President Barack Obama gave his important speech on the Affordable Care Act law. He talked about his proposed fixes to the healthcare law. He said that he will allow insurers to extend policies that have been canceled for one year even if they do not comply with the law. Some insurers doubt that such a measure will work. We know that the October 1 rollout of the program including the website experienced huge problems. There have been cancellations of existing policies, because they did not meet the higher standards of the 2010 healthcare law called the Affordable Care Act. The President wants to fix the problem that deals with the health insurance cancellations since online marketplaces opened. Now, insurers could renew those plans for a year. The move was in response to a tide of anger from Republicans and fellow Democrats that Obama was not fulfilling his frequent promise that people who like their current health plans would be able to keep them under the ACA. "I think it's legitimate for them to expect me to have to win back some credibility on this healthcare law in particular and on a whole range of these issues in general," Obama said during a press conference. Millions of Americans have received cancellation notices because insurers did not renew policies that were protected because they predated the 2010 law (or because they were made after the law was enacted). Many Republicans do not have a plan to handle health care at all except of them wanting either the status quo (which doesn't work) or a total privatization of the health care system (which doesn't work either). By March 31, everyone should have health care according to the law or pay a fine. Enrollment figures released by the administration on Wednesday indicated that only 106,000 people have enrolled for health plans through the exchanges, a tiny fraction of the hoped-for millions. Many insurance companies lust after profit. The White House has brought in Jeffrey Zients, who is set to become President Obama’s top economic adviser in January, to oversee the effort to fix the site. The selection of Zients, a multimillionaire investor and management consultant, is indicative of the intimate connections between the Affordable Care Act and the health care industry. Zients once worked at Bain Consulting, formerly headed by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He founded Portfolio Logic, a small private equity firm with a stake in PSA Healthcare, a pediatric home health business. The White House contends that Zient’s health care investment does not constitute a conflict of interest with his work at HealthCare.gov. The Affordable Care Act is a mixed bag law. Many human beings will receive health care as a result of the law and others will not. Single payer health care is superior to the Affordable Care Act.
Most Americans believe in an increase of the minimum wage. I agree with it as well. The Tea Party extremists are wrong to advocate no increase in the minimum wage. They have an anti-government zealotry. The interests of Wall Street and big business elite hate an increase of the minimum wage. A minimum wage would help millions of average Americans. About 47 million Americans still live in poverty. We have had a stagnation of the minimum wage. The national minimum wage was created under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was created as a means to lift millions of American workers out of poverty and to stimulate the economy. Yet, it was still not indexed to inflation and big business (which was hostile to the start) fought often successfully to prevent Congress from raising it. So, after the past 40 years, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has decreased greatly. If Congress had kept the minimum wage in pace with inflation over this period, it would be about $10.74 today. It is now $7.25 today or about two-thirds of its previous purchasing power. We also witness more numbers of workers and their families live in poverty. The annual salary of a full time American worker employed at $7.25 per hour is $15,080 (which is less than the official federal government poverty level for a family of two). The poverty level for a family of four is $23,550, which is considerably beyond what a minimum wage worker earns. The rich has grown far richer for the past decades. Between 1968 and 2012, as the minimum wage declined in value, the top 1 percent of households doubled their share of the nation's income. The typical CEO of a big business received a 16 percent raise in 2012 to $15.1 million. During that year, the pay of Wal-Mart's CEO Mike Duke rose to 14 percent (to $20.7 million). We know that by contrast Walmart (or the largest employer in America) pay its sales associates an average wage of $8.81 an hour. Even McDonalds employs large numbers of the nation's low wage workers. In 2012, the CEO of McDonalds was paid $22.7 million. Although, his income roughly tripled in 2012, the income of McDonalds' fast food workers remained abysmal. The United States now has the most unequal distribution of income in the industrialized world. The minimum wage is low, so the under paying of workers have caused corporations shifted the real costs of doing business to the general public. There is a study released this October by the University of California and the University of Illinois. It found that 52 percent of America's fast food workers receive assistance from public programs like food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Medicaid thanks to the poverty level wages. As a result, taxpayers are contributing $7 billion per year to pick up the cost of supporting these fast-food workers. The study estimates that public assistance to McDonald’s workers alone amounts to $1.2 billion a year — the equivalent of one-fifth of that corporation’s annual profits. Taxpayers are also paying enormous amounts to support the impoverished employees of Walmart and other giant companies. The minimum wage being so low harms workers. That is twenty states and D.C. has raised their minimum wages higher than $7.25 federal rate. Congress is currently considering the Fair Minimum Wage Act that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $10.10 in three steps and then index it to the cost of living. That is why many human beings want a living wages. Many workers have protested in desiring a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Some corporations believe that such an action will harm job gross, but sophisticated studies by economists said that little to no effect on employment of raising the minimum wage. Summarizing the studies earlier this year, Paul Krugman — the Nobel Prize-winning economist — declared: “The great preponderance of the evidence … points to little if any negative effect of minimum wage increases on employment.” The reason is that if you have a higher wage, workers stay on the job longer. That can increase labor efficiency and decrease the cost of recruitment and retraining. 2/3s of minimum wage workers are employed by large businesses, which can easily afford higher wages. Walmart had $469 billion in sales and $17 billion in profits in 2012. We need great jobs not just any type of jobs. Another objection is that low-wage workers are mostly teenagers, who don’t have to support a family. But people over the age of 20 constitute more than 88 percent of the 30 million American workers who would receive a raise if the federal minimum wage were increased to $10.10 an hour. These are adults — many of them married and, also, parents. We know that the poor spend more of their money than the wealthy. Increasing the minimum wage can pump billions of dollars of consumer spending into the American economy. The minimum wage increased to assist working Americans and their families is not immoral. Poverty level wages and record profits for big corporations are disgraces in America.
The Warren Commission was a controversial commission. Even those who agreed with the Oswald did it alone viewpoint admitted that imperfections and errors greatly acuminated in the Warren Commission. It had no defense team representing Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald was essentially convicted by the national media from the very beginning. There was huge pressure on the Warren Commission to find Lee Harvey Oswald guilty. As a matter of fact, in a document dated January 11, 1964, and titled "Progress report", J. Lee Rankin prepared a work outline, with subheadings titled "Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy", and "Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives." So, even before the first witness was called to testify, the Warren Commission decided automatically that Oswald was the assassin. We know that on the morning of November 23, 1963, Hoover told LBJ that the case against Oswald was not then very good. We know that the Commission tried to duplicate the feat of shooting Kennedy from the Book Depository building with first class marksmen from the Armed services. None of them could achieve the goal. Secondly, by no stretch of the imagination was Oswald a first-class rifleman. In fact, when author Henry Hurt interviewed dozens of Oswald’s Marine Corps colleagues, they were dumbfounded that the Warren Commission could state that Oswald could perform with such shooting skill because the Oswald they recalled was either a mediocre shot or worse. For instance, Sherman Cooley said, “I saw that man shoot, and there’s no way he could have learned to shoot well enough to do what they accused him of.” (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 99). And Cooley was an expert hunter and excellent shot. Hurt concluded after interviewing several dozen Marines, “on the subject of Oswald’s shooting ability there was virtually no exception … it was laughable.” So, the Warren Commission's report is filled with omissions, distortions, and other things that all sides of the JFK assassination debate know about. Even Senator Richard Russell has internal criticisms of the Commission. One of the biggest mistakes of the Commission was that its most active members were Allen Dulles, John McCloy, and Gerald Ford. These 3 men are key members of the Western establishment. Allen Dulles was fired by President John F. Kennedy for lying to him on Cuba and other foreign affairs. JFK also fired deputy Director of the CIA Charles Cabell and Director of Plans Richard Bissell. A real commission will deal with independent voices, but not conflicts of interests or establishment figures at all. Even we have plenty of evidence that Jack Ruby had links to Mafia figures. Ruby was associated with Mafia figures such as Joe Campisi and Joseph Civello. Also, Ruby also idolized Lewis McWillie, the Mafia associate who was involved in transporting guns to Cuba with Ruby. According to British journalist John Wilson, Ruby had visited an American gangster named Santo, in a Cuban prison. Wilson was almost certainly referring to Mafia don, Santo Trafficante. Not to mention that Ruby was in contact with Mafia figures such as Lenny Patrick and Barney Baker leading up to the assassination. We know that Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of the Civil Air Patrol with the CIA affiliated David Ferrie. Ferrie had recruited many of these young men for future affiliation with the military. We know that the FBI and the CIA done tons of wrongdoing then and now. So, the terrorist actions of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence organizations have been omitted by the Warren Commission because of obvious reasons. Therefore, we know that the late President John F. Kennedy was not perfect. Yet, he did some good for American society from his support for conservation to his call for world peace in his famous American University speech from 1963. He wanted a federal effort to grow jobs in American society. So, we should fight for the truth. We have the right to seek justice and to investigate lives all of the time.
We know that education is important. We realize that corporate interests want high stakes standardized testing and the attacks on teachers (even qualified, great teachers). Public education has been harmed by massive budget cuts, privatization, and massive closures of public education schools nationwide. Even NCLB deals with standardized testing that punishes failing schools, increases privately run charter schools, and other goals. There are other groups like Teach for America that place more and more young people in the front lines of education without adequate preparation. Many of them leave the teaching profession for other jobs. We know that studies show that top down punishment based reforms do not work. The reality is that most teachers spend hours of time figuring out what our students know and don't know so that we can best instruct them in real skills and concepts that we know are critical for them to be successful in life-long learning. As a result of the prioritization of standardized tests over teacher-created assessments, schools spend an inappropriate amount of time gearing all student instruction and practice towards getting students to perform on these tests. Also racism and economic inequalities are in educational system. If you address these 2 problems, then it can go a long way in handling true educational reform. The issue with charter schools is that only a select among of students deemed potential successes join them .The rest are left in neighborhood public schools that continued to be treated as pariahs. Many public schools have issues because of lack of funds and an extreme narrowing of the curriculum. Even education academic Linda Darling-Hammond has studied what she calls redlining and she documented the destructive impact of charter schools' selective migration policies. The Race to the Top program has forced the closure and privatization of thousands of inner city schools. Wall Street, hedge fund human beings, and Chambers of Commerce members, and the business establishment ((including the corporate media and all of the elite Democratic and Republican politicians) have worked to privatize public education. America has been a land filled with racism and the evil system of white supremacy. The black community and others are victims of an oppressive system. There black human beings and all people need to have the same rights, respect, resources, and privileges as anyone else. When you compare many schools, the resources are unequal. Ironically, many humans of color after the Brown desegregation ruling adopt the Eurocentric mores and values of white America. When you see Eurocentric mores advanced, that is about some our African people being brainwashed to worship white supremacists, slaveholders, and murderers like George Washington, Andrew Jackson (who killed Seminoles), Christopher Columbus (who murdered tens of thousands of indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere). Many of them are taught to love the very system that oppresses millions of black human beings from stolen coast to stolen coast. The racial double standard requires black students to work two and three times as hard as their white counterparts simply to get the same opportunities. Now, we should do something about this situation. We should fight not accept institutional racism in American public school systems nationwide. Even Arnie Duncan has turned some schools into military schools. Today, we have the same racially segregated schools as we did in the 1960's. Finland have shown many solutions. Finland have all publicly financed schools. The schools in Finland are heavily universal with highly qualified teachers in them. The community has a stake in them. The situation in Finland deals with cooperation not competition. Life is not a standardized test. More connections among students, teachers, and the community are necessary to handle this problem. Also, handling economic inequality can go a long way in improving American educational situations too.
It has been 15 years since the death of Kwame Ture. The Brother Kwame Ture was hero for all African peoples of the world. He inspired the younger generation of the 1960's to embrace Power. For we must have Power in order for us to have true liberty and justice in society. He passed away on November 15, 1998. He was only 57 years old. He worked as an organizer of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party. He loved Africa. He was a great friend of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They agreed on the same goals, but differed on tactics. Dr. King greatly respected Kwame Ture and vice versa. Kwame Ture was a great orator. He knew how to how his emotions in his speeches. He knew about to apply history, politics, economics, religion, and other themes into his words as a means to bring the point that liberation is key to the struggle of black humanity. Liberation is the freedom of humanity to create their own destiny without an oppressor controlling human beings in a brutal fashion. He was right to advocate Black Power. He was right to say that understanding African history was necessary to achieve true Black liberation. He was right to expose the weaknesses of mainstream capitalism. He was right to profusely disagree with imperialism. So, Kwame Ture was accurate and correct on so many critical issues that confront our people or deals with the essence of Africa. Our black heritage is strong. It is a heritage that exists from ancient civilizations to modern scientists. It is a heritage that relates to the beautiful Motherland of Africa and to various locations in the four corners of the Earth. The knowledge of self and the love of Black Humanity will go a long way in improving the societal conditions of our people. We have a responsibility to build up Brothers and Sisters as well. Far too often, some (who are racists, etc.) want to degrade Brothers and Sisters unfairly. That is wrong since if we do that, then we degrade ourselves. Black is Beautiful. Therefore, we should encourage each other as a means to grow, to gain more insight, and to improve our own lives. There is nothing wrong with Black Love, Black Unity, and Black Power, so we respect our legacy from the words from Malcolm X to the words from Fannie Lou Hamer. Subsequently, it is righteous to live strongly for black liberation. We have the right to set the record straight. The truth is that black community is diverse and is accepting of Brothers and Sisters with eclectic tastes, diverse nationalities, and diverse personalities. Black Humanity should be strong (as Brothers and Sisters have every right to be strong, uncompromising, and stoic against injustice. So, a man should be a man and a woman should be a woman. There is nothing wrong with manhood and womanhood at all), active, and ready to fight for justice. Justice, freedom, and truth are great principles to live by. When we live our lives for helping our neighbors, for tranquility, and for justice, then we can have a true calling in being a blessing in the lives of humanity.
By Timothy
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