tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-278469762024-03-20T23:45:16.176-07:00The Digital FirehoseA political stream of consciousness.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.comBlogger903125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-12708141494730703032018-09-21T05:16:00.004-07:002018-09-21T05:16:56.326-07:00A heartbeat postI'm writing this post just to keep my blog alive. I miss the ease of Blogger, but I don't miss the tiny audiences that Blogger now brings. I don't miss the algorithms that limit my reach. I don't miss the lack of a useful backup, either.<br />
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Nowadays, I write my blogs in Markdown on StackEdit, an browser based Markdown Editor. StackEdit makes it easy for me to backup my blogs. Then I past that into my blog at Steemit.com. Steemit doesn't have an algorithm that limits my reach like Facebook and Google Plus. I also cross-post at Medium.com, and as far as I can tell, they don't limit my reach, either.<br />
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I don't know what it is, but Medium makes it easy for me to read for an hour if I want to do that. They seem to be thinking bigger at both Steemit and Medium, but at Medium, I can look at my feed and find articles I want to read at the top. Steemit requires a bit more effort to find them, but I can find them.<br />
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Anyway, if you want to find my content, I'm there on Medium and Steemit, two places that don't limit propagation based on a political agenda.<br />
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Have a great day. :)digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-60564296475673695572017-12-07T03:48:00.000-08:002017-12-07T03:48:10.786-08:00Giving Patreon a trySo I tried Steemit for a year or so. It's interesting, but there is a heavy emphasis on curation and I'm just not that into curation. I'm a writer. I love to write. I love to publish and I love to promote good ideas. As much as I liked it, Steemit required a lot of extra curation work to even get noticed. Sorry, Steemit. I'm just not into curation, yet. <div>
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I have two small kids and soon they'll be in school. Then I can really dig into curation. I really just like to write and publish and see what happens. </div>
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I like blogger for the great user interface and formatting options, but Google is really stingy with pay. Steemit was much better, but there is a lot of relationship maintenance that must happen. It's sort of a nepotism network for writers. I know that sounds critical, but there is a lot of "vote for me and I'll vote for you" stuff going on there. It is fair to say that there is a lot of fellowship going on, but I'm not so sure I want money to be the basis of my friendship on Steemit. That's what it looks like to me, anyway.</div>
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I really just want my words to stand on their own. That's it. I find an idea or concept, I write about it, I publish it. Then I do some promotion and see what happens. I'm kind of an agnostic writer. I don't write to make something happen. I write to see what will happen next. Every article is an experiment.</div>
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So, I will start publishing on Patreon to see what happens. It's an experiment. Steemit and Patreon may be experiments, but I will always come back here. At least until I find a better way. You can find my Patreon page here:</div>
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https://www.patreon.com/digitalfirehose</div>
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I hope to see you there. :)</div>
digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-65258357138943523722017-06-20T05:08:00.001-07:002017-06-21T04:08:58.409-07:00To my dear readers, I'm slowly moving to SteemitI know I haven't been posting much lately. I'm a father and I have one kid who likes to stay up late to read books and play chess. I have another that wakes up at the crack of dawn to find me in the basement, writing. I'm a father and being a father comes first, before this blog and before anything else. When they're awake and I'm not at my day job, I'm a dad first.<br />
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So I haven't had much time to read, to research articles and to write them. I've been looking for inspiration to write about and I can find it, but it's tempered by at least one little kid who wants to be with Daddy. Day and night. </div>
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Now there is the realization that I'm obsolete and that everything I do everyday is so that they can have a better life than I have had. Fathers Day just passed. I spent the day working at my job with a rotating shift. No one, other than my Mom, sent me any kind of message wishing me a nice day.</div>
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While I do find time for subjects of interest, beyond my fascinating kids, writing is it. I write to live and I do what I can to make sure I find time to write ten things I'm grateful for every day. I write a morning page everyday (from The Artists Way) and often, ideas for my articles spring for there. I write more than a million characters to that morning page every year. I've been writing a morning page since 2008. That means I now have more than 9 million characters just for that alone.</div>
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I've learned a few things about promotion on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I'm still not very good at it, and for awhile there, I got 78k pageviews in one month. It was nice, but it wasn't very profitable. My wife would surely like to see me make good money at it. But I still have a day job and am looking for a way to transition from that to being a well paid freelance writer. I have a feeling my days are numbered in IT just because of institutional age discrimination. I guess you could say that I'm an old fart in the realm of IT.</div>
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I'm a stickler for details, I probably don't do as much volume as they would like me to do. I like to document everything so that I can say, "I did that" when the procedure calls for me to do it. But I'm dedicated and I do find some enjoyment in my day job. I get to work with command line *NIX. I get to run that command line logic I've come to love in *NIX. I'm perpetually fascinated with the way the command relates to the output.</div>
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And so it is that I write. I love watching the thoughts come to the fore, and the characters flow onto the screen. I love engineering a sentence just so. To make it say exactly what I want it to say. I love making a point. I love spreading the ideals of peace that are so dear to me now.</div>
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For now I have come to a place where peace to me is the understanding that we are all doing the best we can. That personal criticism is to be left for those who are more qualified. I'm learning to discern that in politics, I criticize the idea, not the person. I want ideas that work for everyone, or at least, most of us, rather than a minority interest.</div>
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I have come to a place where I know that punishment teaches no skills. I've seen it all the time in social media. People bashing each other, saying hurtful things and thinking that somehow, that is "going to teach them a lesson". All that name calling really does is belie the strength of one's position in a debate. The words that people write are a window to their mind their thoughts. When I see someone trashing another, I see how that person might talk to himself.</div>
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When I see one person call another a really nasty pejorative, I think, "Oh, is that how you talk to yourself?" I see someone lost in the world of reward and punishment. The idea is that if we want to reinforce good behavior, we reward it. If we went less bad behavior, we punish it. The problem with this is that humans are far more complex than that.<br />
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Humans will take action that they believe to right, without regard to reward or punishment. They will work towards a goal that they have in mind without reward. They will give of themselves without regard to themselves, in order to make someone else better, or give them a better life. The same line of reasoning and experience shows that people will continue behaving badly no matter how awful the punishment may be. Perhaps that is because people who are punished for challenging behavior do not have compassion for themselves, and therefore believe that they "deserve" to be punished.<br />
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Regardless of reward and punishment, behavior will not improve unless the skills required to net the reward or curb the unwanted behavior are taught. This is what matters to me, more than anything right now. I've been thinking and writing and researching this for more than a year now, and I just don't see any other way that it could be. If humans want world peace, then teaching the skills to achieve that peace should be paramount.<br />
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So let me tell you why I will be slowly moving to Steemit. Steemit is the first social media and blogging site I've seen that takes social media and blogging activity and turns it into cash. Steemit converts every like, every comment, every story, into digital currency called Steem Dollars and Steem Power. Both of these can eventually converted into real money that we use every day to buy things. Steem Dollars are similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum. They are alternative mediums of exchange that are governed by the laws of mathematics, not men.<br />
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I have never put a single cent into Steemit. But I have grown my account from nothing to about $140 depending on exchange rates, and that is not with a great deal of effort. That is far more than I have earned with Google. I have squat to show for Twitter and Facebook. There are other sites like Steemit, but for now, I'm going to be there.<br />
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Going forward, when I write a new article, I will write it on Steemit and promote it on Google+, Twitter and Facebook. My blog will still be here and I'll post from there on a periodic basis to keep it alive and prevent it from being deleted. But my most current writing will be on Steemit.<br />
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Some of you may be asking, "Wait. What about Patreon?" Patreon is nice, but it just seems too complicated for me. I rather like the idea of converting social media action into digital currency that can later be used to buy things. It seems like a natural evolution of social media.<br />
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You can find my blog on Steemit here:<br />
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You'll find familiar articles there as I've been copying those that I like the most there when I don't have the time to write. There are some that I will always treasure and they will find a new home there. The reason for this is that all Steemit activity is recorded to a blockchain, making it pretty close to permanent. Blockchain is an encrypted, distributed database for recording and verifying transactions. That distributed part means that there is no single point of failure. That's what makes Steemit so appealing to me.<br />
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I'll still be around, debating, posting, and commenting, but over time, I will be shifting my efforts to Steemit. I hope to see you there, too.</div>
digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-24939815847380008192017-06-09T05:43:00.001-07:002017-06-27T04:55:09.428-07:00Skills, punishment and reward, and the war on drugsAfter I wrote my last article, <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2017/06/skills-punishment-and-reward-in-context.html">Skills, punishment and reward in the context of American politics</a>, I heard a voice in my head talking about the drug war. I could just hear Nixon's voice talking about what he'd like to do to the hippies and the African Americans of the counter culture revolution. And I thought of my own kids and how they should be able to live in a world free of drug violence. My family and I live a life of relative peace and I intend to teach my kids how to do the same as adults.<br />
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So I recalled this meme. It was about John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy adviser. There was a cool quote on the meme, so I looked for the meme but didn't want to spend an hour poring over hundreds of images to find the right one for this article. So I did some more digging and found <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/">this article, "Legalize it All", by Dan Baum, in Harper's Magazine</a> and the quote used by so many meme artists:<br />
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At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”</blockquote>
Baum also dug up a priceless quote by H.L. Menken which is well worth repeating here because it is worth a laugh: "Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." The drug war was a lie and still is. God forbid that someone should be happy without God, or even on their own motive force.<br />
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Decades ago, I read a story about Pete Townsend, a singer, songwriter and guitarist for the band, <a href="http://www.thewho.com/">The Who</a>, in OMNI Magazine. Back then, Townsend was drinking a fifth of cognac a day and shooting heroin and he wanted to stop. Then someone contacted him about a potential solution, "a little black box". Townsend received treatments that involved attaching small electrodes to the skin on his head and passing a small current across his brain. The idea was that the current was at a certain wavelength and amplitude that would induce his brain to release the endorphins that were replaced by the heroin and the booze. After some weeks of treatment, Townsend was unhooked and happier. It was then and there that I realized that my brain is a 2.5 million year old pharmacy.<br />
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The Townsend story was well documented and isn't it interesting that the little black box never came into popular use as a drug addiction treatment? Maybe that's because at least one science fiction writer I used to read figured out that the same black box that could get you unhooked from drugs could be the drug. We wouldn't want people figuring out that they could use tiny amounts of current to induce their brains to get high, either. But I digress...<br />
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What I find so interesting in the drug war is that the entire effort is based on punishment as a deterrent. Why provide an alternative solution that people can use when a punishment will provide all the motivation anyone will ever need to stay off drugs? Because that would require teaching the skills needed to stay off drugs. Skills?<br />
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Happiness is not a destination or even a state of mind. It is a skill. You can experience joy to be sure, and you can do it without God or drugs. In fact, the pleasure people feel on God or drugs depends on the capacity of the brain to produce the endorphins required to generate the perception of pleasure. But it takes skill to get to that place, to establish the context to know you're experiencing pleasure.<br />
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It takes skill to go to a church and sing until you're crying with joy just as much as it takes skill to know where to buy the smack, heat it up on a spoon and inject it. Both of them require knowledge, and repetitive experience with anticipation of the reward. But neither can fill empty arms if you lack interpersonal skills to really get to know someone else, or to be of service to someone else.<br />
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If you're familiar with the history of the drug war, ask yourself, why those god-fearing people felt it incumbent upon them to punish others for not falling in line and being good citizens? Where does a god-fearing man get the idea that his hands are the right hands to punish other people for their sins? Didn't their conception of god say that, "Vengeance is mine", not a task for mere mortals? Who knew that there are natural consequences to our actions?<br />
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As I was writing this article in my head the last few days, I could not help but recall the scenes of torture in the movie, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Years_a_Slave_(film)">12 Years A Slave</a>. There is one particular scene that I will never forget, where a white man holding a bible and reading scripture while another white man whips an African woman who knows not why she is being punished. Now I look back on that scene and wonder again, why didn't they teach their slaves the skills they needed to achieve the morality they preach?<br />
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This to me, is the essence of the war on drugs. If the war on drugs is about morality, then teaching the skills to achieve that morality would come first. But what followed the war on drugs was a war on education. In the 1950's, 60's and 70's, we had some of the finest public primary education in the world. Then Paul Gann came along to limit taxation in a way that changed the face of California. Since then, the State of California has been mired in huge budget deficits and an ailing public education system. It wasn't just California. Conservatives the land over have worked hard to weaken public education to make way for privatization. The path to privatization of a public service is to weaken it so much, that a private solution seems palatable. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/08/a-sobering-look-at-what-betsy-devos-did-to-education-in-michigan-and-what-she-might-do-as-secretary-of-education/?utm_term=.fea25f50ecdf">Just think Betsy DeVos</a>.<br />
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What if the alternative to the war on drugs is to teach skills that kids need to get along with others? Those skills include collaboration, critical thinking and discovery. Those kinds of skills help kids to stay off of drugs, because if you know how to collaborate on a solution to a problem, you know how to ask for help. But that's not what the powerful and elite Christian conservatives want. They want the rest of us to seek their version of a punitive god first, you know, for redemption. Their concept of redemption is what they were taught by their parents, so how would they know any better?<br />
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With millions of people in prison for drugs, with their lives destroyed, and future generations starting at a disadvantage, we need to rethink our punitive ways. The failure of the drug war is proof that punishment teaches zero skills. Well, it does teach one skill: obedience. Punishment and threats of punishment have another element that few parents seem to understand: punishment wipes out critical thinking skills.<br />
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I know this from my own experience. A young mind juiced up on adrenaline from punishment is not able to think critically about what went wrong, how to ask for help (a parent bent on punishment is not interested in helping their kid, let alone collaborating with him), and is incapable of talking about how to avoid the problem next time the same situation comes up.<br />
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One last thing about the whole punishment and reward mentality. If you're a fan of Pavlov, you know that punishment and reward make animals more susceptible to suggestion. The skill missing here is discernment, discernment of the natural consequences to an action. If you're teaching punishment and reward, then making a young mind open to suggestion is what you're doing. That suggestion could come from anywhere, and usually, that is what we call "peer pressure".<br />
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Consider the following situation: For years, a couple had been teaching their kids reward and punishment to get them to do what they want, to behave better. But now those kids have friends. Some of them are drinking or popping pills. And now, those kids are thinking, I better do what they do or my circle of friends will punish me. I may lose my friends.<br />
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When we collaborate with our kids to solve the problems in their lives they will surely encounter, we teach them to ask for help. When we punish them for their misbehavior, we teach them not to ask for help. I have kids and I want to see them asking me for my help to solve their problems. I'm not talking about solving the problems they encounter for them. I'm talking about collaborating with them to solve the problems they encounter. Then when they are adolescents, I want them to know that if they have any questions about drugs, they can always come to me for help.<br />
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The skill of collaboration isn't just for kids. It's for adults, too. Adults who are using drugs to check out don't know how to collaborate enough to avoid using drugs, for if they did, they wouldn't be using drugs. The joy of collaboration is a joy unmatched by any drug. Collaboration is baked into our genes and is the primary tool that has allowed the human race to survive.<br />
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Collaboration is the antidote to the war on drugs. Collaboration is the ultimate morality, for when we collaborate together to solve our problems, we will have peace.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-87691955734210444002017-06-07T05:37:00.003-07:002017-06-30T03:48:33.261-07:00Skills, punishment and reward in the context of American politicsYears ago, shortly after the Iraq War began to settle down somewhat, someone had shared video of a adolescent Iraqi boy. He was caught stealing and the punishment was to slowly roll a truck tire over his arm. Back then I could watch such a video and not flinch, but I knew he was going to lose his forearm as I watched that video. I look back now and ask myself a simple question: did that punishment teach that boy any skills beyond learning how to adapt to life with one hand?<br />
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While it is easy for some to claim that Muslims are barbarians, it is a fair stretch to say that Americans are any less barbaric. One look at the way our police state has mercilessly killed kids in our streets should give one pause.<br />
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In the context of political discourse in social media, I see debates in which some parties seem unable to restrain their urge to mete out punishment upon those they disagree with. Their punishment is laced with profanity, invective and aspersions. I've seen responses completely bereft of facts in what would otherwise be a straightforward discussion and debate of the facts. I've even felt it within myself, the urge to "punish" someone else in social media, but I've held back, let the feelings pass, and cobbled together a reasoned response instead.<br />
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In all my interactions with other people, I strive to avoid the urge to punish, for I have gained awareness of what happened to me and how I was punished myself by my parents. I was punished for not having the skills to meet the standards set by my parents. I am learning, in no uncertain terms, that punishment does not teach skills, and just to be clear to those who are fans of Pavlov, reward doesn't teach any skills either.<br />
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Every animal has a primary instinct to preserve oneself. Every animal has a primary cause and that is to stay alive. Animals, humans included, stay alive by meeting their needs. therefore, every animal action can be traced to a primary cause: meeting needs required to stay alive. Readers familiar with my work here on this blog already know that that I'm a fan of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, here's a sample below:<br />
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<a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-basic-guaranteed-income-in-context-of.html">A basic guaranteed income in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs</a><br />
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<a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-basic-guaranteed-income-in-context-of.html">Prison reform in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs</a><br />
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<a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-basic-guaranteed-income-in-context-of.html">The conflict between good and evil in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs</a><br />
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In the intervening months and weeks since I wrote those articles, I've been slowly refining this concept to reduce it to the simplest explanation for all human suffering when it is caused by human beings, and sometimes when its just mother nature. In every case, it boils down to the same statement: Humans suffer when they lack the capacity to respond adaptively to their environment. </div>
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No longer do I make the assumption that evil exists for the sake of evil. No longer do I assume that the 7 deadly sins exist just because. The root cause in all actions by human beings is to satisfy an existential need. Whether or not we can satisfy that need without hurting others depends on the skills we possess.</div>
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For example, I'm watching House of Cards, quite possibly some of the best political drama I've ever seen on any screen. While it would be easy to say that Francis and Claire Underwood are evil and without conscience, we still don't know why they are evil. Yes, Mr. Underwood is consumed with a thirst for power, leverage and control, but after 5 seasons, we still don't know why he's like that. The writing in this show is so good that I forget what I'm thinking about with human needs most of the time. I don't know what is going to happen next and that's why I continue to watch. Even now, there is a part of me that wants to see how the Underwoods will slip away, unscathed, if they do.</div>
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When I started writing about this business of good and evil, I had come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as good and evil. Good and evil are supernatural explanations for cooperative and challenging behavior in human beings. There is a continuum of people. On one end there are the confused - those we might call "evil" and the less confused - those we might call "good". All of us are seeking to meet existential needs.</div>
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Since the election of Donald Trump, I've watched social media and I can tell you, the catharsis is so thick, you can cut it with a knife. On and on, the memes (pictures with captions) just get more and more insulting to Donald Trump and others within his power circle. I get the catharsis, I really do, but I fail to see how those memes will influence the policy debate in a positive fashion, particularly for progressives seeking a meaningful discussion with those in power now. I can assure you that criticism doesn't teach any skills. I know. I've tried it from both ends and it doesn't work.</div>
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When I see Donald Trump announce that "we're going to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate" for "a better deal", I see a man who has not articulated the need for a better deal. Who will get a better deal? America? Against 194 countries who have already signed and will go forward without us? I see a man who told us that with Obamacare we must come up with a better plan before replacing Obamacare, but has no compunction to pull us out of an agreement on climate without offering a better plan, first.</div>
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When I saw the news reports of Donald Trump bragging about groping women, I see a man who has everything he wants and still wants more. At the time that he bragged about groping those women, he was already fabulously wealthy, yet he is still not satisfied with who he is as a person, so he must degrade someone else. And somehow he still managed to get elected.</div>
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When I see how Donald Trump fired James Comey and expressed dissatisfaction with Jeff Sessions, I see him bringing his Apprentice character to the White House. I see him bringing all the drama that he loves to the White House. And I wonder, what need is he trying to serve?</div>
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I offer these examples not as criticism of Donald Trump. I offer these examples to show that even with fabulous wealth and power, it requires a certain amount of skill to appreciate that wealth and be satisfied with it, to know when enough is enough. In America, we are being trained to idolize the wealthy, as if somehow they need it. I suspect that some of the wealthy need fans, for our media would not idolize wealth unless the wealthy media owners wanted that to happen.</div>
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What I see is that money, power, beauty, or whatever, are very poor substitutes for interpersonal skills. If you lose that power, you're going to need to find a way to get along with others who watched you abuse it. If you lose that money, you're going to need to negotiate for your next meal. If you lose that beauty, then you will need to hone up on your conversation skills.</div>
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The primary human skill, the one that made humans one of the most successful mammals on the planet is cooperation. Set aside for a moment the enormous ecological damage we have done to the planet, for it's a safe bet that natural selection does not favor animals that degrade the environment they live in, and walk with me down this path. A path to world peace and survival of those who know how to cooperate.</div>
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Cooperation is baked into our genes. We know this because we have language. Language provides the most efficient means of communication between animals of the same species. Language allows humans to cooperate for their mutual safety, and allowed culture to follow, to blossom.</div>
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When we cooperate, we use language to collaborate, to share ideas, to help each other. A basic human instinct is to help others, even if there is no apparent and immediate reward. Somewhere at the base of our brains, we know that the person we help now might save our skins later, but we don't know for sure, so we work together. This is one reason I make a point never to burn bridges, to always leave the door of communication open. I can't help it if the other person does it, but I will always remain open to talking again.</div>
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I have had the time to think through revenge and punishment and have learned that revenge is never sweet, so I avoid situations where that might even come into play. I err on the side of peace every day. I have thought through punishment and have figured out that punishment, like reward, doesn't teach any skills. The only skill that punishment and reward teach is obedience. And as Don Henley famously said in his song, The Heart Of The Matter, "pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms". No amount of achievement can replace interpersonal skills, or to put it differently, love.</div>
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Donald Trump represents to me, the ultimate American schism, that we can reward ourselves out of misery, that we can punish others with impunity for our own personal relief and gratification. I say this without disrespect to Mr. Trump, for he is only doing what he has learned to do. I am forever an optimist. I believe that if Mr. Trump, and every other human could, they would do better. Everyone wants to do well, to do better than before. </div>
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All of what you see here has been extrapolated after reading many books on suffering, recovery and relationships. I have looked long and hard to make sense of human suffering, for I too, have suffered and wanted relief. I believe that we can put humanity on the path to world peace by teaching our kids the skills they need to live in peace. These skills are learned, not bought. They are taught through innumerable acts of collaboration with our kids, and everyone we come into contact with everyday.</div>
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We can have peace by <a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Raising-Human-Beings/Ross-W-Greene/9781476723747">raising human beings</a>.</div>
digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-4321252543604681372017-06-01T05:29:00.001-07:002017-06-01T05:29:36.979-07:00Trump is the pied piper for the GOP on the debate over health care<div class="tr_bq">
Remember how the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign elevated Trump and a few other candidates as "pied piper" candidates? <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428">Politico documented their effort in great detail here</a>, quoting a campaign memo:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:<br />
• Ted Cruz<br />
• Donald Trump<br />
• Ben Carson</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."</blockquote>
Who remembers the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin? I happened upon the Pied Piper story a few months ago while reading bedtime stories to my kids. As you will see below, that story kind of stuck in my head and it took me some time to put two and two together.<br />
<br />
The story goes that a town was infested with rodents (just think elite GOP for this article) everywhere and no one knew how to get rid of them. Then one day a man with a pipe showed up and offered to remove the rats for a certain fee. The town council, in their excitement at the prospect, offered 1000 gold pieces even though they did not have it.<br />
<br />
The pied piper played his music and walked. The rodents followed him as he played. Then he stopped at the side of a river where the mesmerized rodents made a turn into the river where they all promptly drowned.<br />
<br />
Could Trump be that kind of man for the GOP? I think so. Consider that for the duration of their quixotic quest to repeal Obamacare, members of the GOP have returned home to conduct town halls only to face angry, hostile and frightened constituents. Most of that anxiety stems from uncertainty about health care, and more specifically, Obamacare.<br />
<br />
The GOP has been having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to repeal it with very little luck behind them and ahead of them. Trump has told all of us that unwinding Obamacare is incredibly complex. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/us/politics/trump-concedes-health-law-overhaul-is-unbelievably-complex.html?_r=0">From the New York Times</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
President Trump, meeting with the nation’s governors, conceded Monday that he had not been aware of the complexities of health care policy-making: “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”</blockquote>
This is an open admission that repealing Obamacare is going to take a lot more time and effort than Trump anticipated. It gets better from here. Governors from around the country want to avoid losing coverage for the people that have already found it under Obamacare, further adding to the complexity. <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/312878-kasich-warns-republicans-on-obamacare-repeal">Even Ohio Governor John Kasich has little enthusiasm for the repeal effort</a>. They know that if they lose coverage, they lose votes.<br />
<br />
And then Trump said that Congress must deal with Obamacare first before they can go after tax reform. From the same NYT article cited above:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Because of the intricate procedures that govern budget legislation and the inherent complexity of health care, Republicans appear unlikely to undo the health law as quickly as they had hoped. Mr. Trump said Congress must tackle the Affordable Care Act before it can overhaul the tax code, also a high priority for Republicans. And those delays could slow work on other priorities like a trillion-dollar infrastructure push.</blockquote>
Trump has been creating a legislative logjam for enthusiastic Republicans in Congress who can't wait to "do the people's business". To get to what they really want to do though, they're going to have to repeal and replace Obamacare without losing any coverage for the people who have it (though lately, Trump appears to waiver on letting people lose coverage). Trump is clear that he also wants to shift spending priorities to the military, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/us/politics/trump-budget-military.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news">also from The New York Times</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
President Trump put both political parties on notice Monday that he intends to slash spending on many of the federal government’s most politically sensitive programs — relating to education, the environment, science and poverty — to protect the economic security of retirees and to shift billions more to the armed forces.</blockquote>
This will further restrict the ability of the GOP to grow the economy. What Trump is pursuing for cuts are peanuts compared to the military and social safety net programs, which are funded by their own distinct taxes. An obscure economist who goes by the name of "Dean Baker" provided <a href="http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/news-for-nyt-donald-trump-and-paul-ryan-are-not-political-philosophers">some interesting analysis</a> of the same NYT article including this nice tidbit:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The claim that Paul Ryan is concerned that these programs would "swallow the bulk of government spending" directly contradicts everything Paul Ryan has been explicitly advocating for years. Ryan has repeatedly put forward budgets that would reduce the size of the federal government to zero outside of the military, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. (See Table 2 in the Congressional Budget Office's analysis.) It is difficult to understand how a major newspaper can so completely misrepresent a strongly and repeatedly stated view of one of the country's most important political figures.</blockquote>
So Ryan wants to reduce the federal government to nothing but the military and and the most popular social programs? What a surprise. So do many other Republicans. Suppose Trump let's them have their way? I can just imagine the blowback from Main Street America on the spending cuts alone. And the really odd thing is this: no amount of tax cuts are going to grow the economy. We've tried it. During the last decade, taxes were at their lowest ebb in modern history and we still got the Great Recession.<br />
<br />
Trump seems to be dramatizing his role as president. Whatever he does, it's going to be extreme or make him appear stupid or incompetent, or to contradict himself. Whether it be cuts to social programs, or how he conducts himself with other leaders, I see the liberal press painting Trump as a buffoon. <a href="https://www.indy100.com/article/moments-prior-photo-donald-trump-difference-between-him-rest-g7-sicily-7760046">Here is a short list</a> of recent fumbles on the part of Trump that have been offered by the press to confirm their narrative:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He touched an orb in Saudi Arabia [Trump criticized Obama for the same thing], met the Pope and became a meme, got snubbed by Macron and pushed aside the Prime Minister of Montenegro.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The other six world leaders managed to play nicely posing for a group photo in front of their respective flags after a brief walk.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Trump was late - because he couldn't manage to walk 700 yards (that's about a third of a mile or 640 metres) to take the photo.</blockquote>
From foreign policy fumbles to domestic gaffes, Trump is proving to be one of the most unpopular presidents of modern times, and <a href="http://reverbpress.com/politics/trump-dragging-republicans-polls/">now its starting to show in the polls</a>. The debate over health care has been a major case in point. Millions of Americans across the political spectrum are filled with anxiety to the point of agitation, and they are now starting to mobilize for single payer health care, according to <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/20121/where-trump-voters-and-socialists-agree-single-payer">In These Times</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In early April, a public radio program in the Rust Belt city of Rochester, N.Y., spent an hour discussing healthcare—but not, as you might expect, the GOP’s attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare. It focused instead on the brightening prospects for a single-payer healthcare system. The guests included a Trump voter and small-business owner, Tim Schiefen, and the co-chair of the Rochester chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Karen Vitale. What was remarkable was how little they disagreed. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Asked his opinion of single-payer, Schiefen responded that it was worth exploring. “The problem is putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse,” he said. “Why are we allowing these gross, overspending health insurance companies … to administer this stuff?” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Increasingly, the single-payer solution is generating that sort of consensus across ideological and party affiliations. In early April, an Economist/ YouGov poll showed that 60 percent of respondents supported a “Medicare for all” system, including 43 percent of people who identified as conservative and 40 percent of Trump voters. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The energy behind single payer is partly a result of the GOP’s success in pointing out the flaws in Obamacare, then failing to offer a workable alternative. Vitale believes that, in a paradoxical way, it’s also driven by Trump. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I think Trump broke open a lot of things,” says Vitale, who grew up in a rural small town an hour south of Rochester. She says that the Trump voters she knows trusted his populist pitch— and “now they’re activated, and they’re acting from a place of self-interest. You can’t put them back in the box.” When Trump breaks campaign promises, she predicts, “They’re going to notice really quickly. They noticed with Trumpcare.” </blockquote>
Takeaway: In the state of New York, a member of the Democratic Socialists Party of America and a conservative business owner who voted for Trump both agree on single payer health care. And they both agree that Trump has made a promise to enact a replacement for Obamacare that doesn't lose coverage. Both are mindful of this promise and both want a solution that works for everybody. And both will take action if Trump breaks his promise.<br />
<br />
Trump may not be able to keep his promise if plaintiffs in <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/this-trump-delay-may-push-obamacare-rates-20-percent-higher-next-year.html">a court challenge to Obamacare subsidies prevails</a>. If the plaintiffs prevail, the subsidies will be lost and the costs of individual insurance plans will rise by 19% or more next year. <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/white-house-to-pay-insurers-while-obamacare-case-kept-on-ice-sources.html">According to CNBC</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A federal district court judge had previously ruled in favor of House Republicans, who in 2014 sued over billions of dollars in payments to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act because they had not been granted via a congressional appropriation. The Obama administration appealed the case, and the Trump administration asked to put the case on hold while it established its position on the matter.</blockquote>
The matter is now in appeals court and while the Obama Administration sought to defend the subsidies, Trump appears to be changing course. Note here that House Republicans sued to have the subsidies declared illegal for lack of a Congressional appropriation. They may be right, but it might cost them dearly in 2018 when people go to the polls to decide if Congress represents their interests.<br />
<br />
Even if Obamacare is not repealed, the mobilization of voters will get serious if voters who use Obamacare find their bills went up because of Republican indifference to their cause. There is a high probability that insurance companies will sense the unease and raise prices for everyone else, too. We're already starting to see signs of that mobilization in local races here and there. Progressive Democrats are starting to win in jurisdictions where Trump won. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/christine-pellegrino-democrat-wins-new-york-trump-voters-bernie-sanders-a7756416.html">The UK Independent has taken notice</a> of a small race in New York:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the 9th Assembly District, mere miles from Mr Trump’s birthplace in Queens, New York, Republicans hold a 13-point registration advantage over Democrats. But Ms Pellegrino – who served as a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention – pulled off a striking upset this week, beating her Republican challenger 58 to 42 per cent.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“We worked hard. I don’t know what happened,” her competitor, conservative Tom Gargiulo, said.</blockquote>
How did they do it?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Bold populism that puts working families’ issues front and center,” Bill Lipton, state director of the Working Families Party, said on Tuesday. “This is how we win in Trump country. This is the lesson for Democrats around the country.” </blockquote>
There is another part to the story of the Pied Piper. After he lured the rats out of town and to their untimely demise, he asked to be paid, as I would expect of Trump. When the piper came calling, the town could not pay, so the piper played again to take the children of the town with him.<br />
<br />
This is about to happen to Trump, but probably not in the way that he had planned. <a href="http://www.salon.com/2017/04/16/trumps-millennial-problem-the-snowflakes-are-becoming-a-blizzard/">Polling analysis by Salon.com</a> shows that Millennials are very unhappy with Trump and they are organizing, too. Millennials perceive Trump as an illegitimate president by a wide margin and they show little if any love for our two party system, so blithely assumed to be a "democracy":<br />
<blockquote>
Overall, only 22 percent of young adults approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 62 percent disapprove. GenForward polls further show that across all racial and ethnic groups the majority of millennials disapprove of Trump. With 71 percent of African-Americans and even 55 percent of whites against him. They are overwhelmingly negative on his policies and his demeanor.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Those who study millennials knew that even if Trump pulled out a win in 2016 “his insular appeal to his preponderantly white coalition has exposed the party to a clear long-term risk.” As the Atlantic reported before the 2016 vote, “Win or lose, all evidence suggests Trump is further alienating a Millennial generation that is already cool to the GOP — and is poised to become the electorate’s largest cohort in 2020.”</blockquote>
Trump may have been the Pied Piper for the GOP, but he may also become the Pied Piper for the Millennials who are not happy about their prospects as a result of the "I, Me, Mine" generation that voted for the Reagan Revolution.<br />
<br />
Lest Democrats get too happy about their prospects resulting a Trump presidency and a GOP gone wild, they had best prepare for campaigns based on “Bold populism that puts working families’ issues front and center". If Democrats fail to heed the message, they may find themselves facing a progressive insurgency the likes of which they have never seen before, with the largest voting demographic behind it, the Millennials.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-41250855509092332602017-05-27T06:16:00.003-07:002017-05-27T06:16:36.795-07:00A bizarre explanation for the high cost of health care in the land of austerityThe hysteria over Trump's budget has been mounting for weeks. There is nothing in the news but deep, deep cuts to everything except the military. And even then, some say that we're not spending enough on the military - never mind that we spend more than the next 6 to 12 countries combined (depending on the source you choose to read). It may be awful to watch, but the debate has subtext.<br />
<br />
Lately, most of the focus has been on the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare) and the American Health Care Act. Most of the press has been given to the Republicans and their surreal opinions on the state of health care. Naked Capitalism has a very good shortlist of some of the untruths Republicans are brazen enough to speak, which you can read about in full detail <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/05/evidence-based-policy-making-dumb-things-politicians-say-health-care-policy.html">here</a>. I've reduced it to a short list here for your review so that we can explore then in some detail from a different perspective:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>The poor don't want health care and the fact that they have such poor lifestyles proves it.</li>
<li>The people who are healthy pay for the sick.</li>
<li>Men shouldn't have to pay for prenatal care for women.</li>
<li>People who lead good lives do not get sick.</li>
<li>No one dies due to lack of access or coverage.</li>
<li>People who don't take care of themselves don't deserve health care or insurance.</li>
</ol>
<div>
That is a short list of talking points that Republicans have made about the current state of health care. The first thing we should notice, as the Naked Capitalism article notes, is the complete absence of science. There is no scientific or empirical evidence backing up these outrageous claims. They are all judgments on the people who suffer the most from the current crisis of health care.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/incoming-congress-has-a-bigger-christian-majority-than-the-american-public_us_586beef3e4b0d9a5945cb162">Since Congress is 91% Christian</a> and 99% of Republicans in Congress are Christian, we can infer that according to some members of Congress, "God is punishing those who are sick, so lets pile on". So sorry for the 1st Amendment. I also note with interest that as far as I know, there has been nothing provided in the budget to teach people the skills they need to stay healthy. Even if they did, people who have the skills to lead a healthy life can still get sick and they can still have accidents. Perhaps they did not see or hear of Carl Sagan with his brainy quote: "Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception." I guess that's a bit much for people who believe in an afterlife.</div>
<br />
<br />
From the faith of some members of Congress, we can also infer that "sick people should not be rewarded, they should be punished". I'm still thinking about the 1st Amendment here. Can we also infer that some in Congress believe that they are "doing God's will"? If so, there needs to be a healthy and public discussion of just what "God's will" is. Who knows what God's will is? I sure don't and I doubt anyone in Congress really knows. Given the immense egos of the people in Congress, it would be easy for them to conflate their own will with God's will.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/32-35.htm">Somewhere in their Good Book</a>, God said, "Vengeance is mine". That would seem to mean that it's not up to those in Congress to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. I think I'll go with Gandhi, "An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind".<br />
<br />
So from what we can see, we have members of Congress constituting a majority, preaching a faith, and being unwilling to use federal funds to teach the skills necessary to "deserve" health care. Are those poor people who are so undeserving of health care really contributing to the high costs of health care? I don't think so. As one member of Congress put it, "the poor will always be with us", and they always have, so the poor can't really be used to explain the high cost of health care.<br />
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Our health care costs were in line with the rest of the industrialized world for much of modern history until sometime around the Reagan Administration. Economist Dean Baker has <a href="http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/baumol-s-disease-george-will-s-misdiagnosis-of-u-s-health-care-costs">some interesting numbers to share with us</a>, and a nice little chart he got from the OECD:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbhqxdAROJGHPkB468A35AkNzfv8ezEd8oSfYf0mQDiLoogDwK92rCSuvzjHJPweoIzz_mhclwC2o-eV6rqAnJIFLzmkus5twuXwil_imH26KVII0wUP2ohfJqjwwRmgZtxOkdcg/s1600/Book2_28024_image002.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbhqxdAROJGHPkB468A35AkNzfv8ezEd8oSfYf0mQDiLoogDwK92rCSuvzjHJPweoIzz_mhclwC2o-eV6rqAnJIFLzmkus5twuXwil_imH26KVII0wUP2ohfJqjwwRmgZtxOkdcg/s640/Book2_28024_image002.png" width="640" /></a><br />
<br />
Notice how American health care costs were fairly close to other industrialized countries for at least 10 years since they started collecting data in 1971. Notice also, how health care costs in the United States diverged in 1981. Hmm. Isn't that around the time of the Reagan Revolution? I think it is.<br />
<br />
In Baker's article he had this to say about the costs of health care:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The reason our health care costs have risen so much more rapidly than anywhere else is not Baumol's disease. Health care is a service everywhere, not just in the United States. The difference stems from the fact that doctors, insurers, drug companies, and medical equipment makers are far more capable of controlling the political process in the United States than in these other countries. They use their political power to restrict competition and get government subsidies. As a result, these actors are able to secure massive rents that come out of the pockets of the rest of us.</blockquote>
Rent seeking? Really? Since the poor have always been with us, it can't be them. It must be the changes in public policy made during the Rent Seeking ... I mean, Reagan Revolution. Doesn't it seem odd then, that no Republicans are talking about this development in our history and what we can do to reverse those changes?digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-9427721818793599322017-05-25T05:15:00.002-07:002017-05-25T05:15:47.630-07:00The conflict between good and evil in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of NeedsFor months now, there has been a quiet conversation in my head, a sort of reduction process to understand just where good and evil come from. As I've mentioned before on this blog, I do not believe in good and evil. Good and evil are terms that come from religion, a sort of supernatural explanation for helpful and challenging behavior observed in human beings.<br />
<br />
In this context, there are really only two kinds of people. There are those who are confused, people we might call "evil" and those who are less confused, those we might call "good". I use the terms "good" and "evil" here to keep the subject matter simple and easy to understand rather than to justify that behavior with a supernatural explanation.<br />
<br />
When I watch pop culture, a movie or a TV series, or read articles in the news, and there is violence in the story, my mind will go to that question, without fail, and ask, "why would anyone do such a horrible thing to another person"?<br />
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To put it differently, and a bit more personally, I ask the following question of myself, every day, all the time: does this serve me? Does this action meet my needs?<br />
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Good and evil, for the purposes of this article and discussion are really about how we get our needs met. Children will learn to lie if they fear for their lives or physical safety. They are not being evil. They are just confused by caregivers who believe that violence will grant the caregivers the relief they need. Even the caregivers are not being evil when they commit violence against children. Yes, their actions are abhorrent, but those actions are evidence of confusion, not evil. Violence doesn't serve any need other than self-preservation in self-defense, and even that is a matter of controversy.<br />
<br />
In almost every example that I choose to look at, transgressions are really about getting needs met, but not knowing how to get those needs met without saying, "please". From a trivial offense, to violence, to corruption on a massive scale, it must be clear to anyone on the outside that negotiation in good faith is not a skill held by the "evildoer".<br />
<br />
When I see one man seeking to acquire and exert power and control over another, I have to ask myself what need, exactly, is that person seeking to satisfy? We can explore this a bit with the chart below, a chart of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and take an act which we might define as "evil" and place it in context.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVaPqX6xsY4lo8G35jw5ISDE-BhVJ_zJtLz1V841ouZkmDfX4W22LqSepW4YqefW_kf-hEFh36uIxM5ly29mmSJNjkN23teahGGAtW1mgrRWXWAHgTIXu1Jl0fW1KSLC3qmJPaEA/s1600/MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1132" data-original-width="1600" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVaPqX6xsY4lo8G35jw5ISDE-BhVJ_zJtLz1V841ouZkmDfX4W22LqSepW4YqefW_kf-hEFh36uIxM5ly29mmSJNjkN23teahGGAtW1mgrRWXWAHgTIXu1Jl0fW1KSLC3qmJPaEA/s320/MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Physiological needs are like air, water, space and are governed by instinct. Safety is the need to preserve oneself from harm and is also governed by instinct. Love and belonging, managed by the higher thinking parts of the brain along with some instinct, are best described as fellowship, friendship, mate or spouse, and family. Esteem is a warm regard and compassion for oneself. And then there is self-actualization, the realization of one's calling and utilization of one's talents in the service of others.<br />
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I can take any movie plot and deconstruct it with this line of thinking. <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-sort-of-political-movie-review-star.html">I wrote about Star Wars not too long ago</a> and attempted to put the plot in this context. I wondered aloud about the antagonists in the Star Wars movies. When the lead antagonist gives the order to blow up a planet, what need is he seeking to meet? As a leader of a well financed, very well organized military organization, all of his basic needs for food, air, water and space are met. He is safe in his ship, which is armed to the teeth and has no adversaries to fear.<br />
<br />
Has our Star Wars antagonist ever experienced love and belonging? Well, that is an open question. In almost every interaction that Darth Vader or Senator Palaptine had with others, there is no question of the power they hold over others. Subordinates know that if they speak out of turn, their throats will be constricted by the use of the Dark Side of The Force, in a possibly fatal encounter.<br />
<br />
So, when Darth Vader crushes the throat of his subordinate almost to the point of suffocation, what need is he meeting? It is most certainly not fellowship or anything even remotely close to that of love. Is he meeting his need for personal safety? He's wearing a suit for his own protection, is armed with a laser gun and light saber and can count upon the obedience of everyone else in his army for protection. Side note: the only thing that punishment teaches is obedience, and in that army, obedience is in abundance.<br />
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Fellowship exists where intimacy is permitted. You cannot have intimacy between two people when one person exerts and maintains overwhelming power over another. Both parties are scared. The one with the power is afraid that at some point, his subordinate will lose fear of that power. The subordinate fears for his life. You cannot have intimacy with all that fear hanging around. So fellowship and any possibility of true love are lost with an overwhelming imbalance of power. In such a relationship, there is power and obedience, and there is no room for love or even a mutual warm regard.<br />
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Where there is a vacuum of esteem, we can expect to find a boatload of power and the willingness to use it against others. To put it differently, if you don't respect yourself, you won't respect others. If you talk with negativity and profanely against others, there is a very high probability that you do the same to yourself, too. Most people who think poorly of themselves, believe that everyone else knows the same thing.<br />
<br />
So if you have power, but still don't believe that your need for personal safety has been met, you will continue to seek more power, more security, and you may never find that what you have is enough. An all powerful being who is still mortal, will spend days and even months, planning for every possible contingency to ensure his needs are met and that everyone else is obedient to him. At some point, that person will need a break. He might need to get high so that he can stop all that thinking.<br />
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Blowing up a planet would induce the brain to release adrenaline. That would be nothing less than an exciting event for someone who lives on power. That is a gigantic high for someone we might deem to be "evil". But is it self-actualization? Being responsible for the deaths of billions of other living beings is not exactly creative. It will not prove that one is lovable, far from it, even when love is what we really want. At best, it is addiction in the extreme.<br />
<br />
Taken in context, I can't think of a single act of evildoing that really meets any human need. At best, evildoing serves as a distraction from the pain that one can be in when the skills to sooth oneself, or to ask for help are lacking. Evildoing is really just challenging behavior, but we use the term "challenging behavior" to describe kids, not adults.<br />
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Challenging behavior in kids is modeled by the parents. If the parents yell, the kids yell. If the parents are not flexible in their expectations, then kids will not be, either. If the parents hit, the kids will hit. If the parents lie, the kids will lie. If the parents have a low tolerance for frustration, the kids will, too. Kids look to the parents to know how to act and respond to changes in the environment - they imitate the behavior of the people around them.<br />
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Challenging behavior is what kids do when they lack the skills to meet the demands of their environment. In adults, this is what some challenging behavior looks like:<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDZmn8A7Byy-z1lJouIzIBKmdrLA29YG2ZAjbKjrcwqnkNxHCWVtc0tf4ndlOHIW96IEURs05ucswGcSsWnVEK2OD-ThGCo7zeEV4eYuFiqEoeKi40djVk3PJzlHeuhTYtUSMVfA/s1600/60b139abb26d92c1571cab88dce3858d.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDZmn8A7Byy-z1lJouIzIBKmdrLA29YG2ZAjbKjrcwqnkNxHCWVtc0tf4ndlOHIW96IEURs05ucswGcSsWnVEK2OD-ThGCo7zeEV4eYuFiqEoeKi40djVk3PJzlHeuhTYtUSMVfA/s400/60b139abb26d92c1571cab88dce3858d.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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What Mr. Reich observes may be a moral crisis, as he put it, but to me, it's a lack of interpersonal skills. White collar crime is not what we see on the local news. The local news is about violent crime, one person doing something awful to another. The local news is replete with stories about one poor person doing some awful thing to another, and neither person has the skills to get their needs met. These are people with no power to control the news of their unfortunate fate.<br />
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A person committing a violent crime is "acting out" because he lacks the skills to meet the demands of his environment. We can call him "evil" but that doesn't really explain why someone would commit an act of violence against another. Once that person is caught, we cast him off to prison as if prison is going to teach him the skills he needs to avoid that situation again. But American prisons are hell on earth by design, they are not places where one learns the skills of civilization. In prison, Americans learn the ways of the jungle.<br />
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Let's have a look at the white collar transgressions above:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Insider trading</li>
<li>CEO pay that is unhinged from productivity</li>
<li>Wage theft</li>
<li>Bribery</li>
<li>Gambling with other people's money</li>
</ul>
<div>
It's almost automatic that when we look at those activities, we think, "evil". I look at those kinds of activities and wonder what needs are met by participating in such activity. With some effort, I can imagine how one might feel doing all that. Here I think of someone like Bernie Madoff, or a hedge fund manager who is caught trading on insider information that everyone else is not privy to.</div>
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<div>
In every case listed above, there is adrenaline, pure and simple. White collar crime involves adrenaline just as much as violent crime, if not more. Because it often plays out over time, it is a longer, slower high, but it is still mood altering, it is a distraction from reality - how we are feeling, thinking and doing. White collar crime is just a very profitable addiction.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
What needs are being met by white collar crime? We're talking about people who have so much money, they're never going to be on the street. They're never going to be poor. Even after paying fines, they can park what remains of their money in a Vanguard 500 fund and live quite comfortably selling a part of the growth at 5% a year on average. Then they can just paint pictures in quiet solitude if they want to. So now we know that the first two rows of the hierarchy of needs are fulfilled. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What about love and belonging? White collar criminals might not have that anymore once their family figures out what is going on. Or maybe the family is fine with it, but as any soap opera fan knows, it's thin ice. And I can't imagine how anyone could have esteem while committing a white collar crime. Even if the transgression is "legal", like how the CEO of Home Depot still got a pot of cash after being ejected from the company in 2007. <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-takers.html">He was a taker</a>. How does one find esteem in that?</div>
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None of that activity, even if it's legal, comes even remotely close to "self-actualization". How does one feel good about buying a company, loading it up with debt and wiping out the employee pension fund for personal gain? <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/05/mitt-is-all-about-money-for-nothing.html">This is what Mitt Romney did</a>, yet millions of people voted for him in a presidential election.</div>
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<div>
When I think of human suffering in the context of skills, I find compassion for others. When I see people suffering, I see people who lack the skills to respond adaptively to the demands of their environment. When I see grown men and women defending a system that allows white collar transgressions against the people who serve them as employees and how they justify it, I also see people who lack the skills to meet the demands of their environment - without saying please. Money is a terrible substitute for interpersonal skills.</div>
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<div>
To me, this is the subtext of the circus on display in the White House and in our Congress. Underneath all the drama is the realization that most of those people do not know how to get their needs met without imposing their will upon someone else. Negotiation in good faith is a rare skill to find. Corruption is rampant.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This is why I use compassion first when someone makes a mistake. I avoid assuming that people are motivated to make mistakes. I assume that a mistake arises from a lack of skill, not motivation. When I see people suffering, I see them as lacking the skills to do better, not motivation. And it doesn't matter how much money or power you have. It doesn't matter if you're beautiful, either. If you don't have the skills to appreciate what you have, you will always want more.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
No amount of punishment nor reward will teach the skills we need to appreciate what we have or each other. The best tool for teaching the subtle skills of discernment and appreciation is collaboration. When we collaborate, we teach the skill of cooperation, too. And when we collaborate, we begin to discover that The Force is within, not without.</div>
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<br /></div>
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True, some see the situation in American politics as dire, and I would agree. But it took a long time to get here. It may take some time to get out, maybe a generation or two. While we're waiting, we can focus on teaching our kids (and everyone else in our lives) the skills of collaboration, for when we teach them, we teach ourselves, too. It's time for <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2016/10/plan-b-for-humanity.html">Plan B for Humanity</a>. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We must teach skills before punishment. We must teach compassion before punishment. Perhaps then, we can finally find peace as a species, because we're going to need peace in order to collaborate and solve the problems we've created for ourselves.</div>
digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-38896224676226381882017-05-18T04:24:00.003-07:002017-05-18T04:24:28.175-07:00To prevent another Trump, open the primary elections in every state at every levelThe bile and the acid Clinton Democrats have flung at Sanders supporters has become a river. It is particularly evident on Facebook, especially now, with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BeckandLee/">a class action lawsuit</a> underway against the Dingaling National Committee and Debra Wasserman-Schultz for "tipping the scales" for Clinton. Given the deep and wide Clinton News Network, it is hardly a surprise that <a href="http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/lawyers-in-dnc-class-action-suit-perplexed-by-media-blackout/">there is a virtual blackout on the story</a>. I guess that would explain why <a href="https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/theres-major-fuckery-afoot-with-the-washington-post-and-i-think-i-know-why-fc32e574d49f">the press has turned to the story on Trump and Russia</a>.<br />
<br />
Clinton supporters claim that Sanders wasn't a real Democrat, but conveniently omit the fact that he registered as a Democrat to run as a Democrat. He met all the criteria to run for president as a Democrat, and the DNC allowed him to run, but to Clinton supporters, he's not a real Democrat. He's caucused with Democrats in the Senate and in the House and voted with Democrats in both houses, but he's still not a real Democrat. Sanders wasn't just running for president, he was ringing a bell. Did any of you Clinton supporters hear it?<br />
<br />
Clinton supporters tell me I should just stop whining and get with the party, that I should have voted for Clinton. That her loss is my fault. How convenient it is for them to omit that Clinton collected commitments from more than 400 superdelegates before the first primaries were held. How convenient it is for Clinton supporters to omit that mainstream media were there to apologize for her and cover her butt and <a href="https://www.johnlaurits.com/2017/ap-sabotages-progressives-right-before-an-election-again-by-jeff-epstein-former-sanders-delegate-guest-post/">used their positions of power to create an implicit bias against Bernie Sanders</a>. And somehow, she still lost the general election.<br />
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Through it all, Clinton was supported by Barack Obama, nearly every sitting Democrat in federal and state office, and the DNC, despite losing more than 900 seats nationwide during the 8 years that Obama was president. How did they lose those seats? <a href="http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/thomas-friedman-shows-yet-again-the-economy-still-has-good-paying-jobs-for-people-without-skills">By acting like Republicans</a> and voting for <a href="https://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm">policies that redistributed income upwards</a>. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/polibig/eastbusi.htm">By fundraising like Republicans</a> (that link is to a ginormous 1986 article that describes ground zero - the point at which the Democrats lost their way) and ignoring their base. Clinton ignored Sanders supporters at her own peril and lost.<br />
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Do you think that Democrats losing more than 900 seats nationwide had anything to with Clinton's loss? I do. Democrats lost those seats because they failed to offer a meaningful and progressive liberal alternative to Republicans.<br />
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Clinton supporters have told me how I have to stop crying over the loss that Sanders suffered. I demur. I'm not crying for Sanders. As an independent voter, I'm crying for relief from the disenfranchisement imposed by both parties with their allegiance firmly held for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed">Boss Tweed</a>. Here are some well known quotes from Mr. Tweed:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The way to have power is to take it.</blockquote>
From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed">the Wikipedia article on Boss Tweed</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
According to Tweed biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman:</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It's hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed's system ... The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization.</blockquote>
What happened at the DNC is probably the best demonstration we've seen in recent history of how much control the wealthy seek to maintain over the nomination process. And when I say "wealthy", I'm not talking about your small business owner pulling a few million a year in gross business income. I'm talking billion dollar businesses running defacto monopolies. Think Walmart, Amazon, Facebook and Google. Think Mobil, Exxon and Shell. Think Comcast, ATT and Verizon. I saw coverage of the Convention and all the logos everywhere.<br />
<br />
Sanders said he's nobody's savior, that his campaign was not about him and he never told us who to vote for, anyway. He told us over and over again, that his campaign was about the issues, not about him. I agree. The debate is not about Sanders losing the nomination to Clinton even though there is serious contention as to that point. The context of the debate between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters is about accountability.<br />
<br />
The DNC is not willing to be held accountable to the people they claim to represent because the people they serve (the real party in interest), do not want any changes. The DNC claims to represent "Democrats", but after what I saw in the news about the nomination process, I will not call them "the Democratic Party", anymore. The superdelegates are unaccountable and are not democratic. The primaries are all for show because, with a few exceptions like Bernie, the vast majority of candidates must win the "money primary". That's where Boss Tweed chooses who gets to run and do well in any election.<br />
<br />
The DNC defense in the courtroom over a motion to dismiss in the class action lawsuit can be summarized as follows:<br />
<ul>
<li>We have the right to tip the scales to any candidate we choose.</li>
<li>Votes don't matter.</li>
<li>We're a private organization with zero fiduciary duty to anyone who sends us money.</li>
</ul>
Seriously? This is an organization that claims "democracy" in their namesake yet refuses to listen to the will of the people they claim to represent?<br />
<br />
And what's with this "we" business? Who is "we"? If the DNC has no obligation to follow the will of the people as expressed through their votes, why are they here? They are here as a conduit for the concentration of power. If the vote doesn't matter, who do they represent? <a href="http://smallplanet.org/content/lawrence-lessig-adresses-political-corruption-nominating-process-government-elections">The 0.02% who use money to exert control over the outcome of the primary elections</a>. They don't really care who votes in the general election, they just want control over the nomination process, and it would follow, the nominee. That is the walled garden erected by the wealthiest people in this country. This is the context of the struggle between the middle class and those who seek to marginalize the middle class.<br />
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My opponents in this debate on Facebook (and elsewhere) insist that primaries should be closed for the people who work so hard to cultivate a candidate, to prevent the primaries from being hijacked by the opposition party. It takes two to tango. If one party can do it, the other party can return the favor. Our party politics are so very polarized precisely because we have closed primaries. And once you close the primaries, then the 0.02% can go wild, serving us up with candidates many of us neither needed nor wanted. Like Trump and Clinton.<br />
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Opening the primaries in every state would provide a check on the power of the dominant parties. It would necessarily moderate the choice of candidates for office by each party. Open primaries would allow independents, now 45% of voters, to have a say in who they want to vote for in the general election. Indeed, it is a neat trick to see that the Republicans with 26% and Democrats with 30% of the national voter registration maintain absolute control over state and federal politics. Open primaries would go a long way to reducing the extreme polarization of our politics.<br />
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It would seem to me then, that extreme polarization of our politics is by design rather than an accident, for nothing in politics is accidental. Closing the primaries has increased the polarization of our politics, dividing our nation and preventing us from acting as one. Opening the primaries at every level of government would dilute the polarization. Open primaries would serve as a reminder to political parties running as private organizations, that they serve the public at large, not just a few very wealthy and organized interests. Open primaries would allow the entire country to work together, to prevent a hijacking of our government by a few very wealthy and entrenched interests.<br />
<br />
It also follows that we need to open our debates. The Democrats and Republicans must not be allowed to keep the debate stage and the free media exposure that follows, to themselves. The tide is starting to turn on the Commission for Presidential Debates and the courts are starting to take notice. In <a href="https://www.rt.com/document/58939bc2c36188c3728b4662/amp">Leveling the Playing Field v. FEC (Case No. 15-cv-1397)</a>, a federal court has ruled that the Federal Election Commission must reconsider their rules in light of the evidence presented in that case. They must acknowledge that only one third party candidate has appeared in a presidential debate since 1988. Just one in nearly 30 years.<br />
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The antipathy directed by Clinton supporters to Sanders supporters must be seen as an excruciating example of resistance to change, rather than a desire for it. The tension created by Clinton supporters demonstrates a clear lack of empathy for Sanders supporters. Sanders supporters wanted someone who was not of the old guard. They wanted someone they could trust and did not find that in Clinton.<br />
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So dear Clinton supporters, if you want the Democrats to win in the midterms, remember, we're progressives and we're here. We're waiting. We'd like to see some inclusion. We'd like to be welcomed. We'd like to agree upon a candidate that all of us progressives want. But if you continue to browbeat us, I'm sure Sanders supporters like me will find something else to do.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-37815132966281428902017-05-10T05:36:00.001-07:002017-05-10T05:36:21.905-07:00Skills vs morality in the debate over health careI found myself inspired to do a little bit of research on Mo Brooks after reading about his interview with CNN just the other day. In this particular instance, his grandiosity (or that of any Congressperson for that matter) was simply breathtaking. Numerous outlets have covered the apparent gaffe by Brooks and I found that Salon had <a href="http://www.salon.com/2017/05/02/alabama-congressman-people-who-lead-good-lives-dont-have-preexisting-conditions/">a particularly insightful account</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As Brooks told [Jake] Tapper: “My understanding is that (the new proposal) will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool. That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people — who’ve done things the right way — that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”</blockquote>
Clearly, Brooks ignores the question of whether or not those people with higher health care costs have the capacity to offset those higher costs in the first place. When people are ill, their capacity to earn more money is diminished, and getting a job is more difficult when employers see your health insurance as a liability.<br />
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The implication of his statement is that people who have higher health care costs are "bad" and that "they deserve" their suffering for being bad people. To put it differently, Brooks seems to think that "people who lead good lives do things the right way" and that the bad people should be punished. The Salon article did mention that Brooks seemed somewhat aware of his gaffe:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Perhaps realizing that his previous comments sounded insensitive, Brooks did try to backpedal later in the interview. “In fairness, a lot of these people with pre-existing conditions, they have those conditions through no fault of their own,” the Alabama congressman told Tapper. “And I think our society, under those circumstances, needs to help. The challenge though is that it’s a tough balancing act between the higher cost of these mandates which denies people coverage because they can’t afford their health insurance policies . . . and having enough coverage to help those people truly in need.”</blockquote>
So, people who are addicts are not people who are truly in need? People who have compulsive diseases are not people who are truly in need? According to Brooks, people should get assistance only under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? If someone received a "preexisting condition" through no fault of their own, like an accident or genetics, they're covered. <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/05/house-health-plan-makes-genes-preexisting-condition/">Oh, wait. Brooks wasn't talking about genetics now, was he?</a> He must be thinking about people living in a polluted environment. Hmm. That's not it, either. <a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/House/Mo_Brooks_Environment.htm">Brooks believes that manure is not a pollutant and that business will regulate itself</a>. I guess a disease from pollution is not a pre-existing condition then.<br />
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The underlying assumption here is that people who are bad should be punished. People who are bad have failed at making good decisions about their health. They should face the consequences of their decisions without government protection. Brooks claims that those bad people are the people who are increasing costs for the good people, yet he doesn't mind that members of Congress have no compunction about exempting themselves from their own laws.<br />
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I used to think this way, too. I used to be one of those "good people" who didn't want to pay for the poor health decisions made by others. But I've made plenty of mistakes of my own and I received plenty of help from other people along the way. In my life, I've learned to be more forgiving, and to let the one without sin cast the first stone.<br />
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Brooks seems to think of himself as a rational person. But he did pretty much what many other people do at the checkstand after shopping for groceries at the market. He seems to have made a rather impulsive decision about health care policy. From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Brooks">the Wikipedia page on Mo Brooks</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In March 2017, Brooks said that he would not vote in support of the American Health Care Act, the GOP's initial plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. Brooks said, "I will vote against the American Health Care Act because it has more bad policy than any bill I have ever faced."But on May 4, 2017, Brooks voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and pass the American Health Care Act.</blockquote>
If the assumption is that good people make rational choices for their own health, and Brooks implies that he's one of those good people by his own statements, how did he flip on the vote? A few months ago he said that Trumpcare had more bad policy than any bill he had ever faced and still voted for that bill. I bet he succumbed to peer pressure.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/history-will-remember-these-217-house-republicans-for-their-inhumanity/">The Nation set the record straight</a> by noting that most members of the House had almost no clue about what they were voting for. It's like watching a flock of birds decide which way to go:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To do this [vote], Ryan’s Republicans voted for a devastating piece of legislation without knowing:<br />
<ul>
<li>the cost of their plan</li>
<li>how many tens of millions of Americans will lose insurance</li>
<li>how their plan will be implemented at the federal or state level</li>
<li>what will remain of their plan after it is reviewed by the Senate</li>
</ul>
House Republicans simply did not care. The overwhelming majority of them cast their votes as Ryan said they should, and then they ran the gantlet—past crowds of citizens chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!”—on their way to a White House Rose Garden “celebration” of their partisanship with Donald Trump.</blockquote>
So it was peer pressure! Is this is Mo Brooks' idea of rational? I find it supremely ironic how the conservatives in Congress seem so fixated on individuals making good decisions and yet they vote for bad legislation and know that they're voting for bad legislation. To vote for that bill, they must be thinking more about all the dark money that funds their campaigns than the people who live in their districts. Brooks is a member of the Freedom Caucus and was elected to Congress in 2010 with that infamous wave of Tea Party upstarts, but apparently, that isn't a sign of a rational thinker.<br />
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I believe that the debate about personal responsibility is a ruse, a deflection, a misdirection. Congress is asking the American people to take responsibility for themselves but at the same time, exempting themselves from the changes in law they propose to make. They are asking people to take responsibility for themselves while protecting doctors from international competition. They are asking people to get into shape while inflicting huge costs with drug patents. They are asking people to take responsibility for their own health care costs, but refuse to address 40 years of wage stagnation.<br />
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At the same time, they are not willing to acknowledge that living a "good life" requires skill. Remember 92% of Congress is Christian and the conservatives among them seem to think that if we could just "let Jesus into our heart" that all would be well and good. Perhaps those God fearing Christians in Congress believe that if we prayed about our health conditions, we could lower our health care costs, too. Ergo, we won't need universal health care because God offers the best plan of all: immortality through salvation.<br />
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Here's the thing. If you're a believer, and I say this with the utmost respect for your faith, and you are praying for something specific, then you're treating God as a personal assistant, not your master. You could just pray for knowledge of God's will for you and the power to carry that out, and be the servant you claim you want to be. Especially if you're a member of Congress (sample prayer in Congress <a href="https://youtu.be/89zbShBFdkQ">here</a>). As a believer, you can have only one master, and it's not you.<br />
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If you're a believer, and believe that all humans are God's Children, you would not make another person a slave or your personal assistant, either. Slavery, racism, and violent "redemption" (thinking of the movie, "7 Years A Slave" here) are all incompatible with Christianity. Yet history is replete with numerous examples of white Christians subjecting other human beings to awful indignities as punishment for their skin color or lack of religious fervor. Our Congress is mostly white, male and Christian, and seems to rely more on punishment for compliance with their ideology than compassionate teaching of skills, First Amendment be damned.<br />
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Evidently, religious fervor is not a very good substitute for skills. Consider sex education as a way to teach the skills young people need. Sex education can teach kids how to treat their sexuality with all the care and respect they need to avoid getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant until they're in a committed relationship, prepared to accept the responsibilities and duties of parenthood.<br />
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Conservatives think that sex education is a private matter that should not be taught in school. But if kids live in God fearing homes where there is a lot of shame about sex, there will be no discussion of the subject, and like Sleeping Beauty, they're going to make the mistake that the parents always feared. At that point, can kids go to their church to learn what they need to know? You know, something beyond "just abstain"?<br />
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The point about teaching sex education in public schools is to put all the science on the subject together and explain it in a way that kids can comprehend and use. Yet conservatives the land over, seizing the power that they now have, are cutting funding for public education wherever they can. Education is what our society uses to transfer knowledge, including skills, from one generation to another. We teach reading, writing and arithmetic as basic skills. We teach communication as a fundamental skill because we transfer all skills through communication, not just genes.<br />
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Oh, yeah. Genes. We use genes to transfer knowledge in the form of instincts, but our brains are big enough to ignore or override our instincts, often at our own peril. Have you ever noticed that when you punish kids, they lack the ability to be rational? That's because punishment sends kids right into their instincts. They're all about fight or flight in the face of physical punishment. Is that love?<br />
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Communication leads immediately to collaboration. Humans collaborate to solve problems, even really big problems created by humans, and collaboration requires skill. And when governments cut funding for education to give a few very wealthy people large tax breaks, they reduce the capacity for our culture to teach the skills our next generation needs to not just to survive, but to live. I know, it seems evil, doesn't it?<br />
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Note to Mr. Brooks:<br />
<br />
The word "evil" is a supernatural explanation for challenging behavior in children and adults, therefore, evil doesn't really exist. There is only confused (what we might call "evil") and less confused (what we might call "good"). Challenging behavior arises from a lack of skills needed to get one's needs met.<br />
<br />
Teach the skills needed to get needs met and the challenging behavior goes away. This is how how brute nature yields to love. I say this because love is more than having a warm regard for another. Love includes teaching the skills required to get needs met, respectfully, honestly, openly and with regard to the needs of others.<br />
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As humans, we have cooperation baked into our genes. Love is the highest level of cooperation, includes sharing of knowledge and including skills, and is ultimately, human nature.<br />
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End of note to Mr. Brooks.<br />
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Human nature is to teach skills for survival, not punishment, and punishment doesn't teach any skills. If Mo Brooks wants high maintenance humans to pay for their health costs, he might take an interest in teaching those humans the skills required to make the money they need to pay for it. Or he can settle for creating a system where everyone pays for it with a universal health care system (think <a href="http://www.pnhp.org/hr676">HR 676</a>).<br />
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If Brooks is truly interested in making the world a better place, he may also want to take notice that in his faith, there is only one master, and it's not him.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-12181543174317963902017-05-03T06:30:00.000-07:002017-05-03T06:30:02.250-07:00Myth: The Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to make bad loansIn recent days, I've been participating in an interesting debate in the Fox News Politics community of Google+. You can find it <a href="https://plus.google.com/+ScottDunnC/posts/gErHew2xAUB?fscid=z12egttgixudzpmze04cclsifqmlujzoky40k.1493601684029843">here</a>. It started out as a debate over trickle down politics, but after a day or two, turned into a debate on the collapse of the housing bubble.<br />
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First, let me show you the meme that I shared in that community:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkaOP52cVyhKwOIGHm0xDhVp1X79nRjXppIxTKQZMfI0fyR96gKLOv3SIKEboym1VWhbrV5561iZteJQK6xJhWZCLRseoeFjyxM7NqrPbcMbebK3zJwvF1PaeWfpQehKxO25tDhg/s1600/17+-+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkaOP52cVyhKwOIGHm0xDhVp1X79nRjXppIxTKQZMfI0fyR96gKLOv3SIKEboym1VWhbrV5561iZteJQK6xJhWZCLRseoeFjyxM7NqrPbcMbebK3zJwvF1PaeWfpQehKxO25tDhg/s320/17+-+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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It's an interesting meme and point of departure for discussion. None of the tax cuts we've seen since Reagan was president have ever closed the federal budget deficit. Yet the pretense is that if you cut taxes, businesses will flower and blossom that will employ more workers in a virtuous circle. During the Bush Administration, tax rates were at a historical low yet, near the end of the 2nd Bush term as president, our nation was plunged into the Great Recession.<br />
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What I find interesting is not how the debate turned to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as the cause of the Great Recession. What I find interesting is that many conservatives hold a sincere belief that the CRA forced banks to make bad loans. It's like an urban myth, literally, but it's a conservative myth.<br />
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I recall the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 very well. I was working a new job as "the IT guy" at a debt collection shop. I enjoyed working there because I saw the other side of debt collection, having at one point in my life, been the person of interest with debt collectors. Working there gave me a window into how at least one loan collector runs his business.<br />
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Every Monday, the owner (who shall remain nameless for this article) would hold a meeting in the lunch room to educate his employees about the law. During his meetings, he would discuss both federal and state laws concerning debt collection. He was quite enthusiastic when he talked about the laws, but he really shined when he talked about the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The Act has been modified since then, but I can recall with clarity, how he discussed the first few sections of the Act, as codified at Title 15, United States Code, section 1692, in shorthand, 15 USC 1692.<br />
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He seemed to glow as he discussed the Congressional findings and purpose, the intent of Congress. He explained, with some glee, that "no debt collector shall be disadvantaged from following the spirit and the letter of the law". He understood that the law was intended to curb or eliminate abuses in debt collection practices and he emphasized that point to a room full of debt collectors every Monday. He said, "Your job, as debt collectors is to follow the law."<br />
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What he showed me is that the preamble to the act, as codified, demonstrates Congressional intent.<br />
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So, during the debate on the subject of the CRA at Fox News Politics, I researched the CRA. It is codified at 12 USC 2901, et. seq. As with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Congress saw fit in 1977, to state their intent concerning this law:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
§2901. Congressional findings and statement of purpose<br />
(a) The Congress finds that—<br />
(1) regulated financial institutions are required by law to demonstrate that their deposit facilities serve the convenience and needs of the communities in which they are chartered to do business;<br />
(2) the convenience and needs of communities include the need for credit services as well as deposit services; and<br />
(3) regulated financial institutions have continuing and affirmative obligation to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered.<br />
(b) It is the purpose of this chapter to require each appropriate Federal financial supervisory agency to use its authority when examining financial institutions, <b>to encourage such institutions to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions. </b>(emphasis mine)</blockquote>
The CRA grants authority to agencies responsible for implementing this law, to encourage lending institutions to make loans that are safe and sound. There is nothing in that law about "liars loans" or directing banks to make loans without checking for income or the ability of the borrower to pay back the loan.<br />
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Conservatives cry foul and claim that banks were forced to make bad loans, but they conveniently ignore the preamble of the CRA which states the intent of the law. That means that everything that follows within that chapter of law must conform to the intent of Congress - the law must be taken in context. Agencies charged with executing the laws are not free to exceed the authority granted to them. If Congress says that agencies must encourage lending institutions to make loans that are consistent with the safe and sound operation of the institution, then agencies must do that. If they did not, any bank could sue for relief from such a rogue agency.<br />
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Did any banks sue over the CRA? Did any banks ever cry foul over a law that purports to make them sell bad loans? Not that I'm aware of. But the banks had no problem selling expensive loans to minorities, even when they could have qualified for better terms. <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/supreme-court-delivers-blow-bad-banks">Just ask the city of Miami, Florida</a>, where they're still cleaning up the mess from all the bad loans that were made. That city sued Bank of America and Wells Fargo over the costs of cleaning the blight left from abandoned homes left by people who could not pay back their loans with bad terms. Those people were sold loans at higher interest rates based on the color of their skin, not their credit scores or history.<br />
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Conservatives in their defense of the banks will blindly ignore the fact that four men were acquitted over loan fraud because executives at the lending institution did not check for income for years before the collapse of the housing bubble. I mentioned this in said debate above, and Salon has that story <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/09/07/finally_wall_street_gets_put_on_trial_we_can_still_hold_the_0_1_percent_responsible_for_tanking_the_economy/">here</a>. Here are some highlights:<br />
<ul>
<li>Four men charged with loan fraud used a novel defense: the bank never checked for income and made "stated income" or "liars loans", so if the bank knew that information on the loan application could be false and just wanted to make the loan, how could they have committed fraud on the bank?</li>
<li>Bill Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence for Financial Regulation at the University of Minnesota’s School of Law, says that bank executives knew what they were doing and committed "accounting control fraud". Bank executives were allowing risky loans while earning bonuses from the sales of the loans.</li>
<li>The Federal agent who had investigated the case—a man with plenty of experience detecting mortgage fraud—told the court that he had not talked to executives at the firms in question and, indeed, had not interviewed any top mortgage executives, ever. As if the bank had no responsibility at all.</li>
<li>The bank CEO never appeared at the trial. He wasn't even subpoenaed.</li>
</ul>
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Conservatives (even neoliberal Democrats like Barack Obama) will tell you that the banks were the victims. But given what we learned in this trial and acquittal of 4 men, banks knew very well what they were doing. <a href="http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/banking/article9151889.html">When Bank of America bought Countrywide</a>, do you think they performed due diligence? I think they did, and they knew about all the bad loans that Countrywide was holding, expected a bailout, and they got one. All of the big banks knew what was going on.</div>
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The same people who defended the banks as victims of government regulation are also willing to overlook one simple fact: banks who can wrangle an $800 billion bailout at their darkest hour are most certainly not powerless to stop a bad law. Banks have the money and the influence to get the laws they want. <a href="https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf">They act as if we live in an oligarchy</a>. They could have stopped or amended the CRA to their liking in Congress, but they did not. They could have amended the CRA with a more sympathetic Congress later. They did not.</div>
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The debate at Fox News Politics then turned to vagueness, that there is too much vagueness in the law to fight it. Well, there's a legal doctrine for that. "<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/void_for_vagueness">Void for vagueness</a>" from the Legal Information Institute:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Under vagueness doctrine, a statute is also void for vagueness if a legislature's delegation of authority to judges and/or administrators is so extensive that it would lead to arbitrary prosecutions.</blockquote>
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An enterprising law firm hired by the banks could have made that argument to stop a law they believe is bad. But they did not.<br />
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Banks do not have clean hands in the meltdown. Not only did they participate in an orgy of bad finance practice, they contributed to the stagnation of wages that made it difficult if not impossible for borrowers to pay back their loans. Banks used their money to influence the public policy decisions that decoupled productivity from wages and have been doing so since the 1970s.<br />
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Since the 1970s, CEO salaries (including bank CEOs) have grown more than 900% while wages have grown a mere 30%. This is a result of a long line of public policy decisions that distributed income upwards. These public policy decisions didn't just decoupled wages from productivity. They decoupled CEO salary from productivity as well, but at the expense of the working class.<br />
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The rise of CEO salary relative to wages cannot be explained by mere economics. A far more plausible explanation is that extreme inequality is a public policy choice, not economics. Economist Dean Baker has that story in plenty of detail in his book, <a href="http://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm">Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer</a> (it's free, too).<br />
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Not only did the big banks cry foul when they stood to lose billions, they created the situation to begin with. They could have acted proactively to prevent the housing bubble and its collapse, but did not, and they had no problem leaving the taxpayer with the bill.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-19309409056844652942017-05-01T05:56:00.004-07:002017-05-01T05:56:58.337-07:00If you sell access to the network known as "the internet", you're a common carrierFederal Communications Commission Chairman <a href="https://twitter.com/AjitPaiFCC">Ajit Pai</a> (Twitter account link) has laid down the gauntlet in his quest to reverse a 2015 ruling that classifies Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as common carriers. Mr. Pai seems to think that classifying ISPs as information services will restore freedom to the internet.<br />
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Pai says that the FCC must dial it back to the lighter touch that was applied before the ruling with Chairman Tom Wheeler at the helm, so that ISPs will invest in their infrastructure again. This despite the fact that <a href="https://muninetworks.org/communitymap">more than 450 cities have built their own world class ISPs</a> when they could not get service from incumbent service providers - and most of them were built before 2015.<br />
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Mr. Pai has filed a notice of rulemaking and a request for comments, <a href="https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.pdf">here is a factsheet</a> for that filing. You can <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC">file your comments on the same here</a>. The vote on the proposed rule isn't until May 18th and even after that, there will be a lengthy period of public comment available (no deadline has been formally announced yet). Ars Technica has a brief article with some very interesting analysis, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/ajit-pai-announces-plan-to-eliminate-title-ii-net-neutrality-rules/">here</a>. The best analysis I've found so far can be seen at Y-Combinator <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14215198">here</a> (highly recommended!). <br />
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I wrote about this issue in 2014 when the FCC and Congress were debating the idea of classifying ISPs as common carriers in my article, "<a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2014/05/justice-scalia-told-us-cable-isps-are.html">Justice Scalia told us cable ISPs are common carriers 10 years ago</a>". Here is the nugget of the article:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Scalia's opinion notes that the cable ISPs are providing the same telecommunications service that the phone companies offer, just using different hardware, while offering "information services". The cable companies offered free email addresses and websites to show that they are "information services", too. The FCC took this to mean that since they are offering information services, they must be classified as an information service rather than a telecommunications service. Scalia's point is that even if the cable companies offer "information services", they are still providing "telecommunications services" and are thus Title II Common Carriers.</blockquote>
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This is the same point as the Y-Combinator article posted above. Lest there be any confusion, let's see what the FCC regulations can say. But before we can get to that, a short civics lesson is in order. The way power is delegated in American law is that all power resides in the people and they delegate power certain powers to Congress. Congress writes the laws and when they write the laws, they delegate power to implement the law to the executive branch. Usually, they delegate such power to the head of an agency. In this case, we're talking about the chairman of the FCC. And when Congress delegates that power, they delegate the power to write rules on how the law should be interpreted and implemented. Those rules are called regulations and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations. </div>
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So how does Congress define a common carrier? <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/153">47 U.S. Code § 153 - Definitions</a></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(11) Common carrier<br />
The term “common carrier” or “carrier” means any person engaged as a common carrier for hire, in interstate or foreign communication by <u>wire or radio</u> or interstate or foreign radio transmission of energy, except where reference is made to common carriers not subject to this chapter; but a person engaged in radio broadcasting shall not, insofar as such person is so engaged, be deemed a common carrier. (emphasis mine)</blockquote>
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<div>
Congress was specifically identifying communication by wire or radio, meaning, if you own the wire, you're a common carrier. Even if you don't own the wire and you rent the wire to someone else, you're still a common carrier. So if you just sell access to the network of wires, you're still a common carrier. That means, ATT, Verizon, Comcast, Time-Warner and any other entity that sells access to a network, regardless of ownership.<br />
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Since this is a delegation of power from the Congress to the FCC, no regulation promulgated by the FCC can exceed the power delegated to it, including the definition of "common carrier". The FCC can neither reduce nor increase the scope of the definition without a grant of power from Congress to do so.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
For decades, ISPs have been hiding behind their "information services" while selling access to their network, pretending that they're not telecommunications services. To paint a bright red line around it, you cannot sell access to the network and then claim you're not a telecommunications provider just because you include "information services", too. This is the issue that was discerned by Justice Scalia <a href="http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/545/967.html">NATIONAL CABLE & TELECOMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION et al. v. BRAND X INTERNET SERVICES et al. [04-277]</a>:</div>
<div>
<blockquote>
If, for example, I call up a pizzeria and ask whether they offer delivery, both common sense and common "usage," ante, at 18, would prevent them from answering: "No, we do not offer delivery--but if you order a pizza from us, we'll bake it for you and then bring it to your house." The logical response to this would be something on the order of, "so, you do offer delivery." But our pizza-man may continue to deny the obvious and explain, paraphrasing the FCC and the Court: "No, even though we bring the pizza to your house, we are not actually 'offering' you delivery, because the delivery that we provide to our end users is 'part and parcel' of our pizzeria-pizza-at-home service and is 'integral to its other capabilities.' " Cf. Declaratory Ruling 4823, ¶39; ante, at 16, 26.1 Any reasonable customer would conclude at that point that his interlocutor was either crazy or following some too-clever-by-half legal advice.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In short, for the inputs of a finished service to qualify as the objects of an "offer" (as that term is reasonably understood), it is perhaps a sufficient, but surely not a necessary, condition that the seller offer separately "each discrete input that is necessary to providing ... a finished service," ante, at 19. The pet store may have a policy of selling puppies only with leashes, but any customer will say that it does offer puppies--because a leashed puppy is still a puppy, even though it is not offered on a "stand-alone" basis.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Despite the Court's mighty labors to prove otherwise, ante, at 17-29, the telecommunications component of cable-modem service retains such ample independent identity that it must be regarded as being on offer--especially when seen from the perspective of the consumer or the end user, which the Court purports to find determinative, ante, at 18, 22, 27, 28. The Commission's ruling began by noting that cable-modem service provides both "high-speed access to the Internet" and other "applications and functions," Declaratory Ruling 4799, ¶1, because that is exactly how any reasonable consumer would perceive it: as consisting of two separate things.</blockquote>
Note also that this is an excerpt from a dissenting opinion with concurrence of Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg. Even Ginsburg, a liberal almost diametrically opposed to Scalia on many issues, concurs with Scalia! Though it is a dissenting opinion, it is worth noting that dissenting opinions do sometimes become the majority opinion in future cases.<br />
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I will be posting my own comment on this issue as well as the many thousands, perhaps millions of others will, and I hope you do, too. The point we must make to the FCC in our filings is this: if you own the pipes, or even sell access to the pipes, you're a common carrier. Even if you add some fancy information service on top of that, you're still a common carrier by virtue of selling access to the network you manage, lease or own. The network includes the last mile, the copper cable or fiber that gets your signals to the internet and that means the companies we love to hate must be regulated as common carriers.<br />
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Sticking to this point and this point alone will bring the debate to a head and finally pull back the facade of "information services" to reveal ISPs as common carriers.</div>
digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-65462343450285777142017-04-24T05:33:00.001-07:002017-06-24T05:54:56.614-07:0013 Reasons Why, a review through the lens of skills, not judgmentI've been watching <i>13 Reasons Why</i> on Netflix for the past few weeks and just finished last night. No, I'm not a teenager brimming with angst, but I know what that was like for me. I just kept seeing that series on my home page on Netflix and, while still waiting for Sense8 and House of Cards, I thought I'd give it a try.<br />
<br />
As I write this, Don Henley's song "<a href="https://play.google.com/music/preview/Thjlfqqboyyi732cr37urwibhgi?lyrics=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=lyrics&pcampaignid=kp-lyrics&u=0#">The Heart of the Matter</a>", is playing through my mind. It is a song about forgiveness, and forgiveness to me is the complete surrender of hate and rage for understanding. But as I will show you below, you cannot have understanding without collaboration. And with collaboration comes skill, the kind of skill teens and young adults need to avoid getting to the point where they even begin to contemplate suicide.<br />
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I want to use this space here to also say kudos to everyone who made <i>13 Reasons Why</i> happen. Some of the scenes were quite intimate in nature and required a tremendous amount of trust in each other to perform. This is an exceptional series and worth the time to watch, particularly for anyone with kids entering or already in adolescence. It is a parable of modern times to show us just what kids are facing now with social media, smart phones and school.<br />
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I can relate to the characters in <i>13 Reasons Why</i> because there was a time in my life as a young man, when I wanted to to take my own life. I had a good friend back then who shot that idea down in the most spectacular way, to paraphrase:<br />
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"Suicide? That's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Besides, suicide is the most selfish thing anyone can do. It's a slap in the face to everyone you leave behind."<br />
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So from that point on, I decided to live for as long as I possibly can, just to see what happens next. Now I can look back on that time in my life and know that I felt that way because I lacked the skills to cope with life better than I did. Since then, I found resources that taught me the skills I needed to adapt, to change my mind. Everything I have done from that point forward was to see what would happen next.<br />
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I watched <i>13 Reasons Why</i> as an exploration of human behavior. Yes, it is a drama, and yes, there is plenty of drama in the series. For Nic Sheff, one of the writers on the series, it is an exploration into teen life, as he wrote in his <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/04/13-reasons-why-suicide-controversy-nic-sheff-writer">editorial article</a> at Vanity Fair:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As soon as I read the pilot for 13 Reasons Why, I immediately knew it was a project I wanted to be involved in. I was struck by how relevant and even necessary a show like this was: offering hope to young people, letting them know that they are not alone—that somebody out there gets them. In 13 Reasons Why, the story of a high-school girl who takes her own life, I saw the opportunity to explore issues of cyberbullying, sexual assault, depression, and what it means to live in a country where women are devalued to the extent that a man who brags about sexually assaulting them can still be elected president. And, beyond all that, I recognized the potential for the show to bravely and unflinchingly explore the realities of suicide for teens and young adults—a topic I felt very strongly about.</blockquote>
Throughout each episode, I watched every human interaction, without judgement. Whenever there was a "f*ck you!" moment, I asked myself if there was an opportunity to teach, an opportunity for collaboration lost. I remembered what I learned from reading books like "The Explosive Child", "Raising Human Beings" and numerous other books over the last 25 years. I watched with interest and noted how quick people were to punish another. "Ew! You remind me of my own shame! Here, let me punish you!" That pretty much sums up every conflict in <i>13 Reasons Why</i>. Can you hear <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/books/john-bradshaw-self-help-evangelist-dies-at-82.html?_r=0">John Bradshaw</a> calling?<br />
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That shame comes from somewhere. With few exceptions, shame is transferred, even inherited, from parent to child. If parents witness their child doing something that reminds them of their own shame, even unconscious shame, then punishment will come, unless the parents are aware of their own shame.<br />
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While it is easy to disregard the adults in <i>13 Reasons Why</i> as they're not central to the plot, I noticed who even showed the slightest interest in collaborating with adults. What I saw was that in homes with abuse, there was little interest or awareness of collaboration as an option to solve problems. Where there was hope and understanding, even reaching out on the part of the parents, there was more of a willingness to talk, to collaborate. This is not a hard and fast rule, this is a tendency of the characters in the series that mirrors life. The adults modeled the skill of collaboration or embraced conflict when they lacked the skill of collaboration.<br />
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Hannah Baker is the protagonist in <i>13 Reasons Why</i>, and like so many other teens and young adults who take their own lives, she died because she lacked the skills to collaborate with others to solve her problems. She tried many times to get help through collaboration, but with a few exceptions, she was surrounded by others who lacked the skills to collaborate. Most of the characters are ready to shoot first and ask questions later, an attribute that is reflected in our country at a personal and national level. Just ask the citizens of any country we're at "war" with now.<br />
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<i>13 Reasons Why</i> has generated a resounding response. As the <a href="https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/top-lists/top-10-series-based-on-books-streaming-on-netflix/">What's On Netflix</a> website observes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Released in 2007, <a href="http://www.thirteenreasonswhy.com/">13RW</a> is a young adult novel written by Jay Asher. Picked up by Netflix and produced by Selena Gomez, it quickly gained traction become one of Netflix’s most popular series. According to Fizziology, more people tweeted about “13 Reasons Why” during its first week of streaming that any other Netflix show-3,585,110 tweets in total. That’s three times as many mentions as the second most-tweeted show and more than 20 times the tweets of popular shows “Orange is the New Black” and “Master of None.” That’s big.</blockquote>
That kind of response indicates that millions of people identify with the characters in the story. They identify with being abused, being shut out, being withdrawn, being cast off. Without collaboration, its every man for himself, everyone is a free agent in a bag of skin. <i>13 Reasons Why</i> is not quite <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies"><i>Lord of the Flies</i></a>, but both are cultural examples of how important it is for the older generation to collaborate with the younger generation. If you punish people because they "didn't get it", they won't.<br />
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When we hate, we surrender the need to understand. When we punish, we foreclose the need to understand. When we hate, we practice it as a skill, just as we do when we punish. Every minute we spend working on, planning on, or executing punishment is a minute we could have spent understanding another human being. While mired in resentment, we are not reaching out to collaborate with another human being. In resentment, we are drinking poison in isolation while waiting for the other person to die. The skills of human survival are taught, polished and honed in collaboration, not isolation.<br />
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As anyone familiar with biology knows, as we adapt to one environment we surrender the ability to thrive in another environment. Just as we cannot defend against all attacks, we cannot thrive in all environments. What makes humans different from all the other animals is our ability to adapt our environment to suit us. I'm not saying that natural selection will reward our ability to adapt our environment to suit us, as climate change is about to show us how much that ability costs, but it is a skill and it takes time to learn and master. Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet, but that ability to adapt is limited to skills we confer upon our progeny.<br />
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<i>13 Reasons Why</i> is a great illustration as to why I treat everything and everyone with tenderness and care. I do this not because that's how the world is, I do it because that's how I want the world to be.<br />
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Everyone I know in my life gets the same treatment. I keep my side of the street as clean as I can. I don't fire back, for they might be giants. I tread lightly wherever I walk and talk. I close doors gently, I don't raise my voice except for imminent danger, I don't break things in anger. I let the feeling pass before I act. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The universe is a reflection of everything that I am thinking and feeling right now. I get to choose what I think and feel because every day is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/">Groundhog Day</a>.<br />
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I have two darling little daughters and I was thinking of them when I watched <i>13 Reasons Why</i>. My kids are young now - a preschooler and a toddler, and someday they will be teenagers. I know that I'm already obsolete, but my job as a parent is to provide 24/7 tech support for life. I do so, willingly, without judgement or reproach of anyone. I'm not a perfect parent, so I allow my kids to teach me something new every day.<br />
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My definition of love is to allow another person to grow to the greatest extent possible, while doing no harm. In my actions, I strive to provide a constant reminder to my wife and kids, that "my door" is always open and that they can talk to me about anything at all, at anytime. That is what Hannah Baker needed from the beginning, an open door.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-4771764030408085802017-04-22T05:30:00.002-07:002018-11-19T04:14:25.407-08:00On blocking, muting and postingJust the other day, I had an interaction with someone in the Fox News Politics community on Google+ that I would like to share with you. I can't remember the subject of the post, but I remember how the comments went. One person criticized another for poor spelling and grammar, even when the first suffered the same malady. So I pointed out that the first person had made grammar and spelling errors, too. He said that I had made an error by putting a comma before the word "too". So I replied with a link to the <a href="http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html">Chicago Manual of Style</a> with a link to the precise page on the use of a comma followed by "too".<br />
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I came back to the post after receiving notification of a new comment only to find that I was blocked from reading or posting comments. I had an exchange with someone who moderated comments on his post and he blocked me. I don't usually get blocked, but I was struck by why I got blocked. I don't use profanity online as a rule and I really did use neutral language to keep it sane. I like to use neutral language to stick to the facts. I was blocked because I presented facts to show that I was right.<br />
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Some of you might be wondering what I'm doing there on Fox News Politics. I'm there for exploration. I'm there to check my assumptions. I'm there because I can preach to the choir anytime. I have posted a few of my blog articles there to see what kind of response I get. I can tell you that it's mostly positive, but it's interesting.<br />
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What I see exhibited in that community is the impulse to punish more than rational debate, and that impulse is not exclusive to conservatives, but it's blatantly obvious there. It's almost as if to say, "If you just don't understand, if you don't agree with me, you should be punished." I've seen numerous interactions where one person is wrong and the other is right, and everyone piles on the person believed to be wrong. They all pile onto the one with the wrong opinion, the wrong facts, whatever. The problem is this: punishment doesn't teach any skills.<br />
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I was blocked as punishment, not as a lesson in civil discourse. Did that teach me a new skill? Perhaps. But for the person who blocked me, he lost the opportunity to persuade me that his position was sound, even just. He, and all the other participants, also lost the ability to see all of my inputs on that post.<br />
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Years ago, I saw this great Sherlock Holmes play featuring Frank Langella cast as the great detective himself. I recall this interaction between Holmes and Dr. Watson, where Dr. Watson hazards what he thought might be a trivial question. Holmes calmly stated in reply, "There is no such thing as a trivial question." That is a sign of true curiosity, the sense that all information is good information, that we can learn from it. I read posts I disagree with because I know that there is something I can learn from it, even if I disagree with it. This is the point of departure in civil discourse. I come to the debate with my mind open.<br />
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As a general rule, I don't block people, even when I disagree with them. I will block on evidence of harassment, sure. But civilized debate? Censuring my opponent closes the debate. Then it's not really a debate, is it? The entire point of civil discourse is so that all opinions are heard, even if the facts prove them to be wrong. I'm not afraid to be wrong, that's why I write this blog. I've been wrong before and have admitted being wrong openly and freely on this blog.<br />
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I don't even mute posts, comments or users much. I think I might have muted a user just once for clear and obvious harassment. Sometimes, I just leave the group or stop following that person if I find their posts obviously offensive. But even that is rare. I'm here for the discussion, not the victory.<br />
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A society cannot function if the dominant faction is allowed to censure everyone else. The entire point of the First Amendment is to allow people to express themselves with words, diagrams, audio, videos, or whatever. The men who framed the Constitution understood that allowing freedom of expression provided pressure relief for people passionate about their views. Let them speak, let them write, let them say what they need to say. An adult audience can evaluate the content against the facts they know and determine if they agree or disagree.<br />
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The Framers did not imagine the internet, but I believe that the First Amendment is just as relevant now as it was then. And now we can fact check against what we read. We can find common ground and corroborating facts, from diametrically opposed sources. I know because I've done it to research my articles. I have found agreement on a fact in economics between a liberal and conservative source. To me, one of the best ways to check facts is to find two diametrically and passionately opposed sources discussing the same event or topic and see what lines up. You'd be surprised at what you find.<br />
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Readers familiar with my work will know that I'm a liberal. I used to be libertarian, even a Republican. But I see now that we're going to have to work together if we, as a species are going to survive. Note that I'm not a Democrat. I'm just an independent liberal with a point of view.<br />
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I don't block because I know what it is like to be silenced. I don't mute for the same reason. I may change sources of information or just add new sources. Online interactions change day by day, and they are often fleeting. There is so much more to life than this screen. Life is too short to be at war with people online that I don't even really know. Sure, there may be some kinship with a few people I have interacted with online, but I really don't know them. Or for that matter, any adversary online and I have no real adversaries.<br />
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I don't think of social media in terms of good and bad people. I either agree or disagree. If I disagree with a comment on one of my posts, I let it stand, but I reply if I believe I can show an honest disagreement based on the facts. I will often provide a link to supporting evidence to buttress my argument. And most of the time, it's not for me or even my opponent in the debate, it's for the peanut gallery, the other people who are watching. I don't expect to change any minds here. Not even my own. But I allow for it to happen.<br />
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So much of what we do is a matter of faith. I distinguish faith from belief for the simple reason that belief holds something to be true, no matter the evidence. Faith is a reservation of judgment, waiting to see what will happen next. It is not, as some may say, the same thing as belief. I just have faith in human beings. I do what I do to see what will happen next, not to make some thing happen. I roll the ball to see where it goes, not to make it go where I want it to go.<br />
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To know the truth we must be willing to surrender what we already know in exchange for something better.<br />
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Write on.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-38610462379212904352017-04-16T05:15:00.002-07:002017-06-18T21:16:35.001-07:00Corruption is a trade of dignity for money - all for lack of interpersonal skills<div class="tr_bq">
In the time that I have spent listening to and reading the writing of gun rights activists, I have learned one clear and overarching message: guns don't kill people, people kill people, and I agree with them. Guns may provide a ready release for the temptation of one person to kill another, but left alone, a gun does nothing. It still takes a person to load it, point it and shoot it. </div>
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So, not too long ago - mere days in social media time, someone suggested that money corrupts people. On this point again, I happen to disagree. Money itself does not corrupt people. If you believe that, then you believe that guns kill people, too. In the same way that people choose to use a gun to kill another person, people choose to allow themselves to become corrupt as a result of money, often because they believe they have no better choice. So, why do people allow themselves to be corrupted for money?<br />
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Notice the language above. I replaced "by money" with "for money". People allow themselves to be corrupted in exchange for something else. In the process of corruption of character, there is a give and take, an exchange of dignity for power. Just ask Golem. "<a href="http://www.buzzle.com/articles/27best-quotes-by-gollum.html">Wraiths! Wraiths on wings! They are calling for it. They are calling for the precious.</a>"<br />
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It has been said that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believe that all corruption stems from child abuse and/or the imposition of adult will in the form of punishment and reward. In fact, I believe that every crime is a result of and can be traced back to child abuse and the punishment and reward regime that is so popular in America for behavior modification. Child abuse and punishment and reward operate on the same assumption: that kids lack the motivation to do better. Apply more force, more coercion, more threats and the behavior should improve, but it never really does.<br />
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To save a few keystrokes and perhaps my sanity, I'm going to lump child abuse and punishment and reward into the term "abuse". The reason punishment and reward is included in abuse for the purposes of this article is that punishments and rewards do not teach skills. I know this from personal experience because I've just never seen it work not with me.<br />
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Here is my personal experience. I was grounded for an entire summer by my dad over my falling grades in junior high school math, but he was far too busy to actually teach me how to develop the discipline of doing the homework. He just expected me to feel pain from the punishment of isolation and to comply to escape the pain. He never offered any help, assistance or his know-how, and God knows how good he is at math.<br />
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I wanted to do better, I really did. But I didn't have the skills to comply with his demands. I could do the math. That wasn't the problem. I just didn't have the discipline to do the homework and had no model or mentor to work with. The only thing left for me to do was resist, so I did. So much so that things didn't improve until he came to my room one night, a little inebriated and crying over this conflict and he surrendered. This is how awful he felt about it, and I could see it. After that I just resolved to do my homework so that I wouldn't break him.<br />
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What my father (bless his heart), and most American parents don't know is that punishment reinforces behavior just as much as rewards do, but neither will teach a skill required to achieve the compliance objectives they set for their kids. More than 30 years of empirical evidence bear this out and has been made easy for laymen to read in books like "<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062270450/the-explosive-child">The Explosive Child</a>" and "<a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Raising-Human-Beings/Ross-W-Greene/9781476723747">Raising Human Beings</a>", by Dr. Ross W. Green, PhD. Both books provide excellent guidance in how to distinguish punishment and reward from teaching skills.<br />
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Abuse does not teach a survival skill. When kids are being abused, they are not learning skills that they can use to improve their life or even save it. Every minute spent at the hands of an abuser is a minute that could have been spent teaching the skills kids will need later on in life to function as an adult. When presented with abuse, kids respond instinctively, with biological programming for survival. You know, like fight or flight. When kids (and adults) descend into instinct, they are not thinking about their responses, so they just act on thousands or millions of years of adaptation built into their genes. Instincts are not about skills, they are built in responses to the environment.<br />
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What kinds of skills are we talking about, then? Problem solving skills. How to get your needs met. How to get along with others. How to pay the bills. How to say, "please". How to say, "sorry". How to find your talents and use them to the best of your ability. My job as a parent is not to inflict pain on my kids. They do that to themselves without my help just figuring out how the world works. My job is to help them discover who they are and avoid hurting themselves or others.<br />
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Every kid faces problems they need help solving - we often call them "growing pains". When kids encounter a problem they cannot solve, especially under duress inflicted by parents, they exhibit challenging behavior. Most parents will respond to such behavior by imposing their will upon the kid rather than work with the kid to solve the problem. That's because most parents make the assumption that challenging behavior on the part of kids is a sign of kids being "willful", as if skill had nothing to do with it. Often, this leads to abuse in the form of physical punishment or coercion. When children are abused, they experience developmental delays that prevent them from resolving the problems they face as kids and have a strong tendency to go through the same problems as adults. When children are abused, they are not taught the skills they need to solve those problems. For more information on this concept in generous detail, check out <a href="http://www.livesinthebalance.org/">www.livesinthebalance.org</a>, an organization dedicated to helping kids and parents founded by Dr. Greene.<br />
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People become corrupt for money when they believe their needs will not be met any other way. Corruption can also be seen as acting out the fate of their childhood, often imposing the fate of one's childhood upon others. Corruption is challenging behavior by adults, learned as kids.<br />
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How else do we explain why a Wall Street hedge fund manager engages in insider trading when he's already worth more than $100 million? I'm not even talking about a billionaire here, just a petty millionaire with enough money that he needn't work for the rest of his life.<br />
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That hedge fund manager already knows how to grow money. Without even skirting the law, our humble hedge fund manager could park that money in a Vanguard 500 mutual fund with consistent historical appreciation of about 5% per year. In such a fund, $100 million would yield $5 million a year, and 20% of that would be taxed if taken as income. Heck, a reasonable person would be fine on a million a year and let the rest appreciate.<br />
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That means, once a year, our hapless hedge fund manager could sell $1 million worth of his stakes in the mutual fund and live off that for a year. For the rest of us, that is easily more than 20 years of income. Lop 20% off for taxes and that's still a tidy sum to live on for a year. So, if you should happen to win the lottery, you know one place to put your money instead of blowing it all on a lost weekend.<br />
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Yet, the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and of course, numerous websites who track this sort of thing go on and on about how some high society individual was caught trying to get still more without playing by the rules. Insider trading, pump and dump, kickbacks, pay for play and the list goes on. Who do these people think they are? Why turn to corruption when they could just kick back and watch their money grow?<br />
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With wealth often comes impunity. <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2017/03/fate-impunity-and-altruism.html">There's that word again</a>. For a completely scathing review of how some wealthy people allow themselves to be corrupted for money and power, <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_pathology_of_the_rich_white_family_20150517">check out this article by Chris Hedges</a>. It's well worth the time to read it for it shows, by a man who has been a personal witness as an innocent bystander and a journalist, just how far down people can go with power and money. But at the end of all that, we must remember that these are only symptoms. Money is not the cause. Left sitting in a pile, money does nothing. Only people can give it power.<br />
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With impunity comes a lack of empathy, for if you believe that money separates your fate from others, you have no skin in the game. For some infected with impunity, it seems like they can change the people in their lives like a bad or worn out part. Middle aged men with money think they can exchange their wife for a better one, younger, prettier, more willing. Frontman for Oingo Boingo Danny Elfman nails this kind of behavior perfectly in his song, <a href="https://youtu.be/vLkAo0Kbfl8">Ain't This The Life</a> (video). But money is no substitute for interpersonal skills. The same relationship problems recur until the skills to resolve them are learned. No amount of money can cure this. Interpersonal skills must be taught, not bought.<br />
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There is something else that can happen with people and money: they may begin to think they're better than everyone else just because they have money. A few years ago, I happened upon this article in Slate, "<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/social_darwinism_and_class_essentialism_the_rich_think_they_are_superior.html">Social Darwinism Isn’t Dead: Rich people think they really are different from you and me</a>", by Matthew Hutson. In it, Hutson describes an interesting concept, "social class essentialism", is a sort of belief system that says, "I'm rich because I deserve it, because I'm better than you". Yet, few people of wealth would want to believe that luck or circumstance would have anything to do with their position. It's all hard work, right? From the article:<br />
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In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness. </blockquote>
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... </blockquote>
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Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.</blockquote>
That "deserving" belief strikes me as one of a culture steeped in reward and punishment. "I do good and I'm rewarded, I do bad and I'm punished." Skill has nothing to do with it. There is a limit to how much good skill can do for you, and that limit is set by circumstances beyond your control. When wealthy people engaged in criminal acts such as collusion or extortion, they are realizing the limits of their abilities just as much as a poor man attempting to rob a liquor store. Both acts have the same source, a sense of entitlement or need, and a lack of skills to fulfill that need, maybe even a lack of awareness or an inability to articulate what that need really is.<br />
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Regardless of social class, when people are frustrated in their ability to meet their needs, they exhibit challenging behavior. This challenging behavior is familiar to us on the local news as murder, rape, robbery, and assault. It is less familiar to us from higher classes of crimes including collusion, extortion, bribery, and racketeering. I guess they weren't kidding when they said that "shame is the rocket fuel for success." Watch any CSI show and you'll see fictional dramas of the same thing. Watch any daytime soap opera and yes, it's the same thing.<br />
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To sum it up very simply, challenging behavior on the part of adults is when people use force to get their needs met instead of applying skills to do the same thing. This what I mean when I say that people allow themselves to be corrupted for money. Corrupt people go for the use of force against others instead of learning and applying the skills needed to get their needs met. They might not even know what need they are trying to meet when they apply force against another.<br />
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This is not to say that all or even any wealthy people are bad people. There are no bad people. There is no evil. Evil is a religious concept, a supernatural explanation for challenging behavior in kids and adults. The most logical explanation for corruption is not the money, it's the lack of skills. It would follow then, if people can't be corrupted by money, money won't make them happy either. To put it another way, if people must allow themselves to be corrupted for money, they must also allow themselves to be happy with money, and that requires skill.<br />
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When I look at the news of the corruption in the halls of power like Wall Street and Washington, DC, I do not see adults. I see children in adult bodies who lack the skills to identify and articulate their needs, and to get those needs met. If they're lucky, they say "What the hell happened?" and change course.<br />
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For the kids who are growing up now, we can change our perspective. We can stop worrying about their motivation to do better and start teaching them the skills they need to make the world a better place. <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2016/11/finding-political-happiness-has-more-to.html">Happiness is a skill</a> that we must teach to change the world.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-19647263592580960512017-04-11T06:10:00.001-07:002018-11-21T05:31:55.604-08:00Land is the subtext in the fight over American internet accessI just finished reading a fascinating article on the Evonomics.com website, a website dedicated to rethinking economics. Economist Josh Ryan-Collins' article, "<a href="https://evonomics.com/josh-ryan-collins-land-economic-theory/">How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory</a>" uncovers a giant hole in economics. In his article, Collins describes how economic theory taught in classrooms for decades has been shaped to teach us to ignore land values in economic planning and public policy. What Collins shows us is that it is nearly impossible to have a coherent discussion of economic policy without talking about land ownership and rents:<br />
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"But there has always been a third ‘factor’: Land. Neglected, obfuscated but never quite completely forgotten, the story of Land’s marginalization from mainstream economic theory is little known. But it has important implications. Putting it back in to economics, we argue in a new book, ‘Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing’, could help us better understand many of today’s most pressing social and economic problems, including excessive property prices, rising wealth inequality and stagnant productivity. Land was initially a key part of classical economic theory, so why did it get pushed aside?"</blockquote>
Collins goes on to show in his article (a long but very worthy read), how the wealthy interests who own most of the land influenced how economics is taught to take land out of the equations, why would wealthy interests seek to do that? People who have used their wealth to amass ownership of land may well want to keep the greatest of all monopolies hidden from Economics 101. For who would want to admit that their share of all wealth is mostly unearned due to the happy circumstance of mere land ownership? From the article, but not necessarily in original sequence from article:<br />
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“In such a case …[land rent]… it would be no violation of the principles on which private property is grounded, if the state should appropriate this increase of wealth, or part of it, as it arises. This would not properly be taking anything from anybody; it would merely be applying an accession of wealth, created by circumstances, to the benefit of society, <b>instead of allowing it to become an unearned appendage to the riches of a particular class</b>.” </blockquote>
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... </blockquote>
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The reasons for this may well be political. Mason Gaffney, an American land economist and scholar of Henry George, has argued that Bates Clark and his followers received substantial financial support from corporate and landed interests who were determined to prevent George’s theories gaining credibility out of concerns that their wealth would be wittled away via a land tax. <b>In contrast, theories of land rent and taxation never found an academic home.</b> In addition, George, primarily a campaigner and journalist, never managed to forge an allegiance with American socialists who were more focused on taxing the profits of the captains of industry and the financial sector. (emphasis mine)</blockquote>
If most economic theories have buried land values as a factor in how an economy works, that would explain this meme:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFeHq4ThJkIDmuqDsNT9twRbFSa6htgcacOxYWacPjn_ySEWg_vZ_aMogD3hfg08LsUaIYgfnjPdWo0penYmVpRtVeZXgam5LCNzFBPBfREeXbdfr0x6tDeiXrFxaZ65qg2GrQgA/s1600/If-us-land-mass-were-distributed-like-us-wealth.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><img border="0" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFeHq4ThJkIDmuqDsNT9twRbFSa6htgcacOxYWacPjn_ySEWg_vZ_aMogD3hfg08LsUaIYgfnjPdWo0penYmVpRtVeZXgam5LCNzFBPBfREeXbdfr0x6tDeiXrFxaZ65qg2GrQgA/s640/If-us-land-mass-were-distributed-like-us-wealth.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Credit for meme: By Stephen Ewen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27391254<br />
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Take a close look at that image. The top 10% own more than half of the land value in the country. The top 40 percent own almost all of it. The bottom 60% own a tiny fraction of the United States. And then there is that little red dot, owned by 40% of the American people.<br />
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Now follow the dots. Very wealthy interests comprising of a small minority of the population, intent on preserving their wealth for generations to come, use their influence to change how economics is taught. By exerting their influence on how economics is taught, they influence economists who graduate American colleges teaching the wealthy man's version of economics, the one that hides the value of land from the rest of us. Those same economists, particularly if they follow the party line, become sources of information for people who write public policy regarding economics and journalists who write about economics. The people who write the laws regarding economic policy turn to experts who were trained to ignore land ownership as a matter of economics. All this effort is just so that the biggest land owners can avoid paying some taxes on the rents they receive from the land they own.<br />
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The tax on the land (we call them inheritance and real estate taxes) is to put the wealth generated by the land back into the economy as government spending for all to enjoy. That is the tax that the wealthy land owners wish to avoid. Such patriotism.<br />
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Now some of you may have read my earlier works on this blog and may well be aware that I'm a big fan of <a href="https://muninetworks.org/">community broadband</a>. I live in an area where there is only one wired internet access provider. That's what FCC Chairman Ajit Pai calls "competition". Ars Technica reports that, "<a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/ajit-pai-says-broadband-market-too-competitive-for-strict-privacy-rules/">Ajit Pai says broadband market too competitive for strict privacy rules</a>". I guess that's what we can expect from a captured regulator.<br />
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I have long wondered why there is so much resistance from the top of the economy for making broadband markets work. I get it that we have telecom monopolies like Comcast, Time-Warner, ATT, Verizon and CenturyLink all working through a local franchise agreement with the cities and states they operate in. Those franchise agreements allow a de facto monopoly to take shape. That de facto monopoly receives enormous protection from state and federal governments that few are willing to acknowledge. There must be a reason why the biggest telecoms get so much protection. Do they really lack the skills to compete against municipal governments in the market for internet access?<br />
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I believe that I understand now why the fight is so difficult. It is not just the incumbent providers protecting their cash cows. It is the land owners protecting their monopolies (from the same Evonomics article):<br />
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Ricardo and Smith were mainly writing about an agrarian economy. But the law of rent applies equally in developed urban areas as the famous Land Value Tax campaigner Henry George argued in his best-selling text ‘Progress and Poverty’. Once all the un-owned land is occupied, economic rent then becomes determined by locational value. <b>Thus the rise of communications technology and globalisation has not meant ‘the end of distance’ as some predicted</b>. Instead, it has driven the economic pre-eminence of a few cities that are best connected to the global economy and offer the best amenities for the knowledge workers and entrepreneurs of the digital economy. The scarcity of these locations has fed a long boom in the value of land in those cities. (emphasis mine)</blockquote>
The fight over internet access is a fight to protect land values in large cities, to protect the land monopolies held by the wealthy elite. If internet access were made easy, cheap, fast and ubiquitous, anyone with good clerical or technical skills could live and work anywhere. For the wealthy landed class, it isn't enough to discourage and restrain social and economic mobility. Geographic mobility must be restrained as well.<br />
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Since at least 2001, there has been a very intense fight in the statehouses across the country over internet access. The major ISPs are just proxies in this fight, but effective proxies they are. One of the first community broadband networks is UTOPIA, built right here in Utah, formally known as the Utah Open Infrastructure Agency. When incumbent ISPs received word of UTOPIA around the year 2000, they worked with The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to draft <a href="http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Broadband_Regulation_Resolution_Exposed">model legislation</a> to kill off UTOPIA or at least seriously hobble it. Since then, ALEC has participated in a largely successful effort to restrain or eliminate municipal efforts to build public internet access networks in more than 20 states (Utah was the first state to pass that model legislation) across the country.<br />
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The primary argument used against municipal broadband systems is that municipal governments should not be taking the risk of building internet access infrastructure, a function best left to private enterprise and savvy investors who really know what they are doing. At least, that's the narrative most of the public is fed. But a funny thing happened in Utah. A natural experiment occurred where the municipal network of Spanish Fork was spared the most onerous requirement of that model ALEC legislation: that the network must rely upon a third party to sell access. While the city of Spanish Fork could sell directly to customers, UTOPIA was required to rely upon third party sellers.<br />
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The results are plainly obvious in this article, "<a href="https://muninetworks.org/content/how-lobbyists-utah-put-taxpayer-dollars-risk-protect-cable-monopolies">How Lobbyists in Utah Put Taxpayer Dollars at Risk to Protect Cable Monopolies</a>", by Chris Mitchell, director of Community Networks, at the Institute for Local Self Reliance. UTOPIA is now buried in debt because they could not sell service directly to residents in their service area. The Spanish Fork municipal network was allowed to sell directly to residents, paid off its debts early, used their profits to add capacity, increase speeds and improve service.<br />
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I know, it sounds absurd, but there are ISPs that actually do that, but they're not private ISPs. More than 450 cities around the country have created public networks to get around private ISPs who will not build at all, or refuse to increase capacity and speed for the cities they serve. I guess the risk that opponents of community broadband refuse to talk about is the risk of legislative opposition, of which they themselves finance, to the public option for internet access.<br />
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Close observers of the struggle for internet access may also be familiar with <a href="http://how%20legacy%20incumbent%20isps%20fight%20the%20economic%20benefits%20of%20community%20broadband/">the fight in Chattanooga, Tennessee</a>, where the Electric Power Board provides a symmetrical gigabit connection for $70 a month, mopping the floor with their competition. The Electric Power Board is a public utility that set up fiber connections to every home for meter readings and discovered that they could also provide internet access. When incumbent service providers discovered what the EPB was doing, it was too late to stop them. So incumbents moved to restrict the EPB from providing such offensive service outside of their original service area. Neighboring communities stuck with inferior service from Comcast and ATT clamored for service from EPB and took their fight to the FCC.<br />
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You might also recall how the FCC ruled that the EPB could provide service to their neighbors in adjacent areas, but the state of Tennessee sued for injunctive relief <a href="http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/story/2016/aug/31/fcc-wont-appeal-ruling-striking-upholding-sta/384235/">and won</a> on behalf of the incumbent service providers to set aside the FCC ruling permitting EPB to service their neighbors. To put it differently, the fight over geographic mobility is so serious that wealthy interests are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain their monopolies, first by wire and then by land.<br />
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It's a subtle fight and it is rarely mentioned in the news if at all, and you'll never see mainstream media framing the story this way. Mainstream media teaches us that when property values go up we all prosper, what they don't tell us is just how much of a drain on the economy rent seeking is. The biggest land owners want steady and stable renters, not people who think they can move to a small town, buy a house and still make a living because they can do their work online or run an online business. The last thing they need is policy makers figuring out how to properly tax and regulate the absentee land owners, the land owners who rent their land rather than occupy it.<br />
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This silent struggle over land is only silent to the extent that the press is willing to discuss it. Some of you still read newspapers. I used to do that, too. But since then, I've learned that when I put a quarter into a newspaper vending machine, I didn't pay for the contents of the paper, the advertisers did. The content we call news, is called the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newshole">newshole</a>" by the newspaper editors for a reason. The advertisers pay for influence on what's fit to print and what is not. Those advertisers are paying for a narrative that is flattering to their enterprise, which on the surface is anything but extracting rents. Advertisers in mainstream media are paying for a narrative that would have us all believe that rent seeking passes for capitalism. And so far, it seems to be working.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-26330293843033624422017-04-04T04:38:00.000-07:002017-04-04T04:38:32.652-07:00Family planning, employment and SCOTUS nominee Neil GorsuchThere is an interesting debate afoot about Trump's nominee to the empty seat on the US Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. It started with <a href="http://shareblue.com/trump-supreme-court-pick-said-women-should-ask-companies-for-permission-to-have-children/#.WNl2jqDsdqI.facebook">this article</a>, a story about a letter from a female law student, Jennifer Sisk, to the chair of the committee holding the nomination hearings. In her letter, Sisk expressed her concerns about professor Gorsuch's suggestion in a class she attended, that employers should ask women about their family plans at the job interview. Here is the summary:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch reportedly told law students that employers should ask women seeking employment about their plans for having children, and also implied that women manipulate companies in order to extract maternity benefits.</blockquote>
What makes that article a bit of a controversy is that at the the head of the article, above a photo of Trump and Gorsuch, there is a link to another article embedded in the text, "<a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/03/20/520743555/former-law-student-gorsuch-told-class-women-manipulate-maternal-leave">reportedly said</a>". Gorsuch supporters I debated on Google+ pointed out that Gorsuch "reportedly said" that employers should ask women about their plans to have children to protect their businesses. That article is on the NPR website and documents some of the contention of the events leading up to the controversy. There are apparently different accounts of what actually happened.<br />
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11 former female clerks who used to work for Gorsuch also sent a letter in support of Gorsuch. I guess they're hoping they can work for Gorsuch again, but this time, at the US Supreme Court. What I find notable is the following passage briefly describing an NPR interview with Jennifer Sisk:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Law professors often ask provocative questions in the course of teaching. When asked if that's what Gorsuch may have been doing, Sisk told NPR: "It wasn't what he was doing. This was second-to-last class, hadn't been the style he had been using to sort of raise issues all class, or all semester."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
She added, "He kept bringing it back to that this was women taking advantage of their companies, that this was a woman's issue, a woman's problem with having children and disadvantaging their companies by doing that."</blockquote>
So the incident was important enough for 12 women to write about to the chair of the committee holding a confirmation hearing and the issue was important enough for Gorsuch to reinforce a policy bias in at least one class. At the very least, he's setting an expectation that women will be asked about their family plans by employers so that employers can protect themselves. Protect themselves from what? More customers?<br />
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The issue was important enough for the committee to ask questions concerning the incident described in Jennifer Sisk's letter. You can find video of the exchange between Senator Dick Durbin and Neil Gorsuch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMybAhA20sY&t=31s">here</a>. If you watch the video, you find Gorsuch citing a standard texbook he uses for class and asks the same question of his class every year. This was not a one-time event, and that fact alone would contradict those who say it never happened.<br />
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In consideration of this nomination, it's worth noting also that Gorsuch has been characterized as another "Scalia", <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch_Supreme_Court_nomination">according to Wikipedia</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
At the time of the nomination, Gorsuch was described as solidly conservative, but likely to be confirmed without much difficulty. Richard Primus of Politico described Gorsuch as "Scalia 2.0" due to ideological similarities, and a report prepared by Lee Epstein, Andrew Martin, and Kevin Quinn predicted that Gorsuch would be a "reliable conservative" similar to Scalia. (footnotes removed)</blockquote>
Justice Antonin Scalia was nominated by President Reagan and sat on the bench as a Supreme Court Justice for nearly 30 years, actively promoting a conservative agenda. That conservative agenda has helped to stagnate wages for 30 years and effectively disconnect wages from productivity for both CEOs and workers (guess who saw the upside). That conservative agenda has helped to keep women at a disadvantage in the workplace. That conservative agenda helped to foment huge transfers of wealth through through <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/ilargi-economies-run-housing-bubbles.html">huge bubbles</a>, like the housing bubble of 2007 and the stock bubble of 2001. That same agenda has relentlessly sought cuts in social safety net programs. That same agenda continues to prevent Americans from making paid parental leave a matter of national public policy.<br />
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Once again, we see public policy heading in the opposite direction of American polling. <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865665149/Survey-Americans-want-paid-family-leave-and-they-support-social-programs-for-families.html">A poll conducted by the Deseret News</a> during the election last year showed strong support of social safety net programs and parental leave as a matter of law. That poll also shows that Americans are acutely aware that family leave, whether to care for a newborn or an elderly parent, scores zero in national public policy, and that we are an exception to all other industrialized countries. <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave/">According to Pew Research</a>, 41 other countries provide paid parental leave as a matter of law.<br />
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The lack of paid parental leave as a matter of law is merely a continuation of a well documented attack on job security that has been ongoing since at least the Reagan Administration. Even former Federal Reserve Chairman, <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/testimony.htm">Alan Greenspan could see and made it clear to Congress way back in 1997</a>, that job insecurity cannot be a permanent tool to increase productivity while at the same time, subduing wage growth:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white;">If heightened job insecurity is the most significant explanation of the break with the past in recent years, then it is important to recognize that, as I indicated in last February's Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, <b>suppressed wage cost growth as a consequence of job insecurity can be carried only so far</b>. At some point, the tradeoff of subdued wage growth for job security has to come to an end. In other words, the relatively modest wage gains we have experienced are a temporary rather than a lasting phenomenon because there is a limit to the value of additional job security people are willing to acquire in exchange for lesser increases in living standards. Even if real wages were to remain permanently on a lower upward track than otherwise as a result of the greater sense of insecurity, the rate of change of wages would revert at some point to a normal relationship with inflation. The unknown is when this transition period will end. (emphasis mine)</span></blockquote>
Has anyone noticed that the transition period referred to by Mr. Greenspan never happened? Employers continue to expect the current wage trend to be the new normal and yet still see productivity gains as before. Economist Dean Baker has provided ample documentation to support his contention that compared to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, productivity has been relatively flat. While relieving us of the scary robots story that mainstream media has been harping on, he points out the fact that despite advances in automation in the last decade or two, <a href="http://job%20displacement%20means%20productivity%20growth.%20if%20the%20piece%20is%20correct%20then%20we%20are%20about%20to%20see%20a%20massive%20upsurge%20in%20productivity%20growth.%20the%20recent%20pace%20has%20been%20just%201.0%20percent%20annually.%20the%20authors%20presumably%20envision%20productivity%20growth%20rising%20to%20something%20like%20the%203.0%20percent%20annual%20rate%20we%20had%20in%20the%20long%20golden%20age%20from%201947%20to%201973%2C%20a%20period%20of%20low%20unemployment%20and%20rapidly%20rising%20real%20wages./">productivity growth still remains flat</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Job displacement means productivity growth. If the piece is correct then we are about to see a massive upsurge in productivity growth. The recent pace has been just 1.0 percent annually. The authors presumably envision productivity growth rising to something like the 3.0 percent annual rate we had in the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973, a period of low unemployment and rapidly rising real wages.</blockquote>
And that was just two days ago in response to a NY Times article suggesting that we'll see big growth in the economy with Trump at the helm. So since at least 1997, key policy decision makers were aware of a trend that workers have endured continuing assaults on their job security. Jennifer Sisk's letter exposes a continuation of the assault on job security and the employment bias against female workers. Her letter exposes a bias on the part of Judge Gorsuch against female workers and for big business. That bias continues today, productivity growth be damned.<br />
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If Neil Gorsuch is concerned that women might manipulate a company to get paid leave for maternity he needs only to look at the public policy actions he has supported as a member of the judiciary and an ideal replacement for Antonin Scalia as noted by <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-judiciary/317684-liberals-should-celebrate-the-gorsuch-nomination">Justin Haskins at The Hill</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It’s true Gorsuch is unquestionably a devoted constitutional textualist and originalist in the mold of Scalia. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the most conservative politicians in Washington, D.C., called the pick “an absolute home run” in an interview with CNN. Erick Erickson, a longtime outspoken conservative and critic of Trump, wrote in an article posted on his political commentary site, The Resurgent, “Judge Gorsuch is the one nominee who matches Antonin Scalia’s intellectual pedigree and will unite all the factions within the Republican Party. … It is rock solid.”</blockquote>
Given the character of Gorsuch, if nominated, I think we can expect a continuation of his disingenuous sympathy for women like Sandra Day O'Connor who had to work as secretary due to this subtle form of discrimination against women. Despite his expressions of sympathy, as a Supreme Court justice Gorsuch will continue making contributions to worker insecurity to discourage women from "manipulating businesses for paid parental leave".<br />
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I think Gorsuch acts in this way not as a matter of conscious personal preference, but in support of public policy for the conservative agenda he represents. A sort of cognitive dissonance that a man like him is privileged enough to enjoy.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-59725074332230076072017-03-29T05:34:00.001-07:002017-03-29T05:34:11.307-07:00HR676, Health insurance, broadband and the public option<div class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/sanders-to-introduce-single-payer-health-care-plan-236516">There is a story floating around</a> that Bernie Sanders will introduce a single payer plan in Congress. That story is being pushed by Politico, but there are scant details and plenty of other distractions in the same article. It is a wonder why Sanders does not just put his weight behind HR 676, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676">Improved and Expanded Medicare for All Act</a>. Yes, it's still in the House, and he's in the Senate, but he's one of the most popular politicians in the country. He could bring HR 676 to national attention and gather support for the same. But he has not done so, at least not yet.</div>
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<a href="http://healthoverprofit.org/2017/03/27/single-payer-bernie-sanders-morphs-into-public-option-howard-dean/">Health Over Profits has a story</a> the one that seems to explain why Sanders has not touched HR 676. From the article:<br />
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Right before our eyes, we are seeing the transformation of single payer Bernie Sanders into public option Howard Dean.</blockquote>
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During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Sanders took off like a rocket, fueled by the promise of a single payer, Medicare for All single payer system.</blockquote>
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His single payer plan paralleled HR 676, the single payer bill in the House of Representatives that now has 72 co-sponsors.</blockquote>
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HR 676 is the gold standard of single payer bills.</blockquote>
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It would deliver one public payer, no deductibles, no co-pays, lower costs, everyone in, nobody out, no more medical bankruptcies, no more deaths from lack of health insurance and free choice of doctors and hospitals.</blockquote>
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That was the promise of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 campaign.</blockquote>
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But since then, Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.</blockquote>
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Then become part of Senator Chuck Schumer’s Senate Democratic leadership.<br />
And this weekend, Sanders has been telling people he will introduce health care reform legislation in the Senate within a couple of weeks.</blockquote>
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But it’s not going to be a companion bill to HR 676.</blockquote>
Health Over Profits has found a logical progression in the actions and statements of Bernie Sanders, an apparent drift away from a part of what made him so popular in the election last year to the position that he has taken now. There is no obvious reason for him not to endorse HR 676. Unless he has become a captured regulator.<br />
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Setting his motivations for his changing posture aside, that means it's up to us to encourage him, even implore him to co-sponsor and promote HR 676 (or a Senate bill identical to it). We should keep our eyes on the prize as a public option might only confuse and distract voters and consumers. Yes, a public option could help, but we already have that in the form of Medicare. It's just the Medicare is restricted to people over 65. The rest of us are left with private plans that treat health as a profit center commodity, not a public good.<br />
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Public health is not a commodity because it varies with the person and a person's behavior. Consider how we treat our cars. A car is a commodity. My health is not.<br />
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I have a car that has a little light on the dashboard that tells me when to take it in for maintenance. I also have a sticker on my window reminding when to take it in, by mileage or date, whichever comes first. The car has sensors that measure the health of the oil in the engine. When the sensors determine that the oil life is 15% or less, I see a light indicating maintenance required.<br />
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Changing the oil in a car is the single most important maintenance to be performed for the engine. Take care of the oil, and the rest of the engine stays clean. Pass on changing the oil and every part that requires lubrication begins to see contact with other parts. Bearings see contact with journals, pistons see contact with cylinder walls and things begin to break down from there. Keeping the oil changed when needed is the most important task for maintaining engine life, and that's the path to 250,000 miles on an engine.<br />
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People may not be machines, but with regular maintenance, other costs go down. Catastrophic costs are minimized. Regular doctor visits allow us to keep bigger problems in check and increase awareness about the health of our own bodies. Regular doctor visits also allow us to develop historical records (just like taking our car to the same shop over the life of the car), to see our progress. A body in poor health also has an effect on the mind. Allow a body to fall into disrepair and we may find we make poor decisions based on poor judgement based on a brain that is not operating in the best environment. Universal health care makes regular maintenance a breeze.<br />
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Under current conditions, people are often afraid of going to the doctor or getting that health screen because they're afraid of a catastrophic cost. They're afraid of losing everything else to health care. Who profits from this system? The shareholders of our largest insurance companies and health care providers. Health insurance companies and health maintenance organizations also have far greater influence on public policy than the average person. They will fight tooth and nail to keep the profits flowing. And thanks to decisions like Citizens United, they will use their profits to influence Congress away from universal health care. To those who profit from the system and use their money to keep it the same I say, "<a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-personal-argument-against-business.html">I want to buy your products, not your politics</a>".<br />
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There are a few problems that incumbent interests have with universal health care. The first is accountability. A single government agency subject to political oversight, collecting data on money spent and outcomes, will make it much easier to keep insurers and hospitals accountable. Empirical evidence will show us what works and what doesn't.<br />
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The second issue is negotiation. While hospitals, medical device makers and drug companies can negotiate differently with different insurers, different insurers may not be privy to the negotiations running in parallel. In other words, one insurer can never know for sure if another company got a better deal on a product or service. With a single payer, universal health care system, there is no "hide the ball" game to play between the insurer and the provider. Attempts to negotiate will be based on evidence of performance for all Americans, all hospitals, all practices.<br />
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There will still be private practice of medicine, but in HR 676, there is one payer, one set of standard forms to complete, and 535 necks to grab in November if things are not done right.<br />
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I also notice that doctors are not exactly having a smooth ride, either. <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/28/maine-voices-the-problem-isnt-obamacare-its-the-insurance-companies/">Check out this article</a> from Dr. Cathleen London of Milbridge, Maine. She outlines the game of the insurance companies, always moving the poles, always hiding the ball, denying claims without cause and stiffing her on payments. This is a doctor on the front lines, who can see what is happening and says, without equivocation, the games insurance companies play have little if anything to do with Obamacare.<br />
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In other words, when people claim that the games insurance companies play are a result of distortions in the market as a result of Obamacare, they are exaggerating at best and lying at worst. After describing a bureaucratic nightmare with an insurance company as a health care provider, she wrote this:<br />
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"This is not the fault of Obamacare, which stopped the most egregious problems with insurance companies. Remember lifetime caps? Remember denials for pre-existing conditions? Remember the retroactive cancellation of insurance policies? Returning to that is not an option."<br />
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There are conservatives who would have us believe in the virtues and efficiency of private enterprise. But Dr. London's experience as documented in her article shows anything but that. The myth of the efficiency of private enterprise seems to stop at the border of the domain of health care. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/insurance-companies-medicare-for-all_us_58c1b1fae4b054a0ea690dc8?on2f1z08oxi7wrk9">The Huffington Post noticed</a> a curious thing about American health insurance companies. On average, they spend about 21% of your premium dollars on overhead and net profit. By overhead, if we're talking about CEO salaries, that might explain a lot. HuffPo compares that lofty overhead figure to Medicare at 1.5%. No health insurance CEO in their right mind would accept those numbers. But no health care CEO ever wants to see their insurance run as a tightly regulated utility.<br />
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Wait. I thought we were talking about health care, right? We are. But as the title of this article implies, there is another domain where the public sector kicks royal ass on the private sector: broadband. I know, I know. This is a huge segue, so bear with me.<br />
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<a href="https://muninetworks.org/">Community Networks</a>, a part of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, has documented more than 450 jurisdictions (towns, cities and counties) that have built their own broadband networks to compete directly with incumbent internet access providers, purely out of frustration with the big cable companies and telcos. The vast majority of those community networks are a success by any measure. Check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBztjr2uCzg">the story of Sandy, Oregon</a> (video), where the city figured out they could do what the citizens wanted for a fraction of the cost that incumbent providers were offering. For $60 a month, you can get gigabit service up and down, right there.<br />
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See? The public sector can actually offer better service than the private sector. It's just not that easy to find in the news because mainstream media has another narrative they'd like you to believe. Who buys advertising with mainstream media? Very large companies like Aetna, United Health Care and Blue Cross Blue Shield.<br />
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The legislation for universal health care has already been written. It just needs a lot of exposure to get Congress on board. I think we can make the pitch to them like this:<br />
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"I see that you're in a <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/14/lawrence-lessig-on-how-cash-corrupts-congress/">Skinner Box</a> made by the biggest health insurance companies in the country. You vote their way, you get their money. I bet that makes it really hard for you to listen to constituents like me who actually live in your district. Vote for HR 676, get it on the President's desk, and you can spend less time in that Skinner Box if he signs it, because you won't have to call the health insurance companies to finance your next campaign. You could just rely upon people like me. How about that?"<br />
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If there was ever a time to call your representatives in Congress, now would be a good time to tell them about your fervent support for HR 676, <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2017/03/political-theater-and-distractions-from.html">just like I did</a>.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-84591965645887081042017-03-25T05:16:00.001-07:002017-03-25T05:16:06.203-07:00Political theater and distractions from HR 676, The Expanded and Improved Medicare For All ActOnce again, I see that the anti-Trump memes are becoming more and more severe, more radical and insulting. Now I'm not a Trump supporter by any measure, and I can understand the catharsis of making these memes. But I fail to see how they translate into public policy decisions that support progressive objectives.<br />
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What I do see is that in the days and weeks leading up to a crucial vote on the TrumpCare/RyanCare/WeDon'tCare bill? A lot of political theater about health care, including counting votes, lots of meetings, press conferences and overtures for the votes. Many of us are experiencing considerable angst regarding health care. So it is with a sigh relief that I see the GOP delaying the vote because they can't make the Democrats on the left or the selfish Freedom Caucus on the right, happy.<br />
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I could feel that angst myself. But instead of creating a new meme about Trump, I called the offices of both of my Senators and my Congressman, and let them know of my strenuous opposition to the GOP health care plan, and then I urged them to support and vote for <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676">HR 676, the Medicare for All</a> bill currently circulating in Congress (they're all Republican, but at least I said something).<br />
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In case you're not aware of HR 676, this is the one that if passed into law, prohibits private insurers from offering health insurance that would compete with expanded Medicare, covers everything from preventive care, to hearing aids, eyeglasses and prescription drugs, and it's all financed with simple taxes that are easily calculated. If you want a tummy tuck or nose job, you're out of luck, but private insurance may be there for you if need be.<br />
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Under HR 676 preventive and catastrophic care would be covered. Nobody goes bankrupt. Everyone pays in, no one gets out. The risk is spread across the entire population. If passed as it is, it will be nearly impossible for business to externalize the cost of health care.<br />
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The entire point of this exercise is the struggle over who pays for it. Conservatives in Congress seem to be of the belief that business must be able to externalize the cost of health care onto the worker and consumer. Progressives disagree. Progressives, and I mean true progressives, hold that everyone must pay so that the costs and the risks are spread as widely as possible. This reduces the costs for everyone and everyone is covered.<br />
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More to the point, progressives understand that business seeks profits and one way to increase profits is to shift the cost of health care onto someone else. A universal health care system financed by taxes on all forms of income is the best way to make it possible. By imposing a small tax on all forms of income, the costs are spread thin enough that everyone can afford to pay into it.<br />
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Part of the reason why health care costs have been so high is that the health care industry, including the insurance industry figured out they could buy the influence they needed to avoid accountability. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Try estimating the cost of any procedure before you actually do it. I've done this. I needed to get something done, a surgery, and I called the hospital and the insurance numerous times and could not get a firm answer on my out of pocket costs for the surgery. It was not until the work was done and paperwork was processed that I was able to get answer. What kind of market is that? It's not a free market, it's an obscured market. This is a result of public policy decisions, not the free market, whatever that might be.<br />
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In a transparent market, we know what the costs are before we go in. We can do comparison shopping before we go in. The experience I had tells me that the costs are obscured by design and for a reason: to keep the patient in the dark. If the patient knew how much it would truly cost, including out of pocket expenses, the surgery would not get done. Worse, it allows the health care industry to land a debt on a patient. Interest on debts just means more money for the health care industry.<br />
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A universal health care system means that when any player in the system attempts to shift the cost burden upon someone else, everyone else notices. Properly designed, the cost of health care cannot be shifted upon someone else because everyone pays into it. All of the data goes into one system, generating statistics to show who is playing fair and who is not. A universal health care system will make it hard for the Epipens and Sovaldis to withstand competition, too. In a universal health care system, the government can compare pricing among products and services in a way that insurers and ordinary people cannot. They can also compare outcomes and use empirical evidence to determine the most effective treatment for any ailment.<br />
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The primary argument missing from the health care debate is that not everyone has an equal opportunity for access. To begin with, not everyone starts with the same opportunities when they enter the health care system. Nobody chooses to have an accident, an addiction, a cancer or an occupational hazard. Nobody chooses to bath in polluted water, risk a natural disaster, or eat food that is poisoned by insecticides. No one has the money to escape all risks, its simply not possible. Insurance was invented to spread the risks.<br />
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We are all doing the best we can. The person I save or help through a socialized health care system may be the one to help me someday. But it only works if we all pay in.<br />
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Yes, a universal health care system is a lot of power to give to a government, but European governments have done well with socialized medicine. So has Japan. Every major industrialized country provides health care as a right, except us, so we know it can be done. There is no reason we cannot do it, except for a lack of political will. Who lacks the political will do make this happen? The people with the most influence on government: the top 1%.<br />
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<a href="http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/february/summary-hr-676-the-expanded-improved-medicare-for-all-act">The best shot we have at universal health care is HR 676</a>. HR 676 solves a problem created by public policy decisions made over the last 30-40 years. Who has the most influence over public policy at the national level (and probably the state level, too)? The wealthiest individuals and companies in the country. We know this because the empirical evidence proves it.<br />
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"<a href="https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf">Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens</a>" is a study that proves without a doubt that the top 1% and the wealthiest corporations and organized business interests have the most sway with Congress. To put it bluntly, big money rules Congress. Where does big money come from? Big businesses and the people who run them. Some people call them "oligarchs".<br />
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The goal then is to lay the problem at the feet of the oligarchs and demand universal health care as proposed by HR 676 (or something like it) as a solution, and no less. Let the oligarchs explain why we should not have universal health care. Let the oligarchs justify why people should go bankrupt for health care. Let the oligarchs justify why people should die for lack of money for health care.<br />
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Respondeat superior, or, "let the master answer".digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-46625949147889132812017-03-21T05:55:00.002-07:002017-06-24T17:51:57.856-07:00Fate, impunity and altruism<div class="tr_bq" dir="ltr">
It is pretended by some that we can destroy without consequence, that we can give without consequence and that we can separate our own fate from that of another, whether we do good or bad. This post is written as a warning, a sort of guide, and an offering of hope that if mankind can make a final and ultimate decision to do no harm, perhaps then, there is a chance for the survival of our species.<br />
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There are some who might say that there is no such thing as pure altruism. <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/altruism">Here</a> is the Merriam-Webster definition:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Definition of altruism<br />
<ol>
<li>unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others charitable acts motivated purely by altruism</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
I happen to believe that there is no such thing as true altruism, and that it is impossible to do a good deed for another with zero reward. In this one and only respect, I actually agree with Ayn Rand who offers <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html">the following analysis</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.</blockquote>
Note for the record, I'm not a libertarian or even an Ayn Rand fan. I'm simply offering her viewpoint here for analysis. What Rand misses here is that humans are built from the ground up for cooperation for their mutual survival. Cooperation is not a choice, it is a requirement for survival. All animals are built this way, but humans have taken the concept to a level that cannot be conceived by other animals due to the size of their brains relative to any other species (with perhaps exception to certain cetaceous mammals like dolphins and whales).<br />
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In the first paragraph, Rand says we're all free agents living in a bag of skin, and that service to others is not required for survival. In another, she recognizes that doing something good or nice for another being has inescapable consequences. Rand seems to have suffered from cognitive dissonance in the sense that she cannot reconcile human beings by their very design and their environment, but urges us to believe that we are indeed free agents in a bag of skin capable of acting without consequence from other humans.<br />
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Impunity is the antithesis of altruism. Impunity assumes action against others without consequence. <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impunity">Merriam-Webster, again</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Definition of impunity: exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss laws were flouted with impunity</blockquote>
Impunity assumes that harms done to another being can be committed without consequence. But as noted above, just as the consequences of good deeds are inescapable, so too are the consequences of a bad deed. For this discussion, we can find a continuum of behavior between altruism and impunity. Both terms have something in common: expressions of altruism and impunity can often be seen as attempts to do something without consequence to oneself.<br />
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Humans are motivated to do good for the feelings that come from doing good. We can feel it in our chest and gut. We sort of glow for a day after doing a really good deed. An anonymous good dead, an act of altruism, is often performed without witnessing the the receipt or discovery of such a gift. We leave a gift at someone's door, or we send something nice in the mail anonymously, or we donate to a charity without revealing our identity. No matter how hard we try to separate ourselves from the consequences of a good deed, there are still consequences.<br />
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In the same vein, when humans attempt to do harm to another, from slavery to murder, to genocide, there are consequences. Even acts of racial discrimination, collusion, frauds and other abuses, have long term consequences that at the minimum are difficult to calculate and are rarely foreseen by the abuser, yet they are there and they can persist for years if not decades later. And with every act carried out with impunity, the body is shot with adrenaline and other hormones, making ready for fight or flight. Every act of harm done to another takes away resources that could be used for the betterment of ourselves or another. That is the primary consequence abusers fail to contemplate in the heat of the moment.<br />
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Abusers who believe they can act with impunity believe that there are no consequences to their actions. But there are. Newton said that for every action, there is a reaction. This is every bit as true in society as it is in physics. It is true in the game of billiards just as it was true in the events leading up to the French Revolution.<br />
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In both cases of altruism and impunity, we see actors seeking to act while attempting to escape the consequences of their actions. It is simply not possible to act without consequence. We are inextricably tied to the consequences of our actions, no matter the reason or action.<br />
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I am using this line of thinking to understand what is unfolding before us, in an enormous power struggle between the wealthy and the poor, between different faiths and those with no faith at all. This struggle has always existed for the history of human civilization. Against this backdrop of a continuum of altruism and impunity, I see the actions of Congress, and their wealthy benefactors, as a strenuous effort to separate their fate from the people they claim to represent. To a certain degree it may seem they are or even have been successful. But as I will show below, our fates are tied and no amount of effort will untie them.<br />
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The effects of global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, are real. They are worldwide and affect everyone on this planet. It is now clear that human inputs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere play a role in the warming of Earth. Spring has been coming earlier and winter is coming later at places closer to the poles. The equatorial regions are indeed warming up and we are seeing new record temperatures across the world.<br />
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Government responses to global warming can be seen as the greatest political blunder in history. We have allowed climate change at our own hand due to the wishes of very wealthy interests to continue to profit from their efforts to extract and sell energy based on carbon. Here in the United States, we know for a fact that <a href="https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf">the average person has zero influence on public policy at the national level</a>. This condition is a result of public policy choices made by people who already have power and seek yet more power.<br />
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The illusion is this: with power comes the ability to separate one's fate from others. Yet everyone will be affected by a warming Earth. There is no escaping that consequence.<br />
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Fanatical Christians, Jews and Muslims may believe that they can act with impunity because they believe they can ask forgiveness for their sins and be absolved, but that still doesn't separate their fate from that of others, or even of others they may have injured. Atheists seem to understand this concept better because they do not seek immortality. They have compassion because they believe that this is it, their one shot at a life and that their fate is tied to others, that they cannot separate their actions from their consequences. Buddhists at least understand that we are all connected.<br />
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Every drone strike is an attempt to separate the fate of one group from another. A drone strike is a unique example of an attempt to split fates since the operator of a drone is sitting safely and comfortably in a military station while the drone is exposed to harm, and armed to harm another. Yet every drone strike is destructive and not only does it lead to the destruction of the target, it leads to the destruction of the abuser, in this case, the United States for every drone strike gives impetus to at least one more terrorist.<br />
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In a similar vein, the people who created Social Security, Medicare and other social safety net programs understood that our fates are irrevocably intertwined. While conservatives bleat that "it's my money", they have little to say when "my money" is being used for destructive purposes, like a drone strike, or worse, a world war. Social safety net programs were created as an acknowledgement of not only the destructive forces of capitalism, but also the creative forces of the same. Visionaries like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace">Henry Wallace</a>, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt understood these opposing forces and also understood that men who promoted and exhibited destructive behavior could not easily be convinced of the damage they were doing to all Americans.<br />
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Another and more subtle example is <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/race-bottom-cities-states-spend-45-billion-per-year-competing-jobs.html">the business tax break</a>. States and cities all over the country, in an effort to prop up their ailing economies, offer tax breaks to big businesses in the hopes of creating more jobs at home. Such tax breaks are usually geared towards building upscale housing for the wealthy or tax breaks for large businesses to "come hither". Consultants who earn enormous fees for doing essentially nothing, almost always suggest a handout to the private sector. Such handouts are only enjoyed by the upper classes and yet few people in the working classes are even aware of this intervention by the government in the supposedly "free" market extolled in conservative rhetoric.<br />
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It would seem ironic then, how few cities (and states) are willing to consider offering a "<a href="https://muninetworks.org/">community broadband</a>" service, public infrastructure that can be enjoyed at a reasonable cost by everyone. As our economy sours in anticipation of another wave of "privatization", a nice word for transferring public monopolies into private hands, little is said in the news of the benefits of community broadband, but a new stadium subsidized at public expense is always worthy of celebration. Once again, we see in a subtle way, how the upper classes try to separate their fates from "the unwashed masses".<br />
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In his book Hegemony or Survival, <a href="https://chomsky.info/hegemony01/">Noam Chomsky took notice</a> of work done by biologist, Ernst Mayr with regards to the prospects for finding intelligent life beyond Earth. Mayr suggested that intelligence may not be favored by natural selection, noted that the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years, and that humans are pretty close to the end of their 100,000 years right about now. We could be at a turning point larger than any of us know right now, and all of us may at last realize that our fates are still irrevocably tied together.<br />
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As an intelligent species, we have a choice between acts of destruction and acts of creation. We have a choice between acts of exclusion or inclusion. Whatever we choose to do, if our species which we like to call "homo sapiens" is going to survive any longer, we must recognize that whatever we do will affect ourselves as well as another. We must take heed of the inescapable reality that when we hurt another that we hurt ourselves, and our prospects as a species for survival, and that when we do good to another, we improve ourselves as well as our prospects for survival. This concept is agnostic as to matters of faith and is supported by all of the science we know now. We ignore it at our own peril, and acknowledge it as a requirement for survival.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-73919115131223168872017-03-14T06:16:00.001-07:002017-03-14T06:16:32.324-07:00Hedging on a transitionFor the past few weeks, I've been working against competing demands for my blogging time. Besides the normal demands like work, family and a really cold basement where my computer happens to rest, something else has come to the fore: Steemit.<br />
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If you follow me on Google+, Facebook and Twitter, you may have noticed an occasional post regarding my efforts at Steemit. I'm just learning about it and I find it a fascinating venture. Steemit is yet another blogging platform but with one big difference. It pays to write on Steemit. From blogging to comments, to following and being followed, Steemit is an attempt to capture the value of social media interaction on a blogging platform and return at least some of it to the users.<br />
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Here is where it gets interesting. Every interaction is captured in a distributed transaction record called a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain">blockchain</a>. A blockchain is a database with encryption that is used to verify each transaction and store it so that every transaction can be verified against another. It is distributed across many peer computers for redundancy, security and speed. Computational effort generates value in the form of Steem, a cryptocurrency very much like Bitcoin.<br />
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I've been working out the logistics and am close to the point of letting Blogger go for awhile to give me time to try this out full time, that is, for all the time that I have available to blog, I will post there. I'll keep my day job, but when I'm blogging, I'll be doing it there, on Steemit. I want to see what a full effort there can do.<br />
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Steemit is still in beta, that is, they're still testing it. Few people really know that it exists, but it's there and so far, I like what I see. I will miss the integration with Google+ to be sure, but I won't miss the tremendous efforts required just to pull a few cents out of it. Don't get me wrong. I have a passion for writing and a passion for a cause. I'd like to be able to pursue those two passions and still pay the bills.<br />
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I'm grown to love Blogger. It's simple, easy to use and integrates well with Google+. When I post my articles on Google+ the comments received show up on my blog for others to read, too. That is a feature I really like that allows me to track comments wherever I happen to post the article on Google+.<br />
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Then again, I post articles on Facebook and Twitter and really don't have any integration from there. So there isn't much lost going from Blogger to Steemit. I can still link Mailchimp to <a href="https://steemit.com/@digitalfirehose">my blog on Steemit</a>, too.<br />
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Relative to Blogger, Steemit seems to be very good at generating value for content produced. Steemit also allows for upvoting of posts like Reddit. But that costs Steem Power, a sort of influence token. It gets more complicated from there and I'm planning on spending a lot more time there just to make myself familiar with it. All I can say for sure is that I'm optimistic about Steemit and I also see that Steemit is not the only social media site using cryptocurrency to pay their users. There are already a couple more to follow Steemit.<br />
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Steemit is attempting to do something that Facebook, Google+, Twitter and a few other social media sites have so far refused to do: pay their content creators for their work, and except for Google+, they show ads at the same time. There are no ads on Steemit, at least not now. Maybe not ever. The investors who created Steemit seem to think that content creators should be paid for their work. They have a business model that I'm still learning about it, but from what I can see, ad support is not an obvious consideration.<br />
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There is something else that I like about Steemit which, I think portends of the future: people will find ways to earn a basic income from something they are already doing. It is possible that in the long term future, say, 10-15 years, much of the routine labor will be automated. Trucks will drive themselves. Trains will drive themselves. Robots will stock shelves and pick produce. It is possible for this to happen, but it's not happening yet. Steemit could be an acknowledgement that we need to prepare for that eventual future. The future envisioned by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprentice_Adept">Piers Anthony in the Blue Adept</a> may not be so far off.<br />
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Billions of people are engaged in social media. Steemit is pioneering a way to channel that energy into blockchain computing. With Bitcoin, you can buy rigs and run software to mine Bitcoin. Blocks on Bitcoin are created by sheer computational power. In a way, such systems are minting money.<br />
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Steem generates blocks on the blockchain by a more familiar user interface, a social media network, something that billions are already doing now. The more content you created the more you earn, based on the votes you receive. The transition from social media networks familiar to us now to a social media network that actually pays their users for content would not be that hard to make.<br />
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I can even see these pioneers like Steemit pulling the old dogs along. I suggest that the appeal of a blogging and/or social media platform that pays for content will eventually be impossible to ignore. If Steemit proves to be successful, others will have to follow or lose their users and their revenue sources: the users. Ultimately, the users generate the value and they are the revenue source that social media relies upon. I see no reason they should not be paid.<br />
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Going even one step further, it is no secret that central banks have been <a href="http://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm">rigging national economies</a>. What appears to be not very well known is who benefits from this manipulation. I can recall in the days when I used to watch TV, and I mean broadcast TV, how the markets would go nuts when interest rates were raised or lowered. The Federal Reserve Bank is our central bank. They control the interest rates in America. When they raise rates, millions are thrown out of work, and stock markets rally. That seems like a good clue as to who benefits from the way our central bank works.<br />
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Cryptocurrencies have no central bank. There are hundreds of them, all competing for your use. The more people use a cryptocurrency, the more valuable that currency becomes. Most can be traded for traditional currency like the dollar and the Euro. There are now exchanges (like <a href="https://poloniex.com/">this one</a>) that allow for purchase and trading of cryptocurrencies, much like any other security or commodity. And they're growing.<br />
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Bitcoin started out small. As developers built the software to exchange Bitcoin, businesses started to see value in using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It's still very tiny relative to the worldwide economy, but it's there. Checking on the prices today, Bitcoin is now on par with gold. <a href="http://goldprice.org/">Gold is selling for $1,204 per ounce</a>. <a href="https://cex.io/">Bitcoin is now at $1,250 per coin</a>. I can recall one story that I saw on Steemit that tells of a man who bought $27 of Bitcoin, forgot about it for a few years and found out that his investment had appreciated to $889k. The growth is there, but can ordinary people use it? I think so.<br />
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Bitcoin is now big enough that governments can no longer ignore it. All power derives from the people. It doesn't matter what form of government you want to call it, all power still derives from the people. When the people get tired of being manipulated by the banks, it is natural for them to seek alternatives. Cryptocurrencies are that alternative until a better one comes along.<br />
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Cryptocurrencies rely upon computational power to generate value. Through personal computing, this power is distributed to everyone who has a computer. Compared to traditional central banks, cryptocurrencies are fairly democratic and not easily prone to abuse by central banks run by governments. Perhaps through a union of social media and cryptocurrencies, the people can finally gain control of the governments that claim to represent them. If not, they may have to form new governments that provide the representation they seek for their mutual benefit.<br />
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I'd say there is a peaceful revolution in process now. Most of us just don't know it yet.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-20281474433216020222017-03-09T05:08:00.002-08:002017-06-15T19:35:48.295-07:00The debate over Obamacare is not a debate over economics, its really about ideology<div>
The GOP has finally released their bill to overhaul Obamacare. Though some key elements of Obamacare will remain, it is clear that the GOP is uncertain just how to undo Obamacare without facing serious political repercussions in the 2018 mid-terms. Given the onslaught of legislative initiatives working through Congress now, it would seem to me that Republicans in Congress now have enough rope to do themselves in for the next midterm election.</div>
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The American Health Care Act, as introduced by Republicans in Congress, is the bill that the GOP has been working on for weeks behind closed doors. <a href="http://www.vox.com/2017/3/6/14829526/american-health-care-act-gop-replacement">The key features of the bill show</a> that allowing parents to keep their kids on the plan until age 26, banning discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, and even the Medicaid expansion will survive for now. The bill has serious changes for much later baked into it so that the current Congress has a chance to survive the midterms. That's cute.</div>
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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/doctors-hospitals-and-insurers-oppose-republican-health-plan/2017/03/08/d9f0f5c2-0426-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?utm_term=.0ed3054a1893">At the Washington Post</a>, they've noticed that opposition to the bill is fairly universal from the industry the bill purports to regulate. Organizations representing doctors, hospitals and even insurers have expressed surprise at the contents of the bill mostly because they were not invited to offer input on the bill. Afraid of offending their donors and their voters, Republicans in Congress seem to be mum about their true objectives, even in this bill.</div>
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Economist Dean Baker suggests that the <a href="http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/republicans-look-to-top-50-million-uninsured">GOP Congress will top 50 million uninsured</a> once this bill becomes law. Here is one very interesting observation Baker makes about how people use Medicaid:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For example, the plan leaves in place the expansion of Medicaid through 2020. This should be long enough so that most currently serving Republican governors will not have to deal with the effect of the elimination of this provision. After 2020 people benefiting from the expansion will be allowed to remain on Medicaid, but new people will not be added. Since people tend to shift on and off Medicaid (something rarely understood by reporters who cover the ACA), after two or three years the vast majority of the people who benefited from the expansion will no longer be getting Medicaid. By 2025, the impact of the expansion on the number of the uninsured will be trivial.</blockquote>
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This is something I did not know: people go on and off Medicaid. Once enrollment is frozen for Medicaid, the people who were on it once, will find that they cannot return after 2020. Great for Republicans in elected office who are already set with gold-plated insurance, bad for people who need the help.</div>
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Numerous critics have requested a scoring of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for the reason that no one knows the true cost of the bill. This is interesting considering that many Republicans claim to be fiscally conservative. Why wouldn't they wait to find out? Perhaps their objective is not the repeal of Obamacare. Their objective is repeal of the taxes imposed by Obamacare that would result in a nice, tidy windfall for the wealthiest of Americans who run very large businesses, but can't wait to externalize the cost of health care for their employees.</div>
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I suggest here, that the debate over Obamacare, and health care in general is not about economics. It's about ideology. Conservative rhetoric maintains that people should be responsible for their own health. In a perfect world, that might be true, but this world is far from perfect, at least with humans in it. What conservative talking points miss is that business does the majority of the polluting, while funneling most of the income generated by the business to the top 1%. </div>
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Business creates pollution. Ordinary people minding their own affairs do not even come close to the effluvia created by business. Business sells things that pollute and people buy them. From plastic doo-dads of all manner, shapes and sizes, to electronics that need to be properly recycled, to vehicles that spew CO2 and particulate matter into the air for us to breathe, to oil spills, and coal ash spills.</div>
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All of that pollution has an effect on the health of the people who use products and services created by the very businesses that seek to escape the costs that businesses can impose on everyone else. This is the argument missing from the debate. There are a few more arguments missing, too. Like how doctors have engineered a shortage of doctors to prop up their incomes relative to everyone else. Or how drug patents now cost Americans roughly $360 billion a year. Or how lawyers game the courts with torts to increase the cost of protection for doctors.</div>
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The entire game is about shifting costs from one party to another. This is how they keep us divided. This is what the GOP plan to replace Obamacare is about. It's time to bring everyone together, into a system that keeps everyone in, everyone covered, and lets nobody out. After all, we're stronger together, right?</div>
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Enter now, the bill now in Congress that is nowhere to be seen in the news, <a href="http://www.medicareforall.org/pages/HR676">H.R.676 - Expanded and Improved Medicare For All Act</a>. This is a universal health care act. This requires everyone to pay in and everyone to be covered. Based on my reading so far, there is very little way that I can see, for any single group to externalize or shift the costs of health care onto another. Here is the bill summary:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This bill establishes the Medicare for All Program to provide all individuals residing in the United States and U.S. territories with free health care that includes all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Only public or nonprofit institutions may participate. Nonprofit health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that deliver care in their own facilities may participate.<br />
Patients may choose from participating physicians and institutions.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Health insurers may not sell health insurance that duplicates the benefits provided under this bill. Insurers may sell benefits that are not medically necessary, such as cosmetic surgery benefits.</b></blockquote>
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The bill sets forth methods to pay institutional providers and health professionals for services. Financial incentives between HMOs and physicians based on utilization are prohibited.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The program is funded</b>: (1) from existing sources of government revenues for health care, (2) by increasing personal income taxes on the top 5% of income earners, (3) by instituting a progressive excise tax on payroll and self-employment income, (4) by instituting a tax on unearned income, and (5) by instituting a tax on stock and bond transactions. Amounts that would have been appropriated for federal public health care programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), are transferred and appropriated to carry out this bill.</blockquote>
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The program must give employment transition benefits and first priority in retraining and job placement to individuals whose jobs are eliminated due to reduced clerical and administrative work under this bill.</blockquote>
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The Department of Health and Human Services must create a confidential electronic patient record system.</blockquote>
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The bill establishes a National Board of Universal Quality and Access to provide advice on quality, access, and affordability.</blockquote>
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The Indian Health Service must be integrated into the program after five years. Congress must evaluate the continued independence of Department of Veterans Affairs health programs. (emphasis mine, <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676/text#toc-H87F6F4A93DE34DF5B9F91798A4C464A7">text of bill here</a>) </blockquote>
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Note that private insurance is effectively cut out of the basic health insurance business. An enormous, confusing bureaucracy of multiple private insurance companies will be replaced by one federal agency, with one neck to grab in November. No one gets out from paying the taxes to support the program, which means that there can be no cost shifting for profits. Increase the burden on party at the risk of increasing the burden for all, and anyone who tries to do that will be found and made known.</div>
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Taxes are imposed at numerous sources, including securities transactions like the sale of stocks and bonds. That means those with lofty incomes who engage in high frequency trading might have to do something more productive with their time and computers. Everyone pays in for their mutual benefit.</div>
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I note with interest that <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676/cosponsors">Bernie Sanders is not a cosponsor of the bill</a>. I wonder if he has an opinion of it. <a href="http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/may/bernie-sanders-introduces-single-payer-bill-in-senate">In 2011, Sanders introduced a similar bill</a>, but the Physicians for a Single Payer Plan liked HR 676 better.</div>
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This is our moment. HR 676 is a far better plan and does not set one generation or even one faction against another as the Republican plan does. If everyone pays in, the costs are nominal for all. Under the current system and worse, with the GOP plan as proposed, burdens are shifted and concentrated on the people who are least able to afford it.</div>
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So let your Congressperson know that you know about HR 676. Let those who oppose HR 676 explain why the people should not be united in the pursuit of quality health care that is already enjoyed by every other industrialized country, as a right. We have an alternative to the GOP plan. Let's talk about that.</div>
digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-88942080337067945822017-03-02T21:49:00.001-08:002017-07-17T04:07:19.115-07:00It's time to start thinking of racism as an addiction: a preventable, progressive and fatal disease of the mind<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/us/georgia-couple-confederate-flags-threats/index.html">Here's an interesting story about a couple in Georgia</a> who were sentenced to a combined 35 years in prison for participating in a parade of trucks flying the Confederate flag in front of an African American family's home where the owner was hosting a birthday party. At least, that's what we get from the headline.<br />
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During the parade, Jose "Joe" Torres stopped his truck, brought out a shotgun and pointed it at the party-goers threatening to kill them. Kayla Norton, the other defendant in the couple, also made threats while at his side. Nobody was physically hurt, but the family in the home brought charges with evidence captured on video with numerous witnesses. Consequently, the couple were arrested, prosecuted and convicted.<br />
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While several other participants were charged in the incident for lesser crimes, it is worth noting that some participants, including the couple, were charged with violations of Georgia's Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act. Finally, we're starting to see racists being charged and identified as terrorists for their acts of aggression. That is a very significant turn of events in terms of prosecution and reporting.<br />
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I watched the video at the head of the article to see how Norton, the female defendant, cried in court and turned to the victims to display an incredible degree of denial (from the CNN article referenced above):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Norton apologized for her role in the incident saying, "I want you all to know that is not me. That is not me, that is not him. I would never walk up to you and say those words to you. I'm so sorry that happened to you. I am so sorry."</blockquote>
This is the kind of denial someone might have expressed after discovering what they had done while blacked out from a drinking binge. It was all fun and games until they found themselves in cuffs in front of a judge (from the same article):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Many people tried to make the case about simply flying the Confederate Battle Flag," Douglas County District Attorney Brian Fortner said in a statement. "This case was about a group of people riding around our community, drinking alcohol, harassing and intimidating our citizens because of the color of their skin."</blockquote>
Step back for a moment and consider the kind of ride these people were taking. I'm not just talking about the alcohol or anything else they might have been taking. I'm talking endorphins. Endorphins are the brain's response to threats and other intense stimuli. The most well known example and experience of endorphins is the "Runner's High".<br />
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Another well known endorphin is adrenaline. Have you ever been in a heated argument and felt the rise of anger? Have you ever felt fear from a threat, like a car that you didn't see behind you, but just whizzed past you? Those examples provide a very mild shot of adrenaline.<br />
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Those people in the parade were packing serious heat (at least one shotgun) and had organized a parade in front of their victim's house. The entire affair appears to be premeditated. In other words, they spent time collaborating and planning their "event", complete with giggles and anticipation. During the event, the alcohol further released their inhibitions enough for them to shout threats and throw objects at their victims, too. The acts of shouting racial slurs, throwing objects, and pointing a gun capable of deadly force, all give rise to huge shots of adrenaline.<br />
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I think we can fairly say that they really didn't think this thing through. Especially the part about getting arrested and going to prison.<br />
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The planning, the acting out and the displays of domineering behavior all arise out of obsession. Obsession is also a form of addiction and is every bit as addictive as drinking, gambling and power. From beginning to end, these people were orchestrating actions to bring about the maximum high that they could achieve. I'm not saying that was their conscious objective, I'm just saying that how it works.<br />
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Norton and Torres displayed all the hallmarks of an addict, or someone in the throes of an addiction. <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/addiction">Here's a handy definition from Psychology Today</a>:<br />
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Addiction is a condition that results when a person ingests a substance (e.g., alcohol, cocaine, nicotine) or engages in an activity (e.g., gambling, sex, shopping) that can be pleasurable but the continuation of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary responsibilities and concerns, such as work, relationships, or health. People who have developed an addiction may not be aware that their behavior is out of control and causing problems for themselves and others.</blockquote>
In this case, the couple experienced intense pleasure, the high from the endorphins they experienced while threatening the lives of others. Their actions disrupted the lives of others, when they terrorized an African American family with their parade, leaving a memory that the everyone in attendance will never forget. Their actions disrupted their own lives when they were sentenced to hard time in prison. This is the power of addiction.<br />
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To put this all in terms that most people would not ordinarily use: racism is a sign of mental illness. Now that I think about it, I've never seen or heard anyone say in the news or in civil discourse that racism is a mental illness. Symptoms in this case include obsession (the websites, the Facebook posts, fantasizing, etc); acting out as in their parade, the display of weapons, shouted threats and the slurs; and the crash, like when Torres and Norton were stone cold sober as they both cried and while she apologized in court. Wash, rinse, repeat. We don't even know how many times they've done this before as this was probably the only time someone pressed charges and made them stick.<br />
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To call them addicts suffering from an unrelenting addiction is by no means a defense of their behavior. On the contrary, they are adults and they make their own decisions, but at the least, they are very confused adults. At the time of their crime, they were high on, and addicted to power.<br />
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They are not evil. I've said before that I don't believe in evil. Evil is a supernatural explanation of challenging behavior in children and adults. There is no evil and good. To put it simply, there are two kinds of people in the world: confused (what we call evil) and less confused (what we like to call good).<br />
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The couple and their cohorts are now in jail awaiting a trip to prison. They didn't plan on going to prison and sincerely believed that what they were doing was right and just, even if the people outside of their little world disagreed. That kind of bravado doesn't come from deciding one night after a game of beer pong, that they're going to act racist for a day. No, this is a result of a long line of decisions, spanning years, maybe decades, of imitating or following behavior from some authority figure in their lives. You know, like their parents.<br />
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I think they learned that behavior from their parents, and from abuse at the hands of their parents. Hitler's Germany was authoritarian and Christian, and it should be noted that <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Your-Own-Good-Child-Rearing-Violence/dp/0374522693">Hitler suffered tremendous abuses at the hands of his father as a child</a>. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-giberson-phd/the-biblical-roots-of-racism_b_7649390.html">American racism has its roots in Christianity</a> to be sure, but I think we'd find that racism arises from abuse in authoritarian families where "might makes right". Yet, millions of other Americans can read the Bible without making conclusions of racial inferiority based upon skin color, just as Martin Luther King did.<br />
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If the parade organizers truly believed that African Americans were inferior, and had taken the time to read their "Good Book", they might find that their purpose (according to their book) is to help those "inferiors", to lift them up, not abuse them. Here's where I get confused. Were they trying to help them? If so, how did they ever come to believe that abusing someone else is even remotely helpful?<br />
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In authoritarian families, the rule is that the child lacks motivation to do well, to pay no mind to the skills the child might need to achieve the morality that is preached by the parents. Punish the child and he will do better. That's the rule.<br />
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Yet, by their actions, it would seem that Torres and Norton weren't even thinking that they would make better people out of those party-goers with their abuse. It was an entirely cathartic affair. Racism is not about superiority and most certainly has nothing to do with helping others out. I am here to say that racism is about people acting out the story of the abuse sustained at the hands of their parents. This acting out is the ritual of their addiction as all addictions have rituals in their expression.<br />
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It is right to restrain with imprisonment, such individuals as those who are willing to brandish weapons, parade in the streets and terrorize people on the basis of color. We must consider the source.<br />
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People are not born racist. They are born into this world without a care about skin color, religion, sexual orientation or nationality. Racism is a learned behavior. It is taught as a set of skills designed to marginalize, minimize and enslave, others who are deemed, "inferior" only due to the color of their skin. They're not the most productive skills, but they are skills, nonetheless.<br />
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Racism is a preventable, progressively fatal mental disease, but it can be arrested. I believe that to be true because it is up to parents to set the example of how to live with others, regardless of skin color. Parents set the example by collaborating with their children to solve the problems that children might encounter, problems that if left unsolved, give rise to challenging behavior. Solve those problems with kids and challenging behavior goes away - and kids learn new skills at the same time. A model for solving those problems can be found at <a href="http://www.livesinthebalance.org/">www.livesinthebalance.org</a>.<br />
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Racism is a set of skills borne of religious dogma, a perversion of morality. Morality is a skill, not dogma. Teach the skills required to achieve the morality of peace, love and compassion, and racism fades away, into grey.digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-7958330030270224572017-02-28T05:14:00.003-08:002017-02-28T05:14:44.397-08:00Last night I tweeted John Lennon's "Imagine" to Betsy Devos and Steve BannonI've been thinking a lot about <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/betsy-devos-christian-schools-vouchers-charter-education-secretary">this quote by Betsy Devos</a>, courtesy of Mother Jones:<br />
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Asked whether Christian schools should continue to rely on giving—rather than pushing for taxpayer money through vouchers—Betsy DeVos replied, "There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education...Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's kingdom."</blockquote>
Aww. She's so sweet, isn't she? She really wants to get taxpayers to pay for the indoctrination of children for her religion. Why? So she won't have to worry about her fellow Christians being persecuted by others like atheists, Muslims and maybe even Buddhists. <a href="http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/06/religion-and-despair-in-classroom.html">I wrote about this fear of persecution years ago</a>. This campaign isn't about saving other people. It's about preventing persecution of Christians. Gosh, if they weren't so incredibly vindictive against others, they might've saved themselves some trouble.<br />
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For two millennia, Christians have, at their own hands, conducted genocide and numerous lesser forms of persecution against other races and religions, all in the name of their one supreme religion, Christianity. This isn't to say that all Christians are bad people. They are not all bad. Many, perhaps even a majority of them, live and love in relative peace, wishing no harm on anyone. A few of them are my friends and they're actually pretty cool people. But God help anyone else should Christians amass absolute political and military power.<br />
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I have to say it seems quite ironic that a religion so totally dedicated to reliance upon God focuses more on believing in God without question, and following the dictates of the leaders of that religion without question. Christian pursuit of political and military power would seem an oddity then, too. This is why we engage in so many wars. Now that Congress is better than 90% Christian, with conservative Republican majorities in both houses, and a conservative Republican Administration running the show from the White House, it's time to call the "leaders" out for what they are, "jihadists", or as someone else put it, The American Taliban.<br />
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If you don't believe me, check out this article on Medium by JC Weatherby, <a href="https://medium.com/@jcweatherby_49412/its-time-to-start-calling-evangelicals-what-they-are-the-american-taliban-4a41731296e4#.rbwpwhc81">It’s Time to Start Calling Evangelicals What They Are: The American Taliban</a>. Here is the nugget:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Evangelicals are advocating a religious extremism that is no different from muslim extremism, which projects religious authority over all people in their domain, which limits the rights of women, controls and limits education, and enforces strict adherence to a moral code, which naturally rejects and punishes all forms of “decadence,” including; “deviant sexuality,” science, reason, and any questioning of authority. Christian fundamentalists, if given the power, will do the same things.</blockquote>
These people want to tell everyone else what to believe. They want to force us all to believe as they do, but at the same time, would rain hell upon anyone else who tried to do the same thing to them. I'm perfectly content with allowing others to believe what they want to believe, as long as they don't try to force me to do the same as them. Homogeneous thinking is not how humans survived for so long. It is the differences in opinion that makes humans a successful species.<br />
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The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival. Getting us all to believe in a Christian God isn't going to "save" anybody. For the leaders of our country who profess Christianity, it's about security. They want to sleep at night knowing that they'd be safe from persecution if everyone else believed as they do. That's what this is all about. It's an entirely selfish motive, and we know it because not only do they want to enforce a certain religious belief upon the rest of us, they want to keep the hierarchy, too. Funny how no one is talking about dashing that hierarchy to a trillion little pieces.<br />
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So I got on Twitter last night and did this tweet:<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/BetsyDeVos">@BetsyDeVos</a> I'd rather <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/imagine?src=hash">#imagine</a> a way to keep your conception of god out of schools and preserve the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/1stamendment?src=hash">#1stamendment</a>. <a href="https://t.co/LVwduRbYkh">https://t.co/LVwduRbYkh</a></div>
— ScottCDunn (@ScottCDunn) <a href="https://twitter.com/ScottCDunn/status/836421832576159744">February 28, 2017</a></blockquote>
And this one:<br />
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<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/BetsyDeVos">@BetsyDeVos</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Morality?src=hash">#Morality</a> is a skill, not <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dogma?src=hash">#dogma</a> <a href="https://t.co/BWsNIJiHj5">https://t.co/BWsNIJiHj5</a> You cannot teach morality without teaching the skills to achieve it.</div>
— ScottCDunn (@ScottCDunn) <a href="https://twitter.com/ScottCDunn/status/836422158305771521">February 28, 2017</a></blockquote>
I would love to see a nice million strong wave of Tweets of John Lennon's song aimed at Betsy. In his song, Lennon offers an important reminder that we're all human, we all have frailties and that we all could live in peace if we can let go of the need to get others to think like we do. He's urging us to coexist, in peace.<br />
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And then I thought about how "anti-establishment" Steve Bannon claims to be. I wonder how committed to that he really is. Would Bannon give up the hierarchy and his place in it once he's accomplished his goals? I don't think so. Absolute power is stupefyingly attractive and addictive to all humans. I sincerely doubt Bannon is an exception to this rule. So I sent him this tweet, too:<br />
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<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/StephenBannon">@StephenBannon</a> Hey, Mr. Anti-establishment...this song is for you: <a href="https://t.co/LVwduRbYkh">https://t.co/LVwduRbYkh</a> To have peace, you must be peaceful.</div>
— ScottCDunn (@ScottCDunn) <a href="https://twitter.com/ScottCDunn/status/836422645855870977">February 28, 2017</a></blockquote>
So far, no responses, no retweets, not really much of anything from that yet. I guess it's to be expected. But I've said my piece and that is enough for me. If the people in power truly believe that their actions will promote world peace, then they won't mind explaining their motives for their actions.<br />
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digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27846976.post-30925105295759003362017-02-25T04:57:00.001-08:002017-02-25T04:57:15.702-08:00Note to Congress: If you're afraid of your constituents, you're probably not representing their interestsRepublicans (and Democrats alike) and their viral town hall meetings are storming the news of late. <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/378206-gop-town-halls-protests/">Some Republicans dismiss it all as paid or organized protests</a>. Ha, ha. <a href="http://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2017/02/22/rubio-says-he-isnt-showing-up-to-town-halls-because-of-their-hostile-atmosphere">And some like Marco Rubio</a> have claimed that they aren't doing in person town halls due to their fear of hostility from their own voters.<br />
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The reports I've read of these town halls seem to provide a disturbing clue about American politics: Representatives in town halls share their views like gospel expecting the people they represent to follow. Um, I think it's supposed to be the other way around. The purpose of the town hall meeting is for elected representatives to get a sense of what the people in their district want. They are supposed to represent the interests of the people, not their own.<br />
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<a href="http://bernie2016.blogspot.com/2017/02/town-hall-in-small-town-america.html">Cyndy A. Matthews provides some insight</a> from a local town hall in a district in Ohio hosted by Representative <a href="https://jordan.house.gov/">Jim Jordan</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The questions about the Affordable Care Act revealed Jim Jordan's position for better or worse on health care. He stated at one point that "health care is bad for business." Business people making big profits are more important than saving lives or preventing the suffering of his fellow Americans in the representative's opinion. He also stated he did not like how his able-bodied 27 year old son had to pay higher private health insurance premiums because other people's young adult children are sometimes sicker with diseases like M.S. or cancer. It wasn't "fair" since his son is "healthy" and shouldn't have to subsidize other "non-healthy" Americans' health care.</blockquote>
Mr. Jordan provides the same rationale that I often see in this debate: "Look, we're all just free agents in a bag of skin. Why can't we get along without being forced to subsidize each other?" Never mind that nobody chooses to get cancer or MS. Nobody chooses to drink or shower in polluted water, either.<br />
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Matthews goes on to report how Mr. Jordan gave someone sympathetic to his views the podium and ignored the others. It would appear then, that Mr. Jordan, like many politicians of late, have mistaken a forum where all views should be given a voice, for a campaign whistle stop. It's as if he really wanted to make it all about him rather than the people he claims to represent.<br />
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The Huffington Post reports that, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marsha-blackburn-town-hall-tennessee-boo_us_58ac8833e4b06e5f777b293e">Rep. Marsha Blackburn [was] Besieged By Boos At Tennessee Town Hall</a>. One member in attendance yelled out, “We are not stupid. Stop this," in response to Blackburn's praise of Betsy Devos. The article goes to describe several incidents where Blackburn is booed by her audience. As a one time comedian, I know how it feels when I bomb and I always learned something when I did, but Blackburn doesn't seem to be learning as this exchange suggests:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Pratik Dash, a Franklin High alumnus, asked the representative to comment on Trump’s statement that he wants to prioritize refugees who are Christian.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Is it right to prioritize people based on their religion?” he asked, to applause from the crowd.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Instead of answering the question directly, Blackburn launched into a discussion of refugees and the need for more vetting, prompting Dash to ask again, “Do you think it’s right to prioritize people based on their religion? Yes or no?”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I know that Christians have seen incredible persecution,” Blackburn replied, prompting another chorus of boos.</blockquote>
It is clear that representatives are trying really hard to steer the conversation to fit their own narrative rather than listening to their constituents and airing their views. The two examples above are just a few of the many that I've seen strewn across the internet. The political climate has gotten so bad for Republicans and politicians in general that even Bernie Sanders chimed in:<br />
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<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
If you don’t have the guts to face your constituents, then you shouldn’t be in the United States Congress.</div>
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/835134406360715268">February 24, 2017</a></blockquote>
I think he only goes halfway in his statement. I replied and took it a bit closer to the truth:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/SenSanders">@SenSanders</a> How about, "If you don't have the guts to face your constituents, you might not be representing their interests."</div>
— ScottCDunn (@ScottCDunn) <a href="https://twitter.com/ScottCDunn/status/835285375467712514">February 25, 2017</a></blockquote>
I qualified my tweet with the word "might", but I think it's fair to say that Congressmen and women who face angry crowds at town halls must know that their constituents are angry because their interests are not being represented in Congress. It's plain to see when Republicans can claim 26% of voter registration and Democrats 30%. Both parties have done a pretty lousy job of representing America. They both gave us Trump and Clinton as choices for president last November.<br />
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Incredibly, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/republican-town-hall-protests-cotton-cassidy-grassley-trump/517608/">The Atlantic has found some politicians willing to admit that the concerns brought up at town halls are real and that the crowds are not manufactured</a>. They are acknowledging that people are taking time out of their busy lives to attend and air their fears and worries. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Congress will actually listen and act on their concerns:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Even if some GOP lawmakers adopt a sympathetic tone toward angry town hall crowds, that isn’t necessarily an indication that they’re changing course. <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/22/14704812/tom-cotton-town-hall-angry-obamacare-insurance">When Cotton told the crowd</a> on Wednesday that he wouldn’t deny Obamacare has helped people in the state of Arkansas, he quickly added it has also “hurt many Arkansans.”</blockquote>
Cotton seems to be misdirecting his constituents around the real problem, a problem that no one in Congress is talking about: big money in politics. <a href="https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf">Scientists have figured this out long ago</a>, but too many people in Congress don't like scientists (they be like, "Republicans"). <a href="https://youtu.be/3CaaWXhrEzQ">Harvard law professor Larry Lessig</a> has been giving speeches with plenty of examples to choose from to be found on YouTube. I guess Congress has not taken notice of him yet, either.<br />
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People are finally waking up and noticing that Congress has been listening to big business and big money rather than their own constituents. Apparently, many members of Congress seem to think that money from big business is what keeps them in office, and that addressing the concerns of their constituents is an afterthought.<br />
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Bernie was right. If you don't have the guts to face your own constituents, you shouldn't be in Congress. He just left out the part about why that's important: if you're not representing the interests of your constituents, you shouldn't be in Congress.<br />
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>digitalfirehosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14217328463771772000noreply@blogger.com0