Donald trump. what is your take on him?

[tands]

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/893808765769846784

 

[JohnRoberts]

Saw an interesting pbs show about bots that basically are program trolls that scan  the internet to make a political point by replying to social media sites by posting replies with links that promote the bots preprogrammed agendas rather than thought out responses .  Really makes me wonder about this tread and I don't pay a lot of attention to it like I use to.

You can look at a forum members other posts to see if (s)he is an active DIY audio participant or a political troll. I have my suspicions when somebody almost exclusively posts in one or two political threads in the brewery, we aren't worth joining just to argue with nerds like me.  (But it isn't against the rules.)

I suspect there may be a generational aspect with kids more comfortable with videos than words.

JR 

 

[tands]

I originally joined because I was spending so much time drooling over emrr's RCA's. There's no way I can afford them, though. I don't consider myself particularly eloquent, in general. Pretty well informed though.

 

[bluebird]

I originally joined because I was spending so much time drooling over emrr's RCA's. There's no way I can afford them, though. I don't consider myself particularly eloquent, in general. Pretty well informed though.

Well it was a little weird when you first started posting because everyone knew you weren't a DIY'er but I think everyone is use to you now. Your just accepted as the "Link" guy in the Brewery... ;D

Are you an audio engineer... bedroom recordist, DJ?  Where are you from?

 

[tands]

Just some geek. I play a little guitar. I have some audio transformers lying around, but the cinemag inputs will cost 150-, and then the power supply...it's hard to get motivated about it, as there are always other things to do with the money, and the place I live doesn't have grounds on the power. 

 

[micaddict]

Does that ever cross your mind while taking a shower?

 

[tands]

It has, but I don't know if that's just paranoid. I just ignore it.  ...Oh, there is a GFCI in there, but hell if I know if it's set up correctly, it does the test reset but the maintenance history of this place is not all that reassuring..

 

[tands]

https://twitter.com/_Anunnery/status/881597842032283648

 

[tands]

This article says Clinton is religious, and now plans to preach.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/hillary-clinton-devotionals/535941/

 

[tands]

In public, top Hillary Clinton surrogate Neera Tanden said at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia that there’s no need to cut the federal corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent.

But in private, Clinton says something quite different to corporations and trade groups.

An 80-page report [link] compiled by Clinton’s own campaign of potentially damaging remarks she made behind closed doors was published by Wikileaks on Friday. It includes extensive comments on tax policy.

During an October 13, 2014, speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, Clinton told the audience that “A number of business leaders have been talking to my husband and me about an idea that would allow the repatriation of the couple trillion dollars that are out there. And you would get a lower rate — a really low rate — if you were willing to invest a percentage in an infrastructure bank.”

Clinton has repeatedly called for increased spending on U.S. infrastructure, but has never specified where the needed revenue would come from.

In a speech the previous month to the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, Clinton also said that a lower rate for all corporate profits regardless of where they are earned “certainly could be on the table” as long as that was “part of a broader package.” However, she specified that “if all you do is lower the rates” that “there’s a price to pay” in terms of lower tax revenue.

American multinational corporations are currently stashing a staggering $2.4 trillion in profits — about 14 percent of the size of the entire U.S. economy — overseas. Multinationals are required by U.S. law to pay the statutory 35 percent tax on profits they earn anywhere on earth, but the tax is not assessed until the profits are brought back to the U.S.

This has allowed Corporate America to essentially hold U.S. tax revenue hostage, refusing to pay its taxes until Americans become so desperate that they will cut a deal giving multinationals a special new tax rate.

more

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/hillary-clinton-privately-pitched-corporations-on-really-low-tax-rate-for-money-stashed-abroad/

 

[tands]

More than 75 documents, including intriguing text messages and discussions about payments to scientists, were posted for public viewing early Tuesday morning by attorneys who are suing Monsanto on behalf of people alleging Roundup caused them or their family members to become ill with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. The attorneys posted the documents, which total more than 700 pages, on the website for the law firm Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, one of many firms representing thousands of plaintiffs who are pursuing claims against Monsanto. More than 100 of those lawsuits have been consolidated in multidistrict litigation in federal court in San Francisco, while other similar lawsuits are pending in state courts in Missouri, Delaware, Arizona and elsewhere. The documents, which were obtained through court-ordered discovery in the litigation, are also available as part of a long list of Roundup court case documents compiled by the consumer group I work for, U.S. Right to Know.

It was important to release the documents now because they not only pertain to the ongoing litigation, but also to larger issues of public health and safety, while shedding light on corporate influence over regulatory bodies, according to Baum Hedlund attorneys Brent Wisner and Pedram Esfandiary.“This is a look behind the curtain,” said Wisner. “These show that Monsanto has deliberately been stopping studies that look bad for them, ghostwriting literature and engaging in a whole host of corporate malfeasance. They [Monsanto] have been telling everybody that these products are safe because regulators have said they are safe, but it turns out that Monsanto has been in bed with U.S. regulators while misleading European regulators.”

Esfandiary said public dissemination of the documents is important because regulatory agencies cannot properly protect public and environmental health without having accurate, comprehensive and impartial scientific data, and the documents show that has not been the case with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and the active ingredient glyphosate.

When reached for comment, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers said, “This trove marks a turning point in Monsanto’s corporate life. They show Monsanto executives colluding with corrupted EPA officials to manipulate and bury scientific data to kill studies when preliminary data threatened Monsanto’s commercial ambitions, bribing scientists and ghostwriting their publications, and purchasing peer review to conceal information about Roundup’s carcinogenicity, its toxicity, its rapid absorption by the human body, and its horrendous risks to public health and the environment.”

“We can now prove that all Monsanto’s claims about glyphosate’s safety were myths concocted by amoral propaganda and lobbying teams,” Kennedy continued. “Monsanto has been spinning its lethal yarn to everybody for years and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers. It’s shocking no matter how jaded you are! These new revelations are commiserate with the documents that brought down big tobacco.”

more

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/just-released-docs-show-monsanto-executives-colluding-corrupted-epa-officials-manipulate-scientific-data.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

 

[tands]

Saw an interesting pbs show about bots that basically are program trolls that scan  the internet to make a political point by replying to social media sites by posting replies with links that promote the bots preprogrammed agendas rather than thought out responses .  Really makes me wonder about this tread and I don't pay a lot of attention to it like I use to.

Oh you reminded me. Don't automatically believe what pbs says either, fazer.

The PBS television program Frontline selectively edited an interview with a single-payer health insurance advocate, and film footage of people protesting in support of single-payer, to make it look as though they were advocating a public option instead. The public option proposal would have offered individuals a government-run health insurance program as an alternative to the mandatory purchase of private health insurance -- a completely different proposal than universal, single-payer health insurance. The Frontline report shows footage of single-payer advocate Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program, and a group of people protesting in favor of a single-payer plan. Flowers is heard saying members of her group were shut out of a Congressional hearing, but the program never mentions the single-payer concept. Instead, viewers are led to believe that Flowers and the protesters were referring to a public option concept, since that was the only progressive proposal discussed in the program. Frontline effectively made it look as though single-payer advocates did not even exist. It's not the first time Frontline has pushed single-payer out of the debate, either. When they did the same thing last year and were called on it, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler attributed the omission to a tight deadline and called it a "missed opportunity."

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/2010/04/9022/pbs-edits-out-single-payer-proposal

JJ: Without asking you to relive the experience, what was the core difference between the healthcare reality you researched and reported, and the one that appeared in the final version of Sick Around America, such that you had to take your name off it?

TRR: I don’t think the problem is that I was biased. I mean, I’ve made two other healthcare films for Frontline, and they hired me for the third one, so I don’t think they would have considered me biased.

You know, people disagree on healthcare policy. It’s a topic that some people are ferociously excited about. We have the richest, most powerful country in the world, but we definitely don’t have the best healthcare system, and we should, with the money we spend, and the training we have for docs and nurses. So people are looking for ways to fix this, and, you know, it gets partisan, it gets controversial.

What happened on this film is after we finished the reporting, Frontline producers and bosses up in Boston put together, edited a film and wrote a script. I didn’t see any of this, and by the time I saw it, I thought it was wrong. And we talked about it; they listened to me. They didn’t want to make any changes, so I said, well, you can’t put me in the film, and they said fine.

JJ: Now, did you find factual inaccuracies, or was it a question of—

TRR: No, I didn’t find factual inaccuracies. In the part of the film that I was in, I don’t think there was anything factually inaccurate. It wasn’t that. They kind of steered the logic of their film in a certain way. They did a very good job of explaining problems with American healthcare. They said they didn’t want to mention any solutions. But then at the end of their film, they talk about the idea of mandating everybody to buy insurance from the private insurance industry, and the interesting thing is, they don’t see that as suggesting a solution. To me, that was suggesting a solution, and I don’t think it’s the solution that represents what we found when we went around the world. So that’s what I told them.

But I think one of the reasons that they don’t understand all the criticism of the film is because they genuinely think they were just reporting news and not proposing a solution. I noticed the FAIR write-up of the film criticized them for picking this one solution. But the people at Frontline would still say oh, no, no, we didn’t pick any solution.

http://fair.org/home/mandating-everybody-to-buy-insurance-was-not-the-solution-we-found/

 

[bluebird]

Just some geek. I play a little guitar. I have some audio transformers lying around, but the cinemag inputs will cost 150-, and then the power supply...it's hard to get motivated about it, as there are always other things to do with the money, and the place I live doesn't have grounds on the power. 

All good dude. Not having enough money to buy real stuff is why this whole DIY thing got started in the first place...if you ever do decide to start putting something together, your in the right place

 

[tands]

Thank you, bluebird. 

The United States is an enormously wealthy country. In 2015, total household wealth stood at $71.3 trillion.

...

The owners of this wealth, or capital, capture around 30 percent of the income produced by the country every year. This income flows to them, not because they work for it, but merely because they own income-generating assets like real estate, equity, and debt. In 2015, total US capital income was around $4.8 trillion.

If this unearned portion of the national income was distributed equally to every individual in society, then each person would receive around $15,000 of income per year in addition to whatever else they receive from working. For a family of four, this dividend alone would bring their household income to $60,000 per year.

The problem is that wealth and capital income are not distributed evenly. In 2014, the average wealth of the bottom half was $349. For the top one percent, it was over $16 million.

This extraordinarily unequal distribution of wealth causes the nation’s capital income to also be distributed in a very uneven manner. In 2014, the bottom half had an average capital income of $826. For the top one percent, it was over $750,000.

Rich people in our society don’t just have high capital income levels. They also have high capital income shares. That is, a large portion of the income collected at the top of our society comes from capital rather than from labor. In 2014, just 5.1 percent of the bottom half’s income came from capital. For the top one percent, around 58.6 percent of income came from capital.

It is worth emphasizing just how much income at the top of society comes from passive ownership of investments rather than from working. The top 0.01 percent of individuals in society have an average income of $28 million. Three-fourths of that income, or $21 million, came from capital in 2014.

If we want to get serious about creating a fair and egalitarian society, we must confront capital directly. Wage levels are important. Benefit levels are important. But getting those things right will not be enough so long as nearly one-third of the national income flows out passively to a handful of people at the top of society.

Current liberal efforts to tackle wealth inequality are woefully inadequate. Policies aimed at building the assets of low-income families, the typical approach to this issue, rarely succeed on their own terms and, even if they did succeed, would only be an insignificant drop in the bucket. For wealth and capital income to become more fairly distributed throughout society, the ownership of existing assets must be reordered towards that end.

http://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/08/05/if-we-care-about-inequality-we-must-confront-capital/

 

[dmp]

Current liberal efforts to tackle wealth inequality are woefully inadequate.

Obama and the Dems increased taxes on high incomes with the ACA. This is one of the main reasons wealthy conservatives hated it. Progressive taxes are the predominate method to curb wealth inequality.
Liberals also opposed the Bush tax cuts, which stoked the wealth inequality we have today.
Voters keep undermining the efforts to put the country back on course by voting in Republicans. Blame the voters.

It's going to end badly, but that's what you are rooting for, right tands?

 

[tands]

Obamacare required everyone buy health insurance from a for profit corp. I'll blame the people making the policies, thanks, including sellout huckster Obama.  Oh, yeah, and Obama  renewed those Bush tax cuts when they expired. These people are not on your side, dmp, they just need your help temporarily. Lmao.

The study, released in January, found that the revenue Medicare Advantage plans received in 2010 exceeded the amount they paid out for medical care by a hefty 30 percent. At more than $2,000 per enrollee per year, that probably topped $20 billion dollars, nearly all from federal payments, not enrollee premiums. The study relied on Medicare Advantage billing data obtained from three large insurers across 36 states, a type of data the government doesn’t yet release.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/upshot/medicare-advantage-spends-less-on-care-so-why-is-it-costing-so-much.html

 

[dmp]

"At the signing ceremony, Obama said passage of the law was propelled "by the fact that tax rates for every American were poised to automatically increase on January 1st." If that had happened, "the average middle-class family would have had to pay an extra $3,000 in taxes next year," he said. "That wouldn't have just been a blow to them; it would have been a blow to our economy, just as we're climbing out of a devastating recession."

Obama declared: "I refused to let that happen. And because we acted, it's not going to. In fact, not only will middle-class Americans avoid a tax increase, but tens of millions of Americans will start the new year off right by opening their first paycheck to see that it's actually larger than the one they get right now."

He said he would not have signed the bill if it did not include "other extensions of relief that were also set to expire." Among other provisions, he cited the extensions of unemployment benefits and tuition tax credits, as well as new tax incentives for businesses.

Obama acknowledged that "there are some elements of this legislation that I don't like," and some that congressional Republicans and Democrats don't like. "That's the nature of compromise, yielding on something each of us cares about to move forward on what all of us care about," he said. "And right now, what all of us care about is growing the American economy and creating jobs for the American people." "

Compromise. Obama was against the tax cuts for the very wealth but needed to compromise. The Republicans are blatantly against what you're preaching, while Democrats have been able to do only a little in opposition. It's hard when the public is poorly informed and votes in the party that is blatantly against their best interest (to the 90% anyway).
I'm not expecting to change your mind with all the propaganda you read on the web. Maybe Trump is the leader this country deserves.
Btw, Obama wanted a public option but couldn't do it.  Think your man Trump is for a public option? Have you read the dumbsh*t he's said about health care? If your goal is just to not have (or afford) health care, keep up your shilling for the Republicans.

"Insurance is, you’re 20 years old, you just graduated from college, and you start paying $15 a month for the rest of your life and by the time you’re 70, and you really need it, you’re still paying the same amount and that’s really insurance."

 

[tands]

Sellout huckster, just like I said above.

Have the dems propose a middle class tax cut, let the Bush tax cuts expire, have the republicans try to vote against a middle class tax cut. This didn't happen because it wasn't the goal, the goal was to keep the Bush tax cuts for the rich. He wasn't a leader, just a flunkie.

https://twitter.com/BenghaziExpert/status/894665362310037505

 

[tands]

Btw, Obama wanted a public option but couldn't do it.

Lmao, got a link for him ever saying that? Please do share it.

Afaik he traded the public option away to the hospitals early in the debate, to keep them from running ads against his insurance industry sellout scheme (Obamacare). After he had campaigned (to be elected) on a 'public plan'. Which his team later denied meant 'public option' when it came time to support it. And, you do remember that no republican votes were needed to pass Obamacare?

What a joke.

 

[dmp]

The Democrats got crushed in 2010 if you forgot. And it wasn't because people were mad they didn't expand medicare into a public option.
People in this country vote at the polls and at the cash register. And a majority vote by staying home.
The Trump / Republicans you're shilling for are doing everything they can to kill entitlements and extract further wealth from the 90%.
Starting with Reagan's "government is the problem" and the Norquist "starve the beast" strategy, they've cut revenue and let the debt spiral up. Once it gets ugly, they can radically scale back Gov spending and cut SS, medicare, medicaid, and any health benefit. They've been able to hoard wealth themselves (and build apocalypse bunkers). As the ACA showed, once the public gets an entitlement, it's nearly impossible politically to take it away. But with a government is severe fiscal stress, they'll be able to make some radical changes.
As much entertainment you get from the anti-Democrat propoganda, they are the only ones standing up for the middle & lower class.
When you're looking back in a decade or so and things in this country are much worse off, remember you were fighting for the wrong side when it mattered.