Just Imagine

Just imagine what it would be like now if George W. Bush and the Republicans were allowed to privatize Social Security and Medicare.

Think about that when you go vote! What kind of economic disaster would it be if Social Security and Medicare recipients stopped getting their checks?

Electronic Voting FAIL!

American News Project update

I just posted a new video at sageofspringfield.com from American News Project, of an interview with Dan Rather and Jim Lehrer that.

The piece titled "The Gospel according to Lehrer and Rather" by Davin Hutchins confirms my suspicions about the news media.

Senator Durbin Under Attack

The Far Right continues to suffer a seemingly endless series of back-firing attacks on Democrats. They tried to go after Barak Obama in ways that only stirred up John McCain's links to the Keating Five scandal, the Iran-Contra scandal, and others.

Now the NeoCons are trying to go after Senator Durbin for saying the words in this video which completely edited out the topic of his speech:



In a letter to the editor that was allowed to be published by the Illinois State Journal Register, a reader repeated the false assertion that Senator Durbin's statement was a general description about all the troops, instead of the few responsible for the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"Won’t forget Durbin comment about troops
I will never vote for a U.S. senator who compares our troops to the soldiers of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the Pol Pot regime.
Sen. Dick Durbin hopes that we will forget that he made these comparisons on the floor of the Senate, but we won’t. I personally remind people every chance that I get.

Please join me in voting against this man in November. He is not worthy of the position he currently holds. We need to fire him and replace him with a responsible person who respects our troops.

Don Day
Chatham"

--letter to the Editor. Illinois State Journal Register, October 17, 2008

Letters to the Editor are typical fodder for AM talk-radio personalities that exploit the suffering of listeners by making false villains and falsely blaming certain politicians for the favors of their opponents.

Letters like the one above will most likely be repeated by someone on the radio, then repeated by other conservative main-stream media outlets as alleged truth.

But this doesn't work anymore. It won't work against Senator Durbin, because we cannot forget what he was talking about.

Senator Durbin was talking about the few individuals responsible for Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse.

The Cost of Health Care

Listening to all of the candidates and all of the pundits I keep hearing the same message regarding insurance and health care. They say they will find a way for us to afford health care, or they will find a way for us to get insurance for health care.

Nobody is asking the questions: "Why is health care so expensive?" or "Why should we need insurance to pay for health care?"

If you're going to want health care in the U.S. why get insurance? Why not just get a loan and buy an extra house or plot of land to invest in for the sole purpose of selling it if you need to pay medical bills?

What? They won't let you do that? Do they make you throw your money down a bottomless pit each month, forcing you to gamble on a chance that you will get sick? There's a fifty-fifty chance that you won't be covered anyway.

The real candidates for public office will have to guts to say "We are going after the Medical Industrial Complex." Everyone else is bogus.

We need congressional hearings about medical costs and those costs need to be justified. Everyone seems to be too terrified to confront this issue, or they are in the pockets of the big drug companies. Health care is not supposed to be part of capitalism.

There is a parallel between politics and medicine. In politics, the public elects candidates who are good at getting themselves elected, but consistently fail at doing the job for which they were elected. In medicine. The money and prestige appears to be the primary motivation behind the pursuit of such careers, overriding the intrinsic benefit of scientific inquiry and maintaining a healthy community.

Hospitals and clinics are absorbed into the fold of giant corporations. Urgent care clinics have the same atmosphere as auto repair shops. Instead of posters advertising tires and shock absorbers, these clinics have posters advertising pharmaceuticals.

The term "doctor" is no longer used in most documentation anymore. Now it's "health care provider" because for liability reasons, you may not see an actual doctor until it's almost too late.

Hospitals and clinics fail when they don't have patients. When people are healthy, pharmaceutical manufacturers lose on Wall Street.

In the end, the societal models in Dietrich Dorner's book "The Logic of Failure" indicate that universal health care might result in overpopulation, perhaps of the "wrong" kind.

Banking Baloon Smoke and Mirror Swindle

The banking crisis arose from the extraction of uncontrolled bonuses, salaries, employee stock options, and expenditures on lobbying the government.

Now bankers want taxpayers to replace in the bank, money that was pocketed by these swindling financial market executives.

Meanwhile, President Bush said that it will be a while before the billions of dollars are doled out, and Wall Street is shuddering from withdrawal pains.

The whole Wall Street bailout is nothing but a gigantic swindle.

American News Project

American News Project posted several reports about the banking crisis that supports some of what I wrote previously.


• Senator Byron Dorgan's uncanny ability to predict the future.
http://newsproject.org/node/135

• An economist eludes to the banking elites getting all of the gains from the bailout.
http://newsproject.org/node/136

• The actual faces of the Wall Street elites.
http://newsproject.org/node/122

• The end of free-market capitalism and the consequence of Ronald Reagan's philosophy that government is the problem. They finally get it.
http://newsproject.org/node/130

What do they mean by the Banking Industry?

The media continue to make the generalization "banking industry" when in fact they are referring only to a few Wall Street giants. There are other banks, hundreds of other banks in the shadows of the those giant firms, waiting for the fall of the skyscraping ivory towers made out of rickety unstable timbers called "credit."

Credit is a crutch. After the last depression people bought only what they needed, and then only when they saved up enough money to make the purchase outright.

Credit allowed people to buy things immediately instead of saving up enough to make the purchase later. If you had to actually sit down and figure out how long it would take you to buy a car outright by saving up part of your wages, you and everyone else would be outraged.

Try it out. Get a calculator and go through your credit card statement and figure out how long it would take you to actually make those purchases outright by saving up the hard earned cash.

Money is flowing out of your town faster than everyone in your town can earn it. The money is almost gone.

Interest payments to Citibank and other Wall Street firms, the purchase of products not made in your own state, gasoline, fast-food franchises in your state paying for their supplies to companies in another state and dividends to their investors who live elsewhere, and lease payments made by shopping mall stores to the property owners in Australia or Saudi Arabia.

It was reported on National Public Radio (NPR) that Walmart is starting the Christmas shopping season very early this year because more shoppers at Walmart are living paycheck to paycheck.

So the biggest hole in this sinking ship is credit. I was lucky to get out of it in 2001. Taking the time to make a budget and save up to buy things instead of using credit takes getting used to but it is well worth it.