US Politics: Don't Panic - Organize

[Darth Richard II]

Oh yeah Barr has said some wonderful things about Michelle Obama.

[Varysblackfyre321]

 

23 hours ago, sologdin said:

isn't really unique.

that aggravates rather than mitigates the offense, compounding their being a compliant imperialist tool to being part of a chorus of such tools. 

Pretty much yeah. Didn’t mean to try mitigate the Post’s conduct. I just wanted to point out sadly, it’s far from exceptional. American imperialism is something generally supported across party lines, and most media outlets do as you say become willing tools to propagate the core message that it isn’t ever controversial  for America to pretend to play world policeman. 

[Zorral]

Wonder what the handle will be this time when he makes like the Terminator.

[Larry of the Lawn]

You guys are all such fucking assholes.  Won't someone think of the 1%ers?  The poor, poor, rich, and powerful 1%ers?

Or fuck it, let's just drug test everbuddy that's used a public toilet 

[Martell Spy]

Really strange how many conservatives think at the same time that every person should be subjected to whatever corporations want to inflict on regular people on a regular basis. Yet, also think Nazis and blatant racists should be given a free pass to spout whatever garbage or vitriol they wish, using private spaces. It just seems like they can't quite decide on what type of dystopia they are trying to build. Live by the Market, die by the Market, assholes.

You can stop whining about climate change now, BTW. It's official, the tycoons are fleeing the planet, so everything will be fine.

 

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Plans to Start Colonizing the Moon
The Amazon tycoon announced a lunar landing launch and some "good news": that the solar system has “unlimited” resources.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/blue-origin-and-jeff-bezos-plan-to-start-colonizing-the-moon?ref=home

Quote

 

“Earth is the best planet,” Bezos quipped. “It is not close. This one is really good. Don’t even get me started on Venus.”

But Earth’s resources aren’t enough for a growing human population, Bezos argued, saying that  even increases in energy efficiency can’t solve humanity’s resource problem, he posited.

 

 

[lokisnow]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Really strange how many conservatives think at the same time that every person should be subjected to whatever corporations want to inflict on regular people on a regular basis. Yet, also think Nazis and blatant racists should be given a free pass to spout whatever garbage or vitriol they wish, using private spaces. It just seems like they can't quite decide on what type of dystopia they are trying to build. Live by the Market, die by the Market, assholes.

You can stop whining about climate change now, BTW. It's official, the tycoons are fleeing the planet, so everything will be fine.

 

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Plans to Start Colonizing the Moon
The Amazon tycoon announced a lunar landing launch and some "good news": that the solar system has “unlimited” resources.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/blue-origin-and-jeff-bezos-plan-to-start-colonizing-the-moon?ref=home

 

So Bezos is a thanos-truther?

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 5/7/2019 at 5:22 PM, Fragile Bird said:

Donald Trump lost more money between 1985 and 1994 than any other individual taxpayer in the US, more than a billion dollars.

The New York Times has received portions of his tax returns, without schedules, from those years. That includes the year he ‘wrote’ The Art of the Deal.

 

This isn’t actually news. Trump has been open about the severity of his financial situation during that time period-he freely admitted on the Apprentice he was billions of dollars in dedt then. Nothing in the Times’ report was really groundbreaking or hadn’t been covered ad-nauseam years ago by various tabloids. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/opinion/white-house/443133-nyt-bombshell-on-presidents-business-losses-was-scooped-by-trump-himself%3famp

[Darth Richard II]

Fuck, if I was rich as Bezos i'd be getting the fuck out of here too.

[Darth Richard II]

6 hours ago, Zorral said:

Wonder what the handle will be this time when he makes like the Terminator.

Oh, was that someone old?

[Fragile Bird]

5 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

 

This isn’t actually news. Trump has been open about the severity of his financial situation during that time period-he freely admitted on the Apprentice he was billions of dollars in dedt then. Nothing in the Times’ report was really groundbreaking or hadn’t been covered ad-nauseam years ago by various tabloids. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/opinion/white-house/443133-nyt-bombshell-on-presidents-business-losses-was-scooped-by-trump-himself%3famp

You, like the idiot who wrote that article, do not understand the difference between ‘being in debt’ and ‘losses’. During my lifetime there were times when I carried large debt (7 figure debt) but none of it was written off as a loss, all of it was paid off.

eta: I don't know the details of the very generous write-off provisions real estate developers had in the US during the time period covered by these tax returns, but I will take a haphazard guess at the kind of stuff Trump does now. Let's say he owns $2 B in property (he claims to own $10 B), and the government allows the property to be depreciated over a 39 year period. That means he gets to write-off $50 M in depreciation every year for 39 years. If he actually does own $10 B worth of property, that's $250 M a year in depreciation he writes off against his personal earnings. I see it seems he owes about $650 M in debt - the US tax rules allow all interest to be deducted, another $25 M or so a year being deducted.

And in those years covered by the tax returns, he lost, well, a billion dollars on failed businesses. He borrowed money for those businesses - he got all the write-offs, while lenders got whatever they could recover from the assets. 

He bought the Doral golf course in Miami for $150 M, secured by a $125 M loan. He provided 17% of the purchase price. His depreciation is $3.85 M a year. He gets his money back in less than 7 years, and has another 32 years in write-offs.

Then there are other things he does. He built a golf course in New Jersey on 150 acres, and then promised not to build houses on the land and got a $40 M tax write-off for the promise. In his election disclosure filing, he valued it at $50 M. But, for municipal tax purposes he claimed it was worth $1.3 M. Big difference in property taxes between $50 M and $1.3.

And on top of everything else, you can be sure there's a lot of bs involved in those write-offs. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pete-buttigieg-responds-to-trump-insult-alfred-e-neuman-its-a-generational-thing/

Not the biggest Buttigieg fan but I found this really funny. 

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pete-buttigieg-responds-to-trump-insult-alfred-e-neuman-its-a-generational-thing/

From the link:

Quote

In 2016, he called Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary," Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted," Marco Rubio "Liddle Marco" and Jeb Bush "Low Energy Jeb." At a rally in March 2016, Mr. Trump boasted about his ability to come up with nicknames for his opponents. 

Apparently Trump's burn on Rubio was that he thought he was from the Northern mountain clans.

Anyway, like Buttigieg I could not identify Alfred E. Neuman if someone just asked.  However, I would get the reference of something like "the Mad icon dude."  And that article's right that it was used ad-nauseam to lampoon Dubya, which I certainly recall quite well and I'm three years younger than Pete.

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

But Clark knew that the emergency room can be expensive. A few months earlier, she’d gone to the emergency after falling down her friend’s stairs. She ended up with a $1,200 bill that she still hadn’t paid.

“I’m weighing my options,” Clark says. “She could have a seizure at any moment. It felt terrible, as a parent, to be in the position of having to do that.”

Clark and her husband decided to give Lily some activated charcoal at home and drive to the emergency room. But they wouldn’t go inside.

“We were just sitting there, facing the door and watching Lily,” Clark says. “We chose the second row because we wanted to be close to the entrance, but also trying to look inconspicuous.”

The Clarks waited in the parking lot for a few hours, and Lily didn’t show any symptoms. They drove home without setting foot in the emergency room.

 

“Am I a bad person?” Why one mom didn’t take her kid to the ER — even after poison control said to.
The emergency room bill I can’t stop thinking about.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/2019/5/10/18526696/health-care-costs-er-emergency-room

[A True Kaniggit]

3 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

“Am I a bad person?” Why one mom didn’t take her kid to the ER — even after poison control said to.
The emergency room bill I can’t stop thinking about.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/2019/5/10/18526696/health-care-costs-er-emergency-room

Don't scare me like that. That whole article I kept expecting a horrifying ending to that story.

[Martell Spy]

4 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Don't scare me like that. That whole article I kept expecting a horrifying ending to that story.

There is a horrifying ending to this story. The entire healthcare system that terrorized this mother is still in place. And various hospital lobbyists are currently fighting tooth and nail to insure that it remains in place for the next 50 years. You may have grandchildren and great-grandchildren terrorized by the very same system. 

 

Big Pharma Is Pushing a Big Lie
People are dying because they can't afford necessary medications, but drug manufacturers say they need high prices to fund future breakthroughs.

https://newrepublic.com/article/153864/innovation-drug-price-myth

Quote

 

It’s common for industry representatives to tell stories of individuals whose lives have been saved by innovation—or of individuals who are desperately waiting for a breakthrough. These emotional appeals should not distract from the facts: Big Pharma does not apply the majority of profits from costly medicines to research and development (R&D); Big Pharma does not drive innovation; and Big Pharma does not meaningfully invest in treatments for rare and neglected diseases. As industry representatives are sure to plug “innovation” again at the next hearing, and at other high-level discussions on drug prices, it’s important to understand the industry’s actual role in the development of lifesaving medicines.

Industry spending on R&D is a fraction of what it spends on marketing and lobbying, and as many academics and journalists have noted, it also pales in comparison to the drug manufacturers’ claims. Citing a 2014 report by the industry-funded Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, manufacturers have posited that it costs about $2.6 billion dollars to develop a new drug. The cost, according to consumer advocacy groups like Public Citizen, is actually closer to $161 million—an amount manufacturers can sometimes make back within days of introducing a product. For instance, drugmaker Novartis likely recovered R&D expenses for the leukemia drug Gleevec in less than two weeks. And drug companies’ contributions to R&D are even slimmer when considering government tax credits that come with these expenditures, which can reduce corporate costs by almost 50 percent.

Drugmakers would also have us believe that scientists in corporate laboratories conduct the “basic” or preliminary research for most new medicines. Their ads feature in-house researchers peering in microscopes and studying brain scans. In reality, it is the federal government that funds 84 percent of initial drug research, and charitable organizations additionally contribute on top of that. A recent study showed that all 210 of the new drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016 were funded by the National Institutes of Health. 

 

 

[Zorral]

11 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

here is a horrifying ending to this story. The entire healthcare system that terrorized this mother is still in place. And various hospital lobbyists are currently fighting tooth and nail to insure that it remains in place for the next 50 years. You may have grandchildren and great-grandchildren terrorized by the very same system. 

And it's even worse than this!  As I've been banging on here for years now, it's more and more difficult, down to impossible, to even receive health care in more and more places.  From today's Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2019/05/11/feature/whos-going-to-take-care-of-these-people/?

Quote

 

‘Who’s going to take care of these people?’
As emergencies rise across rural America, a hospital fights for its life

.... More than 100 of the country’s remote hospitals have gone broke and then closed in the past decade, turning some of the most impoverished parts of the United States into what experts now call “health-hazard zones,” and Fairfax was on the verge of becoming the latest. The emergency room was down to its final four tanks of oxygen. The nursing staff was out of basic supplies such as snakebite antivenin and strep tests. Hospital employees had not received paychecks for the past 11 weeks and counting....

 

 

[maarsen]

On 5/11/2019 at 2:50 AM, Fragile Bird said:

You, like the idiot who wrote that article, do not understand the difference between ‘being in debt’ and ‘losses’. During my lifetime there were times when I carried large debt (7 figure debt) but none of it was written off as a loss, all of it was paid off.

eta: I don't know the details of the very generous write-off provisions real estate developers had in the US during the time period covered by these tax returns, but I will take a haphazard guess at the kind of stuff Trump does now. Let's say he owns $2 B in property (he claims to own $10 B), and the government allows the property to be depreciated over a 39 year period. That means he gets to write-off $50 M in depreciation every year for 39 years. If he actually does own $10 B worth of property, that's $250 M a year in depreciation he writes off against his personal earnings. I see it seems he owes about $650 M in debt - the US tax rules allow all interest to be deducted, another $25 M or so a year being deducted.

And in those years covered by the tax returns, he lost, well, a billion dollars on failed businesses. He borrowed money for those businesses - he got all the write-offs, while lenders got whatever they could recover from the assets. 

He bought the Doral golf course in Miami for $150 M, secured by a $125 M loan. He provided 17% of the purchase price. His depreciation is $3.85 M a year. He gets his money back in less than 7 years, and has another 32 years in write-offs.

Then there are other things he does. He built a golf course in New Jersey on 150 acres, and then promised not to build houses on the land and got a $40 M tax write-off for the promise. In his election disclosure filing, he valued it at $50 M. But, for municipal tax purposes he claimed it was worth $1.3 M. Big difference in property taxes between $50 M and $1.3.

And on top of everything else, you can be sure there's a lot of bs involved in those write-offs. 

My father once told me about his rich uncle who would buy apartment buildings during the Depression in The Netherlands. He would then offer tenants 3 months free rent. Once the building was fully occupied he would then sell it as fully leased. He became wealthy doing this. Even acting as a fraud artist Trump goes broke unlike my great uncle.

 

[DMC]

I didn't read the link, but Warren's political capabilities are plainly limited.  And she has demonstrated very poor instincts thus far.  Like her policy initiatives though, for the most part.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

I didn't read the link, but Warren's political capabilities are plainly limited.  And she has demonstrated very poor instincts thus far.  Like her policy initiatives though, for the most part.

Meow meow meow!

[The Anti-Targ]

9 hours ago, Zorral said:

And it's even worse than this!  As I've been banging on here for years now, it's more and more difficult, down to impossible, to even receive health care in more and more places.  From today's Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2019/05/11/feature/whos-going-to-take-care-of-these-people/?

 

Not sure how long the concept has been around, but in lots of communities we've had food deserts for a while. Seems like a new similar phrase should be coined around proximity to essential healthcare. "Healthcare deserts" is more evocative than "health-hazard zones", which sounds more like a place loaded with harmful chemicals or radioactive waste than a community that lacks essential healthcare facilities within a reasonable radius.