Warning from Public Citizen on the extent of the plutocracy

I received this mass emailing today from Public Citizen:

Warning from Public Citizen (from a mass emailing I just received). These numbers are stunning: Here’s something rather alarming to consider. Forbes recently updated its list of billionaires. Each of the notorious Koch Brothers — Charles and David, the 6th and 7th richest men alive — are now estimated to be worth $40 billion. That’s up $6 billion each from just a year earlier, which was up $9 billion each from just a year before that. I guess it really does take money to make money. If you have billions to begin with. But wait, there’s more. Total spending in the 2012 federal election — for the White House and every open seat in Congress — was $6.3 billion. It was the most expensive election ever. Yet the Koch Brothers could have easily covered that record-smashing tab all by themselves just with the amount their already vast wealth increased in a single year. Let me say that again: The Koch Brothers alone could pretty much fund every candidate for federal office without even eating into their unimaginable fortunes. Then there’s casino magnate and funder of the far-right, Sheldon Adelson. And Karl Rove’s dark money Crossroads outfits. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs, Comcast and all the other mega-corporations that “are people too.” We face this basic choice: democracy or plutocracy. I know where I come down, and where you do, too. It’s time to roll up our sleeves. Nobody is doing more than Public Citizen — that’s YOU — to defend democracy from billionaires and Big Business. We ARE the front lines in the battle for the very heart and soul of this country.

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A personal perspective on Obamacare

My family just signed up for an extremely expensive "Bronze" policy with Obamacare. It is shameful that there are only two companies "competing" for our dollars in St. Louis (it's worse than shopping for a phone company). It's shameful that none of the policies in the bronze or silver range include Barnes Hospital (St. Louis' premium teaching hospital) in their network. It shameful that even though we are paying $1,000/month for a family of four, that the annual deductible is in the range of $4,300 for indiv and $8,600 for family, with annual out-of-pocket deductible for our family being $12,700. There is no real competition here, and I have yet to see the any reason to believe that the ACA will pressure providers to lower their costs. In America, we pay many times the amount for basic services (e.g., MRI scan) than people in other countries. Our economic side of our hospitals, including "non-profit" hospitals, are a joke, with their executives getting exorbitant salaries while they are on a shopping spree to buy up the local medical practices so that there is no meaningful competition, even your local doctors. I recognize that the ACA forces insurance companies to provide certain minimum coverages and that they can no longer cherry-pick patients based on pre-existing conditions, which was rampant and immoral. The ACA is certainly better than nothing. The most shameful thing of all, however, is that even with the faults of Obamacare, the Republicans want to destroy the modest protection it offers many of us, and the substantial protection it offers low-income families. They propose to replace it with nothing at all. The Republican proposals I have seen would send all of us back to ravages of the dog-eat-dog for-profit health market where cherry-picked customers pay unregulated prices, where premiums have been skyrocketing for decades, where many folks are offered paltry coverage that they have no way of paying for, and where many people are deemed "uninsurable." If politicians can only convince us to keep watching lots of sports events and movies, maybe we will never force them to enact meaningful reform. We need single-payor coverage, like most other civilized countries. For more on the dreadful situation we currently have, check out Stephen Brill's excellent article. I'll end with this somber reality from Brill's article:

The health care industry seems to have the will and means to keep it that way. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and healthcare product industries, combined with the organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMO’s, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.

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Fake Payday Loan Reform

Missouri and Utah are among the states in which legislators are proposing fake payday loan reform, per "States’ Attempts To Reform Payday Lending Are Often Just Smoke & Mirrors." Here's an excerpt:

Sen. Mike Cunningham, who sponsored the Missouri bill . . . says it will protect consumers from some of the practices payday lenders have utilized for so long. Missouri’s proposed reform comes less than two years after a group called Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity helped put an end to a ballot initiative that would have allowed Missouri residents to vote for or against capping the state’s interest rate at 36%. The current proposed bill does not feature any kind of rate cap, meaning interest for a typical two-week payday loan can balloon to more than 1,000%.

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What Karl Marx got right

To this point, Karl Marx offered a system of government that has not worked well anywhere that it has been tried, at least so far. I took a college course on Marx many years ago, and I was impressed with many of his criticisms of capitalism. Some of those criticisms of capitalism are becoming apparent to most of us, as set forth in this article by Sean McElwee of Rolling Stone. Here are the headings: 1. The Great Recession (Capitalism's Chaotic Nature) 2. The iPhone 5S (Imaginary Appetites) 3. The IMF (The Globalization of Capitalism) 4. Walmart (Monopoly) 5. Low Wages, Big Profits (The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor) McElwee's conclusion:

Marx was wrong about many things. Most of his writing focuses on a critique of capitalism rather than a proposal of what to replace it with – which left it open to misinterpretation by madmen like Stalin in the 20th century. But his work still shapes our world in a positive way as well. When he argued for a progressive income tax in the Communist Manifesto, no country had one. Now, there is scarcely a country without a progressive income tax, and it's one small way that the U.S. tries to fight income inequality.
Here's a related article by Jesse Myerson of Salon: "Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism)." Here are the misconceptions: 1. Only communist economies rely on state violence. 2. Capitalist economies are based on free exchange. 3. Communism killed 110 million* people for resisting dispossession. 4. Capitalist governments don’t commit human rights atrocities. 5. 21st Century American communism would resemble 20th century Soviet and Chinese horrors. 6. Communism fosters uniformity. 7. Capitalism fosters individuality. Myerson's conclusion regarding misconception 7:
As a matter of fact, most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.

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