Stir Crazy! Episode #12: Labour Party Madness!

1. I'm done with 70 and 80 year old candidates. We need younger progressives. Our country is run by plutocratic gerontocrats. It's also time to dump the democratic party and start a new party

2. Fine episode and I appreciate what you all said regarding Bernie Sanders' cop-out move to hand over the 2020 race to Joe Biden. I was hopeful for Sanders, given his campaign platform's "pledges" about what the USA seriously, urgently, needs, but did wonder if he'd come to cop-out and he now has. Imo, it makes for a rather untrustworthy candidate and there's no way that his cop-out words would convince me to vote for Biden, so if Trump wins the 2020 election, then I won't forget Sanders' cop-out move or switch. Bernie was quite an "enchanter". Reminds of charlatans, which I hope Bernie isn't, but am still reminded of this "angle" nonetheless. There's SURELY no way that Biden would take on what the Sanders campaign had for GOOD proposals for the country, and as I posted months ago, though not in as much detail as you all did in this video, BIDEN undeniably is a war criminal and, of course, he'll never be held to account for this under USA politics. I was surprised that Sanders didn't mention a single word about this latter matter about Biden, but the surprise didn't last for long, for it quickly became Sanders' way of " playing with politics ". So, if Trump wins the 2020 presidential elections, then I won't be surprised. The US is AGAIN going down the sh*t hole. What'll be sad is that Sanders couldn't be a person who stands by his words.

3. All good except the sisters synopsis of “conspiracy theory” Look it up. 1st, CIA invented phrase to thwart investigators formulating truthful theories around JFK assassination. (See H.W. Bush) 2nd the theory is not that the transparent government is working against humans, but just like International Mafias a strong hegemonic shadow government is double crossing humanity (see Project Paperclip). The underlying sentiment that fueled Nazi party continued slowed but unbroken. 3rd 5G does not directly spread virus. However our bodies are filled with plethora of bacteria, fungus etc. and when our bodies lose balance one or some dominate and take over. Think wholistic balancing of chi. 5G operates primarily on a 60hz cycle that creates a harmonic disruption with oxygen in air molecules rendering them bio unavailable. Remember fam, all good science starts with theory some threatening, but stay brave, stay united, be woke ✊🏽

4. Luqman's facial expressions say it all.

5. Four years of Trump or Biden either way means four years of trying to survive on our own. Only problem is the environment may not let us all survive. Was ready to fight with Bernie, but he has capitulated the cause. And it looks like AOC and Tulsi have folded too. So where does that leave us, dead. Now we need a new champion. Its yellow shirt time but we need a way to organize the movement.

6. U crybabies blame everything on Trump

7. Neoliberalism is exactly the opposite of what it’s advocates pretend it to be.
   While neoliberals pretend to be in favor of strengthening the market and stimulating competition, in reality neoliberals (referred to as „neoclassical“ in economics) destroy the institutional framework, which market economy and competition need to exist.

   So called market fundamentalists argue, that market outcomes determined by an aggregate of an infinite number of individual decisions (Walrasian auction) are a more efficient recourse allocation than central planning by the government. However such markets with perfect competition and no market power, where suppliers can‘t influence prices rarely exist in reality. In order to protect competition, there needs to be a government financed by taxes to enforce strict anti-trust laws, so market power is minimized and consumers can enjoy the benefits of competition lowering prices. Otherwise you get suppliers which become basically central planners of the market as soon as they gain market power to the great damage of consumers. Market power eliminates competition and monopolizes markets. However the neoclassical economists act as if the markets would regulate themselves and take competition for granted ending up arguing, that there‘s no need for the government to intervene with private businesses applying anti-trust-laws. As a consequence there are emerging more and more monopolized markets, in which suppliers gain excess profit by constantly keeping the markets understocked and charging consumers the price which maximizes their revenue, no matter whatever the actual cost of production is. So in reality, a private owned monopoly centrally planning a market outcome instead of Walrasian auction, to cause consumers the largest harm possible without decreasing the revenue leads to a much worse recourse allocation than even government central planning could be.

   In Health Care markets are often monopolized by weaponizing intellectuals property rights. After purchasing promising research, pharmaceutical companies apply for protection of intellectual property. If granted, there‘s created another monopolized market and pharmaceutical companies can charge not according to production costs but according to the price which maximizes their revenue, as competition is excluded. The income monopolists gain by selling pharmaceuticals overpriced would according to classical economists not even qualify as profit but as economic rent. Economic rent in classical economics is in contrast to profit income gained without being productive, in other words unearned income (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unearned_income ). In mainstream economics monopoly rents are also called excess profits. The income of a monopolist does not reflect the real value of the produced goods and services (production costs + a justified return which would occur in a competitive market situation), but the market power it has. As pharmaceuticals are more or less inelastic, meaning a change in price hardly affects demand, because people absolutely need medical treatment if they become sick and can hardly substitute the medicine they need with a cheaper products, the monopoly rents pharmaceutical companies have to gain from acting as monopolists maximizing revenue are ridiculously high. Those who are priced out of the marked and have suffer pain or even die, don’t matter to neoclassical economists because if they would have simply worked harder they could have afforded to pay the monopoly rent. As an economics student I have to say, that universities are transforming their economics students into sociopaths following a tunnel vision, instead analyzing how the economy actually works. In reality pharmaceutical companies also harm productive businesses of other sectors, as people have to spent so much on their health care that they struggle to buy other consumer goods and sometimes even get heavily into credit card debt, because of costs for medical treatment. So pharmaceutical companies basically abuse intellectual property protection to expropriate the income of productive wage earners as monopoly rent. Moreover, due to the fact that insurance plans in the United States are individualized instead of standardized like in Germany, wage earners are subjected to further rent seeking by insurance companies, trying to figure out all preconditions that might provide a justification to increase the payment arranged in the contract. The result of all this is, that no other people on planet earth spends such a high fraction of GDP on health care as the American people, yet many American people lack access to basic health care and avoid doctors wherever they can. https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/9/2/6089693/health-care-facts-whats-wrong-american-insurance
   Another result is, that in the current Coronavirus-pandemic Dr. Anthony Fauci had to tell the House of Representatives, that the United States health care system „is not set up“ to deal with a pandemic like this even though it should be. Further he said that unlike in other countries people in the United States cannot get tested free and easily.
   https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-us-test-trump-covid-19-dr-fauci-cases-map-a9398866.html%3famp
   The reason why many Americans don‘t have access to basic health care and avoid doctors despite the American people spending the largest proportion of GDP on health care in the world, is largely because a major share of health care spending in the US is siphoned off as monopoly rent by the pharmaceutical rentiers.
   People as real estate rentier Donald Trump or Mike Pompeo are as utterly shameless to praise themselves in the midst of the crisis, despite their own mismanagement and ignorance of WHO warnings, blaming the disaster on the WHO and China, shifting the blame and deliberately putting the security of the Asian-American-community at risk.
   Then neoliberal millionaire and billionaire politicians like Trump are as boldfaced as telling, that health care spending is so high, that extending health care services would come at an even higher cost for the American people. The wickedest of them argue, that they are in favor of cutting health care just to protect working class Americans from skyrocketing health care costs. While telling these lies, they’re silent about the fact, that all the countries providing their citizens much more extended health care than average working class Americans can dream of, pay (by far) a smaller fraction of their GDP on health care than the American people. Secretly they hope, that voters will never find out, that the government simply would have to crack down on intellectual property laws respectively on the misuse of these laws, break up the major pharmaceutical companies, regulate prices and nationalize the insurance companies which are not producing anything or finance health care insurance by tax revenue like in Denmark in order to liberate health care from the excessive extraction of skyrocketing monopoly rent.

   Another important problem with neoliberalism is the role of public utilities. Economist Michael Hudson explains, that according to Simon Patton, who was the first professor of the Wharton businesses school, which was the first business school in the United States, infrastructure is the fourth factor of production, which hasn’t the purpose to make a profit. As infrastructure is not the market itself, but the access to the market, infrastructure should be kept in the public domain to keep the market free from access fees and to lower the cost of production. Infrastructure in any country is the greatest investment, there is. Despite that, public utilities by definition are natural monopolies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly ) that should be kept in the public domain, to prevent the economy from being monopolized.
   However neoliberals tell that the government has to privatize the public utilities, in order to cut taxes for businesses by reducing government spending ratio (austerity) and because the market could operate the public utilities more efficient anyway. Privatizing the natural monopolies creates huge monopoly rents burdening the whole economy and constituting access fees for market participants, turning the whole economy into a high cost economy. As a result new market entry barriers are created, productive wage earners get further expropriated, for the use of utilities they can’t avoid, jobs get destroyed by monopoly rents pricing productive wage earners out of the world marked and whole economies gets further monopolized.

8. Dennis Kucinich was more Progressive…even stood for REPARATIONS. Why he was redistricted.

9. "…how to campaign in the south?" No, #BernieSoWhite #NewNewDealSoWhite offered every group a revolution and 10/20/30 cons for us as a #PermanentUnderclass suffering in #ConcentratedBlackPoverty! #ClassDoesntFixRace

10. Great conversation!

11. The Democratic Party is where good ideas go to die! -Lucman

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