016 to mark the quincentenary of the Reformation. During a service in Lund Cathedral he praised Martin Luther for restoring the centrality of scripture. There was corruption in the church, worldiness, attachment to money and power, he said. Some conservatives were unimpressed by this display of ecumenism.

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from Civil war in the Vatican as conservatives battle Francis for the soul of Catholicism