May Day 1986 to The Present:
From Celebrating a Wedding to entering the Unknown
Archetypal Research Metaphysician's Office Opens Today in Greensboro, North Carolina!
Joseph H. Bryan-Royster, Ph.D., Msc,D,
Saturday, May 1, 2021
Saturday, February 6, 2021
In the USA: How to Demolish Oligarchy in 3 Easy Steps...
How to demolish the oligarchy in 3 easy steps
American democracy has been tainted by lobbying and corporate interests. How do we fix it? Blow it all up
By MICHAEL LIND
APRIL 24, 2015 1:59PM (UTC)
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” That was the motto of Jacksonian democracy. I’m generally not a fan of Jacksonian politics in general, but Jacksonian hostility to “class legislation,” or different policies for different classes and categories of citizens, is an idea that people on left, right and center can embrace. Case in point: We need to replace a bewildering miscellany of tax and economic security programs targeted at different constituencies with a few simple and universal policies that are identical for every Americans, rich, poor and middle class.
Let’s start with health care. Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, we Americans now have a means-tested program for the poor, Medicaid, divided between the federal government and the states; another means-tested, state-based program for children, SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program); a purely federal system for the elderly, Medicare; employer-based health insurance subsidized by the tax code; a system of tax-subsidized individual health insurance for working-age people purchased through exchanges; and the Veterans’ Administration, a separate system for retired military personnel. And those are only the major public health care programs.
That’s right. We have six separate, major American health care programs, with different streams of revenue and based on different systems. Medicaid and Medicare are single-payer, multiple provider. The Veterans Administration is single-payer/single-provider. The ACA exchanges are based on an individual mandate. Medicare and the VA system and the subsidy to employer-provided health insurance provided by the federal tax code are purely federal policies. Medicaid and the exchanges and SCHIP are partly federal, partly state-based.
Are you still with me, class? Quiz tomorrow.
America’s health care policies are a dog’s breakfast. America’s retirement policies are a dog’s breakfast that a dog barfed up later.
We have a universal, federal public defined benefit (DB) system: Social Security. We have federal tax subsidies to employer-based DB pensions. And that’s not all. We have a variety of tax-favored private defined contribution (DC) systems, including IRAs and 401(k)s. Oh, and most public employees—teachers, fire fighters, police—are covered by separate, public DB pension plans—huge pools of state-controlled money frequently raided by state legislators or milked by finance-industry friends of corrupt state governors and mayors.
By my count, that’s four distinct major retirement systems in the U.S.
Education? We have public provision: public K-12 and public community colleges and state universities. Outside of this system of direct public educational provision, we have a separate system of federal student loans. And a third system of federal grants. And because three incompatible systems of aiding higher education are not enough—this is America!—we have yet a fourth, completely different system of tax-favored college savings accounts. America’s system of funding higher education is not quite as insanely complicated as our health care and retirement systems. But we’re getting there
The political scientist Steven Teles calls this kind of baroque public policy “kludgeocracy.” Another way to describe it would be that Rube Goldberg gets elected and promotes various goals—health care, retirement security, educational access—by means of needlessly elaborate contraptions involving candles, levers, and gerbils running on wheels.
Who benefits from this complexity? Lobbyists, tax preparers, accountants, and rent-seeking parasites in the private sector who figure out how to game these needlessly elaborate systems to skim money from taxpayers and rate payers. Complexity is the friend of corruption. Simplicity, on the other hand, promotes democracy. So here’s a suggestion, in the spirit of Jacksonian frontier violence as well as Jacksonian democracy: Blow it up.
Blow it all up. Blow up retirement policy, health care policy, and education policy. Replace them with simple, universal, purely federal policies that are the same for everybody, no matter what your income or age or state of residence.
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
Total demolition is not necessary. We can pick one or two of the existing systems in each area and expand them and universalize them, while demolishing the other policies.
Let’s start with health care policy. What should stay and what should go?
In good Jacksonian fashion—“equal rights for all”—we prefer universal programs which treat all citizens of all economic classes identically to means-tested programs based on income. So we will keep Medicare and Obamacare (the exchanges) and get rid of the means-tested programs, Medicaid and SCHIP. It also makes no sense to maintain a separate medical system for retired military personnel, and recent scandals have cast doubt on the argument that the VA is a model of good medical practice. So let’s scrap the VA as well.
We could combine universal Obamacare for working-age people with universal Medicare for the elderly. Or we could choose between two universal, lifelong systems: universal, lifelong Medicare or universal, lifelong Obamacare.
The main problem with U.S. health care is not on the payer side, but on the provider side—the Big Pharma oligopoly, the hospital oligopoly and the physician cartel use their monopoly power to extort excessive payments from American society. The solution, used even by countries like Switzerland with purely private, individual-mandate systems, is “all-payer regulation”—the conversion of the medical-industrial sector from a group of price-gouging profiteers into a publicly-regulated utility with regulated prices. As long as medical prices are regulated and profiteering drug companies, hospitals and doctors are reined in, then health care will be affordable whether you have lifelong universal Medicare or lifelong universal Obamacare.
Next let’s blow up American retirement policy. Let’s begin by phasing out employer defined benefit (DB) pensions. Your retirement income, like your health care access, should not depend on particular employers.
The biggest employer pensions are those of state employees. Many state employees were left out of the Social Security system in 1935 because state public pension systems already existed. That was 80 years ago. It’s the 21st century. All American workers—public and private alike—should be part of a single universal retirement system, independent of particular employers.
If we get rid of tax-favored pensions from public and private employers alike, we are left with a public DB pension—Social Security—and various private defined contribution (DC) plans like IRAs and 401(k)s. Most other democracies have a mix of both systems. We can as well. Let’s have a two-tier system: Social Security plus a federal, tax-favored DC plan on top of it (preferably one less easily gamed by sleazy, fee-skimming money managers). The left and right can fight over the relative proportions of Social Security and the tax-favored defined contribution plan. But progressives and conservatives might be able to agree to phase out public and private defined benefit pensions.
Education policy? Here, too, there is a need for incineration, followed by reconstruction.
The student loan system has turned out to be one of the biggest policy errors in American history—saddling students with debt while enriching bankers and indirectly subsidizing bloated university administrations. So let’s get rid of federal student loans.
Let’s get rid of Pell grants, too. Pell grants go to students who can’t afford to pay for college. But this misdiagnoses the problem, which is affordability on the provider side, not lack of income on the part of the student. We already have a system of public community colleges and state universities. Why not make admission free to all students who get in, as President Obama has suggested in the case of community colleges? We don’t charge students admission to public K-to-12 education. We pay for it with taxes. Let’s have a taxpayer-funded K-16 system.
Most American students go to public institutions of higher education. What about the minority of students who go to private colleges and universities? Wealthy private universities, like Yale and Harvard (I went to the former, and have taught at the latter) could afford free admission for everyone, not just the needy. If their greed leads them to continue to soak middle-class and upper-class students, at least the Ivies and other private universities can provide scholarships for low-income students. Private universities are tax-exempt institutions. They ought to act like charities, not hedge funds or for-profit conglomerates. So here’s an idea: Limit tax-exempt status to private universities with free tuition for all students. If schools want to charge tuition, let them be taxed as for-profit corporations.
We have now, in our thought experiment, blown up and burned down American health care policy, American retirement policy, and American higher education policy. We have then built, upon the smoldering ruins of present-day complexity, a new, simple, universal, purely national system that is the same for every citizen, rich and poor.
In health care, there is only universal, lifelong Medicare or lifelong Obamacare—a single federal program with portable benefits, the same for everybody, with no role for the states or private employers at all. Simple.
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
In retirement policy, there are only two universal federal programs: Social Security, and a simple, universal defined contribution private savings plan on top of it.
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
In higher ed policy, we now have two simple systems of free higher education. All public community colleges and state universities now offer free tuition, paid for by state taxes and federal grants. Tax-exempt private colleges and universities also offer free tuition, paid for out of their tax-favored endowments.
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
Fantasy? In the short term, sure. The well-paid parasites who profit from complexity will see to that. But there are two kinds of politics: Moving the ball and moving the goal-posts. This is about moving the goal-posts. This is about the next generation, not the next election.
Rome was not built in a day, and the antiquated, crumbling, rat-infested fire hazard that is American public policy will not be condemned, demolished and replaced by a clean, modern, solid structure overnight. But the sooner we start the demolition, the better. In the meantime, “Equal rights for all, special privileges for none” would make a good campaign slogan in 2016.
Editor's Note: 2022 & Beyond too - JDHWB-R
MICHAEL LIND
Michael Lind is the author of more a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Politico, The Financial Times, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, Salon, and The International Economy. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The National Interest.
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
PINK FLOYD... High Hopes (Ringing of the Division Bell)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jMlFXouPk8
Lyrics
Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun
Along the Long Road and on down the Causeway
Do they still meet there by the Cut
There was a ragged band that Followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay
The grass was greener
The light was brighter
With friends surrounded
The nights of wonder
Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide
At a higher altitude with flag unfurled
We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of world
Encumbered forever by desire any ambition
There’s a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we’ve been so many times
The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river
Forever and ever
Writer/s: WATERS, ROGER/GILMOUR, DAVID JON
Publisher: Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., IMAGEM U.S. LLC
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun
All start when magnets were miracles.
All start when we were only kids.
When the world is a new things for us.
When the mind and the genius of this children was free.
But all things go wrong when the bells of the division start to ring.
The division of adults.
The innocence of children is lost when growing, they can form opinions.
Different opinions become people divided.
Seems like if to David Gilmour doesn’t like the way these things happen.
When he was young maybe he have high hopes that life don’t respect.
We can see more of this in another song too. I refer to Shine on you crazy diamond.
Along the Long Road and on down the Causeway
Do they still meet there by the Cut
Maybe Longroad and the Causeway was real places in Cambridge, that was Gilmoure’s hometown.
He ask if people that remain there, while he go away to reach his dream, stay there now.
The Cut happens when Gilmour leave his hometown to follow is career in music.
There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay
If you don’t accomplish your dreams soon, you will get weighed down by the responsibilities of the adults life, like family, job and money debt. All this social pressures try to tie the child to the ground.
Essentially, all start when we are put in school. All dreams slowly disappear, and we start a fight with the world.
But the life proceed inesorably in this way for everyone. And the slow decay starts. And is hard to resiste to him.
A reference to Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver is tied to the ground by Lilliputians, a big numbers of miniature, “small creatures”.
The grass was greener
The light was brighter
With friends surrounded
The nights of wonder
When we were young all things were simple. And this way to be simple, made all things beautiful and with a shine and purity that we remember in this way for the rest of our life.
The green fields where we ran were greener that the fields of grass that we see now. The colors were more intense and vivid.
And the light. Oh, the light don’t seems the same light. The light was a lot more brighter that this. The sun is different in this days.
And the best things of that times, were the friends. The people that make all that things really important. My friends were like me. And i was like them. This is the best part.
The real important thought.
And the nights. The special places when we can be completely ourself. When we were free. Really completely free. Like our minds. To discover, to explore and to wonder. When the world show to us the best things.
Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide
The world was beautiful in the past. In our youth. And aging, is inevitable. You can remember the past and feel that everything was better. But you know that you can have only a glimpse of how it was.
The life continue. Something is growing. Inside of us. You can continue to dream and take steps towards the freedom of our youth.
But is not the same type of freedom. The purity of our youth can’t come back again completely. You can be close to that feeling. But our aging process make ourself really different.
We are unable to be free like we were in our youth.
At a higher altitude with flag unfurled
We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of world
How beautiful was be young. We were really free. And we can reach a higher altitude with our mind, Because our thoughts were free. With all the power that we can have, and with all the flags unfurled, because we were proud of ourself.
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There’s a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we’ve been so many times
The desire and ambition are forever a costant company in the human being. Is inside our nature. The progress of umanity depends in great part by this two feelings.
They seem so tremendous, but they become temible only when they lead to the drak side of humanity.
Is a constant process in our lifes. Is our nature to want more, and want to become more.
We watch the horizon forever. We explore the deepest ocean and the farest star. We want to know more. Is our nature.
And we know that is hard. But we must do it.
Maybe Gilmour talk about High Hopes too, because is the last song of this that they think be their last album.
The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river
Forever and ever
Again here Gilmour talks about his youth. But he talks a little more and say that life is like a river. The flow go only in one direction. Forever and ever.
This is how our life works. We can’t change this.
Conclusion
“This is the best of all possible worlds”. Voltaire writes this in his novel Candide: or, The Optimist (1762).
We can think up different worlds, but they wouldn’t be plausible. Everything is in balance here and now. So life is what it is. And it will always be this way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eje4IrmSVJI
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
No More Presidents of USA... Where do we go from here?
Do we need a head of state? Does the United States of America need a president? Support Renegade Cut through Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/renegadecut
#2020election #president https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-divis... https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/T... https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/jleg/v... https://www.harpercollins.com/product... https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2015... https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/p... https://www.insider.com/list-of-most-... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... https://www.archives.gov/founding-doc... https://www.thoughtco.com/number-of-p... https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/stati... https://www.britannica.com/list/9-us-...
Following the events of January 6 at the United States Capitol, we need to figure out how to prevent this from happening again. Support Renegade Cut through Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/renegadecut
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Legal Tactics Against Fascism: https://spencersunshine.com/2020/08/2...
MAGA and Fascism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4G7a...
Sunday, November 29, 2020
OVERLAND TOUR: ORIGINAL DOWNLOAD VISION!
~ Joseph the Lamplighter, March 21, 2019 ~
Inaugurating Magic Coat at the Vernal Equinox
One People of Earth IN Community
Multidirectional Overland Tour
Interfacing Caravans: 2016-2024
Multiple Starting Points and Stops at many established, new, and forming Intentional Communities...
Vehicles joining caravans encouraged to convert to fuels beyond petroleum in the course of our journey together...
Purpose is to share an idea of building a One Earth Community Switchboard: created to network decentralized hubs in sustainable communities evolving as an alternative solidarity economy...
Self-governance through the process of consensus decision making on the local level IN Community is fostered...
Collective monitoring of people elected to represent constituents at every level in this Republic to ensure transparency in legislation and for calling out actions in variance to local consensus, even to the point of recall elections if necessary...
Interfacing with indigenous peoples on the 5th Longest Walk from La Jolla, CA to Washington, DC in solidarity with the raising of awareness about drug use in native communities and inner cities...
Goal of multidirectional overland tour is to BE the catalyst for spiritual, political, and economic transformation; reaching critical mass during the next two years and moving across the face of Gaia...
We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for... and we’re done waiting!
JOIN US AT ANY INTERFACE POINT ALONG CARAVAN ROUTES OF OUR JOURNEY TOGETHER AS ONE LIFE IN SYNTHESIS. THE TIME IS NOW!
Released Today as an Open Intention of Heart for Collective Brainstorming into Manifestation as One People of Earth
IN Community
Namaste'
I AM, also known as Lamplighter (One of Many Aspects IN Source)
or Joseph David Henry Ware Bryan-Royster
Inspired by the OPAL Tour, October 25th-December 15th, 2013
Originally Posted from Vision Download November 29, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2020
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
STREET URCHINS ARE EVERYWHERE IN AMERICA!
Pink Floyd - On The Turning Away (1989-07-15) FM
blooms in October, 2020
Crossville, Tennessee, USA
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