May 8, 2015

But, McCamy, watch this speech:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12805180

Sorry, but Bernie doesn't have to apologize. Why support a candidate who has to apologize, whether Byrd or Hillary when you have a candidate that is smart, most often right in his judgment even on complex foreign policy issues and can speak with moral authority, authenticity, a candidate we can trust through and through.

Again. Watch this.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12805180

It's Bernie and he is the best qualified to be president in 2016. Authentic, honest and very, very wise. No need to apologize. And if he does need to apologize about something, he will be ready to do it.

Bernie is our candidate for 2016. I'm just amazed at this speech.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12805180

May 7, 2015

As I usually do in preparing for an election, I am gathering articles, books and information

on the candidates that I may refer to when preparing to stand on a street corner or somewhere and talk to voters.

Here is the first document that I have printed out and will file in a notebook in order to refresh my memory from time to time (with acknowledgement to Loonix who posted it first):

f You’re Wondering If Hillary Is Turning Populist, Just Ask Her Banker Friends

Hillary Clinton is trying to recast herself as the future president of the people—but she’ll need more than a PR campaign to erase her longstanding ties to Wall Street.

<snip>To grasp the dangers that the Big Six banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) presently pose to the financial stability of our nation and the world, you need to understand their history in Washington, starting with the Clinton years of the 1990s. Alliances established then (not exclusively with Democrats, since bankers are bipartisan by nature) enabled these firms to become as politically powerful as they are today and to exert that power over an unprecedented amount of capital. Rest assured of one thing: their past and present CEOs will prove as critical in backing a Hillary Clinton presidency as they were in enabling her husband’s years in office.

http://www.thenation.com/article/206625/if-youre-wondering-if-hillary-turning-populist-just-ask-her-banker-friends?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

May 4, 2015

Do you know of an alternative?

I don't think there is one.

The icebergs that are melting are adding fresh or unsalty water to the ocean.

Icebergs that break off into the ocean from glaciers do not contain salt, as they are formed by freshwater on land (snow, ice).

Icebergs that form in the ocean mostly do not contain salt either. This is because as the seawater freezes, it forms a crystal structure (ice) that prevents salt ions from being included.

http://www.answers.com/Q/Do_icebergs_contain_sal

I suppose the salt we would put in would not change the proportion of the salt in the ocean all that much. A lot of the water we use goes right back into the ocean. We are on the coast.

What is storm water pollution?

Storm water pollution is when water from rainstorms, garden hoses and sprinklers causes runoff that collects harmful debris and flows through local creeks, rivers and lakes - eventually draining, untreated, into the ocean.
. . . .
Los Angeles is located in four watersheds - Los Angeles River, Ballona Creek, Dominguez Channel and Santa Monica Bay. The water from these four watersheds flows into San Pedro and Santa Monica Bays and ultimately into the Pacific Ocean.
. . . .
Storm water flows do not receive any treatment because of the sheer volume of runoff – tens of millions of gallons on even the driest day – from an area encompassing more than 1,000 square miles.
. . . .

The sanitary sewer system takes waste water from toilets, showers and sinks and routes it to one of several waste water treatment plants here in Los Angeles. Once there, it receives multiple levels of treatment before being discharged into the ocean.

more

http://www.lastormwater.org/about-us/frequently-asked-questions/

We put a lot of water that is salty in the ocean, so if we put salt in it too, I suppose it won't be such a problem.

May 3, 2015

Great work! Hillary and Bill could do a lot of good with their foundation if they stuck

to doing the foundation work.

But their foundation relies on donations from extremely wealthy people to do that good work.

And that is where a problem arises if we want to get big money, the money of wealth and influence out of our government and have a government that governs for all of us.

It is very difficult to go to wealthy people for money and then turn around and speak out for some cause or law that the wealthy people do not want.

I worked in fundraising for eight years. I know all about the influence that wealthy people and their money can have on you when you go out begging for donations for good causes.

I left fundraising when I caught myself going down my list of friends and categorizing them according to whether they were rich enough to give a sizable donation to the homeless project I worked on. I realized at that point that somehow the need to fund the project was causing me to place the value of wealth, my need for money, above the value of human qualities. I'm not sure many will understand what I mean by this.

But to put it another way, I felt that I might be beginning to "suck up" to people who had money because I needed their money for the project that I and others were working together on. I felt that I was developing discrimination against old friends just because they were not wealthy. I'm exaggerating a bit, but some will understand what I mean.

When you try to raise money from the wealthy, you begin to spend a lot of time with them. You think about entertaining them according to their tastes. They invite you for lunch at their clubs, etc. and if you do enough of that, you lose the sense of the value of people who are middle class and poor and you lose touch with life outside the elite clubs. You go home to your modest house and life and you feel poor.

I don't think I can explain this well.

May 3, 2015

This morning i woke up thinking about a friend of mine who lost her job some years ago

due to a leveraged buy-out and through no fault of her own. (She was an exemplary employee.) Within 7 months after losing her job, she was diagnosed with cancer. Of course, having lost her job, she had no health insurance. (Even with Obamacare, I'm not sure she is covered.) Her medications cost thousands of dollars a month. She and her husband had purchased a home years ago but still owed on the mortgage.

She got Medical, but there is something that most people do not know about Medicaid and Medical.

Here is is:

Under Medicaid law, following the death of the Medicaid recipient a state must attempt to recover from his or her estate whatever long-term care benefits it paid for the recipient's care. States also have the option of recovering all Medicaid benefits from individuals over age 55, including costs for any medical care, not just long-term care benefits. However, no recovery can take place until the death of the recipient's spouse, or as long as there is a child of the deceased who is under age 21 or who is blind or disabled.

While states must attempt to recover funds from the Medicaid recipient's probate estate, meaning property that is held in the beneficiary's name only, they have the option of seeking recovery against property in which the recipient had an interest but which passes outside of probate. This includes jointly held assets, assets in a living trust, or life estates. Given the rules for Medicaid eligibility, the only probate property of substantial value that a Medicaid recipient is likely to own at death is his or her home. However, states that have not opted to broaden their estate recovery to include non-probate assets may not make a claim against the Medicaid recipient's home if it is not in his or her probate estate.

In addition to the right to recover from the estate of the Medicaid beneficiary, state Medicaid agencies must place a lien on real estate owned by a Medicaid beneficiary during his or her life unless certain dependent relatives are living in the property. If the property is sold while the Medicaid beneficiary is living, not only will the beneficiary cease to be eligible for Medicaid due to the cash from the sale, but the beneficiary would have to satisfy the lien by paying back the state for its coverage of care to date. The exceptions to this rule are cases where a spouse, a disabled or blind child, a child under age 21, or a sibling with an equity interest in the house is living there.

Whether or not a lien is placed on the house, the lien's purpose should only be for recovery of Medicaid expenses if the house is sold during the beneficiary's life. The lien should be removed upon the beneficiary's death. However, check with an elder law attorney in your state to see how your local agency applies this federal rule.

http://www.elderlawanswers.com/medicaids-power-to-recoup-benefits-paid-estate-recovery-and-liens-12018

Medicaid is not a gift to those who are buying or who own their homes. It is sort of a way of means-testing qualification for Medicaid. So no matter how hard my friend had worked, once she had medical bills in the thousands and thousands, it was gone or most of it was gone.

Cancer and many other expensive diseases including end-of-life care in a nursing home impoverish people at random.

I thought about this when I woke up today. How many heart operations has Dick Cheney had? And he of course is covered by excellent insurance and will not lose his home. But if you or I or our parents or families suffered from a medical problem and faced a choice between paying huge amounts for medications and operations or death, we would suffer and if we had been fortunate enough to buy a house or save money, it would be gone in a flash as it was with my friend.

Obamacare has helped to alleviate this problem, but we still have many people uninsured.

Everyone deserves the kind of healthcare that Dick Cheney has received (even Cheney in my opinion) and we need a system of healthcare that really provides the health insurance to cover that care for EVERYONE, and not just those who qualify for Obamacare and for health insurance in general.

I lived in European countries in which health care was viewed as a right. Of the countries in which I lived, I liked the French system the best. French doctors saved my life, and I was not a French citizen. I had health insurance from another European country, but France took care of me anyway.

That's the kind of health care we need in America. Everyone, even those between jobs, should have the health care they choose. Under the healthcare plan I had, I could choose my doctor. Virtually all doctors were available on my plan, and I could pick a different doctor every few months if I felt I was not getting the care I needed.

Now, think about all I have said and the fact that the Republicans just tried to eliminate any estate taxes on the rich.

The Medicaid claim to the assets of a person who needs a lot of expensive care wipes out the assets of many hardworking people in the middle class. We need to change this, and if everyone pays a fair share to insure against severe illness, we can change this.

I'm voting for Bernie. I don't know whether he agrees with me on my view of health insurance, but I think he has a similar view.

And yes, Bernie is right about Scandinavia. We should learn from them and from the Germans and Austrians and Swiss on many issues.

We can still work on our own problems with racism before we worry about the problems with racism in other countries. Baltimore and Ferguson are my problems, not Stockholm. I want to copy the good things that the Scandinavians do and when our race relations are so good we can brag about them, then we can tell the Scandinavians how to correct theirs.

March 14, 2015

Again, one word: GREENSPAN.

I want the Clintons to explain why in the world Bill Clinton reappointed an Ayn Rand disciple like GREENSPAN to the Fed.

There is no excuse for a Democrat appointing a person who literally sat in Ayn Rand's salon to the Fed. No excuse.

I do not trust either of the Clintons.

" Democratic president Bill Clinton reappointed Greenspan, and consulted him on economic matters. Greenspan lent support to Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction program.[28] Greenspan, while still fundamentally monetarist in orientation, had eclectic views on the economy, and his monetary policy decisions largely followed standard Taylor rule prescriptions (see Taylor 1993 and 1999).

In 2000, Greenspan raised interest rates several times; these actions were believed by many to have caused the bursting of the dot-com bubble. According to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, however, "he didn't raise interest rates to curb the market's enthusiasm; he didn't even seek to impose margin requirements on stock market investors. Instead, he waited until the bubble burst, as it did in 2000, then tried to clean up the mess afterward".[29] E. Ray Canterbery agrees with Krugman's criticism.[30]"

. . . .

In the early 1950s, Greenspan began an association with novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand.[45] Greenspan was introduced to Rand by his first wife, Joan Mitchell. Rand nicknamed Greenspan "the undertaker" because of his penchant for dark clothing and reserved demeanor. Although Greenspan was initially a logical positivist,[53] he was converted to Rand's philosophy of Objectivism by her associate Nathaniel Branden. He became one of the members of Rand's inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. During the 1950s and 1960s Greenspan was a proponent of Objectivism, writing articles for Objectivist newsletters and contributing several essays for Rand's 1966 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal including an essay supporting the gold standard.[54][55] Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Greenspan and Rand remained friends until her death in 1982.[45]

He has come under criticism from Harry Binswanger,[56] who believes his actions while at work for the Federal Reserve and his publicly expressed opinions on other issues show abandonment of Objectivist and free market principles. When questioned in relation to this, however, he has said that in a democratic society individuals have to make compromises with each other over conflicting ideas of how money should be handled. He said he himself had to make such compromises, because he believes that "we did extremely well" without a central bank and with a gold standard.[57] In a congressional hearing on October 23, 2008, Greenspan admitted that his free-market ideology shunning certain regulations was flawed.[58] When asked about free markets and Rand's ideas, however, Greenspan clarified his stance on laissez faire capitalism and asserted that in a democratic society there could be no better alternative. He stated that the errors that were made stemmed not from the principle, but from the application of competitive markets in "assuming what the nature of risks would be".[59]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan

Was Clinton unaware of Greenspan's economic philosophy and history? Or did he agree with Greenspan's dislike of regulation of the markets? Because we cannot afford another Greenspan or another attempt at laissez faire markets. We need fair rules for everyone in our economy. It is still dog-eat-dog out there. And Greenspan supported the privatization of Social Security, Medicare and other similar government programs.

I recommend reading the Wikipedia page on Greenspan, remembering that Clinton reappointed him to the Fed, a top spot in our economy, and the rest is history.

No more Greenspans. No more Clintons.

January 29, 2015

To follow up on Holocaust Remembrance Day,

I recommend the film, The Decent One.

It is about Himmler and is based on the papers and letters that were found in his home by the Allied soldiers who stayed there after the war.

It is quite compelling.

One of the prime architects of the brutal Nazi regime, Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler was also a dedicated family man, as this documentary illustrates with items from a newly discovered cache of his personal diaries, correspondence and photos.

http://instantwatcher.com/titles/199738

Reviews are mixed. I think it is very difficult for people to comprehend the banality of cruelty in a fascist society. Cruelty is viewed as virtue. It's hard to reconcile how a man who loves his children can be responsible for so many deaths, such terror.

Today it seems to me that it is particularly important that we be aware of that banality of cruelty. It is so easy for a society to justify extremism and revenge. In particular, we need to consider the torture by our own governmental agencies in the light of this film.