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Stories of injustice and justice
April 10, 2019
LIVE: Senator Bernie Sanders & over a dozen co-sponsors introduce the Medicare For All Act of 2019
LIVE: Senator Bernie Sanders & over a dozen co-sponsors introduce the Medicare For All Act of 2019
LIVE: Senator Bernie Sanders & over a dozen co-sponsors introduce the Medicare For All Act of 2019
Posted by Business Leaders for Medicare for All on Wednesday, April 10, 2019
April 9, 2019
If it keeps piling up, plastics in the ocean could outweigh fish by 2050. These scientists accidentally found a potential solution to the plastic problem.
This Plastic-Eating Enzyme Could Revolutionize Recycling
If it keeps piling up, plastics in the ocean could outweigh fish by 2050. These scientists accidentally found a potential solution to the plastic problem.
Posted by VICE News on Friday, April 5, 2019
April 8, 2019
The Trumps once forced 900 mostly Black families living in Coney Island out of their homes — here’s how the family used taxpayer money to decimate a New York neighborhood
How the Trumps Brought Death and Destruction to Coney Island
The Trumps once forced 900 mostly Black families living in Coney Island out of their homes — here's how the family used taxpayer money to decimate a New York neighborhood
Posted by NowThis Politics on Sunday, April 7, 2019
April 8, 2019
Someone should alert Trump and Republicans in Congress that America is a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Rest
Someone should alert Trump and Republicans in Congress that America is a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
Posted by Robert Reich on Monday, April 8, 2019
April 8, 2019
The devastating historic flooding from the Bomb Cyclone have left Nebraska’s farmers wondering how they’ll recover as storms become increasingly frequent under climate change.
How Nebraska Is Recovering From the Bomb Cyclone
Midwestern farmers are not about to let historic flooding put them under.
Posted by VICE News Tonight on Friday, April 5, 2019
April 9, 2019
Wondering how we can save $$ and cover all Americans?
April 9, 2019
“We need to make this move because we’re in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country,” Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. “It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people’s health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people’s mental health,” he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang makes his case for universal basic income
"We need to make this move because we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country," Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. "It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people's health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people's mental health," he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
Posted by CNN on Tuesday, April 9, 2019
There is an instinct among political pundits to confuse caution for practicality — an assumption that those who advocate for incremental change are being reasonable, while those pushing for bold reforms aren’t. This is seen most starkly in the debate around health care reform, despite the fact that the “practical” pushers of limited reform fail to address the real problems in our health care system.
We all recognize that the status quo isn’t working. We spend more per person than any other country on health care, but we aren’t getting any bang for our buck. We have lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates and more preventable deaths, and too many personal bankruptcies are due at least in part to medical bills.
Where we disagree is the solution. The favorite new “reasonable” plan is “Medicare for America,” a bill from Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Rosa DeLauro that has won the support of big names like Texas presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke and the Center for American Progress, the left-of-center think tank where the plan originated as “Medicare Extra for All.” It has been extolled in opinion pieces for some of America’s largest newspapers as a “realistic” plan to fix what’s broken in our health care system.
Read more commentary:
Take it from me, tweaks won’t fix health care. Dems should focus on Medicare for All.
On the other side, if punditry is to be believed, there are the Medicare for All “hard-liners” who believe in expanding a significantly improved Medicare system to every American, with coverage that includes dental, vision and long-term care. This is portrayed as radical or even unreasonable.
Time to get real. As an economist who has spent decades studying our health care system, I can tell you that Medicare for All advocates are the only ones who are being reasonable, because theirs is the only plan that will control health care costs while finally achieving universal coverage.
The problem with incremental plans, whether they are public options, buy-ins to Medicare or Medicaid, or pumping more money into subsidies in the Affordable Care Act’s individual marketplace, is that they preserve the private health insurance system weighing down our health care.
This may be why pundits and centrist politicians view those plans as “reasonable,” but it means that they are leaving the main reason for our system’s dysfunction in place: the multipayer, for-profit financing model.
Commercial insurance companies are nothing more than middle men. They add no value to our system, but they do drive up costs with their bloated claims departments, marketing and advertising budgets and executive salaries. We pay for all of these things before a single dollar is spent on the delivery of care.
They also create extra costs for providers who need large administrative staffs to deal with billing systems, accounting for as much as $100,000 per physician.
Any plans short of Medicare for All leaves these costs in place. In other words, they leave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in savings on the table.
The waste goes beyond administrative savings. While pharmaceutical companies and hospital groups are consolidating and forming regional monopolies, our fragmented, multipayer system leaves no one insurance plan with a large enough share of the market to negotiate effectively. That allows these companies to essentially set their own inflated prices and bilk the public for hundreds of billions of dollars.
Is it any wonder that they oppose Medicare for All?
If we’re talking about which health care reform plans are serious about attacking cost, providing universal coverage and making sure everyone has access to health care, Medicare for All is the only reasonable answer. No other plan does this effectively, which is why I suspect that the Center for American Progress has not come out with spending estimates. Basic economic tenets tell us that their plan will not reduce health care spending as effectively.
Is Medicare for All bold? Absolutely. Is it reasonable? You bet. It is time to accept that Medicare for All is the practical alternative.
Gerald Friedman, a health care and labor economist, is an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of The Hopbrook Institute.
Related: ‘Our mantra is chaos’: Republican researchers target 2020 Democrats
Yes, Donald Trump has debased and defiled the presidency. He has launched blistering attacks on Democrats, on judges he disagrees with, journalists who criticize him and the intelligence community.
But McConnell is actively and willfully destroying the Senate.
Last Wednesday he used his Republican majority to cut the time for debating Trump’s court appointees from 30 hours to two– thereby enabling Republicans to ram through even more Trump judges.
McConnell doesn’t give a fig about the Senate, or about democracy. He cares only about winning. On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections he famously declared that his top priority was for Barack Obama “to be a one-term president”.
Between 2009 and 2013, McConnell’s Senate Republicans blocked 79 Obama nominees. In the entire history of the United States until that point, only 68 presidential nominees had been blocked.
McConnell’s long game is destroying what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body
This unprecedented use of the filibuster finally led Senate Democrats in 2013 to change the rules on some presidential nominees (but not the supreme court), to require simple majorities.
In response, McConnell fumed that “breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American”. If so, McConnell is about as un-American as they come. Once back in control of the Senate he buried Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the supreme court by refusing even to hold hearings.
Then, in 2017, McConnell and his Republicans changed the rules again, ending the use of the filibuster even for supreme court nominees and clearing the way for Senate confirmation of Trump’s Neil Gorsuch.
Step by step, McConnell has sacrificed the Senate as an institution to partisan political victories.
There is a vast difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms of our democracy, and winning by subverting those norms.
To Abraham Lincoln, democracy was a covenant linking past and future. Political institutions, in his view, were “the legacy bequeathed to us”.
On the eve of the Senate’s final vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2017, the late John McCain returned to Washington from his home in Arizona, where he was being treated for brain cancer, to cast the deciding vote against repeal.
In a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows, the first thief can effortlessly get into anyone’s house
Knowing he would be criticized by other Republicans, McCain noted that over his career he had known senators who seriously disagreed with each other but nonetheless knew “they had an obligation to work collaboratively to ensure the Senate discharged its constitutional responsibilities effectively”.
In words that have even greater relevance today, McCain added that “it is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning’.”
Political success should never be measured solely by partisan victories. It must also be judged by the institutional legacy passed onward. The purpose of political leadership is not merely to win. It is to serve.
In any social or political system it’s always possible to extract benefits by being among the first to break widely accepted norms. In a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows, the first thief can effortlessly get into anyone’s house. But once broken, the system is never the same. Everyone has to buy locks. Trust deteriorates.
Those, like Mitch McConnell, who break institutional norms for selfish or partisan gains are bequeathing future generations a weakened democracy.
Related: Officials forced way in to Stephen Moore home after failure to pay ex-wife debts
The difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms and rules of our democracy, and winning by subverting them, could not be greater. Political victories that undermine the integrity of our system are net losses for society.
Great athletes play by the rules because the rules make the game. Unprincipled athletes cheat or change the rules in order to win. Their victories ultimately destroy the game.
In terms of shaping the federal courts, McConnell has played “the long game”, which, incidentally, is the title of his 2016 memoir. Decades from now, McConnell will still be shaping the nation through judges he rammed through the Senate.
But McConnell’s long game is destroying what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.
He is longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans in history but Mitch McConnell is no leader. He is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. He is also a columnist for Guardian US
March, 2019
Without these women, the world we live in would be a very different place.
International Women's Day: Pioneering Women In Technology
Without these women, the world we live in would be a very different place. 🙌 🙌
Posted by UNILAD Tech on Friday, March 8, 2019
