Category Archives: economy

almost as immorally nuts as GOPers

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I gave up raging over the mess that the GOP so-called “leaders” have been making of my country. It seems like too many of the people on this planet are hell-bent on helping with the demise of sense and sanity.

All of the following are excerpts from this week’s Harper’s Weekly Review, where you can find documentation and a citation for each of these discomfitting reports.

A Walmart in New Jersey asked all black people to leave.

An Ohio man told police that since January he’s been sucker-punching little children at his local Walmart for thrills.

A Kentucky man was charged with wanton endangerment after he got drunk and put his five-week-old son to bed in an oven.

Wachovia Bank was fined $50 million, and required to remit a further $110 million, for laundering funds for Mexican cocaine cartels.

A Swedish report found that the United Arab Emirates is now the fourth-largest importer of weapons in the world.

Dutch officials repudiated a claim by U.S. general and former NATO commander John Sheehan that the gayness of the Dutch army had rendered it unable to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter to Ireland to apologize for the sexual abuse of children by Church leaders.

A lawyer in Oregon was planning to release the Boy Scouts’ “perversion files,” a secret archive of 1,000 documents identifying Scout molesters.

A cable network in North Carolina played two hours of porn on the Kids On Demand channel.

Then there’s the “a little nuts but not immoral” category:

Members of the Winnemem Wintu Indian tribe traveled from California to New Zealand to beg forgiveness of the salmon.

Mexican police were praying to spirits and sacrificing chickens to protect themselves from drug lords.

The Vatican was investigating the daily appearances in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, of the Virgin Mary, who is crowned with stars and floats upon a cloud.

Indian politicians wanted to ban both black magic and Lindsay Lohan.

Finally, neither nuts nor immoral, and maybe a good idea — especially since I haven’t been able to wear my removable bridge because my gums are swollen:

A Bavarian baby-food company said it was planning to market its product to adults who dislike chewing.

Makes you just want to break out in song, doesn’t it?

Stop the World I Want to Get Off

and

Stop the World I Want to Get Off

and

Stop the World I Want to Get Off

ban guns and capital punishment; allow abortions

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I want to ban the sale of guns to anyone who just “wants” one and capital punishment for any but the most hopelessly insane serial killers. I want a public health care option that includes funding for abortions along with widespread sex (read “human reproduction and contraception” education). I am an American of conscience. What makes those Congressional “people of conscience” douchebags any more ethical and moral than I.

The power people of this country are as morally bankrupt as so many of the rest of us are financially.

Poor Obama. He might have won, but we are losing.

sold gold

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My 1950s charm bracelets and the charms from it. Rings I never wear any more. A chain from which a locket once dangled. None were more than 14K. We took them to a jeweler who buys gold.

If we weren’t in a depression, perhaps someone at an estate sale might have bought the bracelets, and we would have gotten a lot more money for them. The styles of the jewelry were none that my daughter would wear. If I had a granddaughter, she might (or might not) one day want the stuff. But the price of gold is at its highest in a long time. And there won’t be a Medicare COLA coming up, and the cash will come in handy.

I have never had an affinity for gold, except for a ring I bought for myself after I got divorced and stopped wearing my wedding ring. It’s a one-of-a-kind organic design, made with the melted wax method. It’s set with a gold moonstone and has meaning for me on many levels.

Otherwise, I wear silver or copper.

And so we sold the gold.

it’s a DEPRESSION, stupid!

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From Wikipedia, via Time Goes By (where Ronni Bennett proves that a “recession” it is not).

“[A] depression is characterized by its length, and by abnormal increases in unemployment, falls in the availability of credit, shrinking output and investment, numerous bankruptcies, reduced amounts of trade and commerce, as well as highly volatile relative currency value fluctuations, mostly devaluations. Price deflation, financial crisis and bank failures are also common elements of a depression.”

And deepening our collective depression, according to Bob Herbert in the NY Times, “Safety Nets for the Rich,”

The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: “U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ’45.”

The headline next to it said: “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.”

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

[snip]

Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans.

We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.

That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.

It’s also depressing not to see the Democrats shove these facts into the faces of the those who don’t believe that so many of the systems that we depend upon for citizen support need major overhauling.

Capitalism seems to only work on a small scale. Small businesses in consolidated communities that compete against one another have to rely on making it based on the quality of their goods and services and the ethics of their business dealings. Neighborly word-of-mouth recommendations and solid reputations ensure their success.

Once capitalism balloons into megacorporations-run-amok (as, it is now) then it’s up to the federal government to protect its citizens from greed, usury, and unethical business practices and to prosecute and punish corporations (and their officers) that take financial advantage of their customers.

Instead, we continue to reward the financial rapists. (see above)

I rather like this quote, from here:

Corruption which mars all aspects of our lives, our environment and prospect of our future generations, has its roots back to the instinctive greed of capitalism itself.

And this one, from here:

What happened to the role of governments in protecting societies and the environment?

For most of his life, my dad was a staunch Republican, and he and I could not even begin to discuss politics for many years — until he reached the age of about 60, after he had become a Commissioner on our city’s Housing Authority and after he had traveled and had experienced disenfranchised populations such as those in Haiti of several decades ago. He told me then that he has come to believe that what America needs is a Socialist Democratic government so that the disenfranchised of this country could have access to a safe, healthy, and opportunity-filled environment. Otherwise it would continue to be only the uber-capitalist, financially well-off citizens who could afford it.

Socialist Democracy, Democratic Socialism. There are lots of definitions for those concepts. According to here:

Political + Social + Economic democracies < => socialism.

While I know that the European form of Socialism has flaws, from my perspective, maybe what we need is a Socialized Democracy, where the Federal government keeps a tight reign on capitalist greed by
— closing corporate and personal financial tax loopholes and off-shore money stashing
— imposing even higher tax rates on the highest income earners (corporate and personal) and outlawing using federal money for corporate bonuses
— encouraging, through tax benefits, the reinvestment of corporate profits into hiring more workers; improving worker benefits, salaries, and working conditions; and improving product quality (all of which benefits the capitalist system)
— providing universal health care (Medicare for all) to all American citizens.

Now, that’s just a start of what an American Socialized Democracy might be able to accomplish from the perspective of this depressed citizen-victim of the out-of-control capitalism rampant in this country today.

a time to disbelieve

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This quote from Talking Points Memo.

Rightwing fearmongers and demagogues
thrive only to the extent the mainstream media
believes they’re thriving.

It’s all a matter of persistent marketing, isn’t it? Say something loud enough and often enough and pretty soon it will be believed.

The leaders of the Right/eous (both political and religious) know and use this strategy well. And, in many cases these days, various Right/eous factions have banded together to strategically defeat a health care plan for America that will both save lives and money.

While there is evidence from other countries regarding how well a single payer national health plan can and does work there is no evidence showing that it won’t work here in America. There is only the persistent and consistent marketing message from Right/eous telling us to believe that it won’t work and that any health care reform has to come about very slowly.

What is this, “faith-based politics”?

The TPM piece cited above ends with this:

Sometimes reform has to occur in a big way, everything or nothing, if it’s to happen at all. That’s the way it is with health care reform at this stage. Every moving piece is related to every other one. That’s also why a public option is necessary.

So forget the authoritative sources. Mobilize and organize. We can get comprehensive, meaningful health care reform if we push hard enough. And we must.

we’ve been punked; wake up Mr. Pres.

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Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

The above from Paul Krugman’s piece in the Times.

C’mon, Mr. Pres. You can’t be that naive, and I hope that you’re not as wishy washy as you’re starting to seem.

C’mon, Mr. Pres. Time to conjure up FDR’s ghost and put some spine in your stand. He might not have looked like he had it, but he had it when it counted.

We voted for change when we voted to you, Mr. Pres. Not small change, either.

They all might be right-wingers, but you were in the right when you promised to push the single payer plan.

Hold your single payer line, Mr. Pres. If not you, who?

I just paid more than $160 for a month’s supply of Nexium because United Health Care does not have that med on its list of drugs that it will cover. (That’s $160 even with a coupon that got me a 20% discount.) I’ve tried three other substitute drugs that are on the list, but none of them work on my GERD problem.

Now, it’s not as though I have a fatal illness or some precondition that my health care insurance refuses to provide medication or other coverage for. But I do pay premiums for which I, obviously, am not getting the benefits I used to get.

And it ain’t going to get any better because the system, as it is, sucks.

Stop letting the ignorant/greedy/selfish (take your pick or add more descriptors) right-wingers nickel and dime us all to death, Mr.Pres.

We voted for change.

CHANGE OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM TO SINGLE PAYER!

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW???

onward to single payer

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That’s the Single Payer health plan supported by everyone who understands how the system can work.

Anyone who wants to can easily find out the truths about the health care issue by doing a reality check.

I just don’t understand why people think that corporate-run health care will look out for their interests. Corporations, by their very nature, are in it to make a profit. So, logically corporate run health care needs to maximize premiums and minimize payments so that they can make a profit. Health care corporations

A thoughtful article in The New Republic calls the right-wings manipulations of the health care reform issues similar to the Swift Boat machinations that torpedoed John Kerry’s bid for the presidency in 2004.

Snippets from that article:

Exhibit number one is the treatment of Eziekel Emanuel, the distinguished oncologist and bioethicist who is working on health reform at the Office of Management and Budget. In the course of his writings, which span academia and popular publications, he has argued forcefully and clearly against physician-assisted suicide. Yet somehow Emanuel finds himself accused of–wait for it–advocating physician assisted suicide.

Every year, millions of families struggle to get affordable medical care for themselves or their loved ones–and end up in financial ruin, going without medical care, or some combination of the two. Many of these cases involve diseases like cerebral palsy or Parkinson’s–or other conditions that require ongoing, expensive care.

Insurance companies try their best to avoid taking on these people. Apply for an individual policy with one of these pre-existing conditions and an insurer will reject you if it can. If it can’t–if, say, you’re lucky enough to get coverage through an employer–you may well find the insurance doesn’t cover what you need.

It’d be one thing if the lunatics on the right had a coherent argument for why these initiatives might be ineffective or counterproductive. But they don’t even bother to acknowledge them, preferring instead to throw out scare quotes like this one from Palin: “Who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.”

Of course, not all conservatives stoop to this level. You can have a rational, if still contentious, debate over health reform with the likes of Stuart Butler (who studies health policy at the Heritage Foundation) or Gail Wilensky (who ran Medicare for George H.W. Bush). But Butler, Wilensky, and others like them aren’t driving the conversation right now. Palin, Bachmann, and their allies are.

We’re stuck in what Josh Marshall has called a “nonsense feedback loop”–a conversation in which Zeke Emanuel wants to kill grandma, health care reform is bad for the people who can’t get health care, and Stephen Hawking has been snuffed out by the British National Health System. Instead of arguments that are unrelated to reality, we’re getting arguments that are the very opposite of reality.

Vehement right-wing opposition to government reform (fueled by those who have nothing to gain from such reform because they gain a great deal from the status quo) is not new. A piece in the Washington Post, In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition shines a spotlight on this pattern of right-wing disinformation dissemination. It’s the old “don’t confuse me with the truth; I know what I believe” syndrome.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can’t stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. “What’s the matter, madam?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” The woman responded with self-righteous fury: “Well, if you don’t know I can’t help you.”

A comment left on the It’s Your Times website by “Wise Merlin” pretty much covers all the problems with the current health care system in America in language that even the least literate right-wingers can understand.

Meanwhile, closet right-wingers are popping up in the least expected places. According to Alternet.org, John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods has launched a major campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.

Whole Foods, “Primo hangout of liberal Democratic yuppies,” should be boycotted, the article goes on to say.

Mackey leads his Wall Street Journal diatribe against national health insurance with a quote from one of his heroines – Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

And the problem with Mackey’s campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance.

Mackey is responsible for these deaths as much as anyone.

And we are responsible for putting money into his Whole Food bank account so that he can continue his campaign without resistance.

I know that this boycott of Whole Foods will upset many liberal Democrats.

Where will they buy their organic wines?

And cheeses?

And tofu?

There are options.

Your local health food co-op.

Farmers’ markets.

Community supported agriculture.

Other corporate chains like Trader Joe’s.

So, please, join the Single Payer Action Boycott of Whole Foods.

Don’t cross the picket lines.

Don’t spend another penny at Whole Foods until John Mackey and his right wing friends are defeated.

And single payer is enacted.

Onward to single payer.

Just as in the times of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President Obama is faced with two connected but separate American crises: the recession/depression of this greedy capitalist economy and the struggle of ordinary citizens to survive on various fronts (health, jobs, education etc.)

According this article:

FDR was not able to solve the economic/capitalist problems of the Great Depression. World War II did that. [Obama is faced with finding a less drastic solution.]

But FDR did make life better for America’s not-wealthy citizens, focusing his New Deal on relief for individuals who through no fault of their own were unable to provide for themselves; recovery of the economy so that business would be able to start hiring people again; and reform of the government and the economy to avoid the recurrence of problems that had risen persistently during the industrial age.

His list of enacted legislation included the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, which enabled the formation of labor unions.

Highly paid corporate executives, who can afford to sock away millions that slip through tax loopholes and who see labor unions as depriving their businesses of additional profit, don’t believe that FDR’s New Deal was that much of a big deal. And so neither do they support Obama’s administration’s efforts to fix the same kinds of problems that FDR faced. After all, those are the problems of the “common man” and have nothing to do with them.

It is time for us common people to rise up and take our country back from the greedy and self-centered who really have no stake in improving the quality of our lives and our health care.

ONWARD TO SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE.

PS. For those who need a visual aid for health care reform, here’s a great one.

hey you anti-universal health care people!

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Wake up! You’re being manipulated by those who can afford to pay for their own most expensive health care.

From here, where’s there are more links to truthful information.

Top Five Health Care Reform Lies—and How to Fight Back

Lie #1: President Obama wants to euthanize your grandma!!!

The truth: These accusations—of “death panels” and forced euthanasia—are, of course, flatly untrue. As an article from the Associated Press puts it: “No ‘death panel’ in health care bill.”1 What’s the real deal? Reform legislation includes a provision, supported by the AARP, to offer senior citizens access to a professional medical counselor who will provide them with information on preparing a living will and other issues facing older Americans.2

If you’d like to read the actual section of the legislation that spawned these outrageous claims (Section 1233 of H.R. 3200) for yourself, here it is. It’s pretty boring stuff, which is why the accusations that it creates “death panels” is so absurd. But don’t take our word for it, read it yourself.

Lie #2: Democrats are going to outlaw private insurance and force you into a government plan!!!

The truth: With reform, choices will increase, not decrease. Obama’s reform plans will create a health insurance exchange, a one-stop shopping marketplace for affordable, high-quality insurance options.3 Included in the exchange is the public health insurance option—a nationwide plan with a broad network of providers—that will operate alongside private insurance companies, injecting competition into the market to drive quality up and costs down.4 If you’re happy with your coverage and doctors, you can keep them.5 But the new public plan will expand choices to millions of businesses or individuals who choose to opt into it, including many who simply can’t afford health care now.

Lie #3: President Obama wants to implement Soviet-style rationing!!!

The truth: Health care reform will expand access to high-quality health insurance, and give individuals, families, and businesses more choices for coverage. Right now, big corporations decide whether to give you coverage, what doctors you get to see, and whether a particular procedure or medicine is covered—that is rationed care. And a big part of reform is to stop that.

Health care reform will do away with some of the most nefarious aspects of this rationing: discrimination for pre-existing conditions, insurers that cancel coverage when you get sick, gender discrimination, and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage.6 And outside of that, as noted above, reform will increase insurance options, not force anyone into a rationed situation.

Lie #4: Obama is secretly plotting to cut senior citizens’ Medicare benefits!!!

The truth: Health care reform plans will not reduce Medicare benefits.7 Reform includes savings from Medicare that are unrelated to patient care In fact, the savings comes from cutting billions of dollars in overpayments to insurance companies and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.8

Lie #5: Obama’s health care plan will bankrupt America!!!

The truth: We need health care reform now in order to prevent bankruptcy—to control spiraling costs that affect individuals, families, small businesses, and the American economy. Right now, we spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care.9 The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade10—and each year, nearly a million people face bankruptcy because of medical expenses.11 Reform, with an affordable, high-quality public option that can spur competition, is necessary to bring down skyrocketing costs. Also, President Obama’s reform plans would be fully paid for over 10 years and not add a penny to the deficit.

I’m looking at the photos that b!X took and posted on Flickr of the emotionally charged gathering in Portland OR regarding the health care issue. We are, indeed, a country manipulated into being divided. What a shame.