Comments by "coolmodelguy" (@coolmodelguy6304) on "The Humanist Report" channel.

  1. Warren Feagins- Main reason is they are all bought out by their campaign contributors, who offer them multi-milloin dollar lobbying jobs when the are done with their office and have done the donors bidding. Bernie Sanders is not beholden to the corporate donor machine, and we need to elect Congress Persons who also refuse to take money from wealthy sources. We also need to require that our representatives do not go into the lobbying business after their terms in office are over. This is how "We the People" can and should clean house in our political system.
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  2. This is what wealth does. All the ills that befall mankind aside from natural disasters, are caused by the wealthy. In modern times the behavior of the wealthy may end organized human life on this planet, because of their recklessness, greed and irresponsibility. It is high time we humans learn that lesson and deal with it.
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  3. Jennifer Collins - I've written this before, Bernie is a master strategist and tactician. He has used the DNC machine to project his Independent message in a manner no other socialist politician could or would in the USA. The "Unity Tour" was a master stroke, revealing the wishy-washy nature of Tom Perez and the outright hypocrisy infection the Democratic Party . . . to anyone who had their eyes and ears open.
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  4. just aburner - There comes a time when . . . no matter how much we are willing to work with somebody, no matter our desire to be able to work out our differences, the other party will simply not cooperate in any way. Take me for instance, until very recently I would say to anybody that it takes both the right wing and left wing to be able to fly. Possibly stupid of me to think so, but I really wanted to figure out a way to work with Republicans. Slash, burn, break and take more for themselves is the only response from them. This trump-don't-care health denial bill is more of the same. How much more of this do we have to put up with? It is bad enough that the Republicans are stealing elections all across the country through gerrymandering and cross-check purging, then setting up their donors to get massive tax cuts, now we have to "get along" with them while they steal our health care? ENOUGH ALREADY!
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  5. The Federal Reserve gave corporations over 3 trillion dollars last year, a sum that will never be paid back, in exchange for pieces of paper. Surely the Federal Government can fork over 1/1000th of that amount to cover missed rents in California, or is Promoting the General welfare no longer a concern of the Federal Government?
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  6. The fracture splitting the democratic party is growing wider. It is now only a matter of time before the democratic party splits and a new party for progressives emerges. It is about damn time.
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  7. Thanks for the support Edgar, revolution is what it is going to take.
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  8. +Adam Kir - Ditto here, fully agree. If there is anyone who knows how to play and survive with principles intact, it is Bernie.
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  9. Devonzell Pernell - Sadly I may have to agree with you. My daughter works for a major corporation dealing with the medical industry. That corporation holds mandatory political rallies where they push their employees to call political representatives about supporting republican backed HSA's (health savings accounts). She is appalled by this corporate behavior and so am I. The whole system has rotted, yet its health can be restored by weeding out those representatives who hold corporations in higher esteem than "We the People" who voted them into office. Vote out the corrupted politicians and vote in those who are only beholden to "We the People".
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  10. I'm 58 and I just freed myself from the mainstream hypnosis machine a couple of years ago. Too many of our peers are simply blind to what is happening, and what has happened to us. Now I'm the renegade and I'm even having a tough time with one of my own children, who is adamant that I vote for whoever the democratic candidate is . . . . well I just cannot stomach Joe Biden. I'm gong to write in Bernie Sanders. The establishment is not going to shove another corporate shill down my throat.
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  11. I've been listening to Dr. Wolff for about six months, he makes a great deal of sense out of the economic mess we are in right now. I never realized that the capitalist workplace economy today had so much in common with the feudalism and slavery economies. The worker co-op economy he teaches would indeed democratize the workplace, where most of us spend our adult lives. The idea that a co-op would vote to shut down factories and move production outside the USA like the top-down corporations have done is laughable, the workers would never go for that and would come up with solutions that would not end their jobs. Medicare for all is just like a giant worker co-op, the republicans and the corporate democrats will fight this to the bitter end because the corporations will not stand for anything that dismantles their profit scams.
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  12. Pete - Oh Pete . . . you are so cynical, and probably not correct in your assessment. Yet you were on to a valid point . . . leaders of any kind will not serve us well. Humans have evolved to the point where we can lead ourselves better than any previous leader is capable of. We have the collective common sense to make the correct decisions. The time will come, hopefully soon . . . when we take the power of decision away from the few, to then imbue and infuse that power into all of mankind. We have grown too many to allow for much delay. and have gained sufficient intelligence to make this decision . . . after all it will be a crime against our species and all species of this world to allow the few to reduce our planet to ash for profit.
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  13. Kevin Sarpei - The essence of my reply to your original post was this: Have you considered that Bernie is a master strategist and political tactician? He used the apparatus of the DNC to promote his message a thousand times more effectively than he could previously. Also consider that the "Unity Tour" was a strategic victory for progressives, pulled off by Bernie. He exposed Tom Perez for being a wishy-washy stand-for-nothing character, and then really shone the sunlight on the corporate corruption eating away at the Democratic Party. That was not to convince corporate democrats of anything . . . . they are essentially a lost cause. Bernie Sanders has been experimenting with the DNC like a scientist in a laboratory, then showing US the incontrovertible results. Progressives are the only audience he is talking to, or needs to talk to.
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  14. +Rick Esping - The haters of Bernie are boiling over mad, because of exact what you wrote. Bernie is pulling in democrats, republicans and independents, something no one else has been able, or even willing to do. One year ago I did not know who Bernie Sanders is, when I first heard him speak I felt an instant resonance with his message. We need more like him.
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  15. Western Civilization - You wrote: "Right, tell that to the many shops and stores in DC destroyed, and windows smashed when Trump was sworn into office. Also Antifa isn't violent ? You must be joking" Western Civilization - You don't know who those thugs were, could have been Nixon risen from the dead with his old cronies . . . . For all anyone knows they were Eric Prince Blackwater thugs hired by Betsy Devos to create havoc, the same ones who attacked Berkeley a few months later. We all know the republiKKKans quivering under tRump's tweets will do anything to create an incident. What part of "Anti-fascism" do you not get? Antifa has been around since before Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, standing in direct opposition to those fascist leaders. We went to war to eradicate fascism in 1941, are you telling me that all those brave soldiers died to protect the KKK and nazi sympathizers so they could have a modern resurgence under tRump? You seriously think that Antifa is a greater threat than those proven mass murderers? To whom exactly, average Joe American or the KKK? I guess you really stand against Western Civilization. Sad. Pathetic.
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  16. Statutory Grape - The original comment author has copied and pasted the same thing on multiple videos. There is no interest whatsoever in dialog.
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  17. +Adam Kir - Yes indeed, you hit the nail on the head. I changed from Independent to Democrat, just to put pressure on the party from within. We will build up that progressive pressure until the democratic party changes its posture, or the pressure will build from within until it hurts like a splitting headache. At that point a split becomes inevitable, and a new born progressive splinter party will actually have the legs to win elections.
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  18. Hi Redsyrup, I agree with Ronin Dave about getting the voting base to step up. It may indeed be a pipe dream, yet at this time getting a third party to be a viable contender is the real pipe dream. As an Independent now registered Democrat, I intend to put pressure on the Dem Party until such a time as they choose to change posture . . . or it is demonstrated to all voters with no doubts remaining that the Dem Party is too corrupted. I think they are too corrupted now, but I also see the logic of taking over the party from within being the most efficient path to follow.
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  19. I have a question. When is Donald J. Trump going to enact measures to protect the United States of America from continued russian assaults on our election process? He received the classified briefing on russian interference in our 2016 election before he was sworn in. There has been ample time for assembling a National Election Security Team to directly address this assault. Not a word has leaked out about protective actions the president has taken or is considering taking to protect the U.S. from further russian assault. If this plays out much longer with no word from the White House about protecting and securing our national elections, the suspicion will continue to grow that D.J.T. is, with his silence on this issue, is adhering to our enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. (Treason, U.S. Constitution, Article 3, Section 3.) The entire United States of America is currently standing witness to this overt lack of action. This is not fake news, it is out in the open what Russia has done in the U.S. elections and European elections. Please address my question.
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  20. Also agreed. The only way this gets solved is that we stop voting for bought candidates. We know who they are, stop voting for them.
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  21.  @jamesfournier9450  - I agree with everything you just wrote. Every system need regulation, which capitalism does not have. The only reason capitalism is not positively regulated is because wealth buys power, which is easy to understand but obscured by propaganda (which is also bought by wealth). My background is in engineering, which when applied to capitalism could make the system work for everyone . . . and therein is the rub, because those with wealth do not want capitalism to work for everyone. They have deliberately engineered programs like 401k's and IRA's with the tax penalty so that they could manipulate the average American, which as an engineer I can see what they wanted to accomplish. The goal was to kill off pension plans through employers and create a so-called retirement platform to drain wealth toward themselves and ensnare average American's as accomplices to their plan. The device called "compounded interest" and it's deleterious effects has been well known for several centuries. In Michael Hudson's paper on compound interest called "The Mathematical Economics of Compound Rates of Interest: A Four-Thousand Year Overview Part II", he makes the following referral: It was in reference to Britain’s war debts that one of Adam Smith’s contemporaries, the Anglican minister and actuarial mathematician Richard Price, graphically explained the seeming magic of how debts multiplied exponentially. His 1772 Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt described how “Money bearing compound interest increases at first slowly. But, the rate of increase being continually accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid, as to mock all the powers of the imagination. One penny, put out at our Saviour’s birth at 5% compound interest, would, before this time, have increased to a greater sum than would be obtained in a 150 millions of Earths, all solid gold. But if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than 7 shillings 4½d.” In his Observations on Reversionary Payments, first published in 1769 and running through six editions by 1803, Price elaborated how the rate of multiplication would be even higher at 6 percent: “A shilling put out at 6% compound interest at our Saviour’s birth would . . . have increased to a greater sum than the whole solar system could hold, supposing it a sphere equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn’s orbit.” Ultimately what this means is that we cannot have an economy with any portion operating by compounding interest rates for either debt or wealth generation. Any economic system that uses compounded interest either must have a periodic reset and debt forgiveness, or the system crashes. The wealthy know this, they want the system to crash regularly so that they maintain power. The only way we escape this is to cap individual wealth accumulation at a set limit, plus put a floor under the bottom via UBI or similar mechanism, or provide for system resets in both wealth and debt. In other words, we cannot let the wealth engineer the system to benefit themselves. Reference: https://michael-hudson.com/2001/04/the-mathematical-economics-of-compound-rates-of-interest-a-four-thousand-year-overview-part-ii/
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  22. Katie, in 2019 the privately held financial assets (over $90 trillion) gaining at least 5% annually, grew by a minimum of $4.5 trillion. If only 19% of those wealth gains were cashed in, all the economic gains from 2019 are erased. The evil bastards know exactly what they are doing. One day soon, the weathiest of these who own the majority of privately held financial assets, are going to sell off their holding, which will collapse the economy entirely. They are simply milking us until the milk is gone, then they will take us around back of the barn and shoot us.
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  23. It's not just billionaires. The whole system of paying wealth more in interest payments than the economy can support has got to go. Right now the top 20% has twice the wealth than the whole economy can make in a year, and they want "interest" money on that wealth? What? Money for free? Just because you already have money? What happened to working hard for your money? Straight up facts. "Investment" is nothing more than cannibalism. The 2018 economy grew by 2.56% and the whole economy never topped $20 trillion. The top 20% has OVER $50 trillion which they "invest" and they will not accept anything less than 5% for a Rate of Return (RoR). So, quick question. How do you get 5% RoR on $50 trillion in a $20 trillion economy that only made 2.56% all year? Math Quiz! The 2018 GDP growth was 2.56% ($560 billion) The top 20% invested $50 trillion at 5% RoR ($2.5 trillion) $560 billion minus $2,5 trillion = negative $1.94 trillion. So how do the top 20% get their 5% RoR when the economy did not grow enough? They raise health care costs. They raise housing costs. They raise energy costs. They raise education costs. They raise food costs. They raise transportation costs. In other words, they cannibalize the economy and "We the People". It is time to end this whole rotten system. Burn Wall Street!
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  24. Evan C. - Not only a conversation about what democracy really means (which I completely agree), but also a conversation about where we want humanity to go . . . . because We the People have totally dropped the reins.
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  25. Kevin Sarpei - Well now . . . looking through hundreds of comments for the last time you posted is a waste of time, would have been easier if you had answered my reply to the last time I read your lead comment . . . . at least then I would have received a notification. You are trolling, for what purpose I don't care. You do not seem to have a legitimate desire for discussion, only provocation.
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  26. +Sam Sadowitz - Well Said, Bravo!!!
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  27. Its really all about one choice, the corporate owned politician. I'm eagerly anticipating the spontaneous formation of a third party, meanwhile I've gone Justice Democrat.
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  28. NyYankees1985 - As one of the "pussy fart babyboomer generation", I am certainly not in favor of keeping the current Dem Party on life support! I know . . . . there are still too many of us that are.
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  29. NyYankees1985 - Yup, and I took part on the dem side of that . . . . until I decided to make a serious research effort to answer seemingly unrelated questions. Doing some digging opens eyes, mine have been. Just kinda disgusted now, knowing so many others are soaking up life as usual without a glimmer into what has happened to us over 35 years. BTW, those clinton psuedo-liberals are Corporate Democrats from now on, a wing of the democratic party that needs to fade into history.
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  30. +Adam Kir - Nothing shows that you are really winning or that the opposition is really scared than when they try to kill the messenger. Or in this case spew out a bunch of hate. I just spent a lot of time going through right wing YouTube videos,and the comments here are a stunning reflection of the comments I found there. No one would actually debate with me on the merits of any subject, but there was a lot of trash talk. Don't feel annoyed at them, all this hate stuff is a sure sign that the real opposition to Bernie is profoundly WORRIED!
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  31. just aburner - You just fried your argument in your own afterburner. Everyone gets sick or injured and needs medical attention. Healthcare is and should be part of the commons, like schools, police, roads, and so on. We all pay taxes for the commons, but greed has taken over the health care system ever since it was privatized. We all pay an exceedingly high cost now and for no other reason than to fatten the wallets of those who really need or deserve more of our money. So who is really the idiot in this conversation, hmmmm? Sounds like you are my friend. One more idiot whose vote the rest of us have to override.
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  32. The economy is already ruined. If you are at all familiar with what happened to "Toys-R-Us", then just apply that on a national level to the U.S. economy. We have been hollowed out and saddled with debt by those who already had wealth and power from as far back as the the 1950's and 1960's, who did a hostile takeover of all American systems in a manner similar to a giant hedge fund. Just read "The Powell Memo" from 1971, its all there, the entire roadmap. Powell claimed to be saving the USA from socialism and communism, but really now, almost 50 years out, the truth of the demise of the USA was always about hollowing out the country until nothing but a dried out husk remained.
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  33. Mike, I hope you are not abandoning YouTube. Some of us cannot afford to pay for anything, so even with the problems of YouTube, this is where we get our information.
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  34. I just changed my registration to democrat, only to support changing the party from within (Justice Democrats). In addition, I'm not buying that old story of "voting third party is a wasted vote" anymore . . . since forty years of voting experience has shown that choosing either major party has been a waste of my vote. The USA is nowhere close to what I expected as a young adult and is undergoing an extraction economy instead of a rising tide economy, that is proof enough for me that the established parties have to go.
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  35.  @jamesfournier9450  - Getting back to the gold standard is a good measure to take, the news I have been reading on the subject indicates that gold will need to reach a price point in the area of $20,000 to $30,000 per ounce in order to back currency in circulation. There is something else to consider that no one really seems to recognize, that all systems, including economic systems, have limits. We treat our capitalist system as if there are no operational limits, which seemed to work in the past just fine. However, with the advent of the modern technological age, we have surpassed or exceeded the capabilities of capitalism, which is now causing enough issues for the system to start malfunctioning. Don't get me wrong here, capitalism is a meaningful system which is still capable, but like any system it has limits. The limits being exceeded on on both ends, or on the bottom and the top. On the bottom end people do not have the capital to buy or rent enough. On the top end the exponential gains in wealth are both sucking wealth from the main body at all levels, akin to a virus that is killing the host. To fix capitalism, limits need to be installed at both the bottom and top end of the wealth spectrum, as well as fixing currency to gold, or to a basket of commodities. If capitalism is allowed to rev up continually from the point we are currently at, it will collapse.
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  36.  @whysocurious7366  - One of the ways we ( regular people ) have been fooled over the past several decades is the lack of inflation applied to certain consumer goods. While the cost of housing, healthcare and education have skyrocketed, basic costs of bread, wine and home electronics have been relatively price stable. When considering your question, the first thought that occurred to me was the "gold hammer" and "gold toilet seat". When the government pays for something, the cost is possibly inflated to ridiculous levels, more than if the item was bought directly by consumers. This would lead to greater corporate corruption in my view. I keep harping on the grievous error in how the economy as a system is currently understood. No functional system has an open bottom end and open top end, yet we allow our economy to operate with both. As an example of a useful system, what happens if your car's engine RPM drops too low or revs too high? On the low RMP end, the engine dies. On the high RPM side the engine will burn up and die. Every system has upper and lower limits, but not our economy? Why? The answer is that an open ended economic system is built for the wealthy, and it always crashes (which serves the wealthy). People drop out of the bottom because the system cannot support them. The open top allows the very wealthy top drain resources from everyone else. The subsidizing of the 1% owner class companies is a direct result of the open top end, because there are no limits to wealth accumulation. However, it is a mistake to focus on the means of production as the problem source when the real debilitating root problem is the "money for nothing" "investment" scheme we have. The term "investment" is being deliberately misused, because real investment involves "risk and reward", while what our present system is simply "reward" (and exponential reward at that). If we are to solve the pressing problems of our age, then we must close off the open ends of our economy. Put a floor under everyone (M4A, UBI, Housing Guarantee, Free College, etc) and put a hard cap ceiling on individual wealth accumulation. If you were to look at the cause and effect of a wealth cap in detail, the ramifications of a wealth cap would be the solving of a great many societal issues and the ushering in of a new "golden age" for humanity.
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  37.  @whysocurious7366  - I am totally in favor of workers owning and running the means of production. As in most things where critical decisions must be made in order to change the way we do business or politics, we must figure out which comes first . . . the horse or the cart. In the case of worker owned enterprises, those who own businesses now will never let go, so we are going to have to force the issue. There is one central focal point to all of our problems, which is that "wealth" prevents us from moving forward. This means we must take out the power arrayed against us, which means taking out wealth. Only when we eliminate the power of wealth will we get worker owned enterprises, nationalized health care, internet access as a utility, housing as a right instead of as an "investment", banking for the common good, the end of warfare generating profit and so on. We must focus on the real problem, which is "wealth buys power". I want individual wealth to be hard capped at perhaps $3 million, that number is high enough to live a life of luxury but not high enough to buy political power, which will prevent those akin to the former Koch Brothers from using excess wealth to alter our political and economic landscape.
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  38. Pete - Good! Keep paying attention! Really, I do understand the cynicism because the way things have played out it is natural to feel that way. In another comment thread I and two others are trying to construct a path to a money-less society. Anyone interested in this type of intellectual endeavor?
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  39. MC - Cool! and Thank you for the links. After I look them over I'll be back to comment on what I absorbed. Meanwhile, could not agree more with you about the food production capability, the waste inherent in the market capitalism distribution system, and that lack of concern for human health. When I listened to Paul Ryan address the questions of a catholic nun about caring for the poor, his answer to her just reeked of everything you mentioned concerning the lack efficiency with the monetary system . . . and the corrupt nature of it as well. That nice life free of deprivation IS doable right now, hope to discuss more about that.
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  40. Abuse of personal debt is trivial. The value of financial assets has gained enough in the past two years to equal a full year of GDP. The only reason that happened is because the Federal Reserve is loaning trillions every year to corporations. They in turn buy back their own stock, artificially pumping up the stock market. Corporate debt of this magnitude can never be paid back.
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  41. Thank you! We hit a home run for Bernie in California and I will write Bernie in this November if Joe Biden gets the nomination.
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  42. And why are the political parties able to carve up our government and the election process? When the politicians represent their wealthy campaign donors over the voters. That means the billionaires, corporations and wealthy industrialists are the problem. The same problem that gave us Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, making SCOTUS unwilling to do what you suggest.
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  43. I'm looking for an answer to my question. I'm not going to play word games, it is out in the open: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/obama-putin-election-hacking/?utm_term=.531f5958cd0d
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  44. ch33tos sesh - Yea right. That is CNN, and not even close to what the Washington Post reported on Friday 6/23/2017. I'm not concerned whether or not trump colluded with russia, I want to know what trump is doing to protect our elections from further attack. Refer to my OP for the original question and if you have an answer, then post your comment.
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  45. the op kingdom - Wow, the level of obfuscation here is disturbing. There is no doubt whatsoever that russia was interfering in the 2016 election. No reasonable person can deny that at all or refute that fact. So lets go back to my original comment and read my question again, if there is an answer I would like to know.
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  46. just aburner wrote - "Why should you be the arbiter of how wealth is distributed. You seem awfully entitled to the money of those who have made better choices than you." Made better choices? Sir, you really need to redirect your energy. "We the People" absolutely must become the arbiters over how wealth is distributed, and it has never been a matter of "the money of those who have made better choices that you". Those better choices you refer to are the back room deals made in the 1960's by a group of cigar chomping industrialists to usurp public offices so they could end the era of workers getting to uppity with their high wages and union representation. "We the People" never had the opportunity to make choices in these matters, so you need to get onto the correct side of history here. We are going to take back our choices now by creating a universal health care system. Medicare administration costs are 6% of every dollar spent on medicare. Private insurance overhead is 20% under the ACA, and that does not include all the other ways the private medical industry ventures have of sticking it to us. None of that market rape of the consumer is going through government administration, it happened that way because the industrialists bought the vote of the policy makers who then fashioned the law to permit this monstrosity.
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  47. Grant R - Hear-hear and seconded!! Very good analysis, thank you.
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  48. Grant R - Once again, excellent analysis. Thank you.
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  49. An economy that has been hollowed out cannot be "stimulated". If you had all of your organs removed, how well do you think your body could function?
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  50. Amazon feels that pointing out that 42% of American workers earn under $15/hr is a point in their favor? Thanks Amazon for substantiating that corporations are truly hollowing out the American Economy. We are the wealthiest nation yet 42% of workers don not get $15/hr? Time for a wealth cap folks, that is the ONLY way we are going to get a stable economy and society.
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