Big News, URGENT ACTIONS, and Good Reads this Week (7-25-2017)

Some of these we better act on TODAY! 

Single-Payer is Cheaper AND Better than What We Have – Three Sources

Imagine! Even the the establishment paper known as The New York Times admits that single-payer health coverage – which we could easily make happen by simply expanding either Medicare or Medicaid to cover everybody – would save us money. 

It’s No Time to Let Our Guard Down

If you keep reading my blog, you now know that the big fish in our government (White House, Congress, etc.) not only betray us for the sake of campaign contributions and follow-up lobbyist jobs or “speaking engagement” kickbacks (and the occasional insider trading) from the robber billionaires, but even play the stock market against us. You die from denied healthcare, your insurance company pockets the difference, and our so-called representatives in Congress buy the quick-to-rise insurance stocks to make their own additional killing — in more than one way. That’s the plan.

The Healthcare Repealers in Congress Invest in Private Insurance Stocks (Video)

Any more doubt that these parliamentarians kill us out of greed? Watch this Jimmy Dore video:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Congressmen Repealing Obamacare Now Buying Health Insurance Stocks”)

Let’s not forget that these “elected” “representatives” who only represent their own greed (and therefore also the greed of their billionaire donor cronies) were preselected by the robber billionaires in every election. We never put them on the ballot! We only get to rubber-stamp those establishment picks on the ballots! We must fight for a better system!

(Boy, was I tempted to write establishment p*icks, if you know what I mean…)

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Private Health Insurances: They are Protection Rackets

Give us money or you will suffer and die:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for title: “Mal Hyman for Congress” and “My Stance on Healthcare”)

Mal Hyman is spot-on describing our private health insurances as protection rackets. Pay us through the nose or suffer and die. That’s exactly how mafiosi make their rounds to collect your hard-earned money. Doctors and nurses don’t talk that way, but they need to get paid for their work like everyone else. Unfortunately, this means that when we get seriously sick, so that treatment costs exceed our savings, we are in deep trouble if we can’t pay. 

Together for Medicare for All

There is nothing about the northern latitude that makes it possible to have universal healthcare in Canada but impossible for us. When is the last time we Americans looked north across the border for progress we want to emulate? We thought we were the greatest after we defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II (never giving full credit to our allies, especially the USSR which took the brunt of Hitler’s armies). Do we still feel like the greatest when healthcare is a human right in all our peer countries while millions of us can’t get any, suffering great pain and dying avoidable deaths by the tens of thousands each year? Do we have any reason to feel great when tens of thousands of us die prematurely each year because available medical treatments were withheld from them? Can we be proud of propping up health insurance billionaires with the blood money gained from thousands dead each year? 

Vital Battle Fronts This Week (7/10/2017)

I. Our Ability to Inform and Organize: Net Neutrality

Our oligarchs want to return to the time where we only had their corporate media to get “information” from and no efficient way to organize via the Internet. Sure, officially, the war on net neutrality is only about money. However, the key here is this: Once Internet providers can separate data streams for different pricing, they can also separate them for blocking political activism and alternative media. If you ask me, that’s the real reason our corrupt corporate politicians are so eager to comply with the industry giants’ call for differently priced lanes on the Internet.

It’s very clear that Trump-appointed new FCC Chair (and former Verizon lawyer) Ajit Pai – do I dare to think of him as a swamp creature? – wants to undo the net neutrality rules many of us fought so hard for in 2015.

Demand Progress is organizing a fight to keep net neutrality intact. They write:

“Net neutrality is the principle that the internet should be an open platform where anyone can build a website, open a small business, and create a community. It’s the idea that no matter how you use the net for your job, your school, or keeping in touch with friends and family, you get treated the same online.”

“Americans in every corner of the country support net neutrality—and that’s why we now have rules that stop cable companies like Comcast and Verizon from throttling or slowing down sites—or determining what you can see or post online.”

“We’re taking a page from Bernie’s book. We’re working with senior organizing staffers from Bernie’s campaign on a bold new plan: build teams of people in key states and congressional districts who’ll be ready to recruit an even larger cadre to swarm district offices, pack town halls, and stage protests outside Verizon and AT&T storefronts.”

They give this DONATIONS LINK.

 

II. GOP/Trump“care” Could get Snuck Through THIS WEEK

Congress’ plan to finance tax breaks for the super-rich robber billionaires who cannot even feel the difference this will make in their wealth by murdering 28,600 Americans each year through denial of healthcare (in addition to the many thousands already dying from denied healthcare every year) may be snuck through the Senate THIS VERY WEEK like it was done in the HOUSE two months ago.

The “Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017” would be better called Wealthcare than Trumpcare, caring exclusively about the wealth of the already wealthiest handful of money aristocrats on Earth while leaving many of the rest of us to die, even as doctors and nurses, treatments, and medications are on standby, waiting to be PAID before they help – but not getting paid and therefore not helping – in our harebrained health-for-profit system.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, an advocacy group which has been fighting to protect Social Security and Medicare since 1982, says it is working around the clock to defeat the Senate’s disastrous Trumpcare bill — the bill which so sanctimoniously will gut Medicaid, weaken Medicare, dramatically increase health care costs for millions of older Americans (like five times!!!) and add 22 million MORE Americans to those who have to subsist without any health insurance (with the resulting early deaths already mentioned).

Here is their DONATIONS LINK.

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With friends like Democrats, Who Needs Republicans? (Jimmy Dore + Commentary)

With friends like these so-called “Democrats” (D-corporatists), who needs enemies (R-corporatists)?

In Jimmy Dore’s video below, meet another crook or two from our Impossibility Party (the “Democratic” Party). It shoes us how the twin-party tyranny leaves us with no option within traditional voting and much reason for a new party. 

Trumpcare/GOPcare: The AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

When, back in March, I calculated a conservative minimum of first-year deaths from Trumpcare (13,500) using the meager data I could scrounge up at a time when I seemed to be the only one asking the question of how many early deaths the wealth care bill’s loss of healthcare would translate to, I warned that the true number would be much higher due to the fact that most of those losing healthcare coverage will be those who need healthcare the most desperately. A recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine has now vindicated my warning. Their estimate, surely based on better data than were available to me, comes to 28,600 casualties per year!

I think, this number justifies the term American Holocaust — at least if you want to reserve the term for internal genocide. (Overseas, we are looking at considerably larger numbers of deaths caused by our wars for profit, especially in the Middle East.) All this suffering and death, merely to shunt even more wealth to the robber billionaires who can’t even feel the increase of their sky-high piles of money and assets and who only use this robbery to keep us too poor and struggling to wake up and fight back!

Here is a news cast on the topic, an interview of Richard Wolff by Thom Hartmann:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Dr. Richard Wolff – The Death Economy, Opioids & Capitalism Exposed”)

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Video Weekend 7/1/2017 : Once Upon A Time a Man Spoke Truth To Power on Corporate TV (Once!), Even More Trumpcare Deaths Ahead, Silencing Dissent, and More (4 Videos)

For one brief moment in this 21st century, a man actually spoke truth to power on our corporate mass media (never to be seen in his job again, of course). It’s amazing to watch. The gist: the officially long obfuscated truth that it is American power mongers who (through the Saudis) radicalize the world’s worst terrorists and supply them with money and weapons. It really was amazing to watch:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “MSNBC Host SHOCKS Panel: “Saudi Arabia Is Funding Terrorists!’”)

The man is Dylan Ratigan, by the way. He now has his own website.

 

Officially, we have no true healthcare debate, just two plans which keep millions of Americans from Healthcare access (27 vs 51 million, especially the very sick, old, or poor whom the robber billionaires will miss the least since they can cash in on their Social Security and Medicare funds via billionaire tax breaks once these unwanted-by-them peons are dead). Rich Americans live on average 15 years longer than the struggling rest of us. Government secrecy is on the rise despite the Freedom of Information Act. Trump’s press secretary disallows cameras (government secrecy gone wild?). Net Neutrality is under attack again. The 1st Amendment keeps being demolished. The criminalization of dissent advances. Felony charges angling for 75-year prison sentences have been levied against Trump-inauguration protesters. Reporters have been charged, too. At least 20 states have put forward or already passed dissent-silencing laws (in clear violation of our constitution — but, then, what else is new in this century of America’s hurtling decline?):

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “[154] Healthcare Debate Fraud, White House Secrecy Beyond Belief & More”)

 

Republicans are deconstructing the Great Society (oh, and so are the “Democrats,” even if this show won’t go as far as to admit this), and they have a stealthy way of doing it over time. A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that about 28,600 more people could die every year in the U.S. if the Senate’s “health” care bill becomes law:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “America’s Economy of Death Exposed…”)

 

And, to finish, a satirical quicky:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “You Are Free! (To Do As We Tell You)”)

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