The cost of health insurance in the US has been steadily rising. Since most people get their health insurance through their workplace, employers have been passing on much of the increased costs to the employees in the form of high-deductible policies but it still represents a big cost for businesses. For a long time, I wondered why big business were not the biggest supporters of government-run, single-payer health care systems like Medicare For All since that would shed them of one of their biggest costs as well as rid them of all the cumbersome paperwork that accompanies it. You would think that this would be a good thing for them. So why were they not the biggest supporters? I had put it down to their ideological dislike of anything that smacks of socialism.
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That is what Kevin Baker argues in the September 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine. He says that it explains why we seem to live in a state of permanent murkiness where abuses happen but are never investigated or if investigated are never resolved or if resolved the findings are buried, one after another, until we get numb and inert. He reviews how little we still know about the major deceptions carried out by the US government in the 55 years that have elapsed since the Gulf of Tonkin.
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There is no question that affordable universal health care coverage is an idea that has caught on as the awfulness of the current system becomes increasingly apparent, and almost all the Democratic candidates have signed on to it. The most comprehensive plan, and in my view the simplest one to understand and implement, is the Medicare for All plan proposed back in the 2016 campaign by Bernie Sanders and endorsed by most progressives. So where does this leave those ‘centrist’ and ‘moderate’ Democrats (those being euphemisms for Democratic politicians like Joe Biden whose have strong allegiances to the business and financial world) who do not wish to alienate the health insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital lobbies whose profits feel threatened by this proposal? These groups come under the labels of Third Way and the Center for American Progress and are favored by the Democratic party establishment.
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Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the attacks of 9/11 have been good for the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and the entire counter-terrorism industry in the US that have used them to get increased funding and powers. In order to keep those dollars flowing, the FBI has had to repeatedly show success in fighting terrorism and one of the means of doing that is setting up sting operations. If they cannot find real threats, they will create ones.
Trevor Aronson writes about a new satirical film The Day Shall Come based on many of the real-life sting operations conducted by the FBI that recruits hapless people with absurd ideas and then coaxes them to take part in ridiculous plots that are then grandly ‘exposed’ by the agency.
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The beginning of the impeachment process seems to have sent Donald Trump into a rage, leading him to call six members of Congress ‘savages’. But it looks like things are only going to get worse for him because people are now looking back over the timeline of events on the Ukraine scandal and starting to connect the dots and it turns out that there are a lot of dots all over the place. One is the abrupt firing on July 28th of Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence (DNI), just three days after the infamous phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky,, and the insistence by Donald Trump that the deputy director Sue Gordon, a career intelligence professional, not be given the job and that indeed she should resign, which she reluctantly did.
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You may remember the case of a driver who used a van to plow into pedestrians on a busy street in Toronto on April 2018 and killed 10 and injured 16. A judge has lifted a publication ban on a four-hour interview that he gave after being arrested, where he says that he was inspired to start a revolution by online videos made by so-called ‘incels’, the term that involuntary celibates give themselves.
The attack traumatized Canada’s largest city, and cast a spotlight on the so-called “incel” online subculture of men united by sexual frustration and a hatred of women.
…In a nearly four-hour interview after his arrest, Minassian told police officers that he was virgin who had never had a girlfriend, admitted to using the van as a weapon and said he wanted to inspire more attacks.
Asked how he felt about the death of 10 people, he replied: “I feel like I accomplished my mission.”
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One of the things that happen when there is a chance of progressives achieving positions that have at least some significant power is that the curtain that hides oligarchic control of the political system gets pulled back a bit and we get to see how the system really works. While Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a spirited challenge in 2016, she was never in any real danger of not getting the nomination, especially since in that race the primary rules with its super-delegates weighted the result heavily in her favor. Hence the big money interests in the Democratic party had nothing to fear from either her or Donald Trump becoming president because they win either way. So many Wall Street executives could contribute to the Democrats because they tend to not be right-wing bigots on social issues.
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Anyone who hangs round children will have heard of Raffi, the singer of songs that have a great appeal for the little ones. My personal favorite is Baby Beluga.
Inspired by the activism of young people around the world like Greta Thunberg, he has come out with a new song about climate change called Young People Marching.
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I had the idea that the whistleblower complaint filed by the unidentified intelligence official who had concerns about the deal that Donald Trump was negotiating with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was of a general nature, expressing misgivings about a single phone call. But the complaint itself that was filed with the inspector general has been released and it is very detailed and covers events over a period of time and involves multiple sources expressing concerns. It contains even more damaging information than the quasi-transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky. It describes a concerted pattern of pressure applied to Zelensky even before he was sworn into office.
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