"Short Takes"

I asked you to disregard my last post about retirement because I thought it too self-pitying. Ironically, I had more comments on that post than any other one so far. And they were nice comments. I went back and reread it and it wasn't as bad as I thought. There was one typo but it did cover in an honest way how I feel about retirement. It was okay after all. So the moral to the story for me is: don't write them late at night after you've had a bad day. Either that or do write them at night after a bad day.

Short Take # 1

Obama Care and the Supreme Court: Well, as you know by now the Supreme Court vote was 5-4 in favor of Obama Care. The Republicans have vowed to begin a process of repealing Obama Care in 2 weeks. Mitt Romney says he will repeal Obama Care on his first day in office. I have a question: Can Presidents strike down (by themselves) a federal law, upheld by the Supreme Court in just one day? The democrats swear Affordable Health Care is good for America and the Republicans believe it's a disaster.

It didn't have to come to this. If the health Care insurers had self-regulated; controlled their ever increasing premium rates, and stopped their unabashed greed none of this would have been necessary. A front page article in the Union Tribune dated Monday June 25 stated that in California the average annual premium increase was 8% and the actual cost increases to the insurance companies was 3-4%. The point is they’ve been adding more and more profits every year all the while crying poor. The same old tired excuse is "raising hospital costs and doctor’s wages". Why didn't they regulate themselves? Remember Hillary Clinton tried in 1993 to get an affordable health care plan through Congress and boy was she bitch slapped to the curb in a New York minute.

At least 20 years ago, politicians knew about the need for insurance industry regulations but because health insurance companies have one of the biggest and most highly paid lobby groups (next to the Military) nothing has ever been done. It's like their motto was the same motto as AIG and Goldman Sachs in 2006-07 and that motto was: We know what we are doing is blood-sucking greedy and wrong but screw it; we’ll drain every dollar from this scam as long as we can. These people have no conscious what so ever.

Why didn't Bernie Madoff stop at 1-2 million scammed dollars? He could have taken his money and gone to a non-extradition country but NO, he had to have more and more and more. The sucker money was there for the taking and he couldn’t resist taking every dollar he could. He figured he’d take it until they came and dragged him away. He did. Why did he have to have hundreds of millions? Greed!

Edmund Spenser (centuries ago) said: avarice was one of the seven deadly sins. So everyone agrees that costs are out of control, insurance companies are unable to stop their greedy selves, and the 2 major parties have opposite ideas on how to fix things.

A lot of people share the blame: Americans that seem hell bent on having ever increasing poor health, greedy, soulless insurance companies and political parties turning health care into a battle ground for politics instead of working to solve this American Problem. This should have been addressed and fixed 25 years ago.

Short Take #2

The Holy Roman Empire covered the Western Hemisphere about 1900 years ago. They even had an army garrison (more than one) in what is now England. The Romans were everywhere, at the same time. Then the day came when they couldn't afford to be everywhere and they had to contract their forces. They pulled out of England. The troops came home.

I say this because according to the book Suicide of a Superpower by Pat Buchanan, America has a military presence in 130 countries around the world. 700-1,000 bases in total. We have troops still on the Island of Okinawa near Japan. Didn't we win that war in 1945? Why we are still there, and in Japan, Germany, Cuba, Wake Island and the list is endless. I thought we had realized we cannot police the world anymore. I thought since the fall of Communist Russia we didn't have to worry about the insidious bear inching ever closer.

We have to get out of other countries and close down our "American Empire" for these reasons:

1. We can't afford it (we haven't been able to afford it for decades) it’s bankrupting us.

2. We incite people to be against us when we run through their country fighting, and thinking we are doing well by spreading the gospel of democracy and capitalism. Haven’t we learned yet, they aren’t that interested in our democracy and capitalism. Here is what they want from us: our money, our trade, our jeans, and a couple of McDonald’s Franchises. They want us to solve their problems like getting rid of their tyrants but then get out (you can leave the Mercedes).

3. We have major issues to solve at home. Divisiveness, out of control debt, spending, immigration, college costs, education reform and just the overall digging out of a deep hole (recession); these are critical issues we have to fix NOW. We can't solve Country A, B and C’s problems when we aren't solving our own.

4. All the lamentations over how cash strapped our education system is when if we would just bring most of our troops home like the Romans did centuries ago and cut military spending we would have all the dollars we could ever want to run the very best schools with the very best professionals. We despair over what a crummy education many kids are getting but we cut education to the bone, adjunct teachers instead of hiring full time, cut back on teaching days and put everyone through the annual pink slip horror story and offer little hope. We have the fucking money but politicians choose to spend it on maintaining marines on Okinawa.

To be fair we should be always vigilant because even though Japan has no military and Pearl Harbor doesn't appear to be in imminent danger from sneak attacks you can never be too cautious. Those Okinawan s could be planning a midnight raid right now on San Francisco.

Bring the troops home. Put an end to the empire.