Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!

 

While the Biden Administration, Congress and the mainstream media are focused on discrediting the proponents of single payer healthcare, Wall Street investors are quietly moving to privatize Medicare and Medicaid to complete their control over the entire medical system.

If you are on Medicare, you have probably been bombarded with advertisements for Medicare Advantage, which is one of the insidious ways that Medicare is being undermined. Now comes the Direct Contracting model, with so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs), which get paid monthly by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a specified portion of a patient's medical care—a significant shift from traditional Medicare's direct reimbursement of providers. These “middlemen” will now control what treatments are available and to whom. And they will extract profits for their investors by – you guessed it – finding ways to deny care.

What is even more outrageous is that this change to someone’s Medicare or Medicaid coverage can be done WITHOUT the knowledge of the individual! Wall Street and private equity firms are salivating over the prospect. Rather than allowing patients to go to providers directly as they do under traditional Medicare, DCEs invite insurers and investors to step in and interfere with the care that we get. Billed as a way for Medicare to cut costs, it turns over to these private entities the role of rationing healthcare.

The Direct Contracting model was introduced under Trump, but has been allowed to proceed, for the most part, under the Biden administration, despite a few voices raised in Congress. Currently a group of physicians from around the nation is working to grab the notice of lawmakers, the Biden White House, and the public by traveling to Washington, D.C. and demanding that the Health and Human Services Department immediately stop the experiment, known as Direct Contracting (DC).

Healthcare represents approximately 18% of the GDP. With Big Pharma, large private health insurance providers, and the privatizing and consolidation of hospitals and physicians’ groups all under the control of “investors”, they have turned to Medicare and Medicaid to squeeze even more profit out of ordinary Americans and into the pockets of the 1%.

Think about it this way. The term “for profit healthcare” explains what it is all about – the “profit” comes first and the “healthcare” is whatever is left over.

A conspiracy? or just the normal functioning of vulture capitalism? or both?

From The Intercept

"A ruthless vulture hedge fund called Alden Global Capital is buying up and gutting newspapers all over the country, including some of the nation’s most storied publications.

"Their strategy is simple: Strip the newspaper to bare bones. Cash in on existing subscribers and advertisers. Watch profits go up — and journalism die.

"After the Chicago Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, the paper’s prestigious downtown office was traded in for one the size of a Chipotle. And a quarter of its newsroom staffers — including decorated reporters and photographers — no longer work there.

"This is just one recent example of the struggles the journalism industry is facing. Since 2008, nearly two-thirds of newsroom jobs at U.S. newspapers have vanished. And the coronavirus pandemic has made the situation even worse: Newsrooms cut over 16,000 jobs in 2020, the worst year on record.

"Journalism is the lifeblood of a vibrant democracy. Every time a journalist is taken off the beat, it becomes easier for politicians and corporations to get away with lying to voters and enriching themselves at the public expense."

Where has all the money gone...?

From the American Prospect - An excellent summary of the origin of runaway inequality and what we  can begin to do about it.

Building Back Better Through Taxing Stock Buybacks

For the past four decades—ever since Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Securities and Exchange Commission changed a rule and opened a floodgate— stock buybacks have been a major contributor to the misshaping of the American economy.

When the top executives of a publicly traded corporation decree that their company will buy back a set amount of the company’s shares, it increases the values of the remaining shares, since the underlying value of the company remains the same but the number of outstanding shares decreases. As those same top executives tend to be very handsomely rewarded for increases in the price of the company’s shares, buying back stock is a legal and apparently painless way of making themselves m-f–ing rich. Nice work if you can get it.

The practice of buying back shares went all but unnoticed by economists until the middle of the last decade, when University of Massachusetts economics professor William Lazonick documented that the sum total of buybacks by the corporations on the S&P 500 over the preceding decade approximated the sum total of their profits. Rather than investing in new equipment or research and development or (God forbid) wage increases, America’s corporate sector was buying back its own stock, to the advantage of their leading executives and their shareholders (chiefly, of course, large shareholders), and to the detriment of, well, the economy at large. Lazonick published his findings in the Harvard Business Review and has continued to cover this subject through a host of articles in the Prospect and other publications.

Over the past decade, the S&P 500 have repurchased more than $5 trillion of their own stock, and the rate of repurchasing is steadily increasing: They’re pledged to buy back $1 trillion in this year alone. According to a New York Times analysis, Apple devoted $423 billion on buybacks over the past decade, while spending just $233 billion on capital expenditures and R&D.

It makes perfect sense, then, that a one percent tax on corporate buybacks is part of the Build Back Better bill that the House has passed and sent to the Senate. Over the next decade, the tax is expected to yield roughly $124 billion to pay for climate investments, workforce development and such that our corporations wouldn’t get around to on their own.

Harold Meyerson

Heather Cox Richardson's Thanksgiving Message (too good not to share)

November 25, 2021 

Heather Cox Richardson

7 hr ago

2,174

263

I started these letters completely inadvertently on September 15, 2019, after I happened to see House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff's (D-CA) angry letter to then–acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire on September 13, noting that the committee knew a whistleblower had made a complaint and demanding that Maguire produce that complaint as required by law. As a political historian, I saw that for what it was: an accusation from a member of the legislative branch that someone in the executive branch had very clearly broken a specific law. That was huge, way different than the general complaints around at the time that, for example, then-president Trump must be violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, an accusation that was vague enough that it was terribly hard to address.

Two days later, on September 15, a yellow jacket sting made me cancel my afternoon plans, and as I sat waiting to make sure I didn’t react badly to the sting, I used the time to write on my Facebook page where I had been posting once a week or so for years. I wrote about the history of the previous month and mentioned the issue of the missing whistleblower’s complaint. That post got swamped with people asking so many questions that I wrote another, and then another.

And so the Letters from an American were born.

Over the past two years, this has become a team project. While I do the legwork of explaining the politics of these crisis times, my heroic editors keep my writing clean and factual.

But this project really belongs to you who read it. It was your voice that created the project, you who inspire me when I am so dead tired I fall asleep sitting up, and you who bring in related material and ask questions and correct my stupid errors. Above all, it is you who are helping to model what we so desperately need in America: a respectful community based in facts, rather than in anger and partisanship, a community that can defend our democracy and carry it into a new era.

I am honored to be walking this road alongside all of you. You are smart, funny, kind, talented, insightful, creative, and principled.

And I am so very proud of what we are building together.

Thank you, for all of it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Who'd a Thunk?

The federal government has mandated COVID vaccinations for all employees, except those who have sought exemptions on religious grounds.  Compliance with the mandate varies widely from agency to agency. The Education Department had just a few dozen exemption requests, while the Bureau of Prisons had thousands. Can't quite get my head around this. Is it because folks working in the prison system are that much more religious than educators?

Cartoon du Jour (from Facebook)

Playing Russian Roulette with a Nuclear Holocaust

 

What if I were to tell you that the US government could save hundreds of billions of dollars and make us and the rest of the world a lot safer at the same time, you might think I’d been hit on the head with, well, an ICBM. That’s an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, in case you aren’t familiar with our stockpile of nuclear weapons delivery systems.

 

The US currently has 400 of them, all sitting in silos in the Midwest. They are armed with multiple warheads, which means they could literally wipe out thousands of targets (which sounds innocuous until you realize that those “targets” are mostly cities with millions of human beings living in them) around the world in a couple of hours and probably usher in a “nuclear winter”. I have to wonder if that’s the solution the Pentagon has for the problem of global warming.

 

If that isn’t crazy enough, they are all on hair-trigger alert. Because of their vulnerability, if there is any indication that the US might be under nuclear attack by a foreign power, the President would have approximately 30 minutes to decide whether to “use them or lose them”. The problem is that once launched, they cannot be called back. This scenario has almost played out on more than one occasion over the past 50 years. So far, the trigger has not been pulled, but in essence, we’ve been playing nuclear Russian roulette for all these years.

 

It should be clear that these weapons pose a grave threat of an “accidental” nuclear holocaust. But what is also true is that they are totally unnecessary as a deterrent to nuclear attack from Russia or China (or anyone else, for that matter). That’s because the US also has huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons aboard bombers and submarines. Because these weapons are mobile, they are not vulnerable to a first strike attack by an enemy and therefore do not have to be launched on warning. Thus, eliminating all land-based ICBMs, would still leave the US with a massive nuclear deterrent. While this still means depending on the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction to prevent nuclear holocaust (with the appropriate acronym MAD), it at least takes the finger off the trigger.

 

According to Gen. James E Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.” And the world becomes a lot safer place for our children and grandchildren, here and around the world.

 

What about the billions of $$$ in savings? It turns out that the military wants to modernize the ground-based nukes with a new generation of ICBMs named the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. The cost? An estimated $364 billion on top of the spending to maintain the current stock of ICBMs during the transition. Northrop Grumman has already been awarded $13.3 billion for “engineering and manufacturing development”. (Note: Northrop Grumman stock is up almost 20% over the last year.)

 

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. For more detail, check out Andrew Cockburn’s new book, “The Spoils of War”. In the book Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling new hires that they would be making “weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.” This, at the height of the Cold War! It’s bad enough to waste our tax money on things that don’t work (try another Northrop boondoggle, the B-2 stealth bomber, which cost over $2 billion each in 1990 dollars for the 21 actually produced and which wasn’t “stealth” at all). But to see society’s wealth squandered on weapons that make us LESS safe is the height of insanity.

 

We would be better served if they just poured the money down the drain. Or they could use it to offset some of the costs of Build Back Better, hopefully mollifying Senators Manchin and Sinema.