Podcast

W,

I mentioned in the other thread that we need both Medicare for all and non-profit health care at the provider end.

But if we’re just talking about the insurance side, and we’re honest with everyone, Medicare for all can’t be beaten. Anyone who argues against it, if they understand what it is, is arguing against saving a fortune, providing health care to everyone, ending all medical bankruptcies in America, and leaving no one behind.

(Those medical bankruptcies only happen here. And to millions of people with insurance too.)

There is no valid argument against making the change, IMO. Again, if we’re limited to dealing with insurance only.

The only arguments against it amount to scaremongering in my view. Clinton tried one angle against Sanders in 2016, by lying to voters and saying his plan means everyone would lose their insurance.

That’s like saying that the person who advocates for 100% public housing for anyone who needs it is taking away the chance for people to live on the streets.

No one loses insurance if Medicare for all is implemented. Everyone is covered for the first time in our history.

Billy_T wrote:

But the total costs for healthcare will be much lower, even with the higher taxes.

I wonder how many people who complain about taxes covering single payer realize they would pay less that way than most people and/or companies pay for private insurance NOW.

Plus imagine if pharma had to negotiate with ONE united insurer.

For me, there…is…no…ETHICAL…argument against a national-care-system.

For me its a first-grade-level, ethical issue.

Right now, with a corporate-for-profit system, millions and millions and millions of American dont have health care.

For me that outweighs everything else. Its real simple.

Everything else is minutiae to me. And any other corporate-for-profit ‘solution’ is unethical to me.

I think people overthink this.

Now do Americans give a shit about those millions and millions and millions of of folks without adequate health care? No, they do not. If they did care, they wouldnt continue to vote for corpse-dems and corpse-reps.

My ‘own’ leading-edge-point here is this is an ethics issue. Not a ‘cost’ or ‘taxes’ issue.

It either matters to people, that millions and millions of Americans are without decent health care,
or it doesnt.

Everything else is just ‘details’. We KNOW universal health care is perfectly do-able. Lots of nations do it everyday.

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IMO, someone on the “far left” could win, if the stars aligned just right. Someone a bit to his or her right, a “progressive,” could also win, under the same circumstances.

Why? Because Americans don’t vote based on ideology. They tend to vote for their own team — D or R — or stay home. There is a small group of voters who aren’t locked onto one team or another, and yes, they can be persuaded. But it’s rarely due to “policy” or anything wonky. It’s personality, the sense of connection with the candidate, a gut response, etc. And they don’t decide things. The D and R folks do, and the numbers of folks who stay home.

People, IMO, make a huge mistake when they say someone “on the left” can’t win in certain parts of the country. If that candidate has “it,” yeah, they can. If that candidate has that special something, yeah, they can. If they don’t, then people tend to just revert to the normal D or R thing, or stay home.

That’s how elections are won and lost in America. Not on where you sit along the political spectrum.

To me, where one sits along the political spectrum can be determined, basically, by how they answer the following questions.

Yeah, I know. I’m oversimplifying things beyond the pale. But to save time, billions of dollars and millions of lives, I think it’s a good way to go:

1. Do you actually believe in collective action to improve quality of life in this country?
2. What percentage of the population should we help, together? A small percentage? Some? Half? Everyone?
3. How soon do you want to implement this collective help? Over the course of years, a generation or two, or right now?

IMO, centrists and moderates tend to be okay with the status quo. So they typically take the low side on all those questions, and are fine with a glacial pace for progress. Conservatives and further to the right claim not to want any collective action on anyone’s behalf, though that claim is, to be kind, problematic. Everyone really wants the public sector to do something — for them, at least. It’s the “far left,” however, that seeks to maximize the potential of collective action for all, now, in the here and now.

To me, the latter is self-evidently the best for the nation and the earth. If people voted for their best interests, they’d always go with that.

waterfield wrote:

WV: Who was your favorite President in your lifetime, W ?

In my adult life it was JFK. In my non adult life I think it would have been Ike.

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You know we had a strange case in WV not too long ago. A legal-scholar-type-guy wrote a long book detailing the long sordid history of corruption in WV politics. It went all the way back to the Hatfield/McCoy days. One chapter was about JFK and his vote-buying in WV back in 1960 and his smearing of Humphrey etc etc etc.

The book is pretty good.

Now the muckraker who wrote it later became Chief Justice of the WV Supreme Court.

But. Irony of Ironies, the guy who wrote with so much passion and detail about Rep and Dem corruption in wv, was Indicted by a Fed Grand Jury and later was convicted of eleven offenses of Fraud. Facing impeachment he resigned in 2018. Below is a link to his book and a short reader review with a reader-edit.

book:https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Another-Vote-Wont-Landslide/dp/0870127489
Don’t Buy Another Vote, I Won’t Pay for a Landslide: The Sordid And Continuing History of Political Corruption in West Virginia Hardcover
book reviews
“Robert Bolton comment:
When Allen Loughry wrote this book, there was another review I encountered in print that stated whatever political ambitions the author may have had within the state were now dead. Against all seasoned political observers’ predictions, Mr. Loughry now serves as a justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Although I am not friends with Justice Loughry, I did meet him during my swearing-in as an attorney, and afterwards he told me he wrote this book in part because he felt it was necessary to give the citizenry a detailed history of their elected officials’ misbehavior to avoid such mistakes in the future.

As for the text itself, it is a thoroughly interesting read and extremely well footnoted. The book was originally a dissertation in pursuit of a S.J.D. and there are occasions when the writing comes off as somewhat wooden. Nonetheless, as a compendium for the history of corruption in this state, there is no better source. While the main focus of Mr. Loughry’s book is the second half of the twentieth century, he is still able to effectively mention the names of judges and congressmen from the early days after the state’s founding. Among the most notable sections (and the one from which the book derives its title) is the description of the obscene amount of money spent in the West Virginia Democratic primary in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was running against Hubert Humphrey. More recent events described include the fall of state treasurer A. James Manchin for the loss and likely embezzlement of state funds, the imprisonment of Arch Moore in a federal penitentiary for bribery in the early 1990s, and a plethora of circuit judges that seem unwilling to behave and avoid being on the other side of the bench.

Within the past five years, one could open their newspaper and see a Lincoln County sheriff who pleaded guilty to ballot stuffing, a judge from Randolph County removed from the bench for an affair with another court official, and Kanawha County’s inability to retain a lead prosecuting attorney beyond two terms because of malfeasance. That said, I think West Virginia has seen a marked increase in the honesty of its elections in recent decades, and I do not doubt Mr. Loughry expressed the voice of many who seek a more honest political life from their representatives.

At well over six hundred pages in small print, this book will take quite a while to read. There are some minor printer’s errors regarding spelling or particular dates, but these subtract very little from the crash course in West Virginia politics you will receive from reading this book. On the whole, I highly recommend it.

Edit: Since I initially wrote this review nearly five years ago, Justice Loughry has been indicted and convicted on federal charges of false statements to an officer, witness tampering, wire fraud, and other criminal counts. In addition, he was facing impeachment before he resigned his office. He is now serving his sentence in a South Carolina penitentiary. It is a bitter irony that the man who wrote the book on West Virginia’s culture of corruption would face charges of similar malfeasance. As one of our local media commentators, Hoppy Kercheval, noted when the news of Loughry’s indictment first broke, “t’s evident now that another chapter needs to be added.”

waterfield wrote:

Politics is dirty-plain and simple. It shouldn’t be but it is and will always be. And I don’t think most people care. .

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Yeah, humans are a mess. Btw, Bobby Kennedy and Ted Kennedy were heavily heavily implicated in the vote-buying and bribing that went on in WV back when JFK was running. Seymour Hersh has written about this.

I’ve discovered in some circumstances, i can vote for a weasel, but I am never gonna pretend like they are beacons of light.

Mainly though, its gotta be about policies. I wish they were ‘clean’ candidates but I’d vote for a weasel if i knew they’d fight for Universal Health Care and fight against Imperial-Wars/Murder.

Thats a pretty low bar, I think. Just give poor people health care, and dont bomb-murder foreigners.

Pretty low bar.

So, do you exercise these days, W? Stayin in shape? Still surf?

w
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waterfield wrote:

But I need to start because (not sure I’ve told this story) my dad’s plane was discovered about two years ago off the coast of Oahu near the marine airbase. It went down during WW 2 in January 1945 as they were attempting to get as many planes as possible to Guam. Many were simply put together with band aids. He was in a PBY which is a pontoon aircraft. They lost the right engine just a mile off the Marine air base and when the pilot attempted to turn back to the base the plane dove into the ocean. 7 occupants, including my dad, were killed. Long story short: the plane was discovered a couple of years ago. Its broken up but parts of the fuselage rests in about 110 ft of water and parts of the props are in about 150 ft. I want to dive on it and spread my mother’s ashes . It is not a particular difficult dive and may not even involve decompression as long as the stay on the bottom is short. But I need to get in better shape than I am right now. Sooo…

That’s quite a story W and my best wishes on that.

…

waterfield wrote:

…. But I need to get in better shape than I am right now. Sooo…

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Yeah, time to get in shape. Make the dive.

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