The End of Our Economy is Tied to the ACA

And this flies in the face of economic reality...Every study you read today shows America suffering through a new "gilded age" fewer very very rich and the rest.  The middle class has now stratified into several layers, those at the top, employed by businesses or the government, have "good" health benefits and incomes that can afford the steadily increasing housing costs.  Then there is a huge strata of people who simply cannot make ends meet on their salaries and will once again have NO health insurance (assuming the ACA is destroyed). 

These are the "folks" as the last real President called them, who needed the ACA.  They could not afford health insurance, at least decent health insurance, and so went uninsured; causing huge burdens on the health care industy.  These are those who go to the emergency room for flu symptoms, cannot afford physicals so get sicker than they need to; diabetes comes to mind here.

And these are also the 60 somethings who are not quite Medicare Age (conservatives predictably want to increase eligible ages).  This demograhic, without the ACA, waits until Medicare kicks in; sometimes for over a decade, during a particularly vunerable age group for cancer and heart disease; diabetes comes to mind as well.

And so, without coverage, they go undiagnosed and then cost much more to keep alive when the disease manifests itself.

Trump is right in only one statement he has made; when he proclaimed that health care is "complicated"...

This complication  costs Medicare more, typically diabetes patients who "wait for Medicare" are way sicker than if they would,  have they had Medical Care EARLIER.

That is what the ACA is all about; and conservatives who lie all the time, act as if it is a government give away.  It isn't. 

The Medicaid "bridge" if you will, is there because millions upon millions of American do not have the funds to afford health insurance at all; children, disabled persons, and the poor are up to 50% of some states at least.  Keeping them healthier is in ALL our  interests. 

How many families do you know who are wresting with elderly parents who have dementia or diabetes and are sucking the incomes out of middle aged families.  How many people do you know who are one paycheck away from fianancial disastere? 

So, conservatives, who Jesus must cry over their pure meanness, decided a long time ago that Medicaid somehow encourages poverty by making people lazy and not finding work.

Right, the homeless people holding signs along the roadside are "having a good time"....ever see any of them fat? 

The facts are America is a severely unbalanced economy that rewards a few and punishes the many.  And the lack of a health care system that is single payer and available for all, actually helps to unbalance and stratify the economic system.

And, it even treatens Medicare, a single payer system based on lifetime payroll taxes, another program that conservatives hate.

To weaken Medicare now will be a bomb that will end the economy period; bringing an endless string of depressions.

Why, because regardless of the conservative bullshit,  you can't bullshit demographics.  We have just started to enter the age of Baby Boomers aging into senility; the costs of that will be huge, and without government help, will simply bankrupt the middle class (all of it).

The problems with their scarcity  economic philosophy is it has failed, predatory capitalism proved to be a disaster a long time ago.  All the countries in the world save the United States long ago made health care a right (a regulated and conditional right) but a right. 

This freed up their economies to grow without the weight of a poor caste of people, caused by a for profit health insurance economic disaster.

It is in the best interest of all of us to stop the recent attack on the ACA.  It is in the best interest of all of us to demand our democracy fix this; with evolution to a single payer system for all supplemented with private insurance for those who want cadillac care. 

This will make losers of the health insurance industry (which is mostly non-profit, they claim) anyway.  But it is the only way forward.

Otherwise we are looking at economic disaster as the health care mess pulls our economy down.

The Huddled Masses

After the Civil War the South had an enormous problem.  The Emancipation Proclamation had freed all of the slaves.  The 13th Amendment likewise ended slavery.  There was not much doubt, with the quick deployment of Federal Troops, that there would be no slavery tolerated anymore in the South.

And then Lincoln was assassinated; leaving a southern sympathizer, Andrew Johnson as President.

The Republican Party then was truly the GOP.  The abolitionists had come from the Republican Party; it was much more progressive than today for sure.

But in areas of race relations, not as bad as the south (more about that in a minute) , but certainly the 19th century mind did not believe in the DNA equality that is a scientific fact in the 21st Century.

Northerners did not condone equality for African Americans.  Southerners  did condone equality for poor whites AND African Americans only backing up those impulses with a wave of terror from 1870 to 1965.

Of course at the time, many African Americans had not been free very long; had been purposefully made illiterate, families broken apart; etc.  In short, there was a huge job of social, cultural and political healing to do; and the north was rebuilding and getting over the worst Civil War in human history.  With Lincoln gone, nothing was done to reconcile slavery, to reparations, no educational remedies, nothing on the federal level.  The states (the rebels) were allowed by the Supreme Court to interpret the 14th Amendment (equal protection under the law) and of course ALL the southern states elected to do NOTHING according to the 14th Amendment.

Johnson began working early (1866) to undo much of the groundwork that Lincoln had set.  He withdrew the military from a south that was seething and hurting since the core of its prosperity (slave labor) was now gone.

So, the same plantation "mass" approach was resurrected with KKK and White Supremacy leading the charge.  And the "lost cause" took the place in southern minds of the war to perpetuate slavery; starting a historical lie that to this day still exists in the south and on Fox News....people still argue that the Civil War was NOT a war over slavery when history proves the exact opposite.

The slave system was perpetuated with great violence and killing.  If a slave got out of line, punishment was swift and sure; including death if need be.

Poor southern whites, who made up the core of the defeated Confederate Armies, had been used during slave times as overseers, field hands, foremen, and in some cases worked along side the slaves.

Remember, the reason for slave labor was a lack of good solid laborers to pick the cotton and cultivate the sugar and tobacco.  The Indians did not work out well; kept dying and running away.

But the black African slave was a different story;  He or she did not know where they were.  The mid-passage usually reduced people to pliable robots; and then when they were sold, breaking family bonds, the last shred of resistance went away for most.  But the plantation system as indeed violent and brutal, whippings and hangings were common; akin to the concentration camps of the Nazis in WWII>

And the poor whites were constantly reminded that they were just a few short steps above the Blacks; and that could all change if they did not support the "massa"..

And so, AGAINST THEIR SELF INTEREST, poor whites in the south cooperated with the development in post Civil War agriculture of share cropping, of Black Codes that essentially made slaves again of freedmen.

And the class that worked to keep it that way, in deference to their desires to not take the African Americans place at the bottom of the barrel, were the poor whites and middle class (very small in those days).  There was no doubt if all the African Americans left, poor whites would take their place at the bottom of the barrel.

The rich got, as usual, richer and the poor, poorer.  African Americans who tried to fight this Jim Crowe system were killed (lynching exploded in the south).

Those whites who sympathized with the freed Africans were ostracized and often burned out by the KKK.    It was not just the African American who were  targets; just whites were targeted and run out of the south constantly.

Fear ruled this unequal and unfair social/economic system.

When the south entered the 20th century it did so with an agrarian economy that was becoming woefully out of date.  Poverty rates were huge.  The industrialization of the north was not spreading into the south; which stayed stuck in slavery days.

WWI liberated many African Americans from the hell hole the south had become.  The needs of the war gave some opportunity (more in WWII) that led the beginning of an exodus from the south of people who were realizing that they could not safely raise a family in the racist segregated south.

So they came north and ran into, poor whites who were being eaten alive by the capitalist system; underpaid and soon to get destroyed by the Great Depression.

When southern whites moved into northern cities, ghettos immediately went up.  African Americans could only live in the most run down parts of town.  White lower class men especially made up KKK groups who stated their white supremacy goals was to "keep the Nigras in their place"...and they did it with violent efficiency....no slight was left unpunished no matter how trivial...people were lynched for not moving off the sidewalk when a white person walked by; etc.

Once again, the rich whites were able to manipulate the masses, keeping BOTH African Americans down AND white middle and lower class.

Then came WWII that changed everything.  America went on a full war footing, supplying not just U.S. Troops but Russia Britain  and China as well as all the Allies.  American became the arsenal of democracy; running triple shifts at plants, providing work for all; including people of color.

Meanwhile,  in the north, laws were put in place forbidding inter-racial marriages.  Housing patterns were manipulated, keeping people of color out of the suburbs.  And, the lower class whites were once again, in the north this time, told by the ruling class that the African Americans were their enemies; that "uppity" blacks need to be segregated with separate schools, communities; etc. While segregation was not as overt as in the south, it still existed; for those immigrants who were crowding into northern cities like Boston, New York, St. Louis; etc., they became the new black.

In the middle of the twentieth century Civil Rights movements for the first time, started making inroads into the wonder land of racism that white supremacy had created.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, began to fulfill the promises that had been made almost 100 years previously.  But, still, the progress was slow; college football teams were still essentially segregated when I played at Stanford from 65 to 69 (we only had eight African Americans, a Japanese American and a few Mexican Americans on the Stanford Varsity).

Integration was attempted with forced busing and tripped yet another white supremacy backlash; that elected Nixon and later Reagan; Republicans whose party had adopted the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party; who finally rid itself of the racist white supremacists that had plagued the party since before the Civil War.  Republicans, dominated by southerner Senators, began sounding a lot like post Civil War Democrats, fighting social justice at every turn for all minorities; especially African Americans.

The GOP, desperate to stop the New Deal run out, started a "southern strategy" and adopted segregationists and racist Senators and Congressmen in great numbers.   The Democrats, to their credit, let these 'dixiecrats' go....and became the party of equality and diversity.

But the phenomenon of poor white people getting fooled by rich white supremacists to do their dirty work and work for nothing, continued and  continues to this day.

Right now, the "Conservatives and Trump" are fighting to end the Affordable Care Act (which helps a majority of people of color, seniors and children).....and also helps many poor rural whites (the descendants of those overseers and flunkies of the Jim Crowe south who would do anything to not drop to the class level of African Americans.

So the phenomenon continues of white middle class and lower middle class citizens voting directly against their own interests in the mistaken assumption that this was the way to preserve their at least superior standing to people of color in their cities.

The sad fact is the ruling elite, in the south and the north, perfected in response to the New Deal, anti-union and anti-human rights positions, that calls for there never to be universal single payer health care for example in the United States.

To have government run health care, single payer, would break the strangle hold small business owners have on poor whites; dangling health care benefits over their heads or using the poor white's antipathy toward unions and minimum wages to continue to make huge profits; not paying any benefits at all with wages well under $10 an hour.  Universal health care would also give a "portability" to workers, who could work anywhere knowing health care was affordable and available and hence not be enslaved to a job that one of the few to "pay health insurance benefits"...

This has created a social group I call the "huddled masses", poor whites and persecuted African Americans who work over 40 hours a week for starvation wages, lose their homes and be homeless or lose their children to inner-city violence.  And now rural whites are addicted in ever growing numbers to the opioid epidemic.

And this time around they elected a Billionaire in Donald Trump as President and almost impossible to understand (unless you read this blog) event!

And they continue to vote against the very reforms, and reformers (Democrats) who could break their treadmill of poverty.

And, just like the overseers in 1840, poor whites vote for racist white supremacists who promise them that they won't lose their status to "those people", and put one conservative fascist into office after another, who once  secured, votes directly against the self-interests of poor white folks.

And tragically this is the same trick the plantation "Masters ie., Massas" used for hundreds of years to perpetuate the slavery system...use racism and prejudice to threaten whites with the unimaginable:  African American attaining a higher status than them.

And predictably, when American actually elected a Black President, the backlash was swift and sure; electing more racists and fascists to office in rural white states, enacting voter suppression laws, cheating in elections even to the point of accepting and collaborating with Russian plutocrats in direct treason to the United States to win the 2016 Presidential Election.

Sound far fetched?  No more far fetched as a class of people who vote against their self interests because of racial status fear over and over and over again; leaving the rich to get even richer and a whole lot of folks POORER!

Hellhole Second Rate Country

That's right folks, a second tier country....second rate, not the leader...less than we should be.

And what did it, what puts us second tier?

White supremacy for one...Idiocy for another.

The mark of a great country is the life style, the sense of well  being, the lack of murder and violent gun driven crime.

And we rank way down in all of these.

Right now, right this instant, we are about ready to gut the ACA for a mean spirited take away of millons of people's health....not their insurance but their health!

And this happens why?  Because white supremacists like McConnell from Kentucky of all places, are absolutely convinced that poor people of color are that way because they are lazy and using the system.

This is of course bullshit, since the vast majority of "users" of Medicaid (poor people's health barely minimal health care which is woefully inadequate anyway).....are very young or very old.

Young as in birth young, Medicaid pays for poor mother's birthing, pre-natal care and post birth care. 

Old as in dementia old, Medicaid pays for skilled nursing placements for milliions of seniors whose families and estates cannot pay the $10,000 per month or more for dementia care.  Moreover, the in home health care that keeps seniors in their homes is another Medicaid benefit; again helping poor and even middle class families from bankrupcy.

And Republican fools are about to end that, plunging the entire middle class into bankrupcy.

How do I know that.  My father died last year of Alzheimers.....it was a long struggle, with Home Health Care for at least three years, and Reverse Mortgage paid placement in a non-Medicaid facility (saving the taxpayers the expense at the cost of the only asset my Dad had).

So no inheritance for us, but also little out of pocket hit to the taxpayer.

Most middle class and poor people seniors do not have a reverse mortgage (you have to own the home outright to quality).

So what does that mean?

It means that when the Republicans get through, a huge tax cut will be given to their rich cronies, and a huge cut to Medicaid and death to babies and dementia ridden seniors will be the result.

And that will make our hell hole of a country even lower in the ranking as a decent place to live.

Happy Father's Day!?

She is right, not all are missing in action.....and it is wrong to fall into the stereotype that African American fathers cat around, abandon their children, don't care; etc.

These are all the myths of white supremacy.

You SHOULD know the history behind this.   The first thing slavers did with newly captured Africans was make sure the families were broken up.  People were much easier to guard on the mid-passage if the were separated from their families.  And the death rate was enormous during this hell on earth experience; with women and children dying first.

So the population that made it to the "New World" were mostly men. 

And then, on the plantations, families were again something that impeded the forced labor camps that really were plantations.  Do not buy the bullshit that Conservative white supremacists spew now; that the plantation live was somehow bucholic, that white plantation owners took good care of their slaves. 

That is simply not true.  Slaveowners treated their slaves like animals, chattel if you will, separating families at every turn, forcing African Americans into a matriarchal society (many African tribes were organized this way in the first place; men were the hunters and women ran the village).  The result, a twisted marital relationship that worked hard to separate men from their families, that encouraged breeding with multiple women (chattel remember).

And so, when freedom finally came, a culture of anti-familiy values existed. 

Somehow African Americans withstood this attack on stable culture; but then the anti-bellum hell hit.  In order to keep "Blacks" in their place (in short working a sharecroppers under Black Codes that reverted them back to slaves) again the family had no place.  Again men were separated from their families to "keep them under control" for nearly 100 years.

More than once men emigrated to the north to work and sent money back to their families.  But the damage continued; existing without family became a survival method.

And then came 1964 and the civil rights act.  And then 1967 and the Supreme Court voting to allow inter-racial marriages.  And the United States finally realized that white supremacy, NOT inherent Arican American "traits" were the cause of the fractured African American families.

And what did whte supremacy do,, when at least Hollywood and mass media realized the destructioin that the war on African American families had brought?

The WAR ON DRUGS with determinant sentences for even minor possession of drugs was the next trick of White Supremacy to continue the subjugation. 

Mass incarceration was now the tool used to break up African American families; and this crime against humanity continues to this day.  Along with this is the practice of shooting first and asking no questions; that everyday kills countless African American males.  In short, in 2017 it is still happening folks.

There is a short truth about black fathers.  If you want more, read up on the truth of Native American fathers, who were genocided out of existence, leaving a cultural wasteland in it wake:

And  that touched me and touches me everyday!  White supremacy is the problem, it always has been, and we need to eradicate it.

And Trump and the Republican Party is the embodiment of it today!

Bill Maur Listen

And at the end of this piece, Bill messes up again.  He says that he, like many of us, grew up in an all white suburb and there was no racism.   He explains piously that his parents set him straight about race.

I believe that.  I believe that his parents told him the "n" word was wrong, that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution mean what they say.  And Bill is an educated person, he has been taught over and over again that racism has no place in America.

And he is spectacularly wrong.

Did he ever even consider WHY the suburb was all white? 

Now this guy went I think to Columbia.  He is Ivy League educated.  But this was when Columbia was almost all white.  And not too long before he matriculated those suburbs were institutionalized segregated.  That means by law. That means in my lifetime the law was changed to allow inter-racial marriages (my parents were illegal in that regard) and integrated the Armed Forces, so combat arms units could be integrated (and Vietnam was our first integtated war (and Afrian Americans seemed to always be on point?)

But what about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights?  What about "All Men (note Men) are created equal?

Read "White Rage" and it all will come into focus.  Read anything about Nelson Mandela and South Africa.

Racism is a western civilization and eastern civilization...all civilization phenomenon.  It is a curse on the human condition.  It is an original sin, you can find it everywhere in human history.  And yes, people of color practice it as well.

But particularly with the United States it stands out so starkly; beause we profess to be the land of the free, the exception to human inequality and hate. 

And our history betrays that; it negates it, it makes us all hypocrites. 

Bill would have been better to admit the racist slur, then go into some of the history on how it came into being. 

Two things conditioned us; two not one..Both were based in the racist poison that declared people with less pigmentation in their skin, caused by thousands of years of living in northern climates, were somehow smarter and more attractive than those humans who lived nearer the equator.  This in spite of the scientific fact that "people of color" has probably been evolution wise the first "human beings" .

Of course in 1600 people didn't know that DNA shows the human family varies less than 5% different, which is skin color and hair type, one "race" from another.

Bill knows this.  But to really know it you need to have read history.

And the second....why the second is genocide of "racial inferiors"; ethnic cleansing.  And that, my fellow Californians, exists right in your backyard (seriously you might have skeletons in your back yard),  victims of Indian hunters, beheaded their bounties; and enslaved the children for life if they let them live.

The founders of Chico, Sacramento, Old Shasta ; etc.etc. were murderers.  If you have ancestory in California, white or colored, you share that disaster. 

And most of us don't know a damn thing about it.  Still, I mean still, we worship Junipero Serra (I was on Serra Blvd two weeks ago when I went to Stanford for a baseball game).  And the Pope recently made of saint of a short hateful racist who used to beat then rape young Native American children. 

So Bill, you screwed up.  But make it worse by declaring that you "grew up" without prejudice and racism.....it is not lost on God that our nation's Capitol still insists on Redskins as its  NFL mascot when its history goes straight to genocidal atrocities. 

That is genocidal atrocities....that is a system of slavery that simply was the most brutal on earth...that is if you really look, as Bill Cosby (?) once said, if you look at America hard enough "You're going to get a black eye"...then proceeded to show in some detail a history that had been repressed for years: Jim Crowe, Black Codes, Institutionalized Racism; etc.

The history is getting right:   the past twenty years have a seen an explosiion of mostly scholarly works that, rather than the Black History phenomenon  of the 70s and 80s, doesn't talk only about Booker T. Washington and all the positives that people of color contributed, but to the stark horror and brutality that lynched thousands  in our history (one of them my great great grandfather).

Put THAT on  your family tree and discuss it.  Discuss it hell, scream about it. 

Then elect a bigot of a President.  Elect with voter suppression laws bigots and racists all over the place, attempting to once again return us to the "America First" environment that lynched people for not moving over on a sidewalk to let a white woman pass, or dared to get a drink of water from a forbidden water fountain, or dared to follow ancient customs and worship a Great Mystery rather than God.

THE ONLY WAY THIS NATION WILL EVER TRULY BE FREE IS TO END WHITE SUPREMACY WITH PREJUDICE.   That means making behaviors like Trumps and others a crime and punish racism at every turn.  You will change your behavior if you spend time in jail.  You willl not have racist behavior if you educate children with the truth.

It is happening....we are a little further along than in 1960....but we are sliding back once again...as white supremacy raises its miserable evil head.

Bill, devote a show or more to the truth if you want to repent.

It Doesn't Work!!!!!

Ok, this whole idea was whoop assed stupid and crazy from the very beginning.  Any of you out there who use household budget analogies to explain governmental funding and budgets need to shut up.

That's right shut up.  Why?

Because IT DOESN'T WORK! 

The ultimate in stupidity was Kansas, a hell hole in the middle of a red state racist mid-west; decided with Brownbacks brilliant business background to follow tea party dogma and cut taxes to stimulate the economy...a great experiment.

Now this experiment is exactly the trickle down experiment that Reagan sold the nation many years ago; that backfired.....it also is the dogma that was accepted practice in 1929...cut taxes, raise taxes and embargos on imports to "Make America Great Again" and the economy would cure itself.

And the Great Depression followed by WWII killed over 60 million people worldwide.  60 MILLION PEOPLE!

And in Kansas, Bloody Kansas, they tried it again...and it blew up the state.

Why...because a government's budget, the bigger it gets, is NOT micro-economics, it is macro-economics a whole different playing field with different rules and a whole lot more complex and variable.  Even macro rules of economics don't always work.

But Republicans have taken over the country with the bullshit that Kansas just ladled into the gut of each of their citizens.

And they failed. 

Redding is doing it right now, recalling the two "liberals' on the city council because of fiscal issues and crime.  They have ignored their own contribution, by refusing to pass a small tax to add back police officers and firemen, leaving the city partially unprotected from the crime that frankly has been spawned partly by the opoid epidemic that middle aged white people are "enjoying" right now.  Life is so miserable for them in Redding they are stoned all the time...nice retirement huh?

And it is failing, and what is needed most is....more government (efficient and robust) to grow the economy.   What More Government?   Oh no..Oh no!!!!!

You see taxes come back to the community ten fold often.  Right now Redding for example, whose tea party state of Jefferson types want to be in a separate state, takes in millions of state dollars of support, with many working on the state payroll, that keeps the city alilve.  In fact, per capita, Redding citizens get more state dollars than do the citizens of Sacramento, the state capitol.

Government employment is the second largest employer, after retail/recreation. So the "suggestion" is to cut government (become the poorest state in the union) and things will be better as millions of dollars are pulled out of Redding.

That is nuts; plain and simple nuts! 

Why?  Why be so stupid!

I taught Civics in High School.  I told and taught the students about the above....and many glassed over, or I got complaints from right wing parents that I was not being "fair".  The kids were often asleep or did not even listen, because their parents were right wingers and hated public education as well as anything else public...So I got the be fair all the time.

Fair my ass...ask people in Kansas what is fair?!

IT DOESN'T WORK.  IT DOESN'T WORK.  IT DOESN'T  WORK...

"What is the Matter with Kansas"?  The Republican right wing is what is wrong with Kansas, just like it is in Redding right wing California!