Bravo on this post - Substack awards need to be a thing.
On the reality we're living in: who could have predicted that violence would proliferate in an environment where every avenue of peaceful recourse has been blockaded, boarded up, booby trapped, buried, bought off, burned, back stabbed, belittled, bulldozed...
Donald Trump is not the engineer on this train. He is just along for the ride and the fares. His “economics” and corruption are just the window dressing. If ever there were a time to pull the emergency cord to engage the brakes and stop the train, this is that time. The demented, devious, and calculating radicals who are the real engineers have been preparing for their moment for forty years. We have a little more than forty days left to erect our defenses and prepare for the announced onslaught.
Last night, I wrote a message at Whitehouse.gov to President Biden (or to whomever monitors the site) with a plea begging that he do everything possible to put impediments and barriers up to slow or stop the attacks from the fascists who are anxiously waiting to start the process of demolishing every institution in sight and eliminating the people who maintain them. I requested that he publicly address the impending danger directly and reassure the public that effective efforts are underway to protect and defend the country, democracy, and the people. I did not use the word panic. However, I described fear and foreboding which certainly amounts to panic for anyone who has been aware of what Trump and his wrecking crew have planned for us.
I suggested expanding the Supreme Court, although I doubt if that is possible at this late date. Others here have other ideas which may be more feasible or practical under the circumstances. Please send any ideas you have (abbreviated, or condensed, of course) to the Whitehouse.gov site. I would prefer to see the 2024 election voided because of massive documented foreign interference. But that is definitely too rash, brash, and bold to hope for from Democrats.
Surrender is suicide. These people mean business and they are ruthless and without conscience. We cannot rely solely on heroes such as Marc Elias and a handful of ACLU attorneys. What has been missing has been real leadership which is not based in the politics of self-promotion or self-preservation. Democracy’s defenders will have to step up or fascism’s steamroller will pulverize it and pound it into the ground. The healthcare ripoff is a sideshow. Who will unite the sane and the true lovers of freedom?
We are the victims of the Russian war on the USA. Putin admits he did it and demands quid pro quo from Trump. As far as I'm concerned the admission is dispositive and is actionalble and constitutes an emergency.
Yesterday, I laid out a possible Senate option. Dems still control the senate. Biden could, due to the national emergency require a report on what happened during the election. DOJ arrested some Russian agents on Sept. 4, two months before the vote. Put everything on hold.
I'd like to hear what Romney and Murkowski have to say...
We are awash in facts an information. Thom and his guests and many callers have known what was happening all along. But there is a disconnect and there are powerful forces and interests who are always able to keep the discussion and awareness contained. The lid is screwed on tight. The public is oblivious for the most part. No one feels motivated to blow the lid off or safe in trying to effect real change. The suffering is going to have to get really bad before people take things into their own hands and turn it all around, probably years from now. The only way this could have been prevented is to have real education and real social awareness starting very early, instead of fake schooling and indoctrination disguised as pretend education. It's easier to keep deluding yourself about our ludicrous factory schools as Thom has insisted on doing and blaming everything on the removal of civics classes long after sanguinity and sanity were removed with compulsion and bureaucracy.
I assume that "never up, never in" means you maintained your independence. That's admirable. There will not be any of that after 1/20/24. Could we please, please, PLEASE, retire that tired and ancient baby-with-the-bathwater metaphor? If I were to suggest throwing out bathwater it would be bathwater which is poisoned, foul, and lethal and in which no one should ever put a baby.
What do you believe I want to throw out, other than coercion, intimidation, fascism 101, behavioral modification, and multiple layers of dead bureaucracy? I advocate for doing away with intrusive and destructive laws. In their absence would be mutual respect, intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation, real meaningful engagement instead of feigned interest (for about 70 – 80%), encouragement rather than discouragement, and positivity where there is currently primarily cynicism, frustration, and rank hopelessness or negativity.
You really like those IEP’s! I have never proposed doing away with them. Maybe they would actually result in some much more accurate evaluations and way more useful and satisfying recommendations and remedial measures in an environment that is not misanthropic and hostile for about 1/3 – ½ of students. How about that? Keep them. Every single one. Not a problem. Hire yourself half-a-dozen more IEP experts. Once you are no longer paying all those a$$holes at the ed shed and all the other pointy-nosed fools whose main job it is to make new rules and write new punishments for defiant students (which will no longer be defiant as voluntary participants and recipients of self-directed instruction and information), the money will be there.
Until now, we had a democracy. Except for students in traditional public schools. Now, you are surprised that our citizens who spent over a decade being subservient, disrespected, and abused know next to nothing about it or prefer to be led around by the nose?
Before we dispense with the subject of IEP’s I am also obliged to say that they are predicated on premises and conceptions which are all but meaningless, in my humble estimation. Our entire school edifices are built around a cognitive and knowledge paradigm which is roughly 400 years out of date. I do not buy any of that nonsense, such as 4th grade level reading or ninth grade level math, and all of the absurd tests which do nothing for any kid. Our systems are designed according to disembodied knowledge. Knowledge is embodied. A few rare educators have gotten that message. But they are proscribed from ever utilizing their knowledge in systems with authority and obedience to authority at their center.
I will take issue with one thing Thom said. It was actually Clinton, not Bush, who signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law. This law undid Glass-Steagall, and led to the mortgage bundling (bungling?) craze that caused the Great Recession of 2008.
My question is this: If we have a Minimum Wage, why don't we have a Maximum Wage? Seems to me that anyone should be able to live comfortably on $2 million a year. I recently read that the average CEO salary is $29 million a year. What kind of greedy pig needs that much to survive?
Be careful of what you wish Grace. Have you read any of Charles Dickens books, or even seen The Christmas Carol. Dickensenian England was marked by the maximum wage.
Scrooge paid Tiny Tim's father the maximum wage. The maximum wage was used to keep the common man in poverty and under control of the employer.
Corporate execs are not paid a salary per se, they earn benefits, stocks, and sell those stocks and avoid taxes by use of the tax law,if they pay taxes at all on stock sales, they pay a capital gains rate, which is less than the rate I pay.
BrianThompson received a total compensation package last year of $10.2 million, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants.
He did not pay taxes on the stock grant. You only pay taxes when sold, and often if managed right you can sell them and record a loss.And the loss offsets the gain.
Perhaps instead of a maximum wage, we need a way to have stock restrictions or a total net worth ceiling. It just seems insane to me that people with billions don’t understand or care about us, the ordinary people including those who must struggle to survive while others live in such luxury.
Beyond BRILLIANT - ashamed more people do not understand this - and the way the Dems handled the recent election did not at all address the real problems or send a message to the people who needed to hear it - in the way it needed to be told. So sad that this is happening to what was once such a great country
They did have a message but it was overshadowed by the propaganda of the right. They weren't able to get that message into the silos of the rightwing gaslighters. Though, I doubt if the cult followers who may have heard the message would believe any of it. If their leader or his acolytes don't say it they don't listen
There are two types of messages. The positive message of look what we did,and you should be grateful
And look what they did to you , but we can fix it.
Information including dis and mis information is purveyed to the public through the media. The media in it's various forms, depends on viewership. People will stop on the freeway to gawk at an accident, if it bleeds it leads, negativity, conflict, competitive sells. (The basis of all reality shows is competition and conflict)
The Republicans have mastered the art of selling fear, the Democrats have been selling hope. Fear Trumps hope.
And it hasn't helped that for the last 60 years, the Republican party has been pounding the fear drum, and we are at a point where "owning the lib" is more important to conservatives than even there own well being.
They don't care what Trump's reign will do them, because they have stuck it to the libs and good.
That is a fact that liberals have not yet come to grips with.
Brian L Thompson kills thousands by denying them medical care and becomes a martyr for corporate executioners like himself
Luigi Magione is arrested and faces life in prison for killing a man who has killed thousands.
Stalin said it. Kill one and it is murder, kill thousands and it is statistic
Murder is murder and is wrong, but some of us can literally get away with murder and some of us can't. It depends on your social status, wealth and position..
When it comes to people believing the "truth" that Re-Mags (I'm creating a new moniker for Republicans/Magats, Re-Mags!) dish out it's easy to believe that those undereducated that trump so loves will lap it right up.
~~~In the Dickens holiday favorite, "A Christmas Carol" the Ghost of Christmas Present conceals two starving, wretched children, a boy & girl under his cloak. When Scrooge asks the Ghost "Are they yours?" The Ghost replies, "They are man's! This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both but most of all beware this boy because upon their foreheads is written the word Doom!". Seems to me that once again we don't heed the cautioning of the classics.
~~~We allowed the dumbing down of ourselves & most especially our children & then the Re-Mags have been sure to call those of us lucky enough to have gotten decent educations & perhaps have gone on to college or good trade schools, we are referred to as "elitists". Neither of my folks went to college but they made damn well sure that my siblings & I did. So now, we're the "bad guys" because we question the status quo presented by Reaganomics. We're the "bad guys" for questioning the truthfulness of what trump & his lackeys say. We're "the enemy from within" & need to be removed, jailed, thrown into camps.(You don't really think those camps are just meant for immigrants do you?) We're the ones on the enemies' lists. Remember, when autocrats take over some of the first people to "go" are the intelligencia, you know, the people that have the nerve to question that Status Quo & what they are doing!
You lost me with calling Luigi Mangione a revolutionary. Last I looked, a revolutionary was someone who promoted, advocated, and/or actively worked for revolutionary change. Revolutions generally aren't solo efforts. Lone wolves don't make good revolutionaries -- anarchists perhaps, but not revolutionaries. Does Mangione think he's working for revolutionary change? Did he believe the assassination of Brian Thompson (whose name I keep having to look up) would kick off a revolution, or at least an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system? I don't know. He does remind me a bit of the right-on radicals of my youth, some of whom did call themselves revolutionaries. He's the right age, the right color, and the right sex, and like many of them he comes from an affluent background.
Susanna according to Luigi's three page manifesto he did perceive himself as a revolutionary.
Actually the assassination of Brian Thompson has achieved something a thousand law suits haven't, a deep dive into the practices of Health Insurance and the loss of thousands of lives for which they are responsible. In that sense it was a revolutionary act.
If those statistics on the lack of knowledge are correct (and I believe they are) can you imagine how many people weren't aware that Trump was an adjudicated rapist, stole thousands of top-secret documents and instigated January 6???? During Kamala's campaign I shouted to the void for her to bring these things up EVERY time she spoke but for some reason they were swept away and weren't broadcast to the millions that needed to hear it.
Jayme, the Democrats are wusses, all you have to do is listen to their strategists on MSNBC, worst of all their strategy is the shits. They focus on the positive, take the high road and have no message that can reach the ears of the people, and thus the Republicans dominate the airways with their negativity, slander and lies.
Mark Twain said a lie goes twice around the world while the truth is putting it's boots on.
As the song says You take the high road and I'll take the low road and I'll be in Scotland afore ye.
It is going to be quite a shock to those who voted for Trump because they wanted change when they find out that the change that happens will not be the change they hoped for.
Think about it. Is murder committed by an assassin with a gun more of a murder than a murder committed through gatekeeping that prevents access to health care for those lesser privileged? The majority of elected officials from BOTH cartel parties are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of citizens each year and hundreds of thousands of bankrupticies. All of them who made premeditated decisions in meeting rooms to enable these deaths and bankruptcies ought to be on trial for AT LEAST accessories to murder along with the assassin. The fact that partisan propaganda and corporate media have conspired to brainwash their rank and file party members into accepting murder by bandits with briefcases as legal, tolerable, and even "democratic" is indeed murder when viewed by critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning.
What about a class-action suit against either or both parties? As corporations, not government entities, neither should be able to claim qualified immunity. Asserting themselves as a corporation is how the Democratic Party weaseled out of rigging their own primary election. This time, the plaintiffs might have standing because there is no doubt many can demonstrate severe harm. Conspiracy to harm them might even be provable because the accepting bribery (err..."campaign donations") by those abetting the harm should be easy to document as motivation too.
Thom's Dillinger metaphor begs several questions. What if Thomas Crooks had been successful, and lying-Trump had been assassinated? Would Crooks have gotten the same folk hero treatment as Mangioni? Why is it that Americans are living P2P? Do health insurance premiums and uncovered procedures and meds play a role.?
I have posted elsewhere that the GOP has lied to the public since I was a toddler in the 1950s that "socialized medicine" not only would introduce evil Communism to America, but it would wind up depriving hard-working Americans of access to the best healthcare in the world, creating long waits to be seen by unmotivated incompetent physicians with no incentive to innovate and discover new treatments. The hubris of the American population that had already been brainwashed into fearing communism welcomed private health insurance to subsidize their healthcare.
The cost of that healthcare was softened by the introduction of employer-subsidized health insurance. So Americans arrogantly bought into the gaslight that America had the best healthcare system in the world. Meanwhile, Europe, right next door to the communist USSR and the battlefield of WWII, embraced socialized medical care. Today, the EU is evidence that it is cheaper to just let the government provide health care in exchange for a higher income tax. That free healthcare is also superior to America's employer-subsidized costly health insurance, is reflected in the US having the lowest life expectancy of any 1st-World nation (unless you are rich, then you live into your 90s).
Today, GOP legislators try to defend the private insurance system that subsidizes their staying in office (thanks to Citizens United). They assert that America cannot just overnight switch to a single-payer government healthcare system. Designing and implementing such a program would take decades and raise taxes.
In fact, America can and should switch - almost overnight. The structure is already in place. Nearly all doctors and health labs accept federal DOD Tricare, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare (ACA) insurance. Tricare is free to all military retirees as long as they enroll in cheapy Medicare B. The others offer free or highly subsidized medical care. You just have to be unable to pay for private insurance (i.e., be poor), or, be a member of Congress - ACA is their almost free health insurer.
In simple terms, Americans could escape being robbed by private sector healthcare almost instantly. Of course, the Insurance industry would rage at the millions of unemployed people whose sole job is to file and process claims. The cost of procedures would be capped at the cost already negotiated by government health insurance programs. The cost of drugs would plummet due to similar negotiated caps.
The Trump administration would rage that such a change would create a recession and bury people in high taxes. Of course, if you eliminated co-pays and insurance premiums both businesses and employees would surely see a positive impact on their checking accounts every month. It would eliminate billions in profits that would wind up in citizens' pockets.
The only real barrier to a national healthcare system is unmasking the mythology and lies that justify the national rip-off that has made Mr. Mangioni a folk hero.
The indemnity portion of lianbility insurance is nebulous compared to the the cost of future medical. Most costs occur at the end of life. Medicare is a risk loss plan -- only for the least insurable of the population, the halt, lame and blind and the aged and disabled.
I wasn't a lifer. Not a milirary retiree, but I am a federal retiree. I'm over insured -- on purpose -- my wife and I pay more but we can see what happens unless there's double coverage. We also have long term insurance -- just in case.
I was a cochair of an ABA committee that evaluated healthcare when Hilarycare was offered. There was a window of opportunity that she, personally, squandered. Had Obama forced the issue, we might have reopened the window.
As I keep sayin' the entities that would benefit MOST are big business. If Medicare for all were extended with elimination of the collateral sources rule, it would reduce the cost of all insurance and employers could lay off their risk exposure.
It pains me to see that a-holes like DOGE cannot distinguish between government payouts from general funds and from the trust funds. I'm sorry to say that some Democrats, like Obama, were ignorant about the trust funds.
I still think that we can endow the trust funds, especially the SS retirement and disability funds.
We have resorted to bad boy folk heroes since the foundation of this democracy has all but disappeared - schools that taught citizenship and critical thinking.
Let’s not just agonize over the mess we’re in, let’s organize and do something that will kill two birds with one stone - keep democracy alive while bringing back real schools. Check out WhiteChalkCrime.com and listen to teacher whistleblowers who for years have been trying to do something about the corruption in our schools that’s been slowly dismantling democracy. They can teach you what needs to be done so that democracy regains its rightful place in our schools. Getting the public to distrust teachers was the ingenious act that stole our schools - democracy’s foundation - from us. Turning teacher’s unions into servants for those in power left teachers too fearful to report the truth in the same way most fold under Trump’s power. Trusting called to teach teachers is the only way to get our foundation back. Then run or help others run for school boards on a “save democracy” and “end school shootings” platform. You don’t need a child in the school to do so. We have corrupt schools because good, democracy loving people don’t run for school boards, plain and simple. And now these boards are the only thing we can seize and flood with democracy. So go for it - either run or help people run in blocks to control each board.
Immensely potent post by Thom, and only segments of which any could possibly address. On the matter of celebrating the killer of a premier example of extant, massive corporate corruption, I cheer for the lad. Openly, and loud. My morality of record would prohibit me from endorsing any such reaction. And I, obedient to that moral creed, would deplore any such action, no matter the stimulus. But that was before the war--the war that has been launched and, with Trump's election, has taken a decisive high ground. From now on, underground resistence, Sartre style, including snipering key leaders, the ones most hated, contributing to the morale of all those made enemy. Rational people realize war and those who initiated it demand moral change in order to establish a larger moral sacrifice that will combat the murderous opposition that declared, with enabling propaganda, this war.
Bravo on this post - Substack awards need to be a thing.
On the reality we're living in: who could have predicted that violence would proliferate in an environment where every avenue of peaceful recourse has been blockaded, boarded up, booby trapped, buried, bought off, burned, back stabbed, belittled, bulldozed...
... as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.
.......
And as through your life you travel
Yes, as through your life you roam
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
Woody Guthrie, Pretty Boy Floyd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MwplKjk_O0
My thoughts exactly!
The Ballad Of John Dillinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVkQaf9iRYQ
The difference between Dillinger and Trump/ Musk is that the former robbed banks but the latter rob the U.S. Treasury.
Donald Trump is not the engineer on this train. He is just along for the ride and the fares. His “economics” and corruption are just the window dressing. If ever there were a time to pull the emergency cord to engage the brakes and stop the train, this is that time. The demented, devious, and calculating radicals who are the real engineers have been preparing for their moment for forty years. We have a little more than forty days left to erect our defenses and prepare for the announced onslaught.
Last night, I wrote a message at Whitehouse.gov to President Biden (or to whomever monitors the site) with a plea begging that he do everything possible to put impediments and barriers up to slow or stop the attacks from the fascists who are anxiously waiting to start the process of demolishing every institution in sight and eliminating the people who maintain them. I requested that he publicly address the impending danger directly and reassure the public that effective efforts are underway to protect and defend the country, democracy, and the people. I did not use the word panic. However, I described fear and foreboding which certainly amounts to panic for anyone who has been aware of what Trump and his wrecking crew have planned for us.
I suggested expanding the Supreme Court, although I doubt if that is possible at this late date. Others here have other ideas which may be more feasible or practical under the circumstances. Please send any ideas you have (abbreviated, or condensed, of course) to the Whitehouse.gov site. I would prefer to see the 2024 election voided because of massive documented foreign interference. But that is definitely too rash, brash, and bold to hope for from Democrats.
Surrender is suicide. These people mean business and they are ruthless and without conscience. We cannot rely solely on heroes such as Marc Elias and a handful of ACLU attorneys. What has been missing has been real leadership which is not based in the politics of self-promotion or self-preservation. Democracy’s defenders will have to step up or fascism’s steamroller will pulverize it and pound it into the ground. The healthcare ripoff is a sideshow. Who will unite the sane and the true lovers of freedom?
We are the victims of the Russian war on the USA. Putin admits he did it and demands quid pro quo from Trump. As far as I'm concerned the admission is dispositive and is actionalble and constitutes an emergency.
Yesterday, I laid out a possible Senate option. Dems still control the senate. Biden could, due to the national emergency require a report on what happened during the election. DOJ arrested some Russian agents on Sept. 4, two months before the vote. Put everything on hold.
I'd like to hear what Romney and Murkowski have to say...
We are awash in facts an information. Thom and his guests and many callers have known what was happening all along. But there is a disconnect and there are powerful forces and interests who are always able to keep the discussion and awareness contained. The lid is screwed on tight. The public is oblivious for the most part. No one feels motivated to blow the lid off or safe in trying to effect real change. The suffering is going to have to get really bad before people take things into their own hands and turn it all around, probably years from now. The only way this could have been prevented is to have real education and real social awareness starting very early, instead of fake schooling and indoctrination disguised as pretend education. It's easier to keep deluding yourself about our ludicrous factory schools as Thom has insisted on doing and blaming everything on the removal of civics classes long after sanguinity and sanity were removed with compulsion and bureaucracy.
1. For people like me who worked in the first Trump administration, it was already bad.
2. Never up, never in.
3. I keep referring you to the IEP. Lots of public school kids succeed. You'd throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I assume that "never up, never in" means you maintained your independence. That's admirable. There will not be any of that after 1/20/24. Could we please, please, PLEASE, retire that tired and ancient baby-with-the-bathwater metaphor? If I were to suggest throwing out bathwater it would be bathwater which is poisoned, foul, and lethal and in which no one should ever put a baby.
What do you believe I want to throw out, other than coercion, intimidation, fascism 101, behavioral modification, and multiple layers of dead bureaucracy? I advocate for doing away with intrusive and destructive laws. In their absence would be mutual respect, intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation, real meaningful engagement instead of feigned interest (for about 70 – 80%), encouragement rather than discouragement, and positivity where there is currently primarily cynicism, frustration, and rank hopelessness or negativity.
You really like those IEP’s! I have never proposed doing away with them. Maybe they would actually result in some much more accurate evaluations and way more useful and satisfying recommendations and remedial measures in an environment that is not misanthropic and hostile for about 1/3 – ½ of students. How about that? Keep them. Every single one. Not a problem. Hire yourself half-a-dozen more IEP experts. Once you are no longer paying all those a$$holes at the ed shed and all the other pointy-nosed fools whose main job it is to make new rules and write new punishments for defiant students (which will no longer be defiant as voluntary participants and recipients of self-directed instruction and information), the money will be there.
Until now, we had a democracy. Except for students in traditional public schools. Now, you are surprised that our citizens who spent over a decade being subservient, disrespected, and abused know next to nothing about it or prefer to be led around by the nose?
Before we dispense with the subject of IEP’s I am also obliged to say that they are predicated on premises and conceptions which are all but meaningless, in my humble estimation. Our entire school edifices are built around a cognitive and knowledge paradigm which is roughly 400 years out of date. I do not buy any of that nonsense, such as 4th grade level reading or ninth grade level math, and all of the absurd tests which do nothing for any kid. Our systems are designed according to disembodied knowledge. Knowledge is embodied. A few rare educators have gotten that message. But they are proscribed from ever utilizing their knowledge in systems with authority and obedience to authority at their center.
I will take issue with one thing Thom said. It was actually Clinton, not Bush, who signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law. This law undid Glass-Steagall, and led to the mortgage bundling (bungling?) craze that caused the Great Recession of 2008.
Jeffrey: President Bill Clinton's signing statement for the GLBA summarized the established argument for repealing Glass–Steagall Section's 20 and 32 in stating that this change, and the GLBA's amendments to the Bank Holding Company Act, would "enhance the stability of our financial services system" by permitting financial firms to "diversify their product offerings and thus their sources of revenue" and make financial firms "better equipped to compete in global financial markets."[1][2]: 223 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_the_repeal_of_the_Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act#:~:text=President%20Bill%20Clinton's%20signing,services%20system%22%20by%20permitting%20financial
My question is this: If we have a Minimum Wage, why don't we have a Maximum Wage? Seems to me that anyone should be able to live comfortably on $2 million a year. I recently read that the average CEO salary is $29 million a year. What kind of greedy pig needs that much to survive?
Be careful of what you wish Grace. Have you read any of Charles Dickens books, or even seen The Christmas Carol. Dickensenian England was marked by the maximum wage.
Scrooge paid Tiny Tim's father the maximum wage. The maximum wage was used to keep the common man in poverty and under control of the employer.
Corporate execs are not paid a salary per se, they earn benefits, stocks, and sell those stocks and avoid taxes by use of the tax law,if they pay taxes at all on stock sales, they pay a capital gains rate, which is less than the rate I pay.
BrianThompson received a total compensation package last year of $10.2 million, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants.
He did not pay taxes on the stock grant. You only pay taxes when sold, and often if managed right you can sell them and record a loss.And the loss offsets the gain.
Perhaps instead of a maximum wage, we need a way to have stock restrictions or a total net worth ceiling. It just seems insane to me that people with billions don’t understand or care about us, the ordinary people including those who must struggle to survive while others live in such luxury.
I totally agree, I think they could produce a correlation of a corporation
as to fatalities in their relationship to CEO Pay, the more deaths, the greater the pay.
Beyond BRILLIANT - ashamed more people do not understand this - and the way the Dems handled the recent election did not at all address the real problems or send a message to the people who needed to hear it - in the way it needed to be told. So sad that this is happening to what was once such a great country
They did have a message but it was overshadowed by the propaganda of the right. They weren't able to get that message into the silos of the rightwing gaslighters. Though, I doubt if the cult followers who may have heard the message would believe any of it. If their leader or his acolytes don't say it they don't listen
There are two types of messages. The positive message of look what we did,and you should be grateful
And look what they did to you , but we can fix it.
Information including dis and mis information is purveyed to the public through the media. The media in it's various forms, depends on viewership. People will stop on the freeway to gawk at an accident, if it bleeds it leads, negativity, conflict, competitive sells. (The basis of all reality shows is competition and conflict)
The Republicans have mastered the art of selling fear, the Democrats have been selling hope. Fear Trumps hope.
And it hasn't helped that for the last 60 years, the Republican party has been pounding the fear drum, and we are at a point where "owning the lib" is more important to conservatives than even there own well being.
They don't care what Trump's reign will do them, because they have stuck it to the libs and good.
That is a fact that liberals have not yet come to grips with.
American values
Brian L Thompson kills thousands by denying them medical care and becomes a martyr for corporate executioners like himself
Luigi Magione is arrested and faces life in prison for killing a man who has killed thousands.
Stalin said it. Kill one and it is murder, kill thousands and it is statistic
Murder is murder and is wrong, but some of us can literally get away with murder and some of us can't. It depends on your social status, wealth and position..
When it comes to people believing the "truth" that Re-Mags (I'm creating a new moniker for Republicans/Magats, Re-Mags!) dish out it's easy to believe that those undereducated that trump so loves will lap it right up.
~~~In the Dickens holiday favorite, "A Christmas Carol" the Ghost of Christmas Present conceals two starving, wretched children, a boy & girl under his cloak. When Scrooge asks the Ghost "Are they yours?" The Ghost replies, "They are man's! This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both but most of all beware this boy because upon their foreheads is written the word Doom!". Seems to me that once again we don't heed the cautioning of the classics.
~~~We allowed the dumbing down of ourselves & most especially our children & then the Re-Mags have been sure to call those of us lucky enough to have gotten decent educations & perhaps have gone on to college or good trade schools, we are referred to as "elitists". Neither of my folks went to college but they made damn well sure that my siblings & I did. So now, we're the "bad guys" because we question the status quo presented by Reaganomics. We're the "bad guys" for questioning the truthfulness of what trump & his lackeys say. We're "the enemy from within" & need to be removed, jailed, thrown into camps.(You don't really think those camps are just meant for immigrants do you?) We're the ones on the enemies' lists. Remember, when autocrats take over some of the first people to "go" are the intelligencia, you know, the people that have the nerve to question that Status Quo & what they are doing!
Luigi for president!
Hell, he's no more murderous than the incoming one...
Or the insurance companies.
Juror nullification.
And you are, thereby, nullified.
You lost me with calling Luigi Mangione a revolutionary. Last I looked, a revolutionary was someone who promoted, advocated, and/or actively worked for revolutionary change. Revolutions generally aren't solo efforts. Lone wolves don't make good revolutionaries -- anarchists perhaps, but not revolutionaries. Does Mangione think he's working for revolutionary change? Did he believe the assassination of Brian Thompson (whose name I keep having to look up) would kick off a revolution, or at least an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system? I don't know. He does remind me a bit of the right-on radicals of my youth, some of whom did call themselves revolutionaries. He's the right age, the right color, and the right sex, and like many of them he comes from an affluent background.
Susanna according to Luigi's three page manifesto he did perceive himself as a revolutionary.
Actually the assassination of Brian Thompson has achieved something a thousand law suits haven't, a deep dive into the practices of Health Insurance and the loss of thousands of lives for which they are responsible. In that sense it was a revolutionary act.
If those statistics on the lack of knowledge are correct (and I believe they are) can you imagine how many people weren't aware that Trump was an adjudicated rapist, stole thousands of top-secret documents and instigated January 6???? During Kamala's campaign I shouted to the void for her to bring these things up EVERY time she spoke but for some reason they were swept away and weren't broadcast to the millions that needed to hear it.
Jayme, the Democrats are wusses, all you have to do is listen to their strategists on MSNBC, worst of all their strategy is the shits. They focus on the positive, take the high road and have no message that can reach the ears of the people, and thus the Republicans dominate the airways with their negativity, slander and lies.
Mark Twain said a lie goes twice around the world while the truth is putting it's boots on.
As the song says You take the high road and I'll take the low road and I'll be in Scotland afore ye.
It is going to be quite a shock to those who voted for Trump because they wanted change when they find out that the change that happens will not be the change they hoped for.
Think about it. Is murder committed by an assassin with a gun more of a murder than a murder committed through gatekeeping that prevents access to health care for those lesser privileged? The majority of elected officials from BOTH cartel parties are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of citizens each year and hundreds of thousands of bankrupticies. All of them who made premeditated decisions in meeting rooms to enable these deaths and bankruptcies ought to be on trial for AT LEAST accessories to murder along with the assassin. The fact that partisan propaganda and corporate media have conspired to brainwash their rank and file party members into accepting murder by bandits with briefcases as legal, tolerable, and even "democratic" is indeed murder when viewed by critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning.
Why can't they be charged with criminal negligence?
IMHO they can.
What about a class-action suit against either or both parties? As corporations, not government entities, neither should be able to claim qualified immunity. Asserting themselves as a corporation is how the Democratic Party weaseled out of rigging their own primary election. This time, the plaintiffs might have standing because there is no doubt many can demonstrate severe harm. Conspiracy to harm them might even be provable because the accepting bribery (err..."campaign donations") by those abetting the harm should be easy to document as motivation too.
Today Michael Moore expressed similar sentiment. I half expected his post to be blocked because I could not open the link for a long time. Michael Moore does not stooge for a Party, as so many Substack sites actually have become. He calls out malfeasance by all perpetrators. See https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/a-manifesto-against-for-profit-health?publication_id=320974&post_id=153048771&isFreemail=false&r=rdp7&triedRedirect=true
Thom's Dillinger metaphor begs several questions. What if Thomas Crooks had been successful, and lying-Trump had been assassinated? Would Crooks have gotten the same folk hero treatment as Mangioni? Why is it that Americans are living P2P? Do health insurance premiums and uncovered procedures and meds play a role.?
I have posted elsewhere that the GOP has lied to the public since I was a toddler in the 1950s that "socialized medicine" not only would introduce evil Communism to America, but it would wind up depriving hard-working Americans of access to the best healthcare in the world, creating long waits to be seen by unmotivated incompetent physicians with no incentive to innovate and discover new treatments. The hubris of the American population that had already been brainwashed into fearing communism welcomed private health insurance to subsidize their healthcare.
The cost of that healthcare was softened by the introduction of employer-subsidized health insurance. So Americans arrogantly bought into the gaslight that America had the best healthcare system in the world. Meanwhile, Europe, right next door to the communist USSR and the battlefield of WWII, embraced socialized medical care. Today, the EU is evidence that it is cheaper to just let the government provide health care in exchange for a higher income tax. That free healthcare is also superior to America's employer-subsidized costly health insurance, is reflected in the US having the lowest life expectancy of any 1st-World nation (unless you are rich, then you live into your 90s).
Today, GOP legislators try to defend the private insurance system that subsidizes their staying in office (thanks to Citizens United). They assert that America cannot just overnight switch to a single-payer government healthcare system. Designing and implementing such a program would take decades and raise taxes.
In fact, America can and should switch - almost overnight. The structure is already in place. Nearly all doctors and health labs accept federal DOD Tricare, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare (ACA) insurance. Tricare is free to all military retirees as long as they enroll in cheapy Medicare B. The others offer free or highly subsidized medical care. You just have to be unable to pay for private insurance (i.e., be poor), or, be a member of Congress - ACA is their almost free health insurer.
In simple terms, Americans could escape being robbed by private sector healthcare almost instantly. Of course, the Insurance industry would rage at the millions of unemployed people whose sole job is to file and process claims. The cost of procedures would be capped at the cost already negotiated by government health insurance programs. The cost of drugs would plummet due to similar negotiated caps.
The Trump administration would rage that such a change would create a recession and bury people in high taxes. Of course, if you eliminated co-pays and insurance premiums both businesses and employees would surely see a positive impact on their checking accounts every month. It would eliminate billions in profits that would wind up in citizens' pockets.
The only real barrier to a national healthcare system is unmasking the mythology and lies that justify the national rip-off that has made Mr. Mangioni a folk hero.
The indemnity portion of lianbility insurance is nebulous compared to the the cost of future medical. Most costs occur at the end of life. Medicare is a risk loss plan -- only for the least insurable of the population, the halt, lame and blind and the aged and disabled.
I wasn't a lifer. Not a milirary retiree, but I am a federal retiree. I'm over insured -- on purpose -- my wife and I pay more but we can see what happens unless there's double coverage. We also have long term insurance -- just in case.
I was a cochair of an ABA committee that evaluated healthcare when Hilarycare was offered. There was a window of opportunity that she, personally, squandered. Had Obama forced the issue, we might have reopened the window.
As I keep sayin' the entities that would benefit MOST are big business. If Medicare for all were extended with elimination of the collateral sources rule, it would reduce the cost of all insurance and employers could lay off their risk exposure.
It pains me to see that a-holes like DOGE cannot distinguish between government payouts from general funds and from the trust funds. I'm sorry to say that some Democrats, like Obama, were ignorant about the trust funds.
I still think that we can endow the trust funds, especially the SS retirement and disability funds.
We have resorted to bad boy folk heroes since the foundation of this democracy has all but disappeared - schools that taught citizenship and critical thinking.
Let’s not just agonize over the mess we’re in, let’s organize and do something that will kill two birds with one stone - keep democracy alive while bringing back real schools. Check out WhiteChalkCrime.com and listen to teacher whistleblowers who for years have been trying to do something about the corruption in our schools that’s been slowly dismantling democracy. They can teach you what needs to be done so that democracy regains its rightful place in our schools. Getting the public to distrust teachers was the ingenious act that stole our schools - democracy’s foundation - from us. Turning teacher’s unions into servants for those in power left teachers too fearful to report the truth in the same way most fold under Trump’s power. Trusting called to teach teachers is the only way to get our foundation back. Then run or help others run for school boards on a “save democracy” and “end school shootings” platform. You don’t need a child in the school to do so. We have corrupt schools because good, democracy loving people don’t run for school boards, plain and simple. And now these boards are the only thing we can seize and flood with democracy. So go for it - either run or help people run in blocks to control each board.
Immensely potent post by Thom, and only segments of which any could possibly address. On the matter of celebrating the killer of a premier example of extant, massive corporate corruption, I cheer for the lad. Openly, and loud. My morality of record would prohibit me from endorsing any such reaction. And I, obedient to that moral creed, would deplore any such action, no matter the stimulus. But that was before the war--the war that has been launched and, with Trump's election, has taken a decisive high ground. From now on, underground resistence, Sartre style, including snipering key leaders, the ones most hated, contributing to the morale of all those made enemy. Rational people realize war and those who initiated it demand moral change in order to establish a larger moral sacrifice that will combat the murderous opposition that declared, with enabling propaganda, this war.