General Discussion

hospitals, ambulatory care centers and residential nursing centers.

There are a number of factors hurting healthcare staffing levels in rural settings. First is the heavy student debt load for doctors. According to Educationdata.org,

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Now that is nearly a mortgage payment. This, coupled with the fact that most medical providers in rural America get most of their revenue by billing Medicaid, the cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill are in the process of forcing many rural healthcare organizations to close. Not because of no need but because of financial pressures imposed by predatory student debt and Wall Street's insatiable quest for shareholder profits in healthcare insurance, for profit providers and big pharma.

This is a serious issue that is exacerbated by the Citizens United ruling and the corporate corruption that has bought much of our Congress. The Republicans don't even pretend to care about this, and many of the institutional Democrats will not move on the issue for fear of primary opponents heavily funded by the lobbies. Dollars are the 'voice' of corporations, which are people according to our current policy structure.

Now, with $39 trillion in national debt incurred mostly by Republicans, the US government has been declared insolvent. This is because of the Chicago School trickle down economic theory which Reagan took to the White House in 1981. When he took power, and Congress started slashing taxes for corporations, the narrative was that lower taxes would stimulate corporations to create more jobs, and the payroll tax contributions of the new workers would more than offset the permanently lowered corporate tax rates.

Thus, we see, if we think critically about this for a moment, that the burden of funding our government, ostensibly 'of, by and for' the people, has moved from 1970s levels, when corporations contributed around 35% of the tax revenue and individual taxpayers like us paid in around 45%. Now, individual taxpayers pay in around 85% and corporations only 9%.

So we see that the government, due to corporate corruption, no longer collects enough money to fund programs that actually help working Americans at their kitchen tables. This is why Trump thinks we can afford a billion a day on a war of choice while cutting services for us right and left.

This problem could by solved by:
- Taxing billionaires out of existance
- Raising taxes on corporations back to 1970 levels
- Changing the rules of corporate governance to a stakeholder model rather than holding profits above all else

This is why I like Mamdani so much. He is thinking outside the box to solve this Wall Street problem because he has essentially 'nationalized' the food store industry.

And don't be fooled when our corporate owned media and the Republicans call him a commie. Wall Street has a long history of driving imperialistic behavior on the part of our government. We have gone into a number of countries that tried to nationalize industries so they could give their people a fair shake, and done regime changes. Take Iran in 1953, for example. Our CIA put Pahlavi in power because the democratically elected ruler of Iran wanted to nationalize industries. Can't have that!

We did the same thing with a number of countries in central and south America as well as the Pacific Rim. This is called imperialism and the American Empire was in there slugging starting in the 19th century. After we took over the British Raj in 1946, it took less than 20 years for the military industrial complex (MIC) Ike warned us about in his Guns and Butter speech in the early sixties to take over. After the assassination of JFK in 1963, they got LBJ to send 500K Americans over to Vietnam. The motive for the MIC, of course, was profits, and the government spent today's equivalent of nearly a trillion dollars on that war. 58,000 American kids were killed, and 3.2 million Vietnamese dies.

Again, this is what imperialism and shareholder primacy capitalism looks like. This is why the 1971 essay known as the Powell Manifesto called for the Republicans to take over the political nomination process. The purpose there was to send candidates to local, state and national elections that would vote in favor of business interests, i.e. tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and gutting any government programs besides defense and national security.

This is what we have. AOC, Bernie, Mamdani and other progressives know this and this is why they are all reported on by the corporate media as being 'far left radical' or 'far left liberal.' They are not. Wall Street just doesn't like them.

I'll leave you with a joke from the old Soviet Union: A Russian and an American were talking. The American commented on how sophisticated the Soviet propaganda apparatus was. The Russian replied, "Our system of propaganda is not nearly as sophisticated as yours!"

The American looked quizzically at the Russian and said, "What do you mean? We don't have propaganda here!"

The Russian smiled, and said, "See what I mean?"