Category: News and Politics
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Forming an action plan before setting a goal = FAIL
Tonight the nation prepares for the next imminent failure of Congress in its efforts to reform the nation’s health care policy. By the end of the week we will likely read headlines that the efforts of our nation’s leadership landed in the scrap heap again. Why? There is a simple but important lesson here for all…
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Trump signals new willingness to work with Obamacare
A new development in the health care reform issue that came out around midnight. In my mind, this news is the most significant news about health care reform in the past several years. We already knew that Americans hate the health care reform bill before Congress for a vote today. One poll by Quinnepiac University…
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Keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Independent
In 2008 the United States suffered a previously unimaginable financial blow stemming from negligence, scandal and fraud at multiple levels of banking, Wall Street investment firms and government. We suffered but survived it by coming together, accepting the major financial setback to our lives, and taking steps to ensure that it did not happen again. One…
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The misguided travel ban
“The record before this Court is unique. It includes significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order”. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson’s’ language in blocking the president’s travel ban is difficult for the average reader. I had to do some digging into the ruling and third party legal commentary…
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Trumpgate: the huge problem on our hands
This is an excerpt from from Robert Reich’s explanation of “Trumpgate”. We are now 8 days into this bizarre event in history sparked by a meltdown by the president and no evidence that there is anything real outside the president’s imagination. I can’t think of any explanation other than these three. If #2 is now ruled…
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When fascism comes: blame public hopes and popular opinion
“When fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread…
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$100,000,000,000,000 (Wealth Inequity in America)
One hundred trillion dollars. That’s the total net worth of all Americans in 2017*. It’s a staggering number. For practical discussion purposes, we might say that figure is the net worth of rich Americans. The top 160,000 households (one tenth of one percent) control a quarter of this wealth. About half of all this U.S. wealth…
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Our plans to widen the US wealth gap
The United States is an amazingly rich nation. Our net worth of about one hundred trillion dollars works out to about $300,000 for every person across the country. Of course we know that wealth is not distributed evenly like this. Most of that wealth is held by a few people. Half of our nation’s wealth is controlled…
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America first is still a dumb idea
This cartoon by Chad Crowe ran in The Wall Street Journal this week with an editorial that said that business leaders know that “America first” is the wrong approach but that they are being politely silent for fear of upsetting the administration. It’s been an obvious economic truth to me, and I do not have any…
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Missing the Meaning of Trump (WSJ editorial)
This editorial published Tuesday titled “Missing the Meaning of Trump” is the most persuasive piece I’ve read in a long while. The author, Holman W. Jenkins Jr. (57) is a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board who grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (near me). Notable excerpts: “the Donald Trump show is likely to remain,…