All across the country Town Hall meetings have erupted with Republicans attacking their own elected officials as they suddenly realize what the repeal of Obamacare really means to their own health.
These are people who voted Republican at the last election because there were platforms presented which involved areas like jobs, in which they were more interested, so they followed the lemming rush over the cliff on their own healthcare. Well no matter what they say, the Republicans in congress still want to get rid of your healthcare. Trump seems to be in the middle of this, holding firm on Medicare and Medicaid while talking about the repeal of Obamacare, but only if a successful replacement can be found. Of course, that is the problem. There is no aspect of Republican thought that allows for the establishment of universal healthcare in this country. The GOP did not believe in it when Obama forced it through a Democratic House and they didn’t believe in it when they tried to get it repealed over 50 times in the past seven years. The thing that isn’t clear to any intelligent person is how the Tea Party was able to convince voters that it was a bad thing in 2010 and again in 2014, when repealing it was the principal issue on which the GOP successfully ran. Then, unbelievably, they did it again in2016 but his time they had other things on their agenda, things that any sensible person could see were ridiculous yet those red state and mid-western voters bought them.
So now Trump wants to repeal and replace at the same time but Ryan and McConnell want to just repeal. The rest of the Republican politicians would really love to just dump it, but the people who have it and don’t want to give it up are in open revolt. Why are they in such a dither about losing their healthcare? Why do you think? Because even with all its problems it works far better than any alternative so far suggested. It doesn’t work completely, There are flaws, big ones, but it can be fixed. The ACA should have been fixed and would have been fixed years ago if it weren’t for all those GOP Senators and congressmen who live in the pockets of big insurance, big pharma and all the other medical industries that bleed the people dry in the name of good health.
There is no alternative health plan after seven years because no one on the Right wants one. They are making too much money from the healthcare industry to want to give it up. Everything they have told the people in the last seven years about Obamacare is a lie.
Yes the cost of Obamacare goes up every year but so has the cost of every kind of health insurance every year for decades. Obamacare isn’t going up as fast as the other kinds of insurance did. That’s a real fact. Not like a Kellyanne Conway fact.
There is no question that healthcare is expensive but it doesn’t have to be anywhere near as expensive as it is now. Insurance company operating costs and profit can run anywhere from 20 to 40% of the cost of procedures. Right there you have enough savings to make a single payer (government) system worthwhile. Medicare costs run between 3 & 4% a procedure. Even a moron can see the difference and the advantage of single payer. The Republican politicians aren’t morons, at least many of them aren’t. They’re just greedy bastards who are willing to sell their voters down the river to benefit the blood-sucking slobs that fill their pockets.
If Obamacare were fixed and run correctly, including the complete elimination of private insurance, the limiting of drug costs, the curtailing of much of the mal-practice action, the health system takeover of most research and development and the installation of health protection and disease discovery plans, we could insure every man, woman and child in the country for less than we are spending now to insure about three quarters of them. And we would do a better job.
*****
Those same aforementioned Town Halls are erupting with the anger of Republican voters who miraculously seem to have realized that they voted into office, candidates who seem determined to screw them again. This after, as also mentioned above, they did it in 2010, 2014 and then again in 2016. You can’t fix stupid. Or maybe you can. Maybe, just maybe, these fools are beginning to wake up and realize that the GOP con men they have put in office over and over again are not motivated by any desire to help the people of their districts, but by overwhelming greed; greed as exemplified by the insurance and drug companies who have a trillion dollar stake in how we pay for healthcare, greed by corporate America that has the same trillion dollar stake in getting rid of regulations that save the lives and protect the health of workers in their factories as well as citizens that live in the areas surrounding those businesses, greed on the part of the fossil fuel industry, that just like the tobacco industry has long known the dangers that its pollution is causing directly to people and even more to the environment, greed on the part of Wall Street and the Real Estate industry that cheat depositors, scam mortgage holders and steal homes from those not sophisticated enough to protect themselves. These are the giants that pay the graft and the sometimes-legitimate campaign expenses of the men you voted into office and while they are thankful for your vote they are really on board with the money that fills their personal coffers.
Trump promised you that he would drain the swamp, that he would find jobs that would build better lives for the people of this country but every step he has taken since he won the election has been in exactly the opposite direction. Sure he made a lot of noise about saving a couple of jobs at a couple of small companies in the mid-west but where it really counts he has done everything he can to stab you in the back.
It started with his cabinet where he nominated men and women in Health & Human Resources, the EPA, the Labor department, the Treasury, Education and almost every other domestic post that will do exactly the opposite of helping the people that those departments were set up to help. I won’t bore you by going over each job and showing how he has nominated someone to fill it that will destroy it, I will just point to the words of Trump’s chief advisor, the racist neo-Nazi, Steve Bannon who spoke up at CPAC and laid out the Trump administration’s plan to destroy every department that is set up to help the little people for the benefit of the rich.
Trump was a rich spoiled kid, who got to be a rich dishonest businessman and is now a rich egomaniacal sociopath. The key word is rich and like most of the rich he sees no responsibility to anyone who is not as rich a he is. He knew before he promised to create jobs that this was impossible because robots had already replaced people in the jobs he was talking about. No one in Trump’s cabinet is going to help anyone get a job, hold a job or get paid adequately for the job he is already doing. No one in Trump’s cabinet is, in any way, going o protect your air, water, national monuments or any animal or human rights. No one in Trump’s cabinet is going to help protect you from dishonest banks, thieving mortgage lenders, credit card schemes or investment scams. They weren’t appointed to do that. They were appointed to do just the opposite. Now it becomes a question as to whether or not the all but useless Democrats can take advantage of this chaos.
****
Jason Chaffetz is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. That’s the same Jason Chaffetz who pushed myriad investigations of Hillary Clinton’s involvement in Benghazi. He’s the same Chaffetz that wouldn’t stop until Hillary sat in front of his committee for eleven hours as she put them all firmly in their place, made them all look like the fools they are. He’s the same Chaffetz that didn’t ever seem to learn that the Secretary of State is not responsible for the safety of hired guns protecting our embassies nor was Hillary the one who voted down funds to increase that protection. But that never mattered to Chaffetz.
Now he has a chance to investigate a real problem, the Russian interference with our elections. This is a genuine big deal, but Chaffetz isn’t sure he has the authority to start an investigation. That didn’t fly well with the voters in his native Utah who screamed him down at a recent town hall meeting with cries of “Do your job.”
Chaffetz ran an unending series of investigations of Hillary and almost everything about the Obama administration he could make up, but now he doesn’t see anything in the Trump administration’s cozy interactions with the Kremlin tat needs investigating. What Chaffetz is interested in, and is boldly moving forward on, is his deadly serious investigation of Sid the Science Kid. Yes the chairman of the most powerful investigative committee in the House is after the CDC because they made an award to the Jim Henson Company based on their work informing the public about the Zika virus. They did this using Sid the Science Kid. How incredibly scandalous can you get.
Sid is the obviously subversive kid who appears on the Muppets, telling kids that they need to wash their hands even if they can’t see germs. Chaffetz immediately recognized this terrorist activity and lunged into the fray. Anyone can see that Sid is far more of a threat to this country than a president in league with the Russians to protect his own investments in that county. Can’t they?
*****
Donald Trump stood before the nation this week and proclaimed that the press was the enemy of the people. His logic: the press lied through the use of “Fake” news. This, from a clown who can’t finish a sentence without including a lie! Trump may be the biggest liar in the history of politics but he loves to get up in front of his sycophants and call anybody who comes to mind a liar. This is the idiot we have elected President.
Then Steve Bannon got in front of the CPAC conservatives on Friday and declared that Trump’s appointment of his completely unqualified domestic cabinet was not a mistake but a deliberate move to set n motion the destruction of the governmental process that has kept the country, which is the envy of the civilized world, on an even keel for the last 240 years. This, from within the White House. This is a promise of anarchy. This is what Bannon has been aiming at since he started writing for Breitbart News. And now he has found the ultimate fool with which to distract the court while he destroys the castle. We all know that Trump does not read but he should at least listen to his own advisors and understand that he is balancing on the edge of a national revolution. This is not about demonstrations. This is about a shooting war that will make the Civil War look like a skirmish.
Bannon wants to destroy the country and since he has Trump’s ear that means that the office of the President wants to destroy the country it has been elected to lead. That is catastrophic. That is Treason!
****
Watched some dumb bimbo named Jenny May something brag about the fact that she was one of the founders of the Tea Party and that the motivating force behind the Tea party was that you don’t do things that you cant pay for. That sounds great until you play it out to its natural conclusion, which is that if you can’t pay for anything you don’t do anything, which is exactly where the Tea Party plan led us when they took over congress and stopped all government function during the Obama administration. The answer to this stupidity is; wait for it -e taxes. That’s how you pay for things in a democracy.
Much of what we depend on to live a productive life we cannot produce ourselves. To pay for others to produce those things, things like roads, bridges, the electrical grid, the Internet, water and sewer systems, schools, hospitals, etc. we have taxes. Now, nobody likes to pay taxes but they sure like what taxes produce. Producing the things that we need in order to lead our own lives is not the only thing for which we need taxes.
There are, in our world, people who are not as fortunate as others and they need our help We can see in the assistance that we provide to others, who are human beings and who are just warts on the ass of humanity. “I got mine, fuck everyone else,”, is definitely the motto of many of the ultra rich and even more of the far Right. It is also the position of our current administration. Trump may talk out of one side of his lying mouth about infrastructure and jobs but his actions in picking a cabinet of incompetent sub-humans that do not understand the concept of helping others and look only to help themselves, says otherwise. This happens, while the treason speaker, Steve Barron looks to overthrow the basic principals that have made America great long before someone wrote those words for Trump. Instead of trying to solve the real problems that plague the people of this country, this degenerate racist looks to substitute chaos, poverty and ultimately violent revolt for the order that has kept this country the shinning symbol of success for the rest of the planet for the last two and a half centuries.
Bannon has stated plainly that the goal of the Trump administration is the destruction of our government structure. This is inarguably treason. Hitler said what he was going to do and he did it. Stalin said what he was going to do and did it. So has every other dictator in recorded history. Bannon has said what Trump is going to do. They must be stopped before they can do it.