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The nomination of Trump is unprecedented; he was never elected to any office, and his “Republican” credentials are very thin, and throughout his adult life he was not driven by political or ideological considerations but by opportunistic impulses and by his boundless greed. This is a wealthy man - no one knows the size of his wealth, but certainly it is not as big as he claims - who prides himself of rigging the system to avoid paying taxes trough declaring bankruptcies, and establishing fake enterprises like his infamous “Trump University;” Trump is the product of the very economic and political establishment that he is telling us now he is running against.
The fact that less than 11 million citizens voted for Trump in the primaries and caucuses representing less than 5 percent of eligible voters is no consolation to those opposing him, because the popular passions he has unleashed by his shameless fearmongering of “others,” be they immigrants, Hispanics, Muslims, Arabs, or Mexicans, his naked exploitation of legitimate economic dislocations, and the alienation of large swath of Americans from the dysfunctional two party system, and his defamation of whole communities inside and outside the United States has already intimidated many of his early critics. There is more than a whiff of George C. Wallace, the late racist governor of Alabama and three-time presidential hopeful, permeated Trump’s rallies, and the threats that he and his supporters have issued against those who dare to demonstrate against them could conceivably lead to bloodshed.
If the MSM is not correct (and is just propagandizing for their owners) and Bernie Sanders not only has a chance to win the Democratic nomination and be the strongest candidate against Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee, it probably is due to the following reality. From the balloon-of-hope piercing Down With Tyranny blog:
Who are these independents and “moderates” voting for Sanders? It seems reasonable to believe that they are not confused centrists, but “cross-pressured” voters with a wide range of views, all drawn to Sanders’s left-wing economic message. In fact, Sanders has a long record of winning over these kind of populist “moderates.”
. . . Sanders has shown an undeniable ability to connect with the same kind of lower-income and less-well-educated white voters all over the country, from Iowa to West Virginia to Oklahoma.
Democrats have been slowly losing these voters to Republicans since the 1970s; in the last decade, they have almost abandoned them entirely. But non-college-educated whites still represent over 40 percent of the electorate in key swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana.
Many of these poor and struggling voters - however “moderate” according to Gallup - seem very receptive to Sanders’s call for universal health care and a living wage. A Sanders campaign that made deep inroads with working-class whites across the Midwest would be well-prepared to defeat a Republican in November.
It’s difficult to find an equivalent category of voters where Clinton might outperform Sanders in a general election. Women? Clinton’s most recent favorability ratio with all women voters is strongly negative: 41 to 54 percent. Sanders’s mark stands at 44 to 41 percent. In a general election, those numbers might shift - but would it be enough to give Clinton a significant advantage?
Clinton’s strongest support in the primary campaign seems to come from the most loyal Democrats, including African-Americans. But in a bitter campaign against an ethnic nationalist like Trump ... would loyal party voters refuse to turn out for the Democrats, just because Sanders rather than Clinton was the nominee? It doesn’t seem likely.
None of this is to suggest that Sanders should take loyal non-white Democratic votes for granted. That is exactly what Clinton-style New Democrats did when they pivoted to the center in the 1980s. In a general election campaign, Sanders would have to do the opposite, and build a populist coalition that depended on solidarity between black, Latino, Asian, and white working-class voters.
Unquestionably, it would be difficult work. But the opposition of an ever-more-reactionary Republican Party would surely help. And a successful left-of-center coalition would be well positioned - in both ideological and electoral terms - to mount the much larger, long-term struggle necessary to achieve even Sanders’s social-democratic goals.
...[T]here’s no question that Bernie Sanders can win in November-- and there is good reason to believe he would actually be a stronger Democratic candidate than Hillary Clinton.
Don't mention it to the Clinton people though.
Their game plan was finalized years ago and statistics better not get in their way.
You'd almost think they were innumerate (or perhaps just blindly stubborn).
When Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law sought funding for his new hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.
The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing.
Although there's nothing wrong with that. (H/t Jerry Seinfeld)
Hillary Clinton Won't Say How Much Goldman Sachs CEO Invested With Her Son-in-Law
When Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law sought funding for his new hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.
The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing.
The investment did not turn out to be a savvy business decision. Earlier this month, Mezvinsky was forced to shutter one of the investment vehicles he launched under Eaglevale, called Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, after losing 90 percent of its money betting on the Greek recovery. The flagship Eaglevale fund has also lost money, according to the New York Times.
. . . The decision for Blankfein to invest in Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law’s company is just one of many ways Goldman Sachs has used its wealth to forge a tight bond with the Clinton family. The company paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 in personal speaking fees, paid Bill Clinton $1,550,000 in personal speaking fees, and donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. At a time when Goldman Sachs directly lobbied Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the company routinely partnered with the Clinton Foundation for events, even convening a donor meeting for the foundation at the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan.
Mezvinsky, who married Chelsea in 2010, previously worked at Goldman Sachs and started his fund along with two other former employees of the investment bank. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures show that Eaglevale required new investors to put down a minimum of $2 million.
Clinton has dodged questions about her relationship with Goldman Sachs throughout the campaign. In January, we were the first to ask Clinton if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She responded by laughing and turning away. Since our question, other media outlets, including the New York Times editorial board, have called on Clinton to release the transcripts.
Clinton at times tried to conflate the money she received with campaign finance donations to Barack Obama — though the issues are separate; Obama never personally profited from paid speeches before running for president.
As those of us still unemployed and insuranceless have asked from the first mention of the miraculous Romneycare, er, Obamacare knockoff: from whence did it come? And why would any person of decent sensibility assume that poor people should be forced to spend their small purse on health care which demands thousands of dollars in deductibles and co-pays for very little (if any at all) health care?
Capitalism and Obamacare: The Neoliberal Model Comes Home to Roost in the United States - If We Let It
Howard Waitzkin and Ida Hellander
Social Economics/Policy & Research
May 20th, 2016
As the Affordable Care Act (ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare) continues along a very bumpy road, it is worth asking where it came from and what comes next.
Officially, Obamacare represents the latest in more than a century of efforts in the United States to achieve universal access to health care. In reality, Obamacare has strengthened the for-profit insurance industry by transferring public, tax-generated revenues to the private sector. It has done and will do little to improve the problem of uninsurance in the United States; in fact, it has already begun to worsen the problem of under-insurance.
Obamacare is also financially unsustainable because it has no effective way to control costs. Meanwhile, despite benefits for some of the richest corporations and executives, and adverse or mixed effects for the non-rich, a remarkable manipulation of political symbolism has conveyed the notion that Obamacare is a creation of the left, warranting strenuous opposition from the right.
Abundant data substantiate that the failure of Obamacare has become nearly inevitable. Even after the ACA is fully implemented, more than one-half of the previously uninsured population will remain uninsured - at least 27 million people, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office - and at least twice that number will remain underinsured.1
Due to high deductibles (about $10,000 for a family bronze plan and $6,000 for silver) and co-payments, coverage under Obamacare has become unusable for many individuals and families, and employer-sponsored coverage is headed in the same direction.
2 Private insurance generally produces administrative expenses about eight times higher than public administration; administrative waste has increased even more under Obamacare, and remains much higher than in other capitalist countries with national health programs.3 These administrative expenditures pay for activities like marketing, billing, denials of claims, processing copayments and deductibles, exorbitant salaries and deferred income for executives (sometimes more than $30 million per year), profits, and dividends for corporate shareholders. 4 The overall costs of the health system under Obamacare are projected to rise from 17.4 percent of GDP in 2013 to 19.6 percent in 2022.5 A conservative projection shows that premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures for the average family will equal half of the average family income by 2019 and the full average family income itself by 2029.6
The Origins of Obamacare
The overall structure of Obamacare is not new. Similar "reforms" have appeared in other countries over the last two decades. The year 1994 was a significant one for health reform worldwide. Colombia enacted a national program of "managed competition," to replace its existing health system, which had been based largely on public hospitals and clinics. The World Bank mandated and partly financed the reform, and President César Gaviria and his colleagues promoted the reform to financial elites at the World Economic Forum and elsewhere.
That same year a similar proposal, designed by the U.S. insurance industry and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, was advanced but ultimately abandoned. The right wing opposed the plan as a big-government boondoggle, while on the left, opposition centered on the massively increased, tax-subsidized role that the plan would create for the private insurance industry, especially a handful of the nation's largest companies.
During the 1990s, several European countries considered proposals for health reform that followed a similar model of privatization, "managed competition," and increased access of the private insurance industry to public health care trust funds. 7 Although a few, like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, implemented elements of such reforms, most European countries did not, acceding to opposition from left-oriented parties, labor unions, and civic organizations.
In Latin America, Asia, and some African nations, for-profit multinational insurance corporations, mostly based in the United States, tried to expand their operations. Access to public social security trust funds, previously designated to provide retirement and health care benefits, proved a primary motivation for this expansion.8 Conferences and publications organized by the World Bank and insurance companies legitimated such efforts by recruiting progressive spokespersons such as Desmond Tutu in South Africa. 9
Then, in 2006, Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts implemented a reform that required all state residents to buy insurance through the state system if they did not already hold insurance coverage. Romney later disavowed the reform during his 2012 presidential campaign, but the same overall structure re-emerged in Obamacare.
While framed as programs to improve access for the poor and under-served, these initiatives facilitated the efforts of for-profit insurance corporations providing "managed care." The corporations could collect prepaid capitation fees or other premiums from government agencies administering trust funds, as well as from employers and patients, and could invest the reserves at high rates of return.
Insurance corporations also profited by denying or delaying necessary care through strategies such as utilization review and preauthorization requirements; cost-sharing such as copayments, deductibles, co-insurance, and pharmacy tiers; limiting access to only certain physicians; and frequent redesign of benefits.
Such proposals fostered neoliberalism. They promoted multiple competing, for-profit, private insurance corporations. Programs and institutions previously based in the public sector were cut back and, if possible, privatized. Overall government budgets for public-sector health care were reduced. Private corporations gained access to public trust funds. Public hospitals and clinics entered into competition with private institutions, their budgets were determined by demand rather than supply, and prior global budgets for safety net institutions were not guaranteed. Insurance executives made operational decisions about services, and their authority superseded that of physicians and other clinicians.
The Strange Career of Neoliberal Health Reform
The roots of the neoliberal model for health reform emerged initially from Cold War military policy. The economist Alain Enthoven provided much of the intellectual framework for these early efforts. Enthoven had worked as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Robert S. McNamara during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
While at the Pentagon between 1961 and 1969, he led a group of analysts who developed the "planning-programming-budgeting system" (PPBS) and cost-benefit analysis, intended to promote more cost-effective spending decisions for military expenditures. 10 After leaving the military sector, Enthoven emerged as the principal architect of "managed competition," which became the prevailing model for the Clinton reform, Romney-care, Obamacare, and neoliberal health reform throughout the world. Decades later, he remains a strong advocate for this model. 11
After a brief excursion between 1969 and 1973 as vice president and then president of Litton Industries, a major military contractor, Enthoven joined the faculty at Stanford in 1973 as a professor of both management and health care economics. There his work on health policy incorporated several elements common to military and medical systems (Table 1): distrust of professionals, deference to managers, choice among competing alternatives, and cost-benefit analysis, but not necessarily cost reduction.12
By 1977, only four years after leaving the defense sector, Enthoven offered the Carter Administration his proposal for a Consumer Choice Health Plan. Although Carter rejected the plan, Enthoven soon published the proposal. 13 In this early work, Enthoven presented the basic concepts of most subsequent health reform proposals; Obamacare incorporates this same overall structure.
During the 1980s, Enthoven collaborated with managed care and insurance executives to refine the proposal. A new name, "managed competition," proved attractive to business leaders, who met regularly in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. 14 The five largest insurance corporations funded this group, as well as providing support for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and Clinton's Health Security Act.
Several conditions led to the creation of Obamacare as a reform that enhanced the fortunes of the private insurance industry. Campaign financing, as usual, played a major role. Obama, who as a state legislator in Illinois had favored a single-payer approach, drastically changed his position as a presidential candidate. For the 2008 campaign, Obama received the largest financial contributions in history from the insurance industry, more than three times the contributions received by his Republican rival, John McCain. With funding from the insurance industry and financial corporations linked to Wall Street, Obama became the first presidential candidate in history able to turn down government funds for his campaign. 15
The Boilerplate Neoliberal Health Reform
The neoliberal health agenda, including Obamacare, emerged as one component of a worldwide agenda developed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international financial institutions. This agenda to promote market-driven health care facilitated multinational corporations' access to public-sector health and social security trust funds. An underlying managerial ideology claimed, nearly always without evidence, that corporate executives could achieve superior quality and efficiency by "managing" medical services in the marketplace. 16 Enthoven and colleagues in academic health economics participated in this effort, refining terms and giving the enterprise a scholarly credibility.
Health reform proposals across different countries have resembled one another closely. The specific details of each plan appeared to conform to a word-processed, cookie-cutter template, in which only the names of national institutions and local actors have varied. Six broad features have characterized nearly all neoliberal health initiatives (Table 2).
. . . The Single-Payer Proposal
As a non-neoliberal model, a single-payer national health program (NHP) in the United States essentially would create "Medicare for all." Under such a plan, the government collects payments from workers, employers, and Medicare recipients, and then distributes funds to health care providers for the services that Medicare patients receive. Because it is such a simple system, the administrative costs under traditional Medicare average just 1 to 2 percent.38 The vast majority of Medicare expenditures pay for clinical services. Such a structure has achieved substantial savings by reducing administrative waste in Canada, Taiwan, and other countries.
The following features of a single-payer option come from the proposals of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a group of more than 20,000 medical professionals, spanning all specialties, states, age groups, and practice settings. 39 According to the PNHP proposals, coverage would be universal for all needed services, including medications and long-term care.
There would be no out-of-pocket premiums, copayments, or deductibles. Costs would be controlled by "monopsony" financing from a single, public source. The NHP would not permit competing private insurance and would eliminate multiple tiers of care for different income groups. Practitioners and clinics would be paid predetermined fees for services, without any need for costly billing procedures. Hospitals would negotiate an annual global budget for all operating costs. For-profit, investor-owned facilities would be prohibited from participation. Most non-profit hospitals would remain privately owned. To reduce overlapping and redundant facilities, capital purchases and expansion would be budgeted separately, based on regional health planning goals.
Funding sources would include current federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid, a payroll tax on private businesses less than what businesses currently pay for coverage, and an income tax on households, with a surtax on high incomes and capital gains. A small tax on stock transactions would be implemented, while state and local taxes for health care would be eliminated. 40 Under this financing plan, 95 percent of families would pay less for health care than they previously paid in insurance premiums, deductibles, copayments, other out-of-pocket spending, and reduced wages.
From the corporate viewpoint, the insurance and financial sectors would lose a major source of capital accumulation. At the same time, other large and small businesses would experience a stabilization or reduction in health care costs. Companies that do not currently provide health insurance would pay more, but far less than the cost of buying private coverage.
National polls have consistently shown that about two-thirds of people in the United States favor the single-payer approach. 41 Ninety-three members of Congress, led by Representative John Conyers and Senator Bernie Sanders, have co-sponsored single-payer legislation. 42What, then, are the obstacles to a single-payer plan, and should such a program be the ultimate goal for the U.S. health system?
Moving Beyond Single Payer
The coming failure of Obamacare will mark a moment of transformation in the United States, where neoliberalism has come home to roost. For that moment, those struggling for a just and accessible health system will need to address some profound changes that have occurred during the era of neoliberalism. These changes pertain to the shifting social class position of health professionals, and to the increasingly oligopolistic and financialized character of the health insurance industry.
First, the social class position of physicians and other health professionals has changed drastically. Previously, most physicians worked in individual or group practices. Although some were employees receiving relatively high salaries and benefits, most were small entrepreneurs. In the "fee-for-service" system, they seldom accumulated capital on the scale of industrialists or financiers, but they still saw themselves and others saw them as members of an "upper class." Some Marxist-oriented theorists viewed them as members of a "professional managerial class." 43
Physicians increasingly have become employees of hospitals or practices at least partially owned by large health systems. In a large 2015 survey, 63 percent of all physicians reported being employed, including 72 percent of women physicians. 44 These changes mainly reflect the increased costs of owning a private practice, due to billing and other administrative requirements. In the average practice, annual overhead costs have reached about $83,000 per physician in the United States, compared to $22,000 in Canada.45 As a result, doctors mostly have become employees of hospital and health system corporations, where relatively high salaries tend to mask the reality of their employee status.
Before neoliberalism, physicians for the most part owned or controlled their own means of production and conditions of practice. Although their work was often challenging, they could decide their own hours, staff members, how much time to spend with patients, what to record about their visits in medical records, and how much to charge for their services. Today, the corporations for which physicians work control all of these decisions. This loss of control over the conditions of work has caused much unhappiness in the profession. An esteemed clinician described the change as "working on the factory floor." 46
With loss of control over the work process and a reduced ability to generate very high incomes, the medical profession has become proletarianized. 47 Due to their lingering mystique of professionalism and relatively high incomes, physicians often do not realize that their malaise reflects in large part their changing social class position.
In a way, they have joined that highest stratum of workers which Lenin and others referred to as the "aristocracy of labor." 48 From Samir Amin's perspective, the current wave of "generalized proletarianization" has engulfed the medical profession: "A rapidly growing proportion of workers are no more than sellers of their labor power to capital … a reality that should not be obscured by the apparent autonomy conferred on them by their legal status." 49
Beyond the changing class position of health professionals, the transition as Obamacare collapses will need to address the oligopolistic character of the insurance industry, alongside the consolidation of large health systems. Obamacare has increased the flow of capitated public and private funds into the insurance industry and thus has extended the overall financialization of the global economy. 50
In this context, it is important to reconsider the distinction between national health insurance (NHI) and a national health service (NHS). NHI involves socialization of payments for health services but usually leaves intact private ownership at the level of infrastructure. Except for a small proportion of institutions like public hospitals and clinics, under NHI the means of production in health care remain privately owned. Canada is the best-known model of NHI. The PNHP proposal and Congressional legislation that embodies the singer-payer approach are based on the Canadian model of NHI.
An NHS, by comparison, involves socialization of both payment for health services and the infrastructure through which services are provided. Under an NHS, the state generally owns and operates hospitals, clinics, and other health institutions, which become part of the public sector rather than remaining under private control.
In the capitalist world, Scotland and Sweden provide examples of NHSs, where most health infrastructure exists within the public sector and most health professionals are employees of the state. For such countries, the state apparatus includes elements that provide "welfare state" services, including health care, that, however vital, ultimately protect the capitalist system. In the socialist world, Cuba offers the clearest remaining model of an NHS where a private sector does not exist. In the United States, a legislative proposal introduced during the 1970s and 1980s by Representative Ronald Dellums explicitly adopted the goal of an NHS.
The PNHP single-payer proposal emerged from a retreat in New Hampshire during 1986, where activists struggled with these distinctions. Although most participants at the retreat had worked hard for the Dellums NHS proposal, they reached a consensus-albeit with some ambivalence-to shift their work to an NHI proposal based on Canada.
The rationale for this shift involved two main considerations. First, Canada's proximity and cultural similarity to the United States would make it more palatable for the U.S. population, and especially its Congressional representatives. Secondly, a Canadian-style NHI proposal could be "doctor-friendly." Under the PNHP proposal, physicians could continue to work in private practice, clinics, or hospitals. The main difference for physicians was that payments would be socialized, so that the physicians would not have to worry about billing and collecting their fees for services provided.
While PNHP has achieved great success in its research and policy work, these efforts, and those of many other organizations supporting single payer, have not yet generated a broad social movement working toward a Canadian-style NHI. Meanwhile, the neoliberal model, with all its benefits for the ruling class and drawbacks for everyone else, has solidified its hegemony.
Partly as a result, physicians and other health professionals are becoming proletarianized employees of an increasingly consolidated, profit-driven, financialized health care system. And under Obamacare, the state has continued to prioritize protection of the capitalist economic system, in this case by overseeing huge subsidies for private insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
Under these circumstances, it is no longer evident that socialization of payments for health services under a single payer NHI is the only goal toward which progressive forces should struggle.51 PNHP calls for the removal of for-profit corporations from U.S. health care. But that change will not occur within the context of capitalism as we know it.
As neoliberalism draws to a close and as Obamacare collapses, a much more fundamental, socialist transformation needs to reshape not just health care, but also the capitalist state and capitalist society.
Originally published at Monthly Review.
Still wondering how the Clintons became multimillionaires?
Thoughts on The Intercept’s new Leak Policy
Welcome to North Carolina.
Not only are there very few good jobs here (even the ones in the Research Triangle are mostly contract-for-low-pay gigs - how does $27K/yr/no benefits/W2 sound?), but you will be dosed with over 400 times the amount of radiation that is healthy as an extra added attraction.
On a daily basis.
And there is no cure except for leaving. (And we're all taking it with us wherever we go.)
"Your Radiation This Week, May 21 to May 28, 2016"
By Bob Nichols
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
- Shiva
(San Francisco) May 28, 2016 – "Good Day, this is “Your Radiation This Week.” These are the recorded Radiation Highs that affected people this week around the United States and in your neighborhood. There is no way to recover from these kinds of exposures. There is no medicine and there is no cure. Millions now possess a shortened life span due to their radiation exposures. Are you next or already Zapped? Let’s get right to it.
All Radiation Counts reported are partial Counts. Uncounted types of radiation include Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Neutron and X-Ray radiation. Uncounted radiation, if added, makes the actual Count higher and more dangerous.
Normal Radiation is 5 to 20 CPM. 50 CPM is an alert level.
RADIATION CPM* • TIMES NORMAL BACKGROUND LEVEL • CITY, STATE • TYPE • CORRUPTED?
1,445 CPM, 289 Times Normal, Colorado Springs, CO. Beta, Gamma. Yes
1,345 CPM, 269 Times Normal, Portland, ME. Beta, Gamma.
1,329 CPM, 265.8 Times Normal, Raleigh, NC. Beta, Gamma. Yes
1,290 CPM, 258 Times Normal, Louisville, KY. Beta, Gamma.
1,198 CPM, 239.6 Times Normal, Little Rock, AR. Beta, Gamma.
1,160 CPM, 232 Times Normal, Spokane, WA. Beta, Gamma.
1,148 CPM, 229.6 Times Normal, Idaho Falls, ID. Beta, Gamma.
1,125 CPM, 225 Times Normal, Navajo Lake, NM. Beta, Gamma.
1,092 CPM, 218.4 Times Normal, Pierre, SD. Beta, Gamma.
1,055 CPM, 211 Times Normal, Worcester, MA. Beta, Gamma.
1,046 CPM, 209.2 Times Normal, Mason City, IA. Beta, Gamma.
1,032 CPM, 206.4 Times Normal, Billings, MT. Beta, Gamma. Yes
1,031 CPM, 206.2 Times Normal, San Diego, CA. Beta, Gamma. Yes
1,022 CPM, 204.4 Times Normal, Tucson, AZ. Beta, Gamma.
1,021 CPM, 204.2 Times Normal, Atlanta, GA. Beta, Gamma.
1,009 CPM, 201.8 Times Normal, Grand Junction, CO. Beta, Gamma.
1,008 CPM, 201.6 Times Normal, Worcester, MA. Beta, Gamma.
Changes: The YRTW Table of poisoned American cities has changed by adding a Column on the Right hand side. It is labeled “Corrupted?” The purpose of the column is to provide guidance as to the reliability, consistency and truthfulness of an individual city’s High Rad reading for that given week. Since a city’s report is subject to many strongly felt opinions that can affect Rad Readings, whether or not the Rad Unit was reporting at least 168 Hours (24 X 7) takes on additional importance. The number of hours the machines work in a week is not an opinion. It is a documented fact; it is only a number, a measure of efficiency. The unit either reported publicly; or it failed to do so 100% of the time. It can’t do both. All things being equal there should be One Reading per Hour for 168 Rad readings a week. The corruption may originate with a machine error, programming glitch, human intervention or change, intended or not. The response may be “Yes” for “Yes, it is corrupted.” The entry will be “Left Blank” for “Not Suspected.”
New Measurement is Spooky – All Rad All the Time: What’s this? Four recorded cities were over 1,000 CPM all week long, One Thousand CPM Plus, 24/7, all week long, 100% of the time. Used to be the Rad was released and blown from the source to your home town for an hour or two. Now the Rad is more than 1,000 Plus CPM and it lasts for a week or more – 24/7. The Rad hit these cities hard: Colorado Springs, CO., Raleigh, NC., and Little Rock, AR; all were over 1,000 CPM up to three weeks straight. Portland, Maine was over 1,000 CPM all this week, May 21 to 28, 2016. Work your High Rad Plan! What on Earth is going on?
Raleigh, North Carolina Data Sample: Raleigh, North Carolina Radiation Data Greater than 1,000 CPM – May 05 to 12; May 12 to 19; May 19 to 26. Only 144 Readings are from May 5 to May 12, 2016, since May 6, May 7, May 8 and part of May 9 were deleted or never recorded. The day before May 5, 2016, the Rad Spiked then the Unit went off line for four days. Readings from May 5, 2016 to May 26, 2016 are one of the Microsoft Excel Databases retrieved. The Database maxed on 400 records retrieved – May 5 to May 26, 2016. It is a Search retrieval limit set on this database by the owner – EPA.
From and including: Thursday, May 5, 2016To and including: Thursday, May 26, 2016Result: 22 days
I have the Rad databases from the other cities too. The one thing they all have in common is that the Rad exceeded 1,000 CPM all day and all night long for a week or more.
Most Radioactive City in America: Colorado Springs is back yet again as the Most Radioactive city in the US, “Recorded,” that is. Raleigh, Miami, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Billings, Montana are the recent victims of truly spectacular Radiation Counts per Minute (CPM) on EPA Geiger counters and radiation measurement systems. Confidence is high Colorado Springs radiation measurement exceeded 1,000 CPM 99% of the reporting week of May 21 to 28, 2016. Other cities have the radioactive “contagion,” just not as severe, even though the listed cities all exceed 1000 CPM. No action has been taken by the US Government, however; nor is it expected. They are the biggest Cowards of all. The nation destroying strength of Big Time Rads cannot be denied; but, the Rads can be ignored till they kill you. You can run; but, you cannot hide, the Rads always win.
How Cities Cheat on the Rad Reports: The EPA Radiation reports can be manipulated in a number of ways by cheating, psychopathic politicians who would rather lie to their constituents than tell them the sometimes bitter truth about the radiation in their city. The local, state and federal elected officials have developed both legal and “good-ole boys” ways to hide the true radiation count from the unsuspecting public. By far the easiest lie to pull off is to omit the higher of the two counts. That is almost always the Beta CPM. Some politicians always man-up (some women, too) and face the music; preferring that the residents know now rather than not know. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is such a city.
An example of stupendous cowardice in office is portrayed every day by New York City. They weakly say the Big Apple’s always lower Gamma Radiation is it; as if it is all there is. Never fear, cowards abound, Los Angeles is Yellow, too – through and through. The actions of New York City are disgusting and shameful. Cowards they are. I’d throw them all out if I could. The politicians in New York City Lie to the residents’ face while stabbing them repeatedly and furiously in the back. Regrettably, there are many more cities like New York City. May they all have interesting lives. They bogarted the higher Beta radiation; thus reducing the Rad count by about two thirds. The act of evil, sick minds? You bet it is.
No, It is not OK now: The reduction in the count of over cities over 1000 CPM does not mean it is OK now; or, even that it is getting better. Often times when the Radiation goes down the associated Lethality of the Isotopes goes up. The two things are separate measures. It could mean that some of the Uranium 238 has gained a Neutron and changed to Plutonium 239, a more dangerous Isotope.
Te132 – Something Nuclear in Europe Detonated or Exploded: The American East Coast from Virginia to Maine was Rad Assaulted on and around May 4, 2016 from Rad originating in Europe; specifically Te132, a fission product. Something in Europe exploded or detonated. EU officials have had no comment. The 100 Plus point sharp Rad elevation was detected by EPA Rad Monitors in the following East Coast cities: NYC, NY; Shirley, NY; Dover, DE; Baltimore, MD; Hartford, CT; Providence, RI; Portland ME, Richmond VA, Philadelphia, PA; Wed 5-4-2016.
You are again encouraged to view daily the NETc.com free, public site. The above referenced 100 Plus point sharp Rad elevation lit up the subscriber’s page like a Xmas tree. For those with more serious scientific interest, I highly recommend that you subscribe. The cost is around US$20. It is well worth it.
Isotope Count reporting: These CPM numbers do not represent the actual radiation counts in your radiation weather. It is higher [or worse] than these government certified partial reports say. Use these report numbers as your Starting Point in adding up your daily, monthly and annual exposure from your Rad Weather. Most radiation monitors report on the radioactive presence of Cesium 137 at the detector. YRTW will report on “the secrets the Pros use” in estimating the actual Total radiation counts. It is not a pretty picture. Squeamish readers may want to turn to other Veterans Today articles reporting on usual things like wars and people getting blown up by an actual named enemy you can see in pictures.
The Lethality goes up for 35 years; then declines slightly and hangs steady for millions of years, for that release. New releases start a new clock all over again. Regrettably for all normal Humans, that is a bunch of generations. The end result is extinction, of course. Everybody is included; no one is left out. Truthfully, it is a bummer and I know of no variety of radiation-exempt Human Species.
Day One out of the reactor use a news reported Cesium multiplier of 150 Times. After 15 days outside the reactor the multiplier is still approximately 100 times the Cesium Twins. Take all appropriate Rad precautions. A second Multiplier is for Rad particles that have been outside the reactor for ten years or more. The Total radiation declines to approximately Five (5) Times the Cesium level. The Lethality is still increasing though. Here’s how you can calculate an estimate of your Total Rad today: Use a reported account of the Cesium 137/134 CPM in your area and Multiply Times 5. Another way to say it is:
Cs137/134 CPM X 5.0 = Total Radiation released in CPM
Radiation types commonly measured by radiation monitors include Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Neutron and X-Ray radiation. Only Beta and Gamma are reported by the EPA and here on YRTW. There are 1,944 other individual Rad elements, only a few are ever mentioned in articles. In short: The newer disaster’s Cesium 137/134 radiation CPM that is conveniently echoed by local and national news outlets, tells you right away by simple Multiplication how big the disaster really is, even if they are lying. At least it gets you closer than “There is no danger to the public.” That would be You. Think of it as the insider’s secret code. Multiply away! That’s it. No magic or VooDoo, just the facts as close as you can calculate it. Good Luck.
German Analysis of Certain Isotopes after Meltdown: Hold on to your hat. In 1992 Germany calculated that in reactor meltdowns like Fukushima Daiichi the radioactive isotope Strontium 90 would aggressively poison the environment for 109.2 years and then decline slowly over the next 273 years. Of course, we will ALL be long dead by then. Other deadly Rad isotopes put Strontium 90’s generous life span to shame. The German study is here for those brave enough to tackle it. Source: The IAEA: Dispersion of radionuclides and radiation exposure after leaching by groundwater of a solidified core-concrete melt by Bayer, A.; Tromm, W.; Al-Omari, I. (Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany)) from 8. International congress of the International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA8)
Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, 100 miles offshore of Fukushima: "During that March 13 phone call, Cleveland wrote, Troy Mueller — the deputy administrator for naval reactors at the US Department of Energy — said the radiation was the equivalent of “about 30 times what you would detect just on a normal air sample out at sea.” “So it's much greater than what we had thought,” Mueller reportedly warned other American officials after taking samples on the Reagan. “We didn't think we would detect anything at 100 miles.” After Mueller made that remark, according to Cleveland’s transcript, Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman asked him if those levels were “significantly higher than anything you would have expected.” He responded yes. When Poneman later asked Mueller, “how do the levels detected compare with what is permissible?” Mueller said those on the scene could suffer irreversible harm from the radiation within hours. “If it were a member of the general public, it would take- well, it would take about 10 hours to reach a limit,” he said. At that point, Mueller added, “it’s a thyroid dose issue.” If people are exposed to levels beyond the Protective Action Guideline threshold released by the Energy Department, Cleveland acknowledged in his report, radiation could have ravaged their thyroid glands."
Our owners obviously think we love being lied to.
About everything from the effects of depending on "clean" nuclear energy to the necessity for allowing banks to operate with the charter to extract as much from their federally-insured customers as possible.
May 29, 2016
Fascism: The View from Within
The core problem with the discussion of Trump and fascism in today’s New York Times is that it defines fascism solely in terms of what scares liberals. If the goal of fascists were to be scary, then you might judge how fascist a movement is by how much it scares you. But that’s not why people support fascism.
What’s necessary is to see fascism from the inside. Why might people support an authoritarian, chauvinist ruler who attacks minorities and foreigners?
Suppose you have a bedrock belief that people get what they deserve. The poor are poor because they are inferior, and the rich are rich because they are smart and work hard. Lots of people feel this way, not as an analytical proposition to be assessed against the evidence but as a preconscious commitment. This view can work at multiple scales: it enables those who have it to accept the reality of individual, group and national inequality without the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.
But suppose the pattern of winners and losers becomes such that the “natural justice” assumption implies that it is you and your people who are the inadequate ones. The community (class, racial, religious) you identify with is struggling while other communities seem to get ahead. Your country is defeated in war or seems to be declining relative to other countries in wealth and power. How can you reconcile the facts of the world around you with your core beliefs about just desserts?
Fascism’s political appeal is that it solves this conflict. It tells you that foreign or alien groups — less virtuous than yours but ambitious and sneaky — have undermined you. They’ve taken your jobs, tied you up in pointless rules that benefit them by preventing your people from getting what they deserve under the false banner of equality, eroded your values and traditions. Your group has allowed this to happen because it was disunited, even weakened from within by traitors. The solution is to root out these treacherous elements, throw off the artificial laws and constraints (like political correctness) that prevent true merit from getting its rewards, and get rid of the foreigners and parasites. The fundamental political question, from the perspective of fascism, is not how to adjudicate disagreements but how to eliminate the dissent and defeatism that stands in the way of your people’s unity and rightful place in the world.
How such a movement foments repression, violence and war depends on the context—the barriers fascists need to overcome to implement their program. For instance, if there really were a move to expel millions of undocumented residents of the US, this would entail an alarming level of surveillance and force, much greater than anything we’ve seen in this country in decades. This is not because Trump and his followers want a reign of terror in itself, but because that’s what it would take. Do I know whether the expulsion theme is a real prospect or just rhetoric? Do I want to find out?
The proper way to determine the fascist threat from a right wing nationalist movement in the US or elsewhere is to ask (1) do they seek to impose the unity and rule of “the people” (their national or ethnic group) through suppression of minorities, dissent and foreigners? and if so (2) what repressive or violent actions will they need to take to carry out such a program?
ack in the late-housing-bubble period, in 2007, Countrywide Home Loans, which was then the largest mortgage provider in the country, rolled out a new lending program. The bank called it the “high-speed swim lane,” or HSSL, or, even more to the point, “hustle.” 
