WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-01
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Jan. 02, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-02
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Jan. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-03
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Jan. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-04
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Jan. 24, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-05
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JAN 30, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06
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Feb. 06, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06 EXTRA
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Feb. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-07
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Feb. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-08
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Feb. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-09
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Feb. 27, 2014
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Agenda
1. Opening thought by Floyd.
2. How TPP will harm you.
3. Will you get your SS check in
2015?
OPENING THOUGHTS
from
FLOYD
Thought
#1. Well, I am finally going to get this
to you. Last week I mentioned that I had
fallen after a long time without falling.
Well, I have fallen again this week and frankly, that has held me up as
far as getting this posting to you.
There are two really important articles included. Hope you will take a good look. I'll try to do better next week.
Thought #2. WHAT IS FACT? When
I started this blog a little over three years ago, it wasn't to hard to
separate fact from friction, or fact from innuendo, or fact from plain out-right
lie. In the past three years, it has
continually become harder and harder to know what is fact.
Thought
#3. In the past, I have been a strong
supporter of our President. I have
become very disappointed in him and many of his recent actions and
statements.
He made a big
issue of the fact that if you liked the health insurance that you had, you
could keep it, referring to Obamacare.
Now we find out that that isn't true.
It has now
become clear that he has been working secretively with 600 corporations and 11
other nations on a trade agreement that is more than a trade agreement and is
really dangerous to out future.
While I think,
we do need some health reform program I think there is quite a bit in Obamacare
that needs to be thoroughly reviewed and changed.
It just seem to
me, and I sure hope I am wrong, that he has
taken a position that this is his last term and he is going to make it good for
him. I hope he will not do this. I hope that if we can get a Democratic
Congress he will get things done that we really need. I just can't get over his embracing the TPP
(Trans Pacific Partnership).
Thought #4. There are recent indications that even though
the public is more in favor of Democratic ideals, the Republicans are getting
stronger as we go into this midterm election year. It's early yet, but
with the money the Republicans are going to have, we all must do all possible
to get our vote out.
~~~
How
TPP Would Harm You at the Drug
Store
and on the Internet.
Dave Johnson
Campaign for America’s Future / Op-Ed
Published: Wednesday 26 February 2014
A law affecting content on the Internet that was rejected
by Congress shows up in a trade agreement designed to bypass and override
Congress. Small, innovative companies
that manufacture low-cost, generic drugs find their products blocked.
Those are examples of what is in store based on
provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is now being
negotiated by the United
States
Because of these leaks we know that the
TPP has an intellectual property section that will override government rules
that limit the power giant corporations can wield against smaller competitors
and the general public. Intellectual
property (IP) is a term that covers patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade
secrets, industrial designs and similar ‘intangible assets.” (Click here for the IP chapter that was leaked to Wikileaks.)
The rigged process in which only giant corporate
interests are represented at the talks of course produces results that are more
favorable to those giant corporations than to their smaller, innovative
competitors and regular people around the world. The rigged “fast track”
process enables these interests to push the agreement through Congress before
there is time to organize a public reaction.
TPP And Fast Track
TPP is a “trade” agreement that has little to do with
trade and everything to do with giving the giant corporations the power to
override what governments and their people want. The agreement follows the
pattern of the trade agreements that have forced millions of jobs and tens of
thousands of factories out of the United States
TPP is being
negotiated in secret with consumer, environmental, labor, health, human rights
and other “stakeholder’ groups excluded from the table. But the interests of
the giant corporations are at the table, with the negotiators either already well-compensated by the corporate
interests or in a position to be well-compensated later after leaving
government (which many of them tend to do immediately after ending their role
in trade negotiations).
To help push TPP through, the giant corporations are
trying to get Congress to give up its constitutional responsibility to initiate
and carefully consider the terms of trade agreements. The corporations are
pushing for Congress to pass “fast track” trade promotion authority, which
brings in a process where Congress gets a very limited amount of time after
first seeing the agreement to evaluate it and then vote, limits how much they
can debate it and prohibits them from amending it in any way. This gives the
corporations the opportunity to set up a huge PR campaign to pressure Congress
to pass it, before the public has time to organize a response – never mind even
read the agreement.
Intellectual
Property and Drug Prices
One example of the way the intellectual property
provisions favor giant, multinational corporations over smaller, innovative
corporations and regular people around the world is in pharmaceutical prices.
A company with a drug patent is granted a monopoly to
sell the drug at any price they choose with no competition. Currently a drug might be patented for a
limited number of years in different countries. When the patent runs out other companies are
able to manufacture the drug and the competition means the drug will sell at a
lower cost.
Leaked documents appear to show that TPP will extend
patent terms for drugs. Countries
signing the agreement will scrap their own IP rules and instead follow those in
TPP. So giant drug companies will have
the same patent in all countries, for a longer period, and the patent will
prevent competition that lowers drug prices.
Currently smaller,
innovative companies can produce “generic” drugs after patents run out. Because of competition these drugs can be very
inexpensive. Walmart, for example, sells a month’s supply of many generic drugs
for $4, while drugs still under patent protection can cost hundreds or even
thousands. This is of particular concern
to poor countries that will be under TPP rules.
Please read Expose The TPP’s
section The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Public Health,
which begins:
The TPP would provide
large pharmaceutical firms with new rights and powers to increase medicine
prices and limit consumers’ access to cheaper generic drugs. This would include
extensions of monopoly drug patents that would allow drug companies to raise
prices for more medicines and even allow monopoly rights over surgical
procedures. For people in the developing
countries involved in TPP, these rules could be deadly – denying consumers
access to HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and cancer drugs.
What You Can See, Do And Say On The Internet
Another area where the IP section of TPP could give
corporations tremendous power is in deciding what regular people can see, do,
or say on the Internet. TPP will
override our own rules, even imposing laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) that Congress have specifically rejected.
You might remember
when many websites on the Internet “went dark” for 24 hours to protest the
proposed SOPA and PIPA laws. According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s (EFF)
SOPA/PIPA: Internet Blacklist Legislation,
The “Stop Online Piracy
Act”/”E-PARASITE Act” (SOPA) and “The PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) are the latest in
a series of bills which would create a procedure for creating (and censoring) a
blacklist of websites. These bills are
updated versions of the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act”
(COICA), which was previously blocked in the Senate. Although the bills are ostensibly aimed at
reaching foreign websites dedicated to providing illegal content, their
provisions would allow for removal of enormous amounts of non-infringing
content including political and other speech from the Web.
… Had these bills been passed five or ten years
ago, even YouTube might not exist today — in other words, the collateral damage
from this legislation would be enormous.
Larry Magid explained
at the time, in What Are SOPA and PIPA And Why All The Fuss?
The bill would require sites to refrain from linking to any sites
“dedicated to the theft of U.S.
The problem with this is
that the entire site would be affected, not just that portion that is promoting
the distribution of illegal material. It
would be a bit like requiring the manager of a flea market to shut down the
entire market because some of the merchants were selling counterfeit goods.
… Opponents say it would create an “internet
blacklist.”
… There is also worry that SOPA and PIPA could
be abused and lead
to censorship for purposes other than intellectual property protection.
Congress decided to reject SOPA and PIPA. But the provisions of SOPA and PIPA are back,
this time in the TPP, which would override what Congress wants.
Please read the
EFF’s Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement page.
We’ve seen how this
works too many times. The giant
corporations promise jobs and prosperity to get their way, but then We the
People end up with fewer jobs and a falling standard of living while a few
billionaires and executives pocket the difference. Instead of letting the giant corporations push
through yet another job-killing agreement that gives them even more wealth and
power let’s take control of things and fix the agreements that
have hurt us, our economy and our democracy. Fix NAFTA First!
~~~
Will your Social Security check be in the
mail come 2015?
A top
economist says the trust fund for Baby Boomers has disappeared. But, there's something you can do!
Is Social Security one big Ponzi Scheme? In the real world, if an investment guru such as Bernie Madoff is found to be broke and having to scramble to find new investors so he can continue to pay dividends to old investors – he ends up in court.
If it’s discovered that he didn’t bother to invest their
funds at all – instead paid himself an exorbitant salary and squandered the
money – he goes to jail.
Operators of Ponzi schemes usually entice new investors by
offering higher returns than other investments. Paying such high returns
requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to sustain the
scheme.
“When Texas Governor Rick Perry referred to Social Security
as ‘a Ponzi scheme,’” writes Judge Andrew Napolitano,
”he was excoriated by the press, left and right, and by his fellow Republicans,
as well.”
After all, our government wouldn’t do such a thing, would
it?
“For many baby boomers, it’s comforting to believe that
part of the 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax they (or they and their
employer) have been paying is going into a $2.7 trillion Social Security Trust
Fund,” writes economist and retired professor Allen W. Smith.
However, Smith says there is no trust fund – and a number
of elected officials, including former President George W. Bush, have
acknowledged that.
“To make a long story very short, we are supposed to
have $2.7 trillion in Social Security surplus, all earmarked for the baby
boomers’ retirement, due to money generated by amendments approved in 1983,”
says Smith, author of The Looting of Social Security. “But there’s no money in the fund.”
“This revelation should come as no surprise to those who
monitor the government and its deceptive ways,” says Napolitano. “When he first introduced Social Security,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that under Social Security the federal
government would be holding your money for you. He deceptively fostered the idea that Social
Security would be a savings account, into which employees and employers would
make contributions and out of which guaranteed monies would be paid to those
who reached the age of 65. Essentially,
he claimed that you’d get your money back.
“Eventually, the government would acknowledge that what it
first called a savings account and then called old-age
insurance and then said would be fortified by a trust fund did not even
establish a contractual obligation to those who have paid the Social Security
tax — which would be all of us.
“The politicians believed him,” writes Napolitano, “but the
actuaries and the judiciary understood that the government would never hold
anyone’s money for him — as if it were the custodian of a bank account. In the
first of several challenges to the constitutionality of Social Security, the
Supreme Court found that the Social Security fund did not consist of your
money. It was merely tax revenue. Did you know
that?
“And, in a curious yet revealing one-liner in the Supreme
Court opinion upholding the constitutionality of Social Security, even the
court recognized that there would be no trust fund in the traditional sense
when it found that the tax dollars collected and supposedly designated for
Social Security were ‘not earmarked in any way.’
“Thus,” writes Napolitano, “the Feds have conceded and the
courts have agreed that the money you have involuntarily contributed to the
so-called trust fund is not yours and can be spent by the government as it
pleases, just like any other revenue that the Feds collect.
“Where did it go?” asks Smith. Four administrations, from Reagan to George W.
Bush, spent it on myriad non-Social Security efforts, says Smith – so don’t blame the current president.
“Obama didn’t have a chance to use it – it was gone,” Smith
says.
The 1983 amendments approved under Reagan generated revenue
by accelerating Social Security payroll tax increases, allowing a portion of
benefits to be taxed, and delaying cost-of-living adjustments from June to
December.
According to the Social Security Administration website:
“The surpluses are invested in (and the trust fund holds) special-issue
Treasury bonds.” But what’s actually
sitting in the Trust Fund is non-marketable government IOUs – worthless, Smith
says.
The fact has been publicly acknowledged by a 2009 Social
Security trustees report; Sen. Tom Coburn; and President George W. Bush, who in
2005 said, “There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand … future
generations will pay – pay for either in higher taxes or reduced benefits or
cuts to other critical government programs.”
Recently, Speaker of the House John Boehner offered a sobering
statement on ABC’s “This Week,” on Oct. 6, 2013: “…Ten thousand baby boomers
like me (are) retiring every single day – 70,000 this week; 3.5 million this
year. And, it’s not like there’s money in Social Security or
Medicare. The government, over the last 30 years, has spent it all.”
So, are we all doomed?
Will Baby Boomers get their retirement checks?
Smith says there is hope.
However, he says Congress must admit the truth. “The
total cost of paying full benefits in 2010 exceeded Social Security tax revenue
by $49 billion,” says Smith, “and the gap between revenue and costs will become
larger in the coming years.
“On Sept. 27, 2000, I appeared on CNN Today to discuss my
book, The Alleged Budget Surplus, Social Security, and Voodoo Economics. The host did not take me seriously and
asked me if I was ‘a voice crying in the wilderness,’ ” Smith says. “I’d
quickly realized that he was right, with the exception of multiple statements
by politicians and officials.”
He says it’s time that Baby Boomers start protesting –
demanding answers from Congress.
“Boomers are no strangers to taking to the streets to
express their outrage.”
So, dust off those 1970s protest signs.
Demand answers, says Smith.
Get involved – and force Congress to make sure that the
unthinkable never happens.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you
again sometime next week. Right now,
after two recent falls I'm just not sure what day, but I'll be working on
it. Stay with me. You do more for me than I do for you, just
knowing that you are picking up on my blog.
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United
States of America
Floyd
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