The Love Chronicles

Our Nation; what our youth know about it!

Posted: May 25, 2014 in News and politics, Uncategorized
Tags: congress, education, education reform, foreign policy, government, politics, teachers, world war

Our nations independence was July 4, 1776. Eight out of ten people on the street could not tell me the year, and almost half could not tell me the damn day! Which means they have no idea what July 4th is all about. The ones that did mostly referenced the movie Independence Day. When asked about why, most said it was over tea. After the successful conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British government decided to make its North American colonies pay more of the costs of governing and defending them. Over the next 12 years Britain imposed a series of new taxes and other revenue-raising measures on the colonies that aroused heated opposition. The American colonists resented the trade regulations by which Britain utilized American economic resources to its own advantage, and they likewise resented their lack of representation in the British Parliament. British intransigence to these grievances spurred a growing desire for independence on the Americans’ part. When was the civil war? The civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865. Not one single person was able to tell me the correct answer to that question. Most thought Washington was president during that conflict! They also thought the war was about political and economic issues not connected to slavery and that the only reason Lincoln freed the slaves was to help win the war and for no other reason. The truth is in the 1860 presidential election campaign led by Abraham Lincoln, he opposed the expansion of slavery into United States’ territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8% for the six.[5] Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln’s inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on “King Cotton” that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America. Watch the movie that came out a year or so ago about Lincoln. It is historically accurate and a good history lesson.

The history of WWI and WWII, well I might as well have been asking questions about molecular biology. No one knew when, why, or how we got into each. WWI began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. The great powers in Europe had been at each others throats, so to speak, for about 4 decades. The defining moment that started WWI was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, an ethnic Serb and Yugoslav nationalist from the group Young Bosnia, which was supported by the Black Hand, a nationalist organization in Serbia. The more immediate cause for the war was tensions over territory in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary competed with Serbia and Russia for territory and influence in the region and they pulled the rest of the Great Powers into the conflict through their various alliances and treaties. WWII was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, though some related conflicts in Asia began before 1939. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people, from more than 30 different countries. In a state of “total war”, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust, the Three Alls Policy, the strategic bombing of enemy industrial and/or population centers, and the first use of nuclear weapons in combat, it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities. This made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history. The Alls Policy was something I was not familiar with. It was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three “alls” being kill all, loot all, destroy all! I will stop there, as my conversations with individuals about Nam and current or recent conflicts is something I am still studying. The history of the world in general gets into the age of the earth, evolution, religion, and would take volumes, plus is not a popular subject where I come from. So I may tackle that, as I have some strong opinions based on facts, science, and yes, the bible, but does not need to be discussed to prove my current point. My point is, people I talk to have never taken courses in local, state, and federal forms of government. They have no accurate sense of our history, or how we came into being. This includes people who are proud to cite parts of the constitution, especially certain amendments, but have no idea of how or what was going on when they were drafted. They think they do, and are sure they have the straight of it, but when pressed, actually have no clue. These, I believe, represent the majority of our voters. It is also why we follow whoever inundates us with the most information prior to our elections, and couches this information in a way that catches our imagination, but is neither factual nor true in even a minor way in most cases. Yet we follow like lemmings with no true idea of why we are running off of a cliff by the millions.

I have no problem with rich people; I think the fact that you can become rich is part and parcel of what America is about. But it cannot happen at the expense of the vast majority of the American public, the poor, or the middle class! Their spending power is what makes the economy work, now, in the past, and in the future. If they don’t have extra coin in their jeans to spend, our economy will not grow. Plain and simple folks, it is how it is. So basing a company on profit only at the expense of the worker will cause economic failure. Shipping jobs overseas, hiding money offshore to keep from paying taxes here at home, this all has to stop, must stop. Most people do not even understand the difference between the national debt and deficit, they think it is one and the same. They also do not understand that the deficit comes first before the debt even comes into consideration, and the middle class pays the bill, not big business, and it never has except to create a growing prosperous middle class, not disassembling it. Understanding this means you have to also be a student of history, a student of the local, state, and federal governments and how it is supposed to work. Without both you cannot understand economics. And listening to a powerful rich person is also a mistake. Study after study shows most know nothing outside the realm of the business they are succeeding in. This means they should not be advising you, so you need to advise yourself. So take a careful look, if you cannot see the majority of the population thriving, not just existing, then the policies that make that scenario a reality are absolutely wrong.

There is a dumbing down of America. We have dropped to the bottom of the pile of industrialized nations in education. We are not one of the countries where the population is happy with its countries policies, and we are fast sliding down that list like an out of control bobsled on the Matterhorn. If you are a conservative, you need to round off the sharp corners, if you are a liberal, you may need to accept some realities that are harsher than you would like. But if you look at things with no preconceived notions, and try to improve the basic education I think is necessary, I firmly believe your decisions will be different, and better, regardless if your political beliefs are conservative, liberal, or other leanings that proliferate out there.

The Love Chronicles; Crymea or cry me a river.

Posted: April 1, 2014 in News and politics
Tags: big banks, congress, Crimea, government, IMF, politics

So Crimea, or cry me a river?

So, we supported the forceful overthrow of a democratically elected government because they were not kissing our ass properly. We are condemning a 98% vote by a people because it does not promote our agenda. Lets see, voting good, a democratic thing to do right. Well I guess not! We are spending a billion dollars, not to help out beleaguered citizens, but to make sure the bankers get theirs and control of the area reverts to the IMF. I thought bailouts were something we said, as a people, were bad. Does not look like our politicians give a damn about what we think!

Hell, I am not sure who is in the right here. Needs more study before I could make that determination. I do know that Crimea is full of ethnic Russians, and that it was part of what is now Russia long before even the Soviet Union came around. If you look at it’s history it had at some time been held by just about every major ethic group on the planet, starting with the Greeks in fifth century BC. So what I think I know is, what the hell business is of ours? It is in their backyard, it poses no threat, has no strategic significance, and the people seem to want Russian control, so there is no human rights issue. Should Russians be allowed to engage in border changes? Well jeez, what about Serbia and elsewhere in the world where we thought it was ok for us to the same. Just asking.

I guess my biggest bitch here is the billion dollars and the billions that will inevitably follow. If we have the ability to come up with this money, don’t we have some financial woes here at home? Doesn’t the fed have an obligation to repay the bonds it took out against the Social Security Fund as just one example of many? Most of you would argue to pay down the debt and I have no problem there either. Instead it is bailing out world banks and financing an IMF takeover of a region with your and my tax dollars. I don’t want to rekindle a cold war. I don’t want to rattle sabers or try to prove I swing the bigger stick! Ok, I know that there are other opinions out there, and I could be totally wrong. If I am, there is a comment section to this blog, use it. Or email if that is how you got it; I am never going to object to being educated.

The Love Chronicles; Inequality in the United States

Posted: March 12, 2014 in News and politics
Tags: big business, campaign reform, congress, education, government, healthcare costs, lobbyists, middle class, politics, poverty, special interests, teachers, unions

Inequality in the United States

Inequality overall is usually expressed as wealth or income gap. Regions (southern states is one example) also make a difference as does race and religion. Religion is a war generator, just as much as ethnic bias is. It indirectly has an effect on world economies and poverty. Education is no longer a guarantee of higher wages or even of employment, at least here in the United States of America!

Americans are living in an unequal society, more so than practically anytime in the last century. The income and wealth differences are greater in the good ole U.S.A. than in any democratic or developed country in the world. As Joe Friday used to say, “the facts, nothing but the facts.”

It is not as if we are condemned to watching all of this from the sidelines. All of these economic and demographic changes are embedded in a larger institutional and political story. In order to understand U.S. inequality and its growth over time, and in order to think about what we need to do to fix it, we need to focus on differences that matter. The simplest way to do this is to go back to our midcentury public policies that sustained both a floor for the bottom of the labor market and a ceiling for the top of it. This was done primarily with the power of unions, believe it or not, as they limited how much management could syphon off in pay and bonuses and other areas like buying back their own stock to manipulate profits for gain, but this puts money in the pockets of few, while money for increased wages and benefits is not even in the plan of a major corporation anymore. The work force was motivated because they were being treated fairly and able to transition to the middle class. The tax base on the top tier of income and profit was also at a much higher rate in the years after WWII, so that the government was able to more easily have funds to operate without creating a huge deficit. Now top tier taxes have dropped dramatically and our politicians are asking you and I to take up all the slack. This includes education, which in my opinion is a criminal act in itself. Some of the so-called 2% are crying that we should be glad we even have a job, and they feel like we are treating them like the Nazis treated the Jews. Actually said, I did not make that up.

Some people blame globalization and entities like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for this inequality. Yes, they are partly to blame, however the real result in globalization has been to bring about more equality to nations, but more inequality within them. We were the only major power after the war that did not have to rebuild an infrastructure destroyed by war. That and the fact that at the time fuel and power sources for industry were cheap and plentiful. However our spending started to increase dramatically starting with the Vietnam War while cheap plentiful fuel was getting harder to come by and also more expensive. Money in the world economy started flowing to countries with younger more energetic economies or who were rich in natural resources. This started narrowing the advantage we had in both trade and influence. What resulted was an economy that used the vast cheap labor pool and manufacturing available at lower costs on foreign soil to blackmail the American worker into working longer for less money, giving up things like unions, healthcare and retirement, in exchange for the company not to outsource their jobs, or moving the company itself overseas or to countries to the south.

We need Unions with their power restored to act for the worker as they once did until they were finally made ineffective by a systematic attack by a small percentage of the population whose avarice has no bounds, basically large corporations. Without unions, workers have no bargaining power at all. Over the years labor’s bargaining power collapsed as I explained previously. This all began with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which outlawed secondary labor actions (such as boycotts, or the picketing by workers not involved in the dispute) and undermined union security in so-called “right to work” states—especially in the South, the rural Midwest, and the mountain west. The Landrum-Griffith Act (1959) further constrained secondary labor actions and permitted non-members to vote in certification (or decertification) elections—essentially inviting employers to hire scabs, and then count scab votes against the fate of the unions. This is a direct result of big business buying the votes it needed to enact such legislation. An assault on unions was systematic, and the middle class and all workers, even those outside of the unions began to suffer. The net result is telling. Early in the century, the share of the American workforce which belonged to a union was meager, barely 10 percent of the labor force. At the same time, inequality was stark–the share of national income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans stood at nearly 40 percent. This gap widened in the 1920s. But in 1935 the New Deal granted workers basic collective bargaining rights; over the next decade union membership grew dramatically, followed by an equally dramatic decline in income inequality. This yielded an era of broadly shared prosperity, running from the 1940s into the 1970s. After that, however, unions came under attack—in the workplace, in the courts, and in public policy. As a result, union membership has fallen and income inequality has worsened—reaching levels not seen since the 1920s. Today’s unions are merely figureheads, they have no real power, they have been systematically stripped over the years by influence peddlers (lobbyists) that work for the elite who can afford to make policy with their wealth, to make even more wealth. Some suggest it is less than two percent of the population that control how the rest of us are going to live. It definitely is not a government for the people and by the people any longer. Well for 98% of us anyway! So look, if you knew that you were going to have to work almost twice as hard for about half the money, would you have agreed? If you knew that a huge portion of health insurance and retirement security was available to employees of corporations but was going to disappear without the protection of a union and that this would result in our elderly being more dependent on social security, medicare, and medicaid, would you still have a bad taste in your mouth about unions? And, of course, union decline contributes to inequality beyond the bargaining table or the paystub. But because public and private sector unions have been such a potent political force across the last century; their decline also undermines support for a wide range of public policies that might sustain working families or check corporate power.

The net effect is clear. For a generation after World War II, the economy and the wages of working Americans grew together—a clear and direct reflection of the bargaining power wielded by workers and their unions. From the early 1970s on, however, union strength fell—and with it the shared prosperity that it had helped to sustain. Labor productivity has almost doubled, but the median wage has grown only 4 percent. Let me repeat that, labor productivity has almost doubled; yet wages have only grown by 4 percent! The share of national income going to wages and salaries has slipped, while the share going to corporate profits has risen. Inequality has widened most dramatically for those who at an earlier point in our history or in any other democratic and industrialized setting would benefit the most from collective bargaining. You can boo hoo and nay say all you want but there is no denying that our country was growing as was our middle class and industry all with higher taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans with strong unions representing workers. Now you think that the average American should work two jobs to get out of poverty and thank the wealthiest for the fact they have jobs. Education suffers because most can’t afford to access it. The specter of poverty, jobs with no future, no advancement with a decent wage, drives people to do some pretty despicable things. This is human nature and we can fix it, we just have to wake up and pay attention to Joe Friday and not the swill being fed us by those who think of us as nothing more than a means to more profit. When we cannot service them anymore we are discarded and replaced. Is that the legacy you keep talking about? I sure hope not.

The solutions here are straightforward. We need to disentangle health care and pensions from job-based eligibility or participation. This would involve moving towards a sort of “Medicare for All” health care system and a system of universal and portable retirement accounts. I know how much negativity there is about the Affordable Care Act, but if you follow the money, it is the same money that does not want unions to thrive, or social programs to be funded, or a minimum wage increase. We of course need to reinvent our compensatory social programs (unemployment insurance, food stamps) so that they are a better match in terms of eligibility, coverage, and duration for the challenges faced by the current generation of working families. Remember that Social Security, among others, is a paid deduction that comes out of every paycheck you receive. You will probably not live long enough to get back what you put in most cases. Also that the federal government borrowed amounts that are described with words like trillion! Now that the bonds have come due, these same top tier lobbyist-funding czars have renamed them entitlements. That is money and a lobbyist talking out his ass, not the true state of affairs. Is there a problem with some people who do not deserve social programs, of course there are. But those are the problems we should be solving and not getting rid of a program that does not affect the deficit.

The concentration of wealth and incomes at the upper end of the scale is bad for our economy and bad for our democracy. Making headway on this front depends upon the redistribution of both economic and political resources, indeed any real progress on the economic side of the equation is likely to be slight or fragile unless we can sever the close relationship (made worse, but hardly invented by the Citizens United decision) between economic affluence and political influence.

Much higher taxes on the rich are the starting point here—both to sustain and to raise the revenues that make other inequality-fighting policies possible. The form of such taxes is as important as their rates: Taxes that penalize or restrain things like a financial transactions tax for instance, which could both raise money and encourage investment in more productive forms of economic activity. Changes in the tax code could be accompanied by checks on executive pay—either through more transparent and active forms of corporate governance or through public leverage. And efforts to chip away at concentration of wealth at the very top should be accompanied by efforts to build the wealth and assets of ordinary Americans.

Now Corporate America has also trained you to respond to the above paragraph by calling it socialism. It is a way to divert your attention from the truth. Were we a socialist republic after WWII? No we were not but corporate taxes were high, unions strong, and corporations and the working men and women were both doing well and getting better off each year. This is not the case today and the United States has the worst record of inequality on the entire planet! Japan and Germany, who surpass us, and most of the rest of the world economically, also have vastly lower inequality thresholds and support more and better social programs than we do. So I can’t say it enough, we rate right at the top of the list or bottom depending on how you want to look at it in rampant inequality on the world stage. I have heard the old proverb started by the gods of industry that if they do better it trickles down to you. Well what trickles down has been shipped overseas along with your job, or is in an offshore account. Dumbest saying I have ever heard. You have heard of lemmings? You say you want to leave a legacy for your children? Well unless you can figure out how to marry them off to about five or six families of royalty in the U.S., you’re just flat out of luck if the current trend continues.

The Love Chronicles: Just Some Thoughts

Posted: March 8, 2014 in News and politics
Tags: congress, Crimea, foreign policy, government, Putin, Ukraine

Just Some Thoughts

I know, OMG, right? I will try and refrain from politics and just try for some history, geography, and of course, some basic editorializing by yours truly. Hey, it’s my blog! Just been thinking about the human condition and trying to understand it.

Let’s start with Ukraine and the Crimea since it is in the news right now. I have been checking news reports from Crimea itself, most of the people there, as far as I can tell, are of ethnic Russian descent and feel like they are not treated the same as most of Ukraine’s citizenry. Now if you look at Crimea, basically it is a peninsula, connected to the main part of the country by a fairly narrow strip of land. The Crimea has always been an area of contention; today’s problems are actually old hat.

Way back in the 13^th century Crimea was the capital of the Golden Horde. Under the protection of the Ottoman Empire for about 300 years until Catherine the Great snatched it up in 1783. As you will see if you peruse the maps I have included, you will see that all of Ukraine has been passed around like vodka at a toga party. You will notice also that Ukraine shares a common border with Russia, and that it has changed in size and shape several times. During world wars it seemed to change owners much like a used car with bad brakes. So changing various political entities and countries have claimed the Ukraine and it’s peninsula off and on throughout history, leaving their stamp on the population. This in turn has caused confusion about who it is and what it stands for. This is my uneducated opinion of course, but I think accurate.

So not surprising that since Ukraine was a Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991 that this is still a pebble in the shoe of Mr. Putin, who is old school and used to be KGB right up to 1991 when it was still the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Wow, that was a mouthful! Hard to type too! Vladimir also has control issues, just look at him strut when he walks, and has to broadcast himself kicking some protagonists butt in a personal defense demonstration. If you poll Russians on who they voted for, you cannot get a lot of response, but out of the response you do get, very few people seemed to have voted for Vlad, but he still wins with comfortable majorities, go figure.

So what should we do? Well whatever we do it should not be trying to play the blame game. As I have stated, I think the President is weak when it comes to foreign policy, but part of that problem is our congress and president not speaking with one voice when it is critical that we do so. Recognizing when that needs to happen is something congress should know and do, but not this congress.

Do we have a right to interfere? That is the debate isn’t it? You see most of the demonstrators in Crimea wanting to return to Russian rule. So who are we to tell them different? Did Putin send in troops to protect ethnic Russians? I think not, my opinion is that he would like the borders of Russia to start to revert back to the way they were when it was the Soviet Union. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine. Crimea’s communist authorities proclaimed self-government in 1992, which ultimately led to the territory being granted expanded autonomous rights by Kiev. Just today they voted to return to Russian control, but of course that is not the way Kiev wants it. So just be aware that this author thinks that it is important not to let Putin have whatever he wants without opposition, he is a dangerous man. Better to pay attention now than later.

You Make Me Happy, When Skies are Gray

A blog I follow written by Joyce’s “Edwards” daughter. She and her husband are currently in Chengdu China. Michelle writes one of my favorite blogs about her adventures and daily life as the wife of a foreign service diplomat. She also works coordinating finding schools, helping out new arrivals to get their bearings. planning parties, outings, the real stuff that makes a place work. I encourage you to take a look.

In Search of the End of the Sidewalk

I got up this morning with high hopes. (I may not have been bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but wrapped in a fluffy pink robe and shuffling through to the kitchen to get Cheerios still counts as being “up,” even if not fully functional.) Why high hopes on this random day in February? Because I could see across the river, and seeing across the river means that the air pollution is down, which means, hope against all hope, we might see a ray or two of sunshine at some point today.

It may sound a bit ridiculous to be cheered by the sight of a river that is less than 100 yards from my apartment, but we’ve been weeks with a steady haze in Chengdu. For those of you who follow air quality indexes (two years ago I would have asked who in their right mind does that, but after a…

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Gallery — Posted: February 27, 2014 in Uncategorized

The Love Chronicles; Education In America Sucks

Posted: January 23, 2014 in Life
Tags: education, education reform, schools, teachers

American Education Sucks

A report out last week by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that U.S. students are falling further and further behind their peers in other countries.

Students in Latvia, Chile and Brazil are making gains in academics three times faster than American students, while those in Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia and Lithuania are improving at twice the rate.

The study’s findings support years of rankings that show foreign students outpacing their American peers in education. Students in Shanghai who recently took international exams for the first time showed up with exam scores higher than any other school system on the planet! In the same test, American students ranked 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading. I suspect even then the tested students did not come from inner city schools in our largest population centers.

Just 6 percent of U.S. students performed at the advanced level on an international exam administered in 56 countries in 2006. That proportion is lower than those achieved by students in about 30 other countries.

In a comparison of education in different countries, we find that many countries not only have a longer school day, but a longer school year. This gives teachers more opportunity to present new material.

Successful education in other countries has some things in common. They actively recruit teachers from the top 10% of the class, and they require all teachers to have a Masters degree. Instead of spending money on standardized testing they spend it on teacher education. Also, in order to attract competent teachers they pay them well and treat and respect them for the professionals they are, and allow them the freedom to know how to teach without being told how by someone who does not have their credentials. Additionally, each community, whether poor or affluent, is funded equally. I believe this to be one of the more important aspects of education and where we fail miserably.

We have turned our schools in the poorer areas of our inner cities, and elsewhere, into simply housing our youth to keep them off the streets, but not actually educating them. These schools have little to offer a student that actually wants an education. Studies show that even students with very high grade point averages do not do well in college because their education did not prepare them to compete at the college level. They do not even do well in junior colleges that have programs that are designed to help these very students. So unless you have a genius IQ and can educate yourself and learn at an accelerated rate once you reach an institution of higher learning, as the title suggests, your education coming out of a very large percentage of American schools, sucks!

We need to treat education for what it really is, the only way to end the inequality of our nations residents. Sure I rail against all the loopholes that in my opinion make the top 10% in this country tax dodgers. I also think that we subsidize big energy companies, you know the ones making billions in profits, for more money than it would take to fix our schools and fund them all equally no matter where they are situated. But no matter how you feel, be you left or right leaning, our school system is failing.

Ok, here is where I may get a little too radical for some of you. I don’t believe our schools should just be housing students. Students who don’t really want to be there and make it hard for the ones that do should be released. So I propose that school be a privilege, not a mandate. If you do not pay attention in class, are disruptive, or you have been caught breaking the law, the school has the right to not continue to educate you. It should be a privilege to go, and I do not mean everyone has to have a high IQ, only that they are using the school to the best of their ability. Now I know that a howl just went up, but this is one of the most insidious problems with large inner city schools. Gangs, drugs, intimidation, even of teachers, are the norm. We have to change this environment. We also need to have a way for students who have been “let go” to earn a way back in. Complicated, of course. Does this mean we will have more people wandering the streets of large cities with no way to earn a decent wage without resorting to crime, sadly yes. So this idea has to come with ideas about how to handle the problems associated with not using our schools as a place just to house our youth. Part of that, an important part, is what I have already mentioned, funding all schools equally. Paying teachers well and requiring a Masters degree to teach. This way you attract highly qualified professionals to the craft of education. Also we need to allow more freedom for the individual school and teachers to decide how to teach and what to teach. Teachers being the key word, not politicians or school boards who do not hold Masters degrees in teaching disciplines.

In our current situation, some form of testing is needed, and the new testing does seem to require the student to think not just learn how to pass the test. However, if what I propose is done, mandated testing would not be needed, and this money could be spent keeping teachers updated and in tune with an ever changing world in order for them to better enrich their students lives.

The Love Chronicles, Christmas 2013

Posted: December 24, 2013 in Life
Tags: Christmas, New Year, season greetings., well wishes

Merry Christmas 2013

Well people, another year has gone by. A great year for me! I know some of us are still trying to climb back up and out, but I have confidence in my friends and loved ones to always find the road and keep on truckin! My year started out great, got the two new bathrooms, roof replaced, new paint in and out, new carpeting, new windows, new shuttered wooden window coverings, new ceiling in kitchen with recessed lighting, and a new wall put up between the kitchen and my office space, and all finally complete. I did have to have them back a few times to adjust this, repaint that, and ask what the he—is that. Oh, also put a small landing and stairs going to the French doors in the back. Never use them, but hey, once I get the dining room and what I call the all-purpose room done, they will come in handy. I thought I would be done last year, but I think expensive thoughts which I have to be talked out of, but I did manage to get in a couple of more things I wanted done. Well basically stuff I knew I would have to do, you see. Those last two rooms are jobs I am doing myself, so have, of course, not been done! But it was a relief to know the house will not fall over, leak, and like that. Took out a bunch of trees that were endangering my house and my neighbors, plowed up the place and made it relatively flat. I can get free construction equipment as long as I am the operator. Sooo, the grass covers it up, but the three yards are a little roly poly places. I did manage to level my back yard, which was messed up when I bought the place, and that allowed me to put a couple of sheds back there with level flooring. I did not like the way the sprinklers were set up so had that redone this spring, I now have the greenest crab grass you ever saw! Ok your bored, I will move on.

Most of you know I took an extended vacation last summer with Jim Mahon on our bikes. There is a blog about our adventures on this blog site, if you are interested. We had some good times. Travelled a lot, mostly on our bikes. We parked Jim’s motorhome in Council. If you know Jim, then you also know he decided to buy a house in Council, then buy a gym and retool and start some pretty innovative programs, starts serving on the City Counsel this January, created an arts and crafts site on the internet and started an organization for the local artists to help them display and sell their creations. Are you not glad I brought Jim with me! He will not admit it, because I have tried, but I am taking credit for at least the initial push to get him to abandon his hermit ways. Our friends threw us a great party at the park; I was overjoyed at the great turnout. Some people travelled a long way to attend, and I really, really, appreciated it, as did Jim.

I finally finished, well at least the first part of what will probably be a two book series. Or maybe a really long novel, who knows. I never even know what the next chapter is going to say until I write it. I am just as surprised at what happens as anyone! By finished I mean the rough draft. I did one editing run myself, and then sent it to a few people to get some feed back. I added some stuff during the editing run and have basically been told to take it back out. After a reread I agree, so already done. The book started out as a hobby, but I am now considering doing some more work on it and maybe publishing. Depends on what kind of feedback I get. My wife loves it, but she would love it if all I had done was spilled and ink bottle on a stack of paper! It is already over 800 pages and 32 chapters, and I have just completed half of the story. It is sci-fi, so not the next great American novel. I do have an idea for a non-fiction, but I want to finish this first, then we will see.

Lets see, what can I bore you with now? I guess the last thing I want to include is that I have been blessed with a stupendous wife of 37 years, a daughter who got her Masters and has been a teacher now for a number of years. English, teaches the advanced classes, and then she specializes in reading disorders, so has a class in that category also. Keeps her on her toes. She used to also issue report cards to the parents. She would ask them to review homework and initial it. She would ask them to schedule regular hours for homework to be done, and then ask them to come in if she thought the student was falling behind, etc. Based on their participation, she issued grades. Of course the parents (the ones with failing grades) complained and the school asked her to stop. That was when she taught grade school. She can now teach up through junior college level or sophomore at a four year, which she did for a short period, but she likes junior high. Vivian and I are both retired, of course, so life is different, but I am not bored. Still have my big iron to ride, a 4 wheeler to get me to some place in the toolies, and plenty of cameras to take pics of it when I get there. So life is good, need to lose some more weight, Vivian needs to gain some, you would think we could figure out how to meet in the middle somehow. All of you take care; have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Love you all,

John & Vivian Love

The Love Chronicles, What I have been Saying

Posted: November 17, 2013 in News and politics
Tags: big banks, big business, campaign reform, congress, education, government, Insurance fraud, politics

Rambling

I really do put a lot of work into trying to put a factual face on what is going on. I even have two books on economics, one from each of the two different ideologies of how an economy should work. Totally confusing, by the way. One of Jim Mahon’s degrees gives him insight into this area and he got me the books. I do have the text of HR 3590, the Affordable Care Act on my desktop; refer to it all the time. I read and study different areas, and have for some time now, so I can try and understand from an informed place. There is a lot of myth out there that has been planted by, well big business. I was just talking to a good friend who accused me of always bashing big business. She stated as long as big business was making money she does ok. So as she said, big business needs to be healthy, but the middle class also needs to be healthy, and a dime or two in the pocketbook, is what makes big business healthy. Henry Ford created the middle class. He did this by paying his factory workers three times more than anyone else. By doing so he made his workers able to afford his cars. At first he was called a traitor by big business, but then they saw that if there was a huge population that could afford to spend on items other than the basics, they made more money, way more than the cost of the wage increase. They also saw Henry getting very rich, so that helped. We have gotten away from this, and we are now driven by the quick profit. Companies are only dedicated to their shareholders, not their customers. We do this with minimum wage jobs, shipping jobs overseas where taxes and wages are less demanding, and the middle class is slipping away. Now this only works if unions are disabled so they cannot collectively bargain for wages, and if profits are made by using third world labor and positioning a company so as not to pay a lot of U.S. taxes. So companies have big profits, but you and me, not so much, and the federal, and yes, state governments go into debt because the revenue from big business just is not there anymore. So they feed you this bullshit about socialism and entitlements and how you and I need to tighten our belts and leave them the hell alone. Now it used to be that as long as big business thrived you and I did ok, but the jobs the companies created were here in the U.S. being done by you and me. And even if your job was not union, a company had to compete for the best workers so had to pay a man or women well above minimum wage to attract that person. But today that is not the norm. Also, thanks to Wall Street and big banks playing with our money and lying to us about it for profit, there is a huge workforce out there desperate for any job, so again, you work two jobs if you can get it, because one puts food and maybe pays some utilities, the other puts a roof over your head, if your lucky. For those of us trying to secure the higher paying jobs, big banks are charging so much for student loans that people with degrees and an education are at risk when they retire because they are still saddled with a huge debt they still have not paid off, so must work up until the day they expire. I have found a huge portion of our mid level executives who say they will be in this fix at retirement age. In order to afford an education at a good college, they are saddled with immense debt. Student loans are charged out at exorbitant rates, with very little oversight. So yes, they have better paying jobs, but they have less freedom than you might think. And yes I think big business has bought politics, and you and I are not represented. It is not a government by the people anymore, and it does not matter what party you are in.

I have also been allowed to read several so called less expensive insurance policies, if it was less money it was a whole lot of “less” coverage. Actually they all cut you off with severe limits if you had anything other than a small accident, and that accident had better not be too severe. Your friends, if you actually read their policies, will have severe limitations. They will have caps on hospital stays, money, testing, and what operations you are allowed to have. So basically if you stay healthy, they will be glad to help pay for a few Doc visits and take your money, since they are making a profit off of you. But if you get sick, you get dumped faster than a rattlesnake in a baby carriage. So minimums were set for care, and maximum profits based on how much we pay the company as a collective whole under the Affordable Care Act. So the health care industry started pouring billions into the rumor mill and the political machines to defeat the very idea.

So my dilemma is that Obamacare is too unwieldy and has some severe drawbacks, but the premise of Obamacare is not such a bad idea. And the socialism thing, big business starts banging that drum whenever anyone tries to exercise any control over their actions, no matter how outrageous they get. Wall street and the current banking systems are prime examples. They have finagled their way into being able to use our money, which means your savings, retirement accounts, even your checking, and gamble with it on Wall Street. That is why banks can fail, and this used to be illegal and for good reason. I could go on and on.In closing, Capitalism is great, but for you and me, a healthy middle class is needed. And I am sorry, the way to do that is exactly how we did it in the past, and yes it was called socialism then also. Look, big business is making more profit now than anytime in history, so if they cry, it is just more of that same bullshit I mentioned before. If you want to see how it works today, go to Detroit and drive around for a couple of hours. If you survive, you will see what todays agenda gets you. Look, I am not oblivious to the fact that we need to pay down the deficit and the debt. It has to be done. But you get our businesses paying taxes here in the U.S., wages being paid here, which also increases the tax base, and enough so we can spend on “stuff”, and that in combination with closing loopholes and austerity is the way to go. Austerity alone simply punishes those of us who are already strapped. Don’t get me started on Social Security. That is the only system, when left alone that pays for itself and adds nothing to the debt. It would have also stayed equal to the task if politicians had not stripped trillions out of it, and then when it came time to pay the piper they want the very people they stole it from to pay it back. So how is that fair or an entitlement, and how is it socialism to tell them to go suck on a rock! Most of you will know this, but your employer also matched your contribution to the Social Security fund. When they figure out how much you contributed that amount is ignored.

Oh, and bye the way, if China loves it, it stinks for you and me, guaranteed! Not sure if that statement fits the conversation, but true nonetheless, and made me feel good.

Now usually I know whom I am going to get a response from. I also have several followers, even from foreign countries, but my friends here and in Idaho are my primary targets. So I will post on Facebook, and will email this. If you bother to read it, and disagree, as I know almost everyone in Idaho will, give me hell. I will respond and I will not be disrespectful. If you can educate me, have at it. Jim Mahon and I are great friends, best friends as a matter of fact, but we have to agree to disagree all the time. But I have learned much from the experience, and I hope, so has he.

Bye the way, one of my followers is in grade school in Eastern Europe and knows more about American politics than most of us!

The Love Chronicles, You Can Hear Them Talking!

Posted: November 3, 2013 in Health and wellness, Life, News and politics
Tags: big business, congress, government, healthcare costs, Insurance fraud, lobbyists

How do you Know if a Politician is Lying

You can Hear them Talking

Obamacare’s critics are going to town on the cancellation letters millions of Americans are receiving from their health insurers, informing them that their health plans won’t conform to the new federal standards for health coverage as of Jan. 1.

We’re supposed to be scandalized by this, since President Obama himself assured everyone that if they liked their insurance they’d be able to keep it. And people just love plans that in some cases cost just $50 a month. At that price, what’s not to love?

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of these plans and placed them in a special category: “junk health insurance.” Some plans, the magazine declared, may be worse than none at all.

Consumer Reports is right. Plans with monthly premiums in the two figures marketed to customers in their 30s, 40s, or even 50s invariably impose ridiculously low coverage limits. They’ve typically been pitched to people who couldn’t find affordable insurance because of their age or preexisting conditions, or who were so financially strapped that they were lured by the cheap upfront cost.

“People buy a plan that’s terrible,” says Nancy Metcalf, Consumer Reports senior project editor for health, “and if they get sick, they don’t even know they don’t have insurance.”

An example from CR: A plan costing $65 a month held by Judith Goss, 48, a Michigan department store employee. When Goss was diagnosed with breast cancer, she discovered the drawbacks of the policy’s coverage limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization — barely enough to cover a day and half and a Tylenol in the hospital. She delayed treatment, so her cancer got much worse before she finally opted for surgery. Those sorts of coverage limits are illegal come Jan. 1.

Many of the supposedly bereft insurance customers being paraded before viewers of network and cable news — and dredged up by House Republicans during the theatrical grilling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius — fall into this junk category. The news reporters never seem to lay out the benefits actually provided by these low-premium policies their subjects supposedly love, or their steep back-end costs if they actually get sick.

Consider the case of Diane Barrette, the 56-year-old Florida woman whose cancellation horror story was reported by a credulous CBS News and picked up by Fox News, which has been a one-stop shop for your Obamacare misinformation needs. Consumer Reports examined Barrette’s Blue Cross Blue Shield policy and made two discoveries: how junky it really is, and how badly her insurer may have misled her about her options. Barrette’s $54 monthly premium bought her almost nothing. The policy pays $50 per office visit (which can run two or three times that) and $15 per prescription (which can run to thousands of dollars a month); above that she’s on her own. Nothing for a colonoscopy. Nothing for mental health treatment. Up to $50 for hospital and ER services — and that only if her treatment is for “complications of pregnancy.” Nothing for outpatient services. Plus Barrette is not of an age where pregnancy is going to be an issue, so basically there was no coverage. This is one of the cases Fox news paraded before us as a “horror” story of lost insurance the customer loved and wanted to keep. Might have just as well cuddled up in bed with a timber rattler.

“She’s paying $650 a year to be uninsured,” said an insurance expert Consumer Reports Nancy Metcalf consulted. If she ever had a serious medical problem, “she would have lost the house she’s sitting in.”

As for the replacement plan her insurer offered, at a shocking $591 a month? Barrette has much better options via the government insurance exchange. Metcalf estimated that she’ll be eligible for “real insurance that covers all essential health benefits” for as little as $165 a month — a higher premium than she’s paying now, sure, but one that won’t cost her her home.

That raises the question of whether the insurers sending out these cancellation notices are trying to cheat their customers, expecting insurance companies to play fair with their customers is as pointless as expecting dogs not to drink from the toilet, but what’s the excuse of the reporters who retail these yarns without fully checking them out? You know how I feel about that!

It’s time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations. Many of the departing plans are being outlawed for good reason, and many of the customers losing them have no idea how much financial exposure they were saddled with in the old days. That’s the real scandal in American health insurance, and Obamacare is designed, rightly, to fix it. Look, I personally know people who have, and have had these junk insurance policies. This article and what I wrote here is the truth, they are not only junk, but they put your property and home in danger. Hospitals do go after everything you owe of value if you cannot pay. I know a nice lady, had a stroke, luckily she rehabbed nicely, no thanks to her insurance. Turned out it paid for nothing. The hospital attached her home. Luckily for her, she has three sons who were able to sell the paid for home and with the proceeds pay off the hospital and get her the rehab she needed. They then pooled their money and bought back their mothers house. So now they are all three sharing a mortgage on a house that had been paid off years ago thanks to junk insurance. The fact that our politicians are still playing politics and not doing what is right for you and me should piss you off.

Michael Hiltzik posted the original article in the Los Angeles Times; I edited and added my own thoughts and points along the way.

Here in California you can use the national website, but we set up our own called Covered California. It also had some original glitches, which have been worked out. Mostly caused by the huge mass of people who attempted to access it on opening day. However California, instead of griping and complaining, has made an effort to make it work. You can compare what you have and what is covered with what is available and compare the cost. There are numbers to call with questions. I have heard no one complaining so far, even Fox is keeping its mouth shut, I guess they couldn’t find anyone willing to prevaricate for money in this case. At least so far as I know!

The Love Chronicles, Everybody Got Left Behind

Posted: July 26, 2013 in Life, News and politics
Tags: American indian, government, healthcare costs, Indian nation, politics, sequestration

Everybody Got Left Behind

John Love

Sequestration, is it necessary? Well I personally think it was a mistake. But since Washington is busy playing the blame game and disagreeing on everything until they get their way, all the way, or pout! Then while they are pouting they pass nothing, do nothing but posture to the press, blow anything and everything out of proportion until congress is just a stale excuse for what used to be our governing body. But lets put that aside for now. I don’t see anyone getting anything done, so the sequester is not likely to go away anytime soon. I would like to address the Indian Nations and how they are being decimated by sequestration.

If you went to school in Council with the class of 1968, especially junior high, then you probably remember Dan Foster. His father was the Minister of the Highway Tabernacle Church. Well he was, and is, an American Indian. He is now Dr. Dan Foster Psy, D., M.S. or in long hand a clinical, forensic, and health psychologist. He is deputy director of the hospital on the Rosebud Reservation, as well as the supervising clinical psychologist. He was and still is one of my best friends and since we have stayed in contact I have tried to stay abreast of what is happening in the Indian Nations because I know it is important to him, so I make it important to me.

It is the same today as it has always been since the 19^th century. What politicians enact in Washington either ignores the Indian or takes even more from them. Sequestration should not be something that includes Indian Country. The reservations depend almost entirely on federal funds. Most politicians have taken the tack that the sequester is nothing more than a mild headache for a country that needs to tighten its belt. This is coming from a group in which the poor among them is at the very least a millionaire. They are ignoring the fact that the cuts are real, specific, very wide in their scope, and brutal. The victims are already among the poorest, sickest, and isolated in this country!

Now at this juncture do not dare to jump on your high horse and start spouting any such garbage that sounds like get a job, or get off the dole. This group is different in the most important of ways. They are a conquered people. Yes they were driven off their land, killed and starved until they were just small groups of survivors of what once were great nations. As a conquered people they were entitled to live by treaties signed by them and the U.S. Government. I won’t bother to remind you how many treaties the U.S. government has trashed for the sole purpose of taking more and more land until most tribes are living in the armpit of a desert or swamp. Even before sequestration America was already in treaty violation. Money for police forces, medical services, and schools usually runs out halfway through the year, which is a violation of the trust we owe these people.

Richard Zephier, executive director of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, recently told Annie Lowrey of The Times, and I quote:

“The damage is being done to agencies and programs whose budgets rely nearly entirely on federal sources, now being slashed. In signing treaties with Indian nations in return for land, the federal government promised a wide array of life-sustaining services. One of the most important is the Indian Health Service, which serves about two million people on reservations and is grossly underfinanced even in good times. It routinely runs out of money halfway through the year. Though Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ health were exempted from sequestration cuts, the Indian Health Service was not. It stands to lose about $228 million in 2013 from automatic sequester cuts alone, out of a $4 billion budget. That will mean 3,000 fewer inpatient admissions and 800,000 fewer outpatient visits every year.”

Education, the most important tool to combat the problems that reservations are plagued have been slashed dramatically. Almost a third of the education budget for the Navajo of Arizona was cut, which was not nearly enough as it was!

Ok, I know that there are a lot of problems on reservations, alcoholism and drug addiction to name just two, but cutting police forces and health services does not help. Again, let me reiterate, we waged war and conquered a people that were, especially in the west, primarily a hunter-gatherer society. As such they did not mesh well with the populations they found around them after they were herded onto reservations. So we owe it to them to not only honor treaties to the letter of the law, but also to the original intent of the words they contained. It goes without saying that if we went back and enforced the original treaties as signed, the Indians would own more than a few states. So honoring our duty to the Indians and actively looking for ways to help them assimilate instead of just making a huge ghetto out of the reservations is our duty. I would appreciate it if each of you would write you congressman and express your desire that the Indian Nation should not be part of the sequestration. Our politicians have enough to be ashamed of without adding insult to injury.