tagged w/ Dennis Kucinich
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Do you support:
Green Jobs?
Direct Taxes on Pollution?
Localizing our agriculture?
Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Cutting the Pentagon Budget?
Taxing the Rich (who can afford it) instead of the middle class and poor?
Legalizing marijuana use and other victimless 'crimes'?
Single Payer health insurance?
Ending the WTO and NAFTA and returning to Bilateral trade agreements based on workers rights and environmental quality principals rather than a race to the bottom?
Then the Green Party is for you!
Want to keep up to day with Green Party goings on? Then join this group!Do you support:
Green Jobs?
Direct Taxes on Pollution?
Localizing our agriculture?... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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Dear Friends,
It is said one should not ask how sausage or laws are made. Are you concerned about a public option? Let me share with you some insight about health care legislation which may not be good for your health.
A lesson in politics. The Kucinich Prediction: Here's what's going to happen ...
1. House will make a big deal about keeping/putting a public option in HR3200 because it competes with insurance companies and will keep insurance rates low.
2. The White House will refer to the President's speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.
3. The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive "co-ops". Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.
4. The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.
5. House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.
6. The bill will pass, not with a "public option" but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn't already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.
This legislative sausage will be celebrated as a new breakthrough and will be packaged as health insurance reform. However, the bill may require a Surgeon General's warning label: Your Money or Your Life!
The bill that Congress passes may pale in comparison to the bill that millions of Americans will get every month/year for having or not having private health insurance.
It will take four years for the new legislation to go into effect. During that time we are going to build a constituency of millions in support of real health care, a constituency which will be recognized and a cause which is right and just: Health Care as a Civil Right.Dear Friends,
It is said one should not ask how sausage or laws are made. Are you... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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I remember waking up, getting ready for English class. It was my second week of my freshman year of college. Before leaving to catch the bus to the other campus, I was checking the primussucks.com bullitan board, as was my habit at the time. There were several posts about the "airline accident" in NYC, and then suddenly, there were posts of a second plane hitting. It was probably a few minutes after 9am. My class didn't start until 10:30am.
I ran downstairs to see what was going on on the news. I sat there watching in disbeleif. I had become friends with the RD of the dorm, and I ran and got her, because I figured she ought to know.
She and I sat there watching as the towers burned. I remember watching as the first tower fell in total disbelief. I already knew at that time that a steel structure building had never collapsed due to fire. I imagined all the people's lives inside being extinguished in a horrible instant, and my could feel my heart fall to the floor with the tower.
Cookie, the RD turned to me and said, "I would hate to be president right now." I looked at her in disbelief, and asked if she was kidding. I looked back at the television and said, looking into the smoke, "for at least a year after something like this, you could pass whatever laws you wanted to. If he wants to the Senate to declare war, he can declare war on whomever he wants. Nobody will question the President during a crisis like this."
Looking back, I don't know how I knew that. I'm not a Machiavellian person myself. Studying history, probably, knowing how we interned the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Knowing how we had the Red Scare during the 1950s. I was too young at the time to understand the Gulf War, but I knew enough by the time Clinton was in office that I was against Clinton bombing Iraqi aspirin factories during the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a distraction. I had followed the 2000 election quite closely as a Senior in high school, watched as it was stolen, and was convinced that G.W. Bush wanted to declare war on somebody. I even have a letter I was assigned to write myself as a Sophomore in College writing to my self as a Senior about what the future holds for me. It scares me a little now, but I said in that letter, half joking, "with George W Bush in office, we're sure to be at war with somebody by now, for no good reason." There was an inevitability I felt about it. Perhaps I was just that jaded.
Sitting there watching as the remaining tower burned, both of us not knowing what to do, Cookie looked back at me after my comment with tears and bit of anger in her eyes, visibly upset by what I'd said, and understandably. She said then, what I would come to agree with in the following October, when the congress passed the USAPATRIOT act. She said then, sitting next to me, "I hope you're wrong."
I wish I had been too.
[full article at link]I remember waking up, getting ready for English class. It was my second week of my... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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Dennis Kucinich on the Ed Shultz show August 19th
Hells yes.
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asherp
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2 years ago
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HEALTH CARE WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
The masquerade is over!
The "public option" is dead.
Health care reform is now a private option: WHICH FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANY DO YOU WANT? You have to choose. And you have to pay. If you have a low income, under HR3200 government will subsidize the private insurance companies and you will still have to pay premiums, co-pays and deductibles.
The Administration plan requires that everyone must have health insurance, so it is delivering tens of millions of new "customers" to the insurance companies. Health care? Not really. Insurance care! Absolutely. Cost controls? No chance.
You will next hear talk about "co-ops." The truth is that insurance company campaign contributions have co-opted the public interest.
I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without breaking our nation's bank! Your contribution will empower our efforts to continue to fight for the single-payer, not-for-profit health care bill, HR676 "Medicare for All," which I co-authored with Rep. John Conyers. The bill now has 85 sponsors in the House.
The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring.
Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no health care.
Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process will insure only the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost.
As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations.
Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - they call this cost control!
If the matter were not so serious, it would be farcical: The executive branch pretends that the proposed health care reforms are something they are not. The legislation is being attacked for something it is not. Congressional leadership and the White House defend the legislation, pretending it actually is the very proposal that is being attacked. But it is not.
A commonsense government health care reform policy would insure that every single American has full access to health care by expanding Medicare to cover everyone under a Single Payer System. We are already paying for a universal standard of care, it is just we are not getting it.
I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without subsidizing insurance and pharmaceutical companies and breaking our nation's bank!
My voice in Congress will continue to challenge the special interests who do not want "single-payer" to succeed. I need you to join me in combating the special and corporate interests who spend millions to try to win this Congressional seat. With your help WE will win again. With your help I will continue to represent your concerns, be YOUR VOICE in the United States Congress, and be the voice for health care for all Americans!
With your help, we can accomplish ANYTHING in America. Persistence, dedication, truth and courage will lead the way and win out in the end.
Thank you,
Dennis KucinichHEALTH CARE WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
The masquerade is over!
The "public... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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The Obama administration admitted last week it promised to oppose proposals to let the government negotiate drug prices and extract additional savings from drug companies. In return, drug companies reportedly pledged to reduce costs by up to $80 billion. The White House has tried to back off the reported agreements, but the drug industry says it expects the White House to uphold its pledge. We speak to former presidential candidate and longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
[includes rush transcript, video at link]The Obama administration admitted last week it promised to oppose proposals to let the... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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This short 9min film is a reader's digest of the book by the same name by author Douglas Rushkoff.
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of ten books on media, technology, and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion, Nothing Sacred, Get Back in the Box, and the novel Ecstasy Club.
He made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and the upcoming Digital Nation. He is the host of the WFMU radio show The MediaSquat, and he will be teaching the New School University this Fall.
In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from a convenient legal fiction to the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they're no longer even aware of it.
http://www.lifeincorporated.netThis short 9min film is a reader's digest of the book by the same name by author... more
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asherp
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is that unless you have a—what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody’s automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual, because there’s always going to be somebody out there who thinks they’re indestructible and doesn’t want to get healthcare, doesn’t bother getting healthcare, and then, unfortunately, when they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room and the rest of us have to pay for it.
But that’s not the overwhelming majority of Americans. The overwhelming majority of Americans want healthcare, but millions of them can’t afford it.
So the plan that has been—that I’ve put forward and that what we’re seeing in Congress would cover, the estimates are at least 97 to 98 percent of Americans. There might still be people left out there who, even though there’s an individual mandate, even though they are required to purchase health insurance, might still not get it or, despite a lot of subsidies, are still in such dire straits that it’s still hard for them to afford it, and we may end up giving them some sort of hardship exemption.PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is that unless you... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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I watched this interview with Bob Bennett saying that there is Zero % chance of passing a healthcare reform bill before August.
The most important thing that he talked about is changing the paradigm of care from:
The present system is that doctors are compensated for what they do to you rather than what they do for you. If a doctor keeps you healthy, he doesn't get paid. But if he cuts into you, or sticks pins into you, or runs you through a machine, then he gets paid for those procedures. We have to change that paradigm, and everybody that has worked on changing that paradigm, whether it's Safeway and their self insured program, they have demonstrated that you can turn the cost curve downwards, you can save money, and increase the quality of the healthcare you get, regardless of where you live. By changing the focus and compensating doctors more for keeping patients healthy.
Although I personally don't agree in allowing Capitalism to continue to have free reign over healthcare, I think that the single payer proposal by Congressman Kucinich HR676 is a better proposal, it should be tailored to include what Bennett proposes above. Rewarding doctors more for keeping patients healthy, than for increasing his earnings by doing more procedures. It makes sense.
What do you all think?I watched this interview with Bob Bennett saying that there is Zero % chance of... more
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jubal
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2 years ago
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[video at link]
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Congressman Kucinich. What exactly did you get passed?
AMY GOODMAN: And explain exactly what you mean by the single-payer plan that, state by state, it could be adopted.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, Medicare is a single-payer plan. It’s the government pays the bills. Now, government doesn’t own all the hospitals under the legislation that I wrote with John Conyers, HR 676, that is co-sponsored by eighty-five members of Congress. Government would essentially be the person or the institution that pays the bills.
Right now, we have a system with 50 million people uninsured, another 50 million underinsured, where you have thousands of different insurance companies that are involved in jacking up administrative costs. One out of every three dollars goes for the activities of the for-profit system, for corporate profit, stock option, executive salary, advertising, marketing, and cost of paperwork. You eliminate that $800 billion a year in overhead, and you have enough money to be able to meet the needs of all people in this country. And when you eliminate the overhead at a state level, you can meet the needs of people of a state level.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what is happening right now, Congressman Kucinich? The latest, the possibility that the bill will not be passed by August, which some have taken to mean it’s going to give more time for Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats to water it down. But they’re not even with the public plan. I’d like you to explain what is being offered, even coming close to the idea of single payer.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, it’s not close to the idea of single payer. It’s mandating that people buy insurance. And it’s telling insurance companies they have to sell insurance. Well, you know who wins in that deal.
The fact of the matter is, this debate is all skewed right now. You know, there are—both political parties are in trouble on the issue of healthcare. Our political system is failing the American people, and it’s a bipartisan affair. So, what we have right now is a mishmash, which is being offered up as reform. Well, no wonder it’s in trouble from all sides.
I mean, if people were offered a clear choice of a single-payer plan or not and told what the advantages are of having the government paying the bills, eliminating the overhead, enabling all Americans to have not just basic coverage with doctor of choice, but vision care, dental care, mental healthcare, prescription drugs, long-term care, all covered, if people knew that was the choice they could have, there wouldn’t even—there wouldn’t be much of a debate at all.
But we’re falling back on old ideological arguments, when the fact of the matter is the insurance companies are running Washington and we have to break their hold. And that’s why the single-payer amendment that I offer that gives states an option is a small step in the direction of trying to give states the ability to be able to determine their own destiny, and then hopefully America will be able to see in these laboratories of states that we can have a single-payer plan that can save people money and protect people’s economic security and their health. Healthcare is a basic right. We still don’t hear of that talked about in the major debate here in Washington about the bill that is being presented.
[more at link][video at link]
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Congressman Kucinich. What exactly did... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]
The House Education and Labor Committee approved the Kucinich Amendment by a vote of 27-19, with 14 Democrats and 13 Republicans voting yes.
The amendment propels the growing single payer health care movement at the state level. There are at least ten states which have active single payer efforts in their legislatures. They are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. The amendment mandates a single payer state will receive the right to waive the application of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which has in the past been used to nullify efforts to expand state or local government health care.
Under the Kucinich Amendment a state's application for a waiver from ERISA is granted automatically if the state has signed into law a single payer plan. With the amendment, for the first time, the state single payer health care option is shielded from an ERISA-based legal attack. Now that the underlying bill has been passed, as amended, by the full committee, we must make sure that Congress knows that we want the provision kept in the bill at final passage!
The state single payer option was one of five major amendments which I obtained support to get included in HR3200. One amendment brings into standard coverage for the first time complementary and alternative medicine, (integrative medicine). Another amendment drives down the cost of prescription drugs by ending pharmaceutical industry's sharp practices manipulating physician prescribing habits. An amendment stops the insurance industry from increasing premiums at the time when people are not permitted to change health plans; and finally an amendment imposing a requirement on insurance companies that they disclose the cost of advertising, marketing and executive compensation expenses (which generally divert money from patient care).[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]
The House Education and Labor Committee approved the... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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This film explores the US health insurance market.
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Cindy Sheehan
7/16/2009
On April 4th, 2004, my son Casey was killed serving the United States Army in Iraq during the illegal occupation started by the Bush Administration.
That illegal occupation was made possible because of the attacks that took place on September 11th, 2001, resulting in the deaths of 2,973 people.
Since that horrid day, victims' family members have been doing everything within their power to seek justice and accountability for what happened, with little to no success. It is shameful that almost 8 years after the fact, they have been denied this. The official 9/11 commission report was a sham and a mockery of justice, not justice.
Currently, there is an effort underway in New York City to get a new investigation onto the ballot by this November. The New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (www.NYCCAN.org) is currently attempting to get enough signatures to make this happen, and they need your help. I wholeheartedly support and endorse this effort.
Please do what you can to support this effort, and thank you.Cindy Sheehan
7/16/2009
On April 4th, 2004, my son Casey was killed serving the... more
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asherp
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2 years ago
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Dennis Kucinich is the MAN!
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Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis took a pounding Thursday from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. One of the most damning exchanges occurred between Lewis and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), when Kucinich exposed Lewis' request for government cover from shareholder lawsuits stemming from BofA's troubled merger with Merrill Lynch.
Bank of America (Skank of America)Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis took a pounding Thursday from the House Committee on... more
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Speaking on a Supplemental Appropriations bill that would continue to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:
"America went to war against Iraq based on a lie. We were told back in 2002 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The previous administration even pursued torture to try to extract false confessions in order to justify the war. It is time to tell the truth. The truth is we should not have prosecuted a war against the Iraqi people. The truth is the Democratic Senate could have stopped the Iraq war in 2002. The truth is we Democrats were given control of Congress in 2006 to end the war. The truth is this bill continues a disastrous war, which has cost the lives of thousands of our soldiers. The truth is the occupation has fueled the insurgency. The truth is the Iraq war will cost the American and the Iraqi people trillions of dollars and as many as a million innocent Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of this war.
"Don't tell the American people that you are ending the war by continuing to fund the war. Don't tell the American people that the war will end when their plans leave 50, 000 troops in Iraq. Don't tell the American people that the way out of Afghanistan is to escalate our presence.
"Get out of Iraq. Get out Afghanistan. Come home America."
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Here here! How unfortunate we will never have a man like him as president of this country.Speaking on a Supplemental Appropriations bill that would continue to fund the wars in... more
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Ron Paul made it to the last bracket!
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asherp
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3 years ago
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The office has essentially the same structure as President Bush's version, with faith-based offices housed in departments such as Health and Human Services and Justice. But he has created a new council that will advise the office: 25 people who have grass-roots experience working in poor neighborhoods and overseas. The council will include secular groups that do social programs, as well as religious groups. And in an attempt to avoid the image of the previous faith-based office, it will include religious conservatives and liberals.
But Obama didn't discuss the biggest controversy: Can religious groups receiving federal money for social services discriminate in their hiring practices?
This debate plagued the Bush administration's faith-based office for eight years. Bush believed that religious groups should be allowed to hire people who believe the same things they do and fire people if they don't, because their beliefs shape everything they do. This policy sparked a spate of lawsuits after, for example, gays who worked for evangelical groups were fired because they did not hold the same views on homosexuality.The office has essentially the same structure as President Bush's version, with... more
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asherp
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3 years ago
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The Federal Reserve is not a government body.
They just issue credit to our currency.
The USA borrows money against credit given to us by private banks, and we owe interest on the money we print.
If we nationalize our money supply again, as it was before the year 1919, we can gain control over our monetary policy, and the credit which the dollar represents.The Federal Reserve is not a government body.
They just issue credit to our... more
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asherp
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3 years ago
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Kucinich outraged: Merrill Lynch bonuses 22 times AIG bonuses By David Edwards Rep. Dennis Kucinich says that there is a bonus scandal that 22 times bigger than the bonuses paid to AIG executives. Bank ...Kucinich outraged: Merrill Lynch bonuses 22 times AIG bonuses By David Edwards Rep.... more
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asherp
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