Showing posts with label Michael Moore. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE OPTION IS ... ??

I've been really trying to keep my distance and my mouth shut as we wind-up health insurance reform or whatever the hell it is. The president is really selling it. He even came here … to Strongsville … and oh my God, he even had our (say no, unless it’s single payer) Congressman Dennis Kucinich with him.
-

Well, I’m confused … and I need answers. Congress, will you or will you not cover every American? Are you really going to force Americans to pay into a “for profit” health care system? … and, Is there strong competition to keep health insurance companies honest? The first answer should be yes, the second answer should be no, and the third answer should be yes.

Unfortunately, that’s not what this health insurance legislation is about. As it stands right now, [regarding that last question] even though we need strong competition [to keep health insurance companies honest], … even though a majority of Americans want that competition … want a strong public health insurance option … looks like we’re not going to get it … Or am I mistaken?

-
See, these political parties rely on campaign contributions [money] from the financial services industry [and yes, that means the financial services industry helps finance (by running ads for, and giving "lobbying" money to) Democratic candidates, as well as Republican candidates].

-
Health insurance companies fall within the financial services industry. So we absolutely, without a doubt, know why Republicans are against health care reform or health insurance reform [Republicans are in the pockets of the health insurance industry]; however, with the Democrats it’s tricky business; they are, after all, the party of the poor, the working class and the middle class.

-
If health care is a right and not a privilege [as Democrats believe, and we believe], then every American has a right to quality, affordable, comprehensive health care. Right?
-

So how do Democrats appease their benefactors ["for profit" health insurance companies], while berating their bad behavior at the same time? How do Democrats convince average Americans that they are on their side? How do they "have their cake and eat it too"?

Well, you have to look like you’re beating up on the health insurance industry. Listen to the rhetoric … you get the feeling … hey, these Dems are really giving it to the health insurance companies. Wait, wait … but aren’t the “for profit” costly health insurance companies getting more customers? Yeah, … but a Dem will say, “We’re not allowing them to deny enrollment based on pre-existing conditions. Wait, wait … but with the exception of children, this regulation won’t kick-in for adults until around 2014; and, by the way, … if these health insurance companies do deny, who’s policing them and what exactly are the penalties? Wait, wait, ... and can't the health insurance companies continue to charge older adults and women more in premium? *****

-
Let’s listen to Michael Moore being interviewed by Lawrence O’Donnell sitting in for Keith Olbermann (Keith’s father just passed … Keith we love ya and you are in our prayers).

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

LISTEN to Natoma at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann#35884301
-

*****PLEASE READ THIS and call, email, write your representative to stop gender based rating, etc (the bill that passed 3/21/2010 does not ... does not address this adequately): For gender-equal health care, enact Medicare for all /By Plain Dealer guest columnist, March 21, 2010, 6:00AM By Sheila Leavitt
-

-
Obama's Final Health Care Rally: Time For Courage

-
Pelosi: 'Get The Bill. Go For It.'

Obama Brings Dennis Kucinich On Air Force One For Health Care Speech

Closing Pro-Reform Ad Has Private Insurers On Corporate Jets, High-Fiving (VIDEO)

Health Care Summit: Republicans Prepare, Hoping For Political Gain

Update: March 26, 2010 - Bill Moyers Journal

After Health Insurance Reform, What Now?

Sicko

Fight Bad Faith Insurance Companies

Monday, October 5, 2009

MICHAEL MOORE UNVEILS TRUE EVIL. AND IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IT, GO WATCH THE MOVIE

It doesn't surprise me that I'm not hearing a lot more from mainstream media about Michael Moore's movie "Capitalism: A Love Story". [Trailer]

Have they been muzzled by corporate?

Even though we're hemorrhaging [jobs and money], the leaders and the wealthy 1% [who control about 85% to 95% of the wealth] of this country want you to think everything is really "not so bad".

The capitalism we used to love and cherish is dead and if we don't embrace Noam Chomsky's better society and discard the disgraceful "Capitalism 201 Gone Wild", we are in deep, deep, shit.

But everybody knows this ... right?

Maybe not, ... maybe we're still in shock or mourning. Remember Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"?

Oh, ... people, ... people, ... people ... have we learned nothing? The rich and powerful are masters in pulling the wool over our eyes. [see Oct. 9th, Bill Moyers Journal, Wall Street vs Reform (Video)]

I learned a whole lot of really repugnant things watching Michael's movie. 1. I had no idea that corporations had life insurance policies on average ordinary workers. I can understand "key man" life insurance policies ... but life insurance on average workers?

Can you see where this whole health insurance reform is heading? Probably nowhere. Even if we get some legislation, will it be real change? I don't think so.

You ask ... why not? ...

Well ... Who wants healthy workers when you can make money on dead ones; and the health insurance company and life insurance company can also make a healthy profit collecting premiums. A win/win for everyone ... right? Everyone accept the deceased's family.

2. Michael wrote a piece called "Goodbye GM". It was a great piece ... and I loved his vision for a new kind of GM. Well, I'm sad to say that no one really talked about Michael's ideas. Just status quo, steady as she fails.

There were a few glimmers of hope in the movie ... Michael showed a company where the workers owned the company; and he also showed workers that fought back and brought a company back to life, along with their jobs.

Michael showed us it is possible to take this nation back from the greedy and corrupt capitalists.

Barack Obama was our chance to clean house. Well, it didn't happen ... so it's up to us to change things. Bottom up ... flip the switch. Non-violent revolution.

The tax-payers own a lot of capital in the companies who generate their own wealth, and who use their influence and power to suck the life out of the very people who now own them.

Are we going let these snakes, hooligans and thugs outwit us? Why not challenge them in the courts, as well as doing a nationwide sit-in (in those companies corridors and offices). That will unhinge the doors to greed and wealth. Don't you think?

To be continued ...

Update, November 26, 2010

"Right-Wing Think Tank Praised Ireland's 'Economic Freedom' ... and Then Its Economy Crashed" | | AlterNet by Terrance Heath, November 26, 2010

November 16, 2010, Democracy Now, "Push Michael More Off a Cliff:" Health Insurance Whistleblower Wendell Potter Details How the Industry Attacked Michael Moore's Film "Sicko"

Watch:

Starving the Beast: Ten Things You Can Do To Take America Back | OurFuture.org by Sara Robinson, November 11, 2010
-

Update: November 10, 2010As the Country Falls Apart, It's Time for Our Revolution | | AlterNet by Ted Rall

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY - MOVIE TRAILER

THIS IS A MUST WATCH -October 9, 2009 BILL MOYER'S JOURNAL - WALL STREET VS REFORM (video); Summary -; GUESTS: OUR CONGRESSWOMAN FROM TOLEDO (MARCY KAPTUR), AND SIMON JOHNSON (BASELINE SCENARIO)

NOAM CHOMSKY

GOODBYE GM

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM

Sunday, September 6, 2009

HAVE CAPITALISM AND HEALTH CARE REFORM GONE WILD?

Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: a Love Story” will premier at the Venice Film Festival tonight. I can’t wait till it gets to the theaters. [See trailer below]

Is the Capitalism that we’re soaked (or should I say drowning) in today have anything to do with the concept of capitalism of yesteryear, or is it simply “Capitalism 201” gone wild?

I love “mom and pop” stores. I even like franchises and international trade; but Citigroup, Bank of America, and huge “too big to fail”, suck the life out of you; swamp and kill everything in their path behemoths … I think not.

And so we arrive on health care reform’s door steps with several behemoths sucking the life literally out of every American in the US of A. We are at the mercy of behemoth health insurance and pharmaceutical companies; and they play a huge role in whether we live or die while they get richer and richer and richer and richer.

Money Driven Medicine - produced by Alex Gibney, and based on Maggie Mahar's acclaimed book, "Money Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much" GET, BUY, SCREEN AT http://moneydrivenmedicine.org/

Trailer:

-

Watch September 4, 2009, Bill Moyers Journal HERE or below:

TRAILER: "CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY"

-
WENDELL POTTER
-
WENDELL POTTER PR WATCH
-
Money-Driven Medicine provides the essential introduction Americans need to become knowledgeable participants in healthcare reform, now and in the years ahead. Produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)
-
MAGGIE MAHAR
-

Friday, June 5, 2009

A NEW BUSINESS MODEL - EMPLOYEES OWNING BIG BUSINESS AND REPUBLICANS PLAN TO STOP IT

The doom and gloom about the Middle Class would definitely be a reality under a Republican Administration. As you noticed, every single Republican in Congress voted against the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as did all but three brave Republican members of the Senate (Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Arlen Specter).

Well, the Recovery and Reinvestment Act specifically addresses the low and middle income. The Middle Class Task Force is working hard to bring GREEN jobs to that sector.

I’ve seen what is going on behind the scenes. Yesterday I was on a conference call that talked about all the projects and training projects going on across the country.

The President didn’t make Van Jones “Green Jobs” adviser for nothing. I would check out “Green for All”.

The other thing, and I know Republicans are dead set against this; unions are not going away. They are the bedrock of the Middle Class and they are here to stay, I hope so under President Obama.

Union workers make more and they did indeed help create a strong Middle Class.
Expect to see GREEN jobs with a strong union component.

The best thing about GM’s bankruptcy was that now, the UAW and Americans own a stake in GM. It has always been my dream for the employees to own the business. This is now becoming a reality. Again, this is something that Republicans are 100% against.

They talk small business, but they never talked about the employees having an ownership stake in big business.

President Obama has done that. GM is not dead. Michael Moore and President Obama talked about hi-speed transit. I see GM being at the center of this move. That will make a lot of union workers and middle Americans very happy; as, I believe, high speed rail can not get done without unions being involved.

So naysayers and the Republican Party … be very afraid cause a new day has come; and the bottom is now going to the top. A flip flop and its definitely a new business model.

This new business model will spread across the world (I hope), ... new GM plants (with employees owning a stake in big business, or owning big business) will transform America and poorer countries who adopt the model and focus on hi-speed rail energizing their economies.

Henry Ford's cars helped build a strong Middle Class. Hi-Speed transit can bring it back.

The one thing we cannot allow is for the Republicans in the Congress and the Senate (and the Republican Party) and a few small minded Democrats to block the Employee Free Choice Act and ACESA

A Phoenix Rising From GM's Ashes

Goodbye GM

GREEN FOR ALL

THE UNITED AUTO WORKERS: BUSTED? (I don't think so -my comments)

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT (EFCA)

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA),

Friday, December 5, 2008

AUTO BAILOUT - JON STEWART

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Autoerotic Explanation

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Jon Stewart says it all. He's right on the money with his summation of the auto bailout; and anyway, it's a bridge loan, not a giveaway for heaven's sake.

Ok, now that we've said it, there is a caveat..... and with that we're likely to agree (to a degree) with "God forgive us" Michael Moore.

Saving the Big 3 for You and Me ...a message from Michael Moore

----------------------------------------------

Stop or pause music player to the right of this blog before starting video.

GAP WIDENS BETWEEN THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS

"72,000,000+ Americans (over half) earn $25,000 or less a year. Another 34,000,000+ earn between $25,000 and $45,000. The notion that everyone is feeling the pain of this recession equally is completely deceptive. Working and middle class Americans are feeling the brunt of this recession. You would think that after the worst crisis since the Great Depression things would be different today in Q1 of 2011. Yet nothing has changed and in fact, we have invigorated the too big to fail with our current government policies. This is a government built by Wall Street banks and for Wall Street banks. Don’t be surprised when the next crisis hits because nothing has changed."

From MyBudget360 :Source "Social Security" -

What "Free Trade" Has Cost The World | OurFuture.org, by Dave Johnson, March 14, 2011

- -

Excerpt: "Income VS Wealth

There are a few people who make hundreds of millions of income in a single year. Some people make more than $1 billion in a year But that is in a single year. If you make vast sums every year, after a while it starts to add up. (And then there is the story of inherited wealth, passed down and growing for generation after generation...)

Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined. "In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available from the Federal Reserve Board, the richest 1% of U.S. households owned 33.8% of the nation’s private wealth. That’s more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent." (Also from the Working Group on Extreme Inequality)

400 people have as much wealth as half of our population. The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion."

9 Pictures That Expose This Country's Obscene Division of Wealth | Economy | AlterNet by Dave Johnson, February 13, 2011

- -

More GRITtv

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

by Chris Hedges (article appeared on TruthDig "We do not shake ourselves awake quickly from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet. -

October 8, 2010 -

Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.

Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods."

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Monday, October 5, 2009

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Friday, June 5, 2009

Friday, December 5, 2008

SB

9/2012 VIDEO TAKES 30 SECONDS TO LOAD AFTER CLICKING ON THE PLAY ARROW - ALSO SEEN ON VIDEO SITE

BILL CLINTON AT DNC 2012

-

Blog Archive

AC

Subscribe via email

-

-

-

TD

-

BCPNJ

-

-

VJ

-

Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank - Dark Money in Politics -wait 20 seconds after clicking play arrow

-

CH

-

TED NUGENT EXPOSED! DID EVERYTHING HE COULD NOT TO SERVE IN THE MILITARY

-

GOP WAR ON WOMEN

-

BOYCOTT

-

GLENN GREENWALD LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR SOME

-

EI

-

TD

-

PART TWO

-

PE

-

-

-

BP

-

JOE SCARBOROUGH - RE: TAVIS SMILEY'S POVERTY TOUR SERIES -OCTOBER 10, 2011

-

Pages

CWC

-

CCER

THE CAPITOL - WASHINGTON, DC

-

-

CSCPARTII

-

BAILED OUT AND SOLD OUT

-

US ECONOMY BOUGHT - CAMPAIGNS

CPD

DN

-

TWEET

PAY ATTENTION

OF INTEREST

-

A BIG THANK YOU TO MIKE AND LAWRENCE

OHIO'S NUCLEAR PROBLEM

-

HANDING THE ENVIRONMENTAL HEN HOUSE TO THE FOXES

-

OUR BLOG LIST

-

-

IS NPR CURSED?

-

U.S. MEDIA FAILING TO REPORT REAL NEWS

-

RELAX YOUR WORRIES AWAY