Issues
FOLLOWING ARE ALL MY OPINIONS, NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF JOHN LINGENFELDER. HOWEVER I WILL DO ALL I CAN TO CONVINCE JOHN TO SEE THINGS FROM THESE VIEWPOINTS–I trust that I will have more success than I’ve had to date with Sam Johnson.
Abortion - Go here for my opinion.
Health Care
The Senate proposal for health care “reform” is nothing more than a government handout to the same Wall Street Health Insurance predators who have raised their premiums 78% from 2000 to 2008 and continue to raise them. It does nothing to contain costs to American families. As long as these monopolies have no competition, you can expect them to continue to gouge the American people. All that the Senate sponsored plan does is deliver between 30 and 50 million new customers to these predators–and no doubt many of the payments to the crooks will be subsidized by ordinary Americans who actually do pay our taxes.
Workers with job-based coverage for their families saw earnings rise 3% from 2001 to 2005, while their health insurance premium contribution increased 30%, according to the study by researchers at the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota.
Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Foundation, a nonprofit group that produces the widely watched annual survey noted that health costs had increased 78 percent since 2001– more than four times the pace of prices and wages.
DO THE MATH and you will know that we must do something and that “something” is to offer Americans not only “affordable” coverage, but also adequate and reliable coverage. Today, just because an American pays exorbitant insurance premiums, there is no guarantee that they will get health care. Insurance companies reward their employees for canceling policies.
Americans need REAL choices for health care insurance. Most Americans are locked into a monopoly of four or five Wall Street good ole boy insurance corporations for their choices.
The problem is NOT with the doctors and health care workers or the quality of health care that Americans receive who can afford to pay the price. The problem is with the Wall Street health insurance middle men who think that their CEO’s and top managers should be paid millions of dollars for doing what amounts to clerical work. These people don’t provide health care–they take our money and then take their half out of the middle. It is an absurd situation that amounts to extortion. These people are just another variation of Wall Street Bankers.
We do not need health insurance corporations, and we don’t need “government-run socialized medicine”. We need to allow Americans to form their own insurance cooperatives –much in the same way that employee owned companies are formed. There is absolutely no reason for companies like Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield to even exist, much less to be making the profits that they do for performing clerical jobs that any high school graduate could perform. It is not only ridiculous, it is criminal. Americans need to stand up to them and to the crooks in Congress like Evan Byah, Joe Lieberman and others who stand up for these monsters–and yes they are monsters and there is a ton of documentation from their customers to substantiate that claim.
Until there is real competition allowed, such as the right for citizens to form their own “employee” owned health care co-ops, thousands of Americans will continue to die each year because they can’t afford the Wall Street solution.
From what I can glean from Representative Sam Johnson’s site, he seems to think that the problem of health care reform can be solved by tort reform (limiting citizens’ access to the court system for medical law suits which addresses 1/2 of 1% of the total cost while health insurance predators continue to raise their premiums 20 to 30% annually). The other part of his solution is for people in need of health care to go begging to charities. I think Americans deserve better and real solutions.
In Collin County in 2010, 144 citizens are, according to national statistics of population distribution slated to needlessly die because they either have no health insurance or because the health insurance they have does not cover them adequately. I plan to follow this closely and if possible, I will identify these people. Health care is a HUGE issue and Sam Johnson, like most Republicans and many Democrats, wants to sweep it under the rug.
Here is a video interview that I did this summer at one of the rallies for Health Care in Dallas. This one was in front of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building.
I push John Lingenfelder to fight for real solutions–not more welfare handouts to Wall Street health insurance predators that are subsidized by our taxes. It is absurd and despicable that the largest government welfare recipients in our nation are not poor people but rich people.
Yes we are engaged in a class war. Few even dare to speak or write that truth. And yes the only weapon that ordinary Americans have is our vote. Only our votes can save us. You won’t stop the financial Wall Street savagery against ordinary Americans and other ordinary citizens of the world by voting more of the same back into power. We’ve been doing that for at least 30 years and ordinary American are farther down the rabbit hole that we’ve ever been.
Your vote is your pebble against the Golaith. It is your only weapon. If you don’t use it, or don’t use it wisely in choosing candidates who will represent you, then we are all doomed in the end to become slaves.
Taxes
My libertarian friends, with whom I agree on many points, but we disagree on this one. One of their favorite alternatives is a consumption tax, implemented through a national sales tax. However, this tax would unfairly burden the poor and hinder their ability to rise up out of their poverty. Low income families spend almost every penny of their earnings on subsistence items. They would pay a higher percentage of their earnings in taxes (just as they do now) under a national sales tax. Higher income families could afford to put a portion of their earnings into sales and investments.
A homeowner who buys an existing home would not pay sales tax on the purchase, but a renter would pay sales tax forever on his rent. (Also, most states tax rental property at higher rates than they tax owner-occupied homes, so a sales tax on top of the “extra” property tax would be heaping more tax on top of an existing unfair tax.) For renters who want to buy a home but are unable to do so, a sales tax applied to rent but not to purchase effects an unconscionable tax penalty for not being able to buy a home, and transfers many billions of dollars from lower-income renters to higher-income homeowners.
WE DO NOT NEED TO RAISE TAXES ON ANYONE. WE NEED TO DECIDE ON ONE PERCENTAGE OF ANNUAL INCOME TO BE PAID (no “adjustments”, no loopholes, ALL your annual income) AND ALL AMERICANS PAY THAT PERCENTAGE OF THEIR ANNUAL INCOME–NO SPECIAL DEALS, NO FINAGLING.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies and 68% of foreign corporations do not pay federal income taxes, according to a congressional report released last month.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined samples of corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005. In that time period, an annual average of 1.3 million U.S. companies and 39,000 foreign companies doing business in the United States paid no income taxes – despite having a combined $2.5 trillion in revenue.
MY SOLUTION TO TAXATION INEQUITIES
First of all, we need to demand that Congress support the American people by closing tax loopholes that enable Wall Street Financial firms such as Goldman Sachs to pay 1% of their income in taxes in 2008. This should be criminal and yet no one of our elected officials bat an eye over this gross inequity.
A telltale sign of corporate tax avoidance showed up in a recent report from the Internal Revenue Service. It pointed out that U.S. companies that reported $707 billion in profit to Wall Street in 2004 scaled that back to $523 billion when submitting their tax returns. In the boom years 1996-2000, 61 percent of U.S. companies paid no federal income tax. And those that did pay tax on overseas profits reduced the effective tax rate from 24 percent to 20 percent. Boston Consulting Group estimates that offshore private banking assets now total almost six trillion dollars.
But the real steal is the booty carried home by private equity general partners. These gentry raise cash from investors, including pension funds, using it to acquire public companies that they believe to be undervalued. They take the company private and carry out a financial reorganization that typically involves selling property and then leasing it back, shrinking employee entitlements, and taking out huge loans. They pay no tax on the interest accruing on these loans. Capital gains and dividends pay tax at lower rates than income. The general partner will charge a fee of 2 percent on the funds under management and also claim– in the standard “two and twenty” formula–20 percent of the “carried interest,” or gross profit on the sale of the reorganized company.
NOTE: Another thing we could do to help the deficit would be to find the money that has been “lost” in the halls of Washington over the past 20 years. For example did you know that the Pentagon alone has “lost” $2.3 trillion dollars since the mid 1990’s? Perhaps the members of Congress could schedule a scavenger hunt?
The Economy
The economy is another head-butting issue for me with my Libertarian friends. Our economy is in the sorry shape that it is today because of the failed conservative economic neo-liberal ideology that BOTH parties have followed for the past 30 years. Markets are not animate objects any more than a corporation is a “person.” Markets are manipulated by human beings for their own self-interests. “Free” markets, like Wall Street Derivatives are nothing more than shell games that financial con artists sell to the American people. They have about as much substance as the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Americans who are interested in democracy and growing the American economy will invest in their own local economies and turn away from the Wall Street shysters who have been robbing us blind with the assistance of our elected officials in Washington DC for the past 30 years.
War and Foreign Policy
In this area, I am in total agreement with my Libertarian friends like Ron Paul. The U.S. Constitution clearly states that the Army should be used for the defense of the United States. DEFENSE being the key word–not OFFENSE. We might want to think about scaling the military and particularly our purchase weaponry way back. We have been brainwashed to be paranoid about other nations and to believe that war is a “natural” state of being–as if killing another human being could ever be thought of as “natural.”
But perhaps the need for a large army and all the expense to maintain it is not as necessary as we’ve been told. Costa Rica, for example, abolished its army in 1948 and have apparently had no need for one for 52 years.
Immigration Reform
Until we address the root causes for the millions of displaced persons from Mexico who are now in our country, we will never solve this problem. Among these root causes include the huge government-backed farm subsidies that we give to Wall Street agribusinesses like ADM and Cargill as well as the ruinous trade agreements like NAFTA that literally run small Mexican corn farmers off their land and upend entire cultures for the benefit of Wall Street and a few Mexican billionaires.
More on Immigration
The Second Amendment
I support the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. I will continue to support this right until that day when our leaders in Washington DC have consistently shown for several years that they represent THE MAJORITY of the citizens in the USA and that day is most definitely not today. There was a time when I was not this paranoid about the unholy marriage between those in Washington and Wall Street, but that time has passed. The unholy alliance between elected officials and Wall Street Corporations threatens us all. It is NOT some nameless “big” government. It is the collusion of the few and powerful against the many. And yes, it is a class war. We need fewer rich politicians, educated in exclusive ivy league schools. We need fewer professional politicians who have been in Washington for 20 or 30 years. We need more intelligent, hard working ordinary Americans to be sent to Washington. We need our peers–people who actually have lived most of their lives on Main Street–representing us. Until that day when the American people are actually represented in Washington DC by a majority of their peers from Main Street, I will stand up 100% in support of our citizens’ rights to bear arms.
Property Rights and Eminent Domain
Again, on this issue, I side with my Libertarian friends who say that we must stop special interests from violating property rights and literally driving families from their homes, farms and ranches. What has recently transpired in Brownsville is awful.
Privacy and Personal Liberty
The biggest threat to your privacy are the elected officials in Washington DC. The Patriot Act with all its pork should be fried up for breakfast.
Globalization
Globalization is a monopoly game that was invented by the rich to colonize poor nations of the world and harvest their natural resources using the slave labor of their locals. And who do you think pays for this? Why, of course, the ordinary citizens of the world pay for it with our taxes that are used to fund the IMF. And no one asks our permission. In fact, our elected officials do the best they can to hide it from us.
We are the ones whose tax money is given without our permission to support the vile actions of Wall Street and the murderous corporations that they support.
How are these funds passed through our Congress? Requests for this money are attached as barnacles to other bills, hidden in pages of other global pork for Wall Street, that’s how.
For example, in June of last year, funding for the IMF was slipped into a $106 billion war supplemental bill–no doubt to line the pockets of multibillion dollar war contractors.
The House rebuked President Obama for trying to ignore restrictions to international aid payments, voting overwhelmingly for an amendment forcing the administration to abide by its constraints.
House members approved an amendment by a 429-2 vote to have the Obama administration pressure the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards and require a Treasury Department report on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) activities.