When I wrote this on October 15, 2024, I was not wrong . The extralegal, extrajudicial assault on our friends and neighbor is an assault on democracy itself ... an assault on humanity itself.
The next right thing we can do is voting to fill the U.S. Congress with elected Democrats and Independents — beginning with early voting this week, and ending big on November 03 — to do what the Constitution and the United States Code demand.
We saw this coming. We won't see it end unless we end it.
Photo Credit
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-bizarrely-posts-acting-president-034505390.html
"[R]iddle me this...."15 years after demonstrating the benefits of the Affordable Care Act at the household level and across the U.S. economy, why would Banana Republicans keep doubling down on hurting people they swore to help?"And why would you let them?"This post details the damage done to ordinary Americans by the neglect of elected Republicans across the U.S. Damage that was compounded by the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress when they passed and President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill last year.And now they're asking for more time to make things even worse, because *they're* not happy till *we're* not happy (and sicker, and poorer, and less secure).In memorable words I first heard in childhood: "Throw the bums out."Register . Vote . Tell your friends.
Here’s the thing….
It’s not the only thing … we’ll get to other things … but this is definitely an important thing because it goes straight to our collective capacity to tell facts from fictions and truth from lies.
It’s about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, also know as the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, and ACA.
On the merits...
The Affordable Care Act began to strengthen the overall economy right out of the gate — by expanding the number of Americans with health coverage, by helping to stabilize the growth of health spending, and by improving financial security for millions of Americans in income brackets that plow every paycheck back into the real economy.
The ACA did *not* reduce overall economic growth or increase unemployment
In fact, a series of Commonwealth Fund reports identified significant private sector job growth, and a slowing of per capita health care spending growth. In real time, the ACA boosted U.S. economic growth in a period when the developed global economy struggled to recover from the Great Recession.
The ACA generated measurable job mobility and entrepreneurial activity
The ACA banned insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. Which meant no one needed to stay in a job because they needed the insurance. Which meant they could move to better jobs, however they defined *better*. Which meant more entrepreneurs could start new ventures without the added risk of being uninsured. It also meant people could retire early if they wanted to. Which meant younger workers could advance sooner. All of which added to U.S. productivity and innovation.
By slowing the growth of health care costs, the ACA improved both the business climate and the cost of governance
Slower insurance premium growth freed up business resources for investment in production and jobs.
Slower growth in overall health spending contributed to lower federal budget deficits.
Cost containment helped stabilize state and local government budgets.
Here’s the rub: Americans in states that chose not to participate fully in the ACA missed out on many of these benefits
To be crystal clear, these benefits were *not* withheld from those Americans by the federal government; their legislators and governors decided to refuse them.
Americans in ACA states saw decreased premiums and more improved coverage that those in others states.
The knock-on effects of improved minimum standards of coverage and care meant higher premiums in states that opted out than those that fully embraced ACA benefits and protections.
ACA states added hundreds of thousands of related jobs; the others did not.
ACA states realized significant reductions in losses from uncompensated care; the others did not.
Hospitals and clinics in small towns and rural counties were significantly more likely to survive and thrive in ACA states than those who took a pass on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Medicaid enrollees in ACA states have benefited from reductions in income inequality, evictions, bankruptcies, and improvements in credit scores that citizens in other states did not.
So riddle me this....
15 years after demonstrating the benefits of the Affordable Care Act at the household level and across the U.S. economy, why would Banana Republicans keep doubling down on hurting people they swore to help?
And why would you let them?
Sources
That command pops up — out of the blue, it seems — in Exodus chapter 22, part of a list of _thou-shalt-nots_ that most people mostly ignore most of the time.
I say "out of the blue" because it seems like a non sequitur in a list that ranges from theivery to liability for property damages to bestiality to labor practices to, well, witches. You can read it for yourself.
I say "most people mostly ignore the Exodus 22 list most of the time" simply because now and again, people self-identifying as Bible-believing, have taken to heart individual items on the list.
Some folks, in obedience to #21, which forbids mistreating or oppressing foreigners, have sought to make that the law of the land — which you'll recall the U.S. has done on and off for 250 years.
And, here and there, when folks have taken it upon themselves to obey #18: — "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" — they've accused, charged, tried, and convicted women and girls of being witches; and not suffered them to live. Sometimes, we know, folks jumped straight from the accusation to the execution ... so... murder. They have the element of speed in common with race lynchings.
I *think* executing people for witchcraft is uncommon these days. But I'm not sure. I mean, historically, we only know the instances when such executions were reported; not any that weren't reported. And I need not mention (but will) that an ungodly number of women and girls have just *disappeared* over the centuries, including this century, so ... we don't know, do we....
From 15 years ago today . Sept 16, 2011.
bizarro world | the wealthy + the poor in AmericaTo which a friend replied:
Somehow I woke up this morning in an America with people who characterize our wealthiest citizens as beleaguered victims living from paycheck to paycheck and our working poor as lavishly pampered tax dodgers.
I find this bizarre.
"And yet both of these characterizations can be found to be true. Wealthy & middle-class citizens over-spending and tying themselves to every penny of a paycheck, underwater in a mortgage and indebted up to their eyeballs. The working poor doing enough to stay under the gov't threshold and continue to get assistance, while buying new cars, digital cable packages and the latest kicks.And I responded:
At the same time you have responsible citizens, both rich and poor, living well-within their means, paying off their debt and trying to make a better life for themselves little by little. Unfortunately, these sanest of people aren't sensational enough to write stories about, unless you're someone like Hemingway or McCarthy, who can take the mundane and make it magical.
And such is the nature of our fallen world. Apologies for the comment longer than the post, but it is indeed an interesting thought. Thanks."
"Thanks for your gentlemanly response, Nate. I think you’ve put your finger right on the bruise.
I have some thoughts about the nature of our fallen world, but I believe I’ll hold them for now and just say this: The people at the center of the fair taxation debate this autumn are not the “wealthy & middle-class citizens” to whom your response gravitates at the beginning — the ones who got in trouble by overspending.
The “beleaguered victims” I’m talking about are the top three-tenths of one percent of U.S. taxpayers:
— the wealthiest 235,000 of whom had incomes above $1,000,000.00 in 2009 (Reuters)
— the top 8,300 of whom had incomes in excess of $10,000,000.00 in 2009 (ibid)
— the top 384 of whom took in more than $1,000,000,000.00 in 2009 (Forbes 400 list).
I don’t believe we have to worry about these households. They shouldn’t be punished; they should, each of them, pay a fair share under the law.
As for the working poor…for now, perhaps it is enough to say that the households who filed returns but paid no income taxes in 2009 had an average income of $14.483.00 (Reuters again), and to ask, “How far does $278.51 a week go in your zip code?”
I think fairness mandates that our wealthiest citizens pay effective tax rates equal to those making, say, $55,000.00, the median income for working age households.
Again, thanks for your thoughtful reply. I hope I’ve been equally respectful."
***
This conversation hasn't changed much in 15 years....
 |
| Electoral College 1932 . by AndyHogan14 on Wikimedia |
These are the 2,200 words Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, accepting their nomination for a second presidential term in 1936. [He would be elected to four terms.]Senator Robinson, Members of the Democratic Convention, my friends:
Here, and in every community throughout the land, we are met at a time of great moment to the future of the Nation. It is an occasion to be dedicated to the simple and sincere expression of an attitude toward problems, the determination of which will profoundly affect America.
I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.
For the sympathy, help and confidence with which Americans have sustained me in my task I am grateful. For their loyalty I salute the members of our great party, in and out of political life in every part of the Union. I salute those of other parties, especially those in the Congress of the United States who on so many occasions have put partisanship aside. I thank the Governors of the several States, their Legislatures, their State and local officials who participated unselfishly and regardless of party in our efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses. [umm....] Above all I thank the millions of Americans who have borne disaster bravely and have dared to smile through the storm.
America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived. [Yeh, well, we elected a president who started the recovery from COVID19, and then re-elected a president — predictably, I think — tore it all down .... and look at us now.]
In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear. [Not this time, no, for no other reason than putting someone in the White House who trades heavily in fear.]
But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most Nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.
Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776-an American way of life.
That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy-from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.
And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution-all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital-all undreamed of by the fathers-the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. [In the Roosevelt years, Americans undid this and made change that lasted for half a century ... The midterms of 1930 were the first clear electoral evidence that Americans were out of patience with government submission to corrupt, carnivorous capitalists; the 1932 general elections proved the tide had, indeed, turned ... and 1934 and 1936 signaled a widening (never perfect; painfully incomplete, yes, absolutely, but a trend line that, bit by bit, sought to expand the American definition of 'We, the people' ... Since then, we have gone back and forth, learning and unlearning, and learning again and again — with fascists and authoritarians hiding in plain sight every step of the way (and sometimes not bothering to hide at all) .... beginning in the 80s, it became clear that many Americans had lost the plot (see The Big Chill); that we'd been persuaded in large numbers to surrender a staggering degree of economic, social, and political power to a new generation of economic royalty who were, frankly, better organized and a good deal more cunning than those who came before . One need only look at the real economy to see where that path led (Look at who owns the greatest share of wealth today; look who retains the greatest bargaining power, whose economic situation is independent of wages, whose prospects are defined by generational wealth - like a home to pass on - and compare the health and wellbeing of those Americans with their neighbors who are running (and borrowing) to stand still) (see Sources below) .... 2026 is — or can be — the next 1930. Right now, we have a shot at do-overs ... we have a shot at renewing American democracy again....]
Back to Roosevelt's 1936 speech.
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor-these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age-other people's money-these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.
Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living-a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.
But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.
For more than three years we have fought for them. This Convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that that fight will go on.
The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our Government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of Government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.
We do not see faith, hope and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a Nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.
Faith-in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships.
Hope-renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.
Charity-in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.
We seek not merely to make Government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.
We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.
In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.
It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.
I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.
[Vote . Bring your friends.]
Sources
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/index.html
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/social-security-act
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-franklin-roosevelts-radio-address
https://www.fdrlibrary.org/wagner-act
https://www.senate.gov/about/parties-leadership/1932-political-realignment.htm
The White House was proud, proud, proud last Friday (September 4, 2026) to launch a video game on the WhiteHouse.gov website in which players control a white man rounding up, Black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits.
Do you have any further questions about whether this White House is in the hands of racists?
Do you have any further questions about the members of Congress who continue supporting this ugliness?
Vote. Bring your friends.
Sources
https://www.whitehouse.gov/arcade/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-classic-arcade-games-maga-makeover-online-launch
Sometimes a person seems to writing about one thing but turns out to be writing about everything.
We tend to accept things because we are told them and to possess them merely at secondhand. If we undergo the agony of thought there may be much that we must discard, but what is left is really ours in such a way that nothing can ever take it from us.
Source
https://www.bibliaplus.org/en/commentaries/290/barclay-daily-study-bible-nt/1-corinthians/15/1-11
