Politics Plus

What is your net-worth?  Most Americans answer with a number representing the stuff they have accumulated.  I disagree.  My net-worth is that I inform people of my political opinions, with the facts that support them, and I give my time to help prisoners learn to become pro-social citizens and succeed in their communities when released.  Vulture Capitalism values only those things that generate profit and/or accumulate wealth.  A group in Switzerland is taking a completely contrary approach.  It’s what I would call a REAL living wage, because it’s a wage just for living.

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

The proposal is, in part, the brainchild of a German-born artist named Enno Schmidt, a leader in the basic-income movement. He knows it sounds a bit crazy. He thought the same when someone first described the policy to him, too. “I tell people not to think about it for others, but think about it for themselves,” Schmidt told me. “What would you do if you had that income? What if you were taking care of a child or an elderly person?” Schmidt said that the basic income would provide some dignity and security to the poor, especially Europe’s underemployed and unemployed. It would also, he said, help unleash creativity and entrepreneurialism: Switzerland’s workers would feel empowered to work the way they wanted to, rather than the way they had to just to get by. He even went so far as to compare it to a civil rights movement, like women’s suffrage or ending slavery… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Structural unemployment in the US is growing, and because of increased automation and the lower cost of importing some goods from offshore, we will have more people that need jobs than jobs for them to fill.  Something needs to be done to support our citizens that business leaves behind.

While I do have some socialist leanings, I also believe that there must be incentives to produce many goods and services.  However, I would support a guaranteed living wage for all people, whether or not they are capable of working.  Those capable of working must either have private sector job, or be given a public sector job, providing for the common good.  Caring for a sick family member might be an example.  We could do this if we redirected welfare for the 0.1% and corporate criminals to providing for all the American people.

Republicans have been dominating the media and keeping, one and only one issue in the forefront of America’s consciousness.  They are making ObamaCare look lie a good issue for them by using the confusion from the Obama Administration failure to get the web site online on time, their own Republican lies, and Big Insurance lies and scams to generate fear in the American people.  What we need to realize is that ObamaCare is just one very temporary issue, and hammer at all the other issues in which Republicans are completely out of step with the American people.

Republicans are out of touch with much of the country on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, according to new poll findings from Bloomberg released late Thursday.

While 55 percent of Americans — including 7 in 10 young people — support the right of gay and lesbian couples to get married, 52 percent of Republicans are opposed.

The poll also showed that 40 percent of Republicans want state legislatures to continue to push for laws that limit abortion, nearly double the 22 percent of Americans who feel that way…

Inserted from <TPM>

While this poll is a clear indication that Republicans are out of touch with America on this issue, Republican politicians, pundits and propagandists are so extreme that they are out of touch with most Republican voters on most issues.

Rachel Maddow illustrated this point by comparing public opinion and Republican voter opinion with what the Republican Congress and specifically John Boehner (R-$) with Peter Welch (D-VT).

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Republicans are right that government is a failure, but only when Republicans govern.  60% of Republican voters support ENDA. 86% of Republican voters support immigration reform. 58% of Republican voters support raising the minimum wage. 81% of Republican voters support background checks. 53% of Republican voters support the Buffet rule. That’s just scratching the surface.  It’s up to us to get the facts out, because the most od themedia won’t do it. We need to remind people that there is more than just one issue.

Unless you’re a billionaire, a corporate criminal, or a hatemonger, even if you’re a Republican, the Republican Party dies NOT represent YOU!

I had an insurance plan that I liked, and all of a sudden I found myself with the choice of losing my insurance or opting for a plan that cost me almost twice as much, had higher co-pays, and covered less.  Of course that happened because of ObamaCare, and I should blame it on the Democrats, right?  WRONG!  The year was 2004, and the insurance was my company health plan.  When Barack Obama promised that, if you like your insurance, you can keep it, he was not thinking about situations like mine.  That was a mistake on his part, and his fix for it is also a mistake.  Sadly, it is a politically necessary mistake.

President Obama, trying to quell a growing furor over the rollout of his health care law, bowed to bipartisan pressure on Thursday and announced a policy reversal that would allow insurance companies to temporarily keep people on health plans that were to be canceled under the new law because they did not meet minimum standards.

The decision to allow the policies to remain in effect for a year without penalties represented the Obama administration’s hurriedly developed effort to address one of the major complaints about the beleaguered health care law. It seemed for the moment to calm rising anger and fear of a political backlash among congressional Democrats who had been threatening to support various legislative solutions opposed by the White House because of their potential to undermine the law.

Senate Democratic leaders said they did not see the need for an immediate legislative fix — a victory for White House officials worried that momentum was building toward consideration of a measure to force the change.

The Republican-controlled House is still set to vote Friday on a bill by Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, that would allow Americans to keep their existing health coverage through 2014 without penalties — as well as allow new people to continue to buy the plans, something the White House said would gut the Affordable Care Act… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Lawrence O’Donnell discussed Obama’s Plan with Steve Kornacki and Eugene Robinson.  (I was unable to find this video in a format available to international viewers.  The piece is entitled President Obama: ‘I Fumbled’.  Hopefully you can find it the time this is posted.)

Note that the individual market is only 5%. For 95% of us, there are no surprises, except good ones.  The vast majority of those whose policies are really being cancelled  because of ObamaCare are paying for insurance that will disappear, when they need it.  Most would get better coverage for the same or less money under ObamaCare, when including the subsidies.  The problem is that Obama cannot prove it until the exchange is working.  He was wrong not to have provided more oversight. He also should have considered that Big Insurance would use it to cancel plans that would qualify, blame ObamaCare, and try to scam their customers into high prices policies.

Obama’s fix makes good his promise and makes it possible to prove that Big Insurance dishonesty and consumer gullibility, not Obama, ObamaCare or Democrats, are to blame for most of this crisis. That is why it is politically necessary.

The reason it is a mistake is that some people, who are now in policies that do not qualify, will stay there for a year longer.  Republicans will use some, whose own gullibility and stupidity will be at fault, to blame ObamaCare for not protecting them.  At the same time, those who stay in substandard insurance, because they are young and healthy, will make the exchange pools older and more expensive than they would otherwise have been.

It would be better to leave the ACA alone and to investigate the insurance scams, but there’s no way that most of the media will pass on these boring details, when the nice juicy scandal will sell so much more soap.