WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU
MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR THREE
Published
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OVERVIEW
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 14
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Dec 18, 2012
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 15
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Jan. 02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 16
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Jan. 08, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 16
EXTRA
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Jan. 11, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 17
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Jan. 15, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 18
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Jan. 22, 2013
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Gbtre OBOF & TYMHM PART 19
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Jan. 29, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 20
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Feb. 05, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 21
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Feb. 14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 22
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Feb. 20, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 23
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Feb. 27, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 23 0SPECIAL
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Mar. 06, 2013
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saOBOF & TYMHM PART 24
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 25
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Mar. 12, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 25-EXTRA
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Mar. 14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 26
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Mar. 19, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 27
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Mar. 26, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 28
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Apr. 02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 29
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Apr. 08, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 30
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Apr. 17, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 31
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Apr. 23, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 32
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Apr. 30, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 33
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May 07, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 34
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May 18, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 35
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May 21, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 36
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May 30, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 37
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June 05, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 38
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June 11, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 39
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June 18, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 40
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June 25, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 41
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July
02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 42
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July
09, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 43
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July
16, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 44
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July
23, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 45
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July
30, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 46
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Aug.
06, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 47
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Aug.
14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 48
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Aug. 20, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 49
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Aug. 27, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 50
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Sept. 05, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 51
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Sept. 11, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 52
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Sept. 18, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 53
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Sept. 26, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 54
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Oct. 02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 55
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Oct. 09. 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 56
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Oct. 16, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 57
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Oct. 23, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 58
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Oct. 31, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 59
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Nov. 07, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 60
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Nov. 14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 61
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Nov. 20, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 62
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Nov. 27, 2013
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In this issue
1.
Introduction by Floyd.
2. Tell
Congress not to rubberstamp NAFTA
regarding
TPP. Important.
3. Three large
truths are diverted by Republicans
tempest
about ACA.
4. More Social
Security & less Military.
5. McDonalds
subsidized by Taxpayers.
INTRODUCTION
I only have one point to make. There is a great deal all over the place that
I want to get to you. Therefore, I am
going to put out an EXTRA the coming Saturday November 30, 2013.
These articles today are important, but some that I
will get to you on Saturday will be even more important, particularly with
regard to TPP. Don't miss reading this
one and the one Saturday. In the
meantime I wish you all a very
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
WITH
FAMILY.
~~~
Tell Congress: Don't
rubberstamp "NAFTA on steroids"
Matt Lockshin
CREDO Action
Published November 19, 2913
The petition reads:
"Congress: Say NO to fast-track trade authority and other undemocratic attempts to prevent Congress from fully vetting secret trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It’s your job to ensure trade deals work for everyone, not just giant corporations, and it would be deeply irresponsible for you to ignore that responsibility by supporting fast-track trade authority."
Automatically add your name:
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Dear Floyd,
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been called
“NAFTA on steroids” – and for good reason.
Negotiated behind closed doors by the governments of a
dozen countries (including ours) colluding with corporate interests, this
secret "trade" deal would eviscerate broad swaths of regulations
that protect consumers, workers, the environment and the soundness of our
financial system.
Last week, a draft of the "intellectual property
rights" chapter of the TPP was leaked, and according to the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, it "reflects a terrible but unsurprising truth: an
agreement negotiated in near-total secrecy, including corporations but
excluding the public, comes out as an anti-user wish list of
industry-friendly policies."1
The first stage in
the plan to pass the TPP is a big push for Congress to pass fast-track trade
authority, which would short-circuit the typical legislative process when
trade deals like the TPP come up for a vote.
Fast-track trade authority would allow the president to
sign a trade deal before Congress has an opportunity to review or approve it.
Then the president could send it to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Fast
track would mean there would be no meaningful hearings, limited debate and
absolutely no amendments to the deal. And there would be tremendous pressure
on Congress to rubberstamp anything the president signs.
The recently leaked drafter chapter is a huge red flag
about the kind of terrible policies the Obama administration wants to include
in the TPP.
As
>From this text it appears that the
And that's only one
chapter, when there are many other chapters that haven't been leaked.
It's the job of
Congress to fully vet trade deals and ensure they work for everyone, not just
giant corporations. In fact the Constitution gives Congress
exclusive authority over trade. And it would be a deeply irresponsible
abdication of responsibility for Congress to pass fast track when we know the
TPP is coming down the pike, especially when we know the consequences of the
TPP could be disastrous.
That is why hundreds of groups including National Nurses
United, the Sierra Club, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Democracy for
Under the TPP, developing
countries would lose access to lifesaving medicines. Unsafe foods and products could pour into
our country while we’re powerless to stop them. Internet freedom would be a
joke. Gone would be the days when the
You might think such a far-reaching proposal would be
subject to intense public debate. But
the text of the proposed deal is considered classified by our government and
even members of Congress have been given extremely limited access to it.
We know the little we do know about the deal because
drafts of some of its chapters have been leaked.
Yet, while the government has kept the public and
Congress largely in the dark about the TPP, it has given 600 corporate
advisers access to the full text of the proposal.
Pressured by giant corporate interests that stand to make
huge amounts of money on the deal, and faced with a public that has
purposefully been kept ignorant about this deal, it’s not hard to see how the
TPP could be rammed through Congress if fast-track trade authority were in
place.
In fact, the reason
the corporate lobby is pushing fast track is that they know the TPP could not
get through Congress without this extraordinary power grab. So the first thing we need to do to fight
back is to ensure Congress does not tie its own hands by passing fast-track
trade authority.
Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets
Automatically add your name:
1"TPP Leak Confirms the Worst: US
Negotiators Still Trying to Trade Away Internet Freedoms,"
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Nov. 13, 2013.
2"Five key questions – and answers – about the leaked TPP text," the |
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~~~
How the Republican
Tempest Over the
Affordable Care Act
Diverts Attention
from Three Large Truths
Robert Reich
NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Sunday 24 November 2013
Having failed to defeat the Affordable Care Act in
Congress, to beat it back in the last election, to repeal it despite more than
eighty votes in the House, to stop it in the federal courts, to get enough
votes in the Supreme Court to overrule it, and to gut it with outright
extortion (closing the government and threatening to default on the nation’s
debts unless it was repealed), Republicans are now down to their last ploy.
They are hell-bent on destroying the Affordable Care Act
in Americans’ minds.
A document
circulating among House Republicans (reported by the New York Times) instructs
them to repeat the following themes and stories continuously: “Because of
Obamacare, I Lost My Insurance.” “Obamacare Increases Health Care Costs.” “The
Exchanges May Not Be Secure, Putting Personal Information at Risk.”
Every Republican in Washington
Republican wordsmiths know they can count on Fox News and
right-wing yell radio to amplify and intensify all of this in continuous loops
of elaboration and outrage, repeated so often as to infect peoples’ minds like
purulent pustules.
The idea is to make the Act so detestable it becomes the
fearsome centerpiece of the midterm elections of 2014 — putting enough
Democrats on the defensive they join in seeking its repeal or at least in
amending it in ways that gut it (such as allowing insurers to sell whatever
policies they want as long as they want, or delaying it further).
Admittedly, the President provided Republicans ammunition
by botching the Act’s roll-out. Why
wasn’t HealthCare.gov up and running smoothly October 1? Partly because the
Administration didn’t anticipate that almost every Republican governor would
refuse to set up a state exchange, thereby loading even more responsibility on
an already over-worked and underfunded Department of Health and Human Services.
Why didn’t Obama’s advisors anticipate that some policies
would be cancelled (after all, the Act sets higher standards than many policies
offered) and therefore his “you can keep their old insurance” promise would
become a target? Likely because they knew
all policies were “grandfathered” for a year, didn’t anticipate how many
insurers would cancel right away, and understood that only 5 percent of
policyholders received insurance independent of an employer anyway.
But there’s really no good
excuse. The White House should have
anticipated the Republican attack machine.
The real problem is now. The President and other
Democrats aren’t meeting the Republican barrage with three larger truths that
show the pettiness of the attack:
The wreck of private insurance. Ours has been the only healthcare system in the world
designed to avoid sick people. For-profit insurers have spent billions finding
and marketing their policies to healthy people – young adults, people at low
risk of expensive diseases, groups of professionals – while rejecting people
with preexisting conditions, otherwise debilitated, or at high risk of heart
disease, diabetes, and cancer. And have routinely dropped coverage of policy
holders who become seriously sick or disabled. What else would you expect from
corporations seeking to maximize profits?
But the social
consequences have been devastating. We have ended up with the most expensive
healthcare system in the world (finding and marketing to healthy people is
expensive, corporate executives are expensive, profits adequate to satisfy
shareholders are expensive), combined with the worst health outcomes of all
rich countries — highest rates of infant mortality, shortest life spans,
largest portions of populations never seeing a doctor and receiving no
preventive care, most expensive uses of emergency rooms.
We could not and cannot continue with this travesty of a
healthcare system.
The Affordable Care Act is a modest solution. It still relies on
private insurers — merely setting minimum standards and “exchanges” where
customers can compare policies, requiring insurers to take people with
preexisting conditions and not abandon those who get seriously sick, and
helping low-income people afford coverage.
A single-payer
system would have been preferable. Most
other rich countries do it this way. It
could have been grafted on to Social Security and Medicare, paid for through
payroll taxes, expanded to lower-income families through Medicaid. It would
have been simple and efficient. (It’s no
coincidence that the Act’s Medicaid expansion has been easy and rapid in states that chose to
accept it.)
But Republicans were dead set against this. They wouldn’t even abide a “public option” to
buy into something resembling Medicare. In the end, they wouldn’t even go along
with the Affordable Care Act, which was based on Republican ideas in the first
place. (From Richard Nixon’s healthcare plan through the musings of the
Heritage Foundation, Republicans for years urged that everything be kept in the
hands of private insurers but the government set minimum standards, create
state-based insurance exchanges, and require everyone to sign up).
The moral imperative. Even a clunky compromise like the ACA between a national system of
health insurance and a for-profit insurance market depends, fundamentally, on a
social compact in which those who are healthier and richer are willing to help
those who are sicker and poorer. Such a social compact defines a society.
The other day I heard a young man say he’d rather pay a
penalty than buy health insurance under the Act because, in his words, “why
should I pay for the sick and the old?” The answer is he has a responsibility to do
so, as a member the same society they inhabit.
The Act also
depends on richer people paying higher taxes to finance health insurance for
lower-income people. Starting this year,
a healthcare surtax of 3.8 percent is applied to capital gains and dividend
income of individuals earning more than $200,000 and a nine-tenths of 1 percent
healthcare tax to wages over $200,000 or couples over $250,000. Together, the
two taxes will raise an estimated $317.7 billion over 10 years, according to
the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Here again, the justification is plain: We are becoming a
vastly unequal society in which most of the economic gains are going to the
top. It’s only just that those with
higher incomes bear some responsibility for maintaining the health of Americans
who are less fortunate.
This is a profoundly moral argument about who we are and
what we owe each other as Americans. But
Democrats have failed to make it, perhaps because they’re reluctant to admit
that the Act involves any redistribution at all.
Redistribution has become so unfashionable it’s easier to
say everyone comes out ahead. And
everyone does come out ahead in the long term: Even the
best-off will gain from a healthier and more productive workforce, and will
save money from preventive care that reduces the number of destitute people
using emergency rooms when they become seriously ill.
But there would be no reason to reform and extend health
insurance to begin with if we did not have moral obligations to one another as
members of the same society.
The initial problems with the website and the President’s
ill-advised remark about everyone being able to keep their old policies are
real. But they’re trifling compared to
the wreckage of the current system, the modest but important step toward reform
embodied in the Act, and the moral imperative at the core of the Act and of our
society.
The Republicans have created a tempest out of
trivialities. It is incumbent on
Democrats — from the President on down — to show Americans the larger picture,
and do so again and again.
~~~
Americans
Want Improved Social
Security
and Medicare and Less
Military
Spending
Dave Lindorff
This Can't Be Happening! / Op-Ed
Published: Thursday 21 November 2013
A tectonic shift is occurring in the US Washington
A coalition of progressive groups organizations,
including of groups like the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and
Medicare, NOW, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Generations United, NARFE and
SocialSecurity Works, last week protested outside the White House against a
proposal, still included in the proposed Obama 2014 budget, to cut back on the
inflation adjustment to Social Security, effectively assuring a gradual, but
significant reduction in benefits in future years for elderly retirees and the
disabled.
Meanwhile, a small but growing group of US senators and
representatives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist from
Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Sen. Sherrod
Brown (D-OH), Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) and Sen. Bryan Shatz (D-HI), is calling
for eliminating the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, so that
all Americans, including millionaires and billionaires, pay the full FICA tax
on their income, a move which would effectively end any talk of the Social
Security program “running out of money.”
It’s about time.
As Sen. Warren put
it in a recent statement on the Senate floor, “We
should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits – not cutting them….
Social Security is incredibly effective,
it is incredibly popular, and the calls for strengthening it are growing louder
every day.”
While Democratic party leaders, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) and President Obama, in thrall to Wall Street lobbyists, have offered
to cut Social
Security benefits by, for example, adopting a new stingier means of calculating
inflation called the “Chained CPI), polls show that Americans consistently and
resoundingly support not just protecting Social Security but expanding its currently meager
benefits.
A recent poll, for instance, by Public Policy Polling,
released on Nov. 20, found that voters, by an “overwhelming margin,” support
expanded Social Security benefits, not cuts in the 77-year-old New Deal
program. Fully 65% of those polled
supported expanding benefits, while on nine out of 10 questions about cutting
Social Security benefits, the “no cuts” position won by over 70%, with only one
question showing the “no-cuts” position winning by “just” 66%.
Clearly, the public and the political parties, including
the Democratic Party, are sharply at odds.
Social Security’s critics -- primarily corporate America
and the politicians and “think” tanks it bankrolls -- argue that the US “can’t
afford” even the current Social Security program. As Peter Peterson, the dour Wall Street
billionaire and founder of the Blackstone Group, likes to put it, the program,
along with Medicare, is “bankrupting” the country, and unless “entitlements”
are cut America US
Nonsense. It’s not that high at all.
It’s time to inject so reality here. If a 12.4% FICA tax to fund Social Security is
so punishingly high, how to explain countries like France, Germany, Sweden, and
Finland, where the social security system taxation levels are far higher, yet
the standard of living, and even the competitiveness of the countries’
economies, are better than in the US?
Take Finland Finland
As Mikko Kautto,
the head of research for the Centre for Pensions, explained it to me during in an interview in his office
outside the capital of Helsinki, “In the early 1990s, Finland began preparing
in earnest for the large aging population we saw coming.” He explained that studies by the Centre showed
that most retirees would need about 60% of their final pre-retirement income to
maintain their standard of living in retirement, and that “consumption
smoothing” became the stated goal of the program. (Sixty percent replacement is
ample in Finland
Finland has not suffered overmuch for this decision to
have the state be responsible for essentially 100% of retirement costs (Finns
have no need to assume the individual risk of putting money into 401(k)-type
funds and then playing the stock market in hopes of possibly having enough
assets to fund their retirement -- or possibly going bust -- as Americans must
do). Its citizens, who get six weeks
paid vacation, paid maternity/paternity leave, free health care and free
college and who arguably have the best public education system in the world,
live better than we Americans do, and their industries -- telecom, automotive,
machinery, forest products and paper -- manage to compete quite well on the
world markets, giving the country a trade balance the US can only dream of.
Clearly high taxes for supporting retirees and the poor
and disabled is not crippling Finland
While I cannot claim to be an expert on the retirement
systems of other nations, it is worth mentioning that the payroll tax rates of
other major developed economies like France, Germany and, Sweden, are all significantly
higher than the US, and yet their economies are all outperforming ours,
including in the area of global competitiveness. Sweden’s retirement system
taxes, paid by the employer, total over 31% of payroll. In France
What does separate the US
from these other developed nations is the staggering amount -- 53% of the
discretionary federal budget -- that the US Germany
The answer then is clear: If the US, where Social
Security on average only provides a meager 30% of pre-retirement income to
retirees, is to expand benefits, the money will have to come from a combination
of higher taxes on the wealthy, higher taxes on employers, and from dramatic
cuts in US military spending.
Despite all the
pro-war propaganda, and the scare stories about terrorism put out by the
government and the corporate media, Americans get this. A poll conducted earlier this year by The Hill,
found that 49% of Americans supported cutting military spending to reduce the
nation’s budget deficit, while only 23% favored cutting Social Security and
Medicare. Meanwhile 69% said they
opposed cuts in those two programs.
And cutting
military spending is, in fact, what Sen. Sanders is calling for in his proposal
to defend and expand Social Security: full FICA taxation on all income, not
just the first 113,400 of income, and several hundred billion dollars a year in
cuts in the military budget. Others are demanding even bigger military budget cuts,
of as much as 25-50% of the current $1 trillion a year level of spending on war
and preparations for war. (Even a 50% cut in the US
military budget would still leave this country spending more than several of
the next-largest spenders, like Russia
and China
Needless to say,
the experience of those same European countries -- Finland, France, Finland and
Germany, as well as many other developed countries like the UK, Italy, Holland,
Denmark, Norway, Spain, etc., as well as Canada and Australia -- shows that it
is also possible to have a better, less costly universal health care system by
adopting some socialized approach, whether the fully nationalized one used in
Britain, a single-payer one where the government is the insurer, as in Canada,
or some combination, and the countries that do this manage just fine without
"going bust" as Peterson et all and the free-market sycophants in
Congress and the White House would have us believe. (A new international study by the Commonwealth Fund found
the US to have the highest health costs and to rank last in quality of care and
outcomes in almost every category among 10 industrialized nations -- with the
exception of waiting times to get care, where America edged out Canada for
second-to-last position.)
As the politics of Social Security and Medicare move away
from rear-guard defensive action to prevent cuts, to a positive struggle to
expand both programs, it is important that Americans become aware of how things
work in the rest of the developed world. That way, the scare-mongers like Peterson and his
ilk cannot get away with fake claims that a decent retirement and health care
for all will “bankrupt” the US
ABOUT Dave Lindorff
Dave Lindorff is an investigative
reporter, a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to Businessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com. He received a Project Censored award in 2004. Dave is
also a founding member of the online newspaper ThisCantBeHappening! at www.thiscantbehappening.net
~~~
McDonald’s:
Low-Paid Workers,
High-Flying
Execs
SUBSIDIZED
BY TAXPAYERS
Jim Hightower
NationofChange
/ OP-ED
Published: Thursday 21 November 2013
In this season of generosity, I'm sure that you get as
much joy and deep internal satisfaction as I do just by knowing that we – all
of us taxpayers together – contribute day-in and day-out to a very big global
cause: Supersizing
McDonald's.
The world's largest
hamburger chain is a needy charity case, because without your and my generous
tax support, the Big MacBosses in charge would have to pay a living wage to
their 800,000-plus
American workers. But, thanks to us, the
$27 billion-a-year hamburger-flipping flim flammers can get away with paying
poverty wages – then send their workforce to get food stamps, Medicaid, child
welfare payments, public housing, and other tax-funded poverty benefits. This public subsidy of the Golden Arches adds
up to a very golden $1.2 billion a year. What a creative business plan! Who says giant corporations aren't
enterprising?
Well, sniff the chain's
top executives, we operate on razor-thin profit margins, so we can't afford to
throw money at workers. Really? Last
year's $5.6 billion in profits doesn't sound thin to me. Also, note that McDonald's more than tripled
the pay of its new CEO last year, elevating him from $4.1 million to $13.8
million.
But what really galls its workers (whose low wages and
forced part-time schedules mean they average less than $12,000 a year) is that
the taxpayer-subsidized profiteer laid out a fat $35 million in October to add
a brand new executive jet to its corporate fleet. This one is a
"Bombardier 605" with the full package of luxurious amenities, and it
cost $2,500 an hour to fly it.
Just flying one
hour on the Bombardier cost more than the combined hourly wages of more than
300 McDonald's workers. Remember, you're subsidizing this. To tell the chain's CEO that this is
immoral, go to www.OurFuture.org.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and
the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again next Tuesday or Wednesday December
3, or 4, 2013.
God
Bless You All
&
God
Bless the United States of
America
Floyd
