June 30, 2017
Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to a federal government single payer system…
Seems to me a single payer health system at the federal level is a no brainer for we the people. This Demo gentle lady house leader favors the states trying to do it but not the federal government. This article does not give a single good reason why we should not have single payer at the federal level. What is your real reason for not pushing single payer at the federal level, gentle lady demo house leader? We have a right to know. It appears you only care about the demo party, not we the people.
Read all about it…
Observer
http://observer.com/2017/05/nancy-pelosi-rejects-single-payer-health-care/.
June 30, 2017
Ah, the magic of finance at the highest levels
Probably the US will eventually do what Japan is doing now. Just punch digits into a computer at the Federal Reserve, call the resulting number money, use it to buy the Federal debt interest free, and then forget about it. Poof the Federal debt is gone. About twenty trillion dollars worth now…
Sovereign Debt Jubilee, Japanese-Style
by Ellen Brown
Japan is selling debt to its own bank, which returns the interest to the government.
This is the most hopeful article I have read in a long time, indicating there really may be light at the end of the tunnel for Earth’s economies, written by a brilliant lady lawyer, Ellen Brown, who is also a renowned money and banking expert, who writes at her Web of Debt Blog.
Read all about it…
Published in Truth-Out, an Internet source of news and analysis
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41099-sovereign-debt-jubilee-japanese-style.
June 30, 2017
Worried about the Federal debt?
According to the Congressional Budget Office federal government cash inflows will increase 9.5 percent next year, but cash inflow minus cash outflow will be negative more than one trillion dollars.
Read all about it…
June 30, 2017
As much as I never liked Fox so-called News and Hannity this audio interview with Camille Paglia does get to the heart of the matter.
Well worth a listen.
June 30, 2017
If you ever had any doubt that the man lies, his many lies are listed here by the New York Times. Maybe you think lying does not matter, that all politicians lie and so forth, and Trump has his heart in the right place and he will actually be good for the US and the world in the end, despite his lying. Who knows? It may be impossible to prove any president in the last sixty or so years did more harm than good during his time in office, with the possible exception of Bush II, given his lying about and invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and lying about what he knew about 9/11.
Read about Trump’s lies…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html.
June 30, 2017
Here is an emergency room MD telling a health care story like it is from his perspective.
Well worth a look and listen.
https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397.
June 30, 2017
Sanders says Republicans should be embarrassed about health care
Well worth a listen…
https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397.
June 30, 2017
WELCOME! To the Stapleton Gallery of Folk History and Conversation, and the FREEDOM, FAIRNESS AND PROGRESS PARTY. The FFPP.
Join now! Here’s how!
From a passage I wrote in 2004 on page 645 of BUSINESS VOYAGES: MENTAL MAPS, SCRIPTS, SCHEMATA, AND TOOLS FOR DISCOVERING AND CO-CONSTRUCTING YOUR OWN BUSINESS WORLDS, 745 pages, a business bible I wrote and first published in 2008:
“I am not a Democrat, or a Liberal, and for sure I am not a Republican, or a Conservative. I am a member of the FFPP, my own creation, the Freedom, Fairness, and Progress Party. If you would like to join this party, send no money, but act in such a way as to encourage all people to act in truly free, fair, and progressive ways. Most Democratic congress people seem about as devoid of workable solutions for real problems in today’s world as Reagan and Bush II, although I will say I think Democratic politicians in Washington in general have been more Christian-like than Republican politicians in Washington since 1980. At least they did not take from the poor and give to the rich. Most Republican and Democratic politicians have done little in the last 25 years but slavishly vote for their party line, as they were told by their party bosses, to conserve their chances of getting help from their party bosses in their next election.”
Vote the rascals out ASAP and replace them with free, fair, responsible, progressive members of the FFPP, who want to do the right thing for all people.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, July 1, 2017, it seems most demos voting in the 2016 primaries were not very bright, not having the sense to vote in their own interests, since most voted for Hillary, the establishment candidate, instead of Bernie, who probably could have beaten Trump in the Electoral College.
Get rid of the Electoral College. The Electoral College makes the popular votes of voters in red states count more than the votes of voters in blue states, a gross insult to voters in blue states.
The last thing we need now are more party-line pandering establishment-financed career politicians, which Trump is not, out to feather their own nests and the nests of their sugar daddies ensconced in their corporate headquarters atop skyscrapers and their favored elite rich few by slavishly voting for bills, acts, laws and rules in their favor, at the expense of we the people on the ground, in the on-going US class war, exponentially increasing the incomes and wealth of the elite rich from year to year, creating ever-widening inequality, inexorably destroying our society from the inside, as climate change destroys it from the outside.
Trump is not a career politician. Even worse, he is a troglodyte reared in penthouses atop New York City skyscrapers, who never worked a day in his life at a real job for a real boss, a classic example of the class of people who pay career politicians to vote in their favor. Working and middle class voters in 2016 actually voted for one of the US’s most successful landlords, no doubt somehow expecting him to work in their interests after he gets in office as president.
Most local politicians are ethical conscientious citizens doing their best to serve their fellow citizens, but the farther from home the government is located for which politicians are elected the more likely politicians are to be corrupted and bought off by large corporations and the elite rich, causing them to vote in their interests, rather than in the interests of their fellow citizens.
Get rid of flat taxes. Large corporations and the elite rich now pay about the same after loophole effective tax rate as the middle class. Reset the top ALETR to above 70 percent where our wisest ancestors set it before 1980, who knew you have to have progressive income tax rates to prevent inequality from destroying society. Use the new tax revenue, borrowed money, and money magically created by the US Federal Reserve (by simply punching digits into a computer and calling the resulting number money) to directly fund infrastructure jobs in green energy, transportation, education and the like to help the unemployed and underemployed and small businesses on main streets, to create a multiplier effect that will create even more jobs as people spend the money the new jobs provide, restoring a semblance of fairness in our society.
Reduce military spending. The US now spends some six hundred billion dollars per year on its military, over half of discretionary spending in the US yearly budget, more than the next eight largest nations combined spend on military activities around Earth. We have become an imperialistic war-mongering nation. Most of the military budget is for offense, not defense.
Get rid of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was gotten rid of in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed by Hillary’s husband Bill when he was president, possibly the most unethical and harmful piece of US legislative action of the 20th Century, which gave bankers in too big to fail Wall Street banks permission to gamble with bank money backed by depositors and citizens using derivatives, financial weapons of mass destruction, turning the money and banking system into a giant gambling casino, putting the deposits and pension money of all citizens at risk to this very day, unfairly biasing the economic system in favor of banksters.
I used a spinning arrow, called the Classroom De-Gamer™, over 30 years in all my university case method business courses at Georgia Southern University to point out and randomly select the discussion leader of the day, thereby insuring every student in the class had an equal opportunity to be the class leader of the day, thereby teaching democratic leadership behaviors. I am now convinced you could randomly select intelligent knowledgeable citizens off the streets of the US and send them to Washington replacing all sitting politicians and the US government would improve overnight, since these citizens could use their common sense to vote for things benefiting we the people, having not been paid with corporate and elite rich money to fight on the side of large corporations and the elite rich in the US class war.
Randomly selecting leaders is not a novel idea. The ancient Greeks had the idea and used it as early as the 6th Century bce. The process is called sortition.
Random selection of political leaders would be better than the election systems we now use—for the simple reason randomly selected leaders would not be beholden to vested interests, or corrupted by the money current politicians have to raise from rich patrons to purchase TV and mainstream media print advertising to get elected to federal offices, money that has to be paid back once they get in office, insuring the government is run primarily to benefit large corporations and the elite rich, not we the people.
Get rid of Citizens United of 2010. This abominable 5-4 Supreme Court decision affirmed into law by five right wing judges was probably the most debilitating US Supreme Court decision of all time, contributing mightily to the destruction of democracy in the US. It defined corporations as people with free speech and therefore free to bribe politicians with as much money as they wished to enact laws reducing their taxes and bending the rules of the economic game in favor of corporate CEOs and the elite rich, causing an exponential rise in economic inequality and peonage in the US.
Join the USVRA (United States Voters Rights Amendment) movement, founded by William John Cox, at http://usvra.us/, to amend the US Constitution to get rid of Citizens United and establish a fair and effective process of democratic voting in the US. Wm Cox and I are long-term friends, having sat in the same Methodist Sunday School Class back at Wolfforth, Texas in the mid-1940s. I serve on the advisory board of the USVRA.
June 30, 2017
How could this happen?
A rural hospital association representative says the Trumpcare bill in the Senate will close hospitals, and people will die…
Read all about it…
June 30, 2017
Why Health Care is a Natural Monopoly
by Richard John Stapleton
Warren Buffett’s got the right idea in the interview below on the cause of the US medical services problem, an inability to control costs. The bottom line is that in industries in which there is inelastic demand, meaning people have to buy something almost no matter what price is charged, free competition does not work for consumers. Prices charged are not inexorably driven down by competition to the lowest level necessary to fairly compensate all factors of production in the industry, including a rational return on invested capital. The system degenerates so providers can fix prices about the way they want, as in the case of high priced drugs, and engage in price discrimination, as in the case of medical services and treatments, that is, charging different prices to different customers. This behavior creates chaotic situations in which almost no one knows what many treatments will cost. The solution is full monopoly, or a natural monopoly, in which prices are set by the state, as in the case of electric and water utilities. Medicine and health services are basically public utilities, since they are absolutely required, like electricity and water, because few people want to die or go blind or go crazy or whatever, and decent human beings can’t just sit back and watch people die, go blind, go crazy, etc. in droves unnecessarily. Consequently, if people cannot pay for their medical treatments providers have to treat them free, and this gives providers permission to set exorbitant uneconomic prices for others to compensate for their losses on those that cannot pay, causing chaos and widespread inequities. Therefore, as Obama pointed out over and over, you have to have affordable health insurance for everyone to control overall medical costs. What Obama did not fight for, unfortunately, is the conclusion that the federal government should provide affordable health insurance with Medicare for all, as a good natural monopolist, setting prices for Medicare health insurance and treatment payments just like good state regulators set prices for electricity and water. The US is the only developed nation on Earth in which medical costs are a major cause of bankruptcy for citizens, an ignoble fate, but a fate less onerous, perhaps, than living the life of a debt slave the rest of your life, with an astronomical unpaid medical bill hanging over your head, that enabled you to avoid a premature death or impairment.
Here’s an interview with Warren Buffett on health services.
https://news.grabien.com/story-warren-buffett-endorses-single-payer-health-care-we-can-affo.
June 30, 2017
God forbid we should be intimidating
10 Signs Your Personality is Intimidating Others (Never Tolerate #7)
Read all about it …
June 30, 2017
Lake Wobegon Schools
More and more schools it seems are becoming Lake Wobegons where all the children are above average and all the women and men are beautiful and brave, according to this article in Zero Hedge at http://www.zerohedge.com/…/high-schools-drop-valedictorian-….
See inside my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning for a fuller discussion of these issues at https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactiona…/…/0692584331.
June 30, 2017
Let’s hope violence in the streets between conservatives and liberals does not continue to increase.
Read about the root causes of political violence in my unfortunately prescient article by clicking below.
https://blog.effectivelearning.net/conservatives-and-liberals-vs-freethinkers/.