The disaster in the Philippines is horrendous. We wish for help and much assistance to the victims and their families. In Hampton Roads, Virginia, where I live, there is a strong Filipino population. Throughout my life, I know in real life strong, intelligent, and lively Filipino human beings. In real life, one great Filipina woman I know named Melissa is helping her community in Hampton Roads (and she is involved in education. I respect her a great deal and she is a great human being). So, they have the right to advance their interests in their lives. I am a black man, so I will always love black people as well. I will forever love Black Women as great, inspiring human beings (that I love from a social and romantic standpoint). Now, the Super Typhoon named Haiyan or Typhoon Yolando harmed the Philippines' central islands last week. Millions of the poorest human beings are still struggling in devastation and destitution. The Philippine government and workers from around the world are helping with the victims. There are shocking scenes of bodies of the dead displayed across towns. Desperate human beings seek rice and other foods for human survival. Children are begging on the streets for food and water. Now, families are living in makeshift huts. The typhoon destroyed entire towns. It knocked out roads, electricity, and water supplies. This events occur globally that was triggered by a typhoon or earthquake. With many remote areas still not accounted for, the death toll is almost certain to exceed the 5,791 people who perished in the 1976 quake and tsunami in the Moro Gulf. There are residents of Tacloban, Philippines rummaging for food in the debris. The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs says 11.3 million people are in need, lacking food, healthcare and access to education and livelihoods. Reports filtering in from remote areas indicate greater destruction. In Guiuan, on the easternmost coast of the Philippines, where the typhoon first struck, the mayor, Sheen Gonzales, told the Guardian: “We are 100 percent wiped out by Yolanda. It was like the end of the world.” Residents were living in flimsy shelters made from tarpaulins or corrugated iron blown off buildings. Mark Biong, the mayor of another town, Giporlos, was waiting at the Guiuan airstrip in the hope of getting supplies. So far he had been given just 480 family packs for 6,000 affected households. “I can’t deliver that,” he said. “It will just create chaos if I bring that little food for my town. People will get angry about it.” Some human beings want to build their homes in concrete, but some families can't afford to do it. At the end of the day, humanitarian compassion is superior to corporate interests. We know that the West is using the Philippines as a means to geopolitically pivot Asia as a means to counter China's growing hegemony. There is a growing U.S. presence in the Philippines as a means to handle the disaster. At the end of the day, the Philippines need help not imperialism. We should never exploit the tragedies found in the Philippines as an excuse to advance Western imperialism at all (as I condemn imperialism and colonialism 100 percent then, now, and forever as a human being). "WORSE THAN hell." That's how Magina Fernandez, a survivor of Typhoon Haiyan in the now-decimated Philippines city of Tacloban, described the aftermath of the storm to CNN. Typhoon Haiyan was a Category 5 storm and one of the largest ever to made landfall. The Philippines have more than 7,000 islands and it is one nation obviously. The city of Tacloban is the capital of the Leyte province of the eastern edge of the Philippines, was hit particularly hard. Tachloban had about 220,000 people residing in it. There are many super storms globally not only in the Philippine region. The government of President Benigno Aquino ought to reject austerity and neo-liberalism (he must not push for more deregulation, more cutting of social benefits to the poor and pushing privatization at all). He is working with the U.S. military to spend as high as 1.7 billion dollars to buy more weapons and warships. We have to address the environment and poverty in the world. 28.6 percent of Filipinos still live under the official (and understated) poverty level. One in four Filipinos live on a dollar a day, 20 percent lack access to electricity, and nearly one-third of the population are unable to provide for basic food and shelter. So, we should fund legitimate charities if we can to assist the victims. We should fight for relief efforts and support efforts to change the social and economic inequalities that exist in the Philippines. The Philippines is a historic, great place. We want them to have blessings and we want them to succeed in this trying time.
The Affordable Care overhaul law is controversial. The administration is having dropping polls. The health care law deals with private companies offering human beings insurance on new exchanges or pay a penalty. The White House allowed insurers to continue health insurance coverage next year for current policyholders that would otherwise be canceled under the new health care law. There is a Republican bill in the U.S. House that would allow people to keep their plans and allow others to purchase new one without the coverage required by the ACA. Some Democrats may vote for the Republican bill if the President did not make the administrative change. We know that in its first month, the federal and state exchanges signed up only 106,185 people combined. This fell short of the 500,000 the administration had hoped to sign up in October. The ACA wants young, healthier human beings to sign up to the program. They want 7 million human beings to buy insurance on the exchanges during the first year of the ACA for the health overhaul in their minds to be viable. At the federal web site HealthCare.gov, only 26,794 had been enrolled. The administration is still working to fix technical problems that have plagued the site since its October 1 launch. Under its new policy, the White House is stating that the ACA will not require insurers to upgrade existing coverage to include “essential benefits”—such as preventive care, maternity care, and prescription drug coverage—for those who are already covered by individual policies. While coverage for those who were enrolled before passage of the health care legislation in March 2010 had already been “grandfathered” in, the move will now extend this exemption to people who purchased insurance after this date. The New York Times quoted a White House official who, when asked if insurers could increase their rates on these policies, said that question needed to be directed to insurers and state insurance commissioners. It is also possible that insurers could chose to renew policies in select markets, and not in others, basing these decisions on the profit to be made or lost through renewing them. There is another proposal by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, would allow people to keep their current insurance permanently, but would supposedly “encourage” people to eventually switch to coverage on the Obamacare exchanges. Her proposal is backed by about half a dozen other Democrats. So, we know what the ACA is all about. The ACA will help some human beings and not all. It was created by Big Pharma and their interests. The insurance industry wrote the Affordable Care Act. It will clash costs for corporations and the government, which will transfer a greater burden onto the backs of workers, and strengthen the domination of private insurers over the whole system. Substandard health care or the status quo is not what we need. We have the right to call for single payer universal health care in the world today. Even Medicare for all can guarantee better healthcare and a simpler system than the ACA. “When Medicare was rolled out in 1966, it was rolled out in six months using index cards,” Dr. Steffie Woolhandler told me Monday. “So if you have a simple system, you do not have to have all this expense and all this complexity and work.” Woolhandler is professor of public health at CUNY-Hunter College and a primary-care physician. She is a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, or PNHP. PNHP is an organization with 17,000 physicians as members, advocating for a single-payer health-care system in the U.S. We are fighting for single payer universal health care for all human beings in the world. The ACA is having its birth pains. Such a plan of universal health care does a great job in preventing profit taking middlemen from getting between patients and their physicians.
The Assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, and others remind us what is most important in life. What is most important in life is dealing with the dealing with our families, respecting our friends, and having love for our communities as well. Growing our cultural heritage and honoring our ancestors including our past loved ones are great ways to create a humorous, glorious future. For the past 50 years, we have been faced with the choice of destruction or peace. The assassinations of the previously mentioned men were tragic and evil. They wanted peace and justice for the human race. They realized that life is not easy, but with strong effort and progressive insights, then solutions can be achieved in the world society. The nuclear arms race and its near disaster of 1962 were narrowly averted by President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In June, 1963, President John F. Kennedy made an impassioned plea at the American University to make peace with the Soviets in his following words: “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal." On January 11, 2013, Robert Kennedy Jr. told Charlie Rose in front of a large Dallas audience that his father, Robert F. Kennedy (brother to JFK), privately believed the Warren Commission was “a shoddy piece of craftsmanship,” and that “the evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman.” Kennedy said his father had “asked Justice Department investigators to informally look into allegations that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had received aid from the Mafia, the CIA or other organizations. He said the staff members found phone lists linking Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin, to organized crime figures with ties to the CIA, convincing the elder Kennedy that there was something to the allegations." Robert Kennedy Jr. praised the scholarship of the book entitled, "JFK and the Unspeakable." One man who “went there” in the sixties was the young award-winning Dallas Deputy Sheriff, Roger Dean Craig, who was on duty when JFK was killed. Craig, in a virtually unknown interview following several attempts on his life, spoke clearly about his orders that morning to watch but not offer security to the JFK motorcade. The rifle Craig and other officers examined in the Texas School Depository did not match the three spent cartridges. Craig’s clear testimony and the tragic story of his ensuing destruction are available online he said that there was surprisingly few Dallas police: none riding beside the limousine, and none sitting on the trunk to shield him. A 2011 study tells of a witness who went into hiding for decades after testifying to the Warren Commission that she was on the Depository stairs and did not see Lee Harvey Oswald at the official time he was reported to have fled. She later found that her testimony to the Commission had been revised. Even now, there are 1,100 JFK assassination records still under wraps, which is in violation of the 1992 JFK Assassination Act. We know that global peace efforts have been massively harmed by these covert assassinations. Therefore, we should never give up. We should continue to fight in the world. Human beings have the right to have health care, education, housing, and a great live filled with joy and happiness. We must love Nature and believe in improving the environment as the great Black Woman and Great Friend Courtney have written about too. We must be better than the status quo. The desire for human liberation and economic justice are awe inspiring goals to seek. For when he see the poor in the world, this is a strike against all of us (for when one suffers, we all suffer). We should always advance transformative, revolutionary changes in the world society.
Voting is a great human right. The goal of voting would be to expand the members of the community who can vote (as a way to develop an efficient, thorough voting experience). Yet, many of these Voter ID laws limit the kind of voter ID cards that folks can use. No reasonable human being is against identification, but some of us are against restricting the certain identifications that those can use in order for a human being to vote. That is the point. In addition, many photo ID alternatives are excluded. For example, the law does not allow veteran ID cards. Discriminatory requirements are never part and parcel of a real, progressive society. Also, many of these laws deal with things beyond just restrictive ID requirements. They deal with lessen voter access, limiting the days that folks can vote, and other immoral procedures. Voter fraud is very minuscule in Wisconsin, so voting fraud is not a serious issue. A real solution is to adequately accommodate the elderly, poor, and minorities to vote by expanding ID requirements not restricting them as the Wisconsin voter ID law does. Now, the stories of Ricky Tyrone Lewis, Ruthelle Frank, Paul Carroll, Dorothy Cooper, and other human beings prove that their voting rights were denied by voter ID laws. Folks have every legal right to bring up lawsuits about such laws. Human beings have the right to speak out triumphantly against evil and to never give up. In the end, we as black people will win. Also, we should be political independents. We all know that the Tea Party Republicans are extremist and wrong. Also, the left gatekeepers are wrong for worshipping the Democratic Party too. The increase of the minimum wage is not here yet. Ironically, most of the American public even most Republican voters want an increase of the minimum wage. Today, we see the truth. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are two heads of the same corporate system of oppression. That is why the elite allow the Democrats to continue the same policies as the previous Bush administration. We know this. Now, the war on terror has expanded via AFRICOM, etc. There are still trillions of dollars sent to Wall Street and their allies. Military spending has gone up. The trillions dollars are sent to the health insurance industry with an imperfect ACA law (without a public option). There has been blocking of radical re-regulation of the big banks and credit card companies. The Bush War criminals and torturers have not received justice to this very day. There is an expanded drone assassination program. The Feds have marginalized pro-labor advocates and true anti-war movement human beings. The police state provisions of the Patriot Act remain. A new bad trade deal is in the works too. The Keystone pipeline is bipartisan and it is loved by the ruling class. The Keystone pipeline have many environmental risks and we should always love and appreciate the beauty of Nature. So, we know the deal. The White House is the executioner of the agenda of the 1 percent. We have the right to disagree with evil and imperialism here and abroad.
There is the issue of HBCUs. Many of my relatives graduated from HBCUs, so this is a personal issue for me. Now, many HBCUs are suffering because of financial issues including other reasons. We still have recessionary conditions in the United States and the new student loan policies have harmed low income and even some middle class students in trying to receive the best education possible in the world. These college loan changes came in 2011. Since then, 28,000 students dropped out of HBCUs because of economic stress. Many institutions are having huge fiscal crisis. Unless solutions radically come about, some HBCUs may experience bankruptcy. Some reactionaries including some members of the so-called Talented Tenth (the black bourgeoisie) are doing little to nothing about this situation. Some want corporate sponsors to dominate such universities, but historically that hasn't worked. Once, you have corporate sponsorship, the corporations have inordinate control over the functions in the universities completely. Now, student loans are more difficult to get since 2011. They were already difficult to get before 2011. Many HBCUs want the old rules restored, but this has not occurred. The Obama administration has compounded the injury by releasing what it calls “college scorecards” that rank schools by graduation rate at a time when poorer students are dropping out in huge numbers nationwide due to economic stress. Some universities are trying to attract wealthier students when overall black family incomes are dropping. Some have advocated the reorganization of HBCUs, but most importantly, HBCUs need inspiration not massive austerity cuts. We should end this war on terror and fund our domestic services. Also, we should have more Black Unity. After the 1960's, many deluded folks left their own communities to seek some so-called "American Dream" when they were escaping their responsibilities to build up their own communities. Today, we need to focus on developing the black community and fight racial injustice, economic inequality, crime, and any evils in the world. We have to have a knowledge of self and learn more about the beauty of Africa. So, African Americans have every right to fight the power. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been executing school closures nationwide and many HBCUs have been underfunded. So, we have to be against gentrification and advance the interests of black people as a whole. There should be a radical redistribution of economic and political power. Culturally, we should reject the token middle class and super rich ethics of silence, conformity, militarism, materialism, and corporate exploitation. We should advance investments in the collective community, strength, honor, and truth.
By Timothy
No comments:
Post a Comment