Zeno_of_Citium's Blog

You must listen to Act One, episode #364 of TAL

2009-08-26T07:23:06Z

The Harlem Children's Zone is applying lessons from studies that show that the verbal environment of children's early lives determine there success later in life. This meshes perfectly with the british study that showed people become who they're are in the first five years of life. I hope you guys will listen to this as it is inspiring and easily mimic with little or no funding. Here's a link:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1311

I found this exchange interesting...

2009-06-20T06:37:07Z

This is from my UHC petition blog

I'm reposting it here because the blog was bumped from the site..

I've been getting around to that in my own blogs which have not stirred much interest.

I have no reason to commit to one method of reform, so far, so I'm keeping an open mind and trying to sift through the chaff coming from all sides for the wheat which might be there so as to have a sound opinion.

Single-payer runs up against the distinction of Uniformity vs. Diversity, in addition to Big Government concerns. It offers reduced overhead but the actual savings are not clear (could be as little as under 10% or as much as over 25%) of current overall costs. Medicare is hardly perfect, and studies have shown that over 90% of insured Americans are reasonably happy with what they have.

I think I understand Obama about "single-payer is nice but 'you caint git thar from here'.

I think single-payer is not reform but revolution, in the USA. As such only violence (virtual, economic, or otherwise) is likely to get it implemented. It might warrant a Constitutional Amendement, depending on which flavor of single-payer is under consideration.

2% employee + 7% payroll tax is 9%. What controls costs to keep those from rising? What rations health care which is current rationed by price of premiums, deductibles, and denials of service? Is is National, Federal, State, or what? Citizens only, or anyone at all?

I'm not sure the problem of moral hazard is that significant, but of course checks and balances are necessary to deal with criminal cheating or frauds. And profit motives are stifled by excess uniformity (while of course excess diversity generates waste and is no guarantee of quality either).

I think single-payer is really socialized medicine with a facade of "it's only social insurance".

Things like that.

Thanks for asking.

Posted by eds

"I think single-payer is really socialized medicine with a facade of "it's only social insurance".

nonsense, single payer is the government collecting the insurance money and paying the doctors without taking a profit for doing so.
It's non-profit insurance.

eds, said something which got my attention up the comment que. It got me thinking about why I support single payer and nothing else.

The gist of the situation for me is that we are a community, a society if you will, and as such we have a responsibility for the well being of everyone and thus the preservation of the community itself. Each of us should contribute what we are able to a pool that pays for the care of all, in the same way our taxes pay for our defense. The current "private" system leaves health care to those who can afford it only. This allows those who can to only take responsibility for themselves. The power of the collective will is felt through democracy itself. The exercise of democracy is being denied through the force of financial power. The health and well being of the community as represented by our taxes is suffering as a result. No private health system or private army can ever represent the will of the community because it has no responsibility to do so.

Posted by Zeno_of_Citium

Do you consider yourself a communist? Your paragraph makes it seem so.

I do agree that "the force of financial power" speaks loudly in DC (and in state capitols), but I have to wonder why consumers (and employers who offer a finite selection of plans) don't speak loudly with their pocketbooks.

It's been suggested that there are cartels operating behind the facade of 1000s of "insurance" companies. Got anything on those?

I've probably spent under $1000 on health care in the past 25years, not counting a car accident for which I negotiated a decent settlement from the insurance company on my own. So I am not in touch with the realities of health care costs except via horror stories and the like. While I have libertarian tendencies, I also have socialist tendencies and consider myself a progressive (and except for fiscal stuff usually a liberal).

I don't believe in the Collective except as 1) a statistical ensemble of individuals and 2) a [usually] muddled notion in people's psyches which can range from a delusion to a basis for lemming-like behavior.

Posted by eds

A communists expects to take all property for the use of the community. I do not. I see my views a close to Socialism. I believe that as a community, or society if you will, we all have a shared responsibility to look after the health of everyone in the community. I believe there are certain services that are essential to a functioning community such as access to fresh water, food and energy production which should be treated like communal property and regulated to the benefit of the community. The idea of communal space is not Communist in the ridged sense you describe. Communism in the idealistic form you describe is complete abdication of private property and enterprise. Please, explain to me why it has to be an either or dichotomy. Democracy is shared power and shared responsibility. Democracy is a form of socialism. Capitalism as it is practiced in the US is anti-democratic and leads to autocratic rule.

Posted by Zeno_of_Citium

"I don't believe in the Collective except as 1) a statistical ensemble of individuals and 2) a [usually] muddled notion in people's psyches which can range from a delusion to a basis for lemming-like behavior."
It is not necessary to believe in the power of collective will or responsibility. All idealism operates inside a conversation between people. Community in that it exist at all exists in the shared language and concerns of the people. The separateness of the elite is at the root of the disillusion of the community and the root of the current conflict. Democracy has failed because the power of the community's will has been usurped by the power of money and high status. That is the result of unfettered Capitalism.

Universal Heath care petition!

2009-06-19T02:53:40Z

I would encourage all of you guys a TPM who believe single payer is the right way to go to sign this petition to show your support for it.

http://sanders.senate.gov/petitions/index.cfm?uid=7fd59f2e-88e1-477a-8eaf-762a5b050809

A Letter to my congressman on Health Care

2009-06-12T18:31:06Z

To all at TPM. I'm asking you to leave bullet points and arguments as to why Americans should have a single payer tax funded health care payment option similar to Medicaid for everyone. I know this has been covered else where but I'm writing a letter and mailing it this weekend and would like help in making my argument effective. So, give me all you got in small increments of course. Just asking for a coherent way to say it to a congress critter, so they get the message.

Thank you in advance.

Deep thought...

2009-04-20T03:20:22Z

Had Al Gore fought as hard as Norm Coleman he would have been president in 2000.

STOP WASTING MONEY ON RICH CHEATS!

2009-02-26T20:52:37Z

Obama's budget has 750 billion more money for banks. That's just unacceptable. These guys have been given enough, and then they keep using extortion to get what they want. ENOUGH!

Let them go bankrupt, then fire the management resell the assets. I'm damn tired of seeing rich fat cats laying off thousands of workers and still getting paid exorbitant sums. If Obama does this he deserves the slap in the face they will give him. They will take the money he offers and undermine his presidency with it. This should not be allowed to stand. Receivership is the best way forward. DO IT NOW. Oh, and order the fed to close its discount window to hedge funds, who will undermine any recovery with their money making strategies. I'm sick of hedge funds getting special privileges.

Conservative? What does that mean?

2009-02-12T22:39:51Z

I'm now thinking that conservatism is a form of schizophrenia. They can't make their mind whether they are socialists or monarchists. They vacillate between the two with nary a hit of irony.

"Drown the government in the bath tub"

2009-02-12T08:27:25Z

Currently, Obama and the rest of Washington DC are trying to get the tax payer to swallow the bad assets thru one big bad bank idea. I think that is the worst possible out come there is because the banks are counting on never taking any responsibility. The banks will do it again and again if you let them. There has to be consequences. Right now there aren't any. Obama said today that bank nationalization was off the table because of the nation's historical temperament towards such action is negative. The "too many banks argument" doesn't wash either because as Josh Marshall pointed out we don't have to nationalize all of them just three of four too big to fail ones. Since he said no to nationalization, that leaves us with the government buying assets at inflated prices and the FED eventually printing money to devalue the dollar. Here comes inflation just when you need it least. Our country is hymned in by our anti-socialist ideology. Plus, we aren't really free marketeers either so letting the banks go under as some suggest and thus the rich go under, is off the table too. Therefor, the government must bankrupt itself for the good of the status quo, which is what I've argued was the plan all along. "Drown the government in the bath tub" is working like a charm. With the government crippled, so is democracy. The will of the people has diminished from token representation to vapor in a single decade. The Oligarchs have won. They are just trying to get us to lay down and die quietly. Can't you hear the music? It's blasting loudly in the MSM.

Another episode of "Lost"

2009-02-07T04:27:44Z

Why is that every time the ideological left wins and election, the bills that pass end up being conservatively driven anyway? Don't tell me America is a conservative country. Most Americans don't know what they really want which is why the conservatives find it so easy to get things their way. Don't tell me Americans are centrists either. Americans want better health care, good education, and some level of assistance in times of disaster. The centrists on the other hand just tried to cut these things in the stimulus bill. Americans are not conservatives and they are not false centrists either. Americans have liberal aspirations but for any the talk of individualism in American society, like herd animals they wait to see which way the everyone else is going before they act. Middle America is waiting for someone or something to let them know it OK to fight for the things they want. Can anyone tell me what that trigger mechanism is that sets them fighting for what they want? The rich have been behaving like a pack of wolves picking off the weak from the herd. The ideological liberal is loosing even though they won the election. You can be damn sure conservatives would be having it their way and only their way had they won the last election. I have to confess even though I'm angry, I'm waiting for everyone else to move too. Well, not exactly, I'm working towards alternative energy production but that's empty without health care reform and a dedication to better eduction. I feel so helpless I could scream. People's apathy makes puke.

The Future of Energy Production

2008-11-09T05:34:59Z

The election is over, but I want to talk about another type of democracy. After reading Al Gore's recent article "The Climate of Change", I started thinking about energy and how we use it. Today we get expensive gasoline from private conglomerates some who buy oil from state owned oil fields such as those in Venezuela. It's strange, to say the least, the way the profit is distributed among the populace in these "free markets", but that's not what I want to talk about. It's the coal fields buried under federal lands which are mined by private interests and this coal is then burned to produce electricity for a couple of hundred million Americans. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of providing electricity, but it's intended purpose is first and foremost to provide a profit for the private interests, remember ENRON. Now, some people may not understand this, and at the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this electricity, which is produced in large part by coal, is brought to our homes over a grid system. Think of it as a web in which every home is connected to every other home. The electricity doesn't flow into each home to simply dissipate upon providing work through appliances, but is maintained at a relatively constant level over the entire grid 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The meter doesn't measure the amount of electricity a home uses. It instead measures the resistance to electric "flow". You might ask, "What does this have to do with anything?" Well for one thing, it's a shared resource. The other is that the many are at the mercy of the few, and it's a dependency based on finite production resources. To top in all off, much of that grid system was built with tax money or tax incentives. The bright side is we are all connected together, and that's a good thing.

What I want to remind you of, is that there is another way to live, while maintaining a similar if not better lifestyle. Forget depending on someone else to produce power. Imagine every home in America with a roof made of solar cells. Imagine all those homes connected to the national grid system. During the day while the populace are away at work, storage devices can be storing the energy being gathered by all the rooftop solar panels for use during the peak hours of the evening, when the workers come home. This would reduce the stress of the current power plants. Most importantly, it would also democratize the grid by turning end users into co-producers. Plus, adding energy storage devices would allow power plants to cut over all energy production. I estimate that if every roof in America were made of solar panels, 30 to 50 percent less energy would be needed from traditional means. The initial cost would be high but the long term saving would be huge. Not to mention, the solar maintenance and replacement industry would create millions of jobs locally. Distributive power production would be a revolutionary change in so many ways I can't begin to count them.

Tonight's discussion about taxes in the debate made me think about the bailout as tax increase.

2008-10-16T03:26:43Z

This bailout that has been rammed down the publics throat by the elite, congress, and the media, is really just a tax increase on the working class. Think about it. When congress takes tax money and loans it at a low rate to rich people, so they can make more money, joe middle and lower class gets hit twice. First, you do your part for society by paying taxes, then you get hit a second time by the rich who use your tax money to make a profit by selling a service to you, with money you just gave to society through taxes. In my book that's called double dipping, and it amounts to a tax increase of what ever percentage profit the rich make off the bailout money.

And what if you were like me you didn't buy a house in the last 30 years, so where's our help? If you were financially prudent, this bailout just gives your money to the wealthiest Americans. Also, if home values decline further, and banks don't get current market values for mortgages, how does this affect the bank's ability to return tax payer's money to the government? Will the congress later forgive banks who can't pay back bailout loans? Its possible.

I think we are looking at a situation where the rich are happy either way. If we don't give the rich money, then housing prices collapse along with the world economy. That would lead to the end of any stability or democracy government could provide. In that scenario, the rich would have total hegemony. If we give them the money, the rich continue the long extraction of wealth from the lower classes anyway, which, you guessed it, leads to total hegemony.

The only way out of this is to raise taxes on the rich, which so far have managed to have everything their way. Just look at the wealth disparity that exist in the world today. The last time it was this bad, heads eventually rolled, literally. Technically speaking, the heads of the poor have been rolling for quite a while in the middle east and other impoverished locations throughout the world.

Buffet knows how to get a go deal

2008-09-23T22:39:41Z

Billionaire Warren Buffet just worked a deal with Goldman Sachs for 5 billion worth of preferred stock that p[ays a 10% dividend. Now the big question is, if Goldman is a part of this government payola plan of Paulson's, does that mean we're paying Buffets tax free dividend? Remember congress made dividends tax free a few years ago, or have you forgotten already. Another question, if Buffet can get that deal why can't Congress? It seem a very revealing event to me.

The Greatest Heist in History

2008-09-14T21:05:26Z

It began sometime ago, but the climax started eight years ago with the election George W Bush. With republicans calling themselves the government opposition party, they railed against taxes and wasteful spending. They promised to remove government from our lives by getting rid of regulation. George W. Bush took care of the things they cared about most, taxes and regulations.
But that's just mechanism. What we are dealing with are thieves. When Alan Greenspan lowered rates to about 1% and left them there, housing prices skyrocketed and banks reaped hugh profits for their preferred share holders and executives. Oh, did I mention Phil Gram deregulated the banking industry, allowing them to trade securities for the first in over seventy years. Then they played musical chairs with pieces of paper called mortgage backed derivatives. When the music stopped, they demanded the tax payer to give them more money. That's using other people's money going up and going down. The property itself is merely incidental as the guys have no interest in holding such assets. These guys rigged the outcome. Just as Enron falsified their accounting to make themselves look profitable. The banks manipulated and cheated in the mortgage industry. Keep in mind when a person's home is foreclosed they have lost all the money that went into interest payments and also in a declining housing market they may lose equity too. The banks get the asset to resell. The government steps in to make up the difference between the current equity value and the future equity value. The bank makes out like the bandit it is, never losing.
This heist will cost citizens of the US, nearly over two trillion dollars. The perpetrators have so far gotten away with vast amounts of wealth. When you combine that with the privatizing of war. The heist swells to nearly five trillion. There is no incentive to win a war when you profits count on the war continuing.