Ben Carson On Fox: "No Group, Be They Gays," NAMBLA, Or Bestiality Supporters, Gets To Change Definition Of Marriage March 27, 2013 From the March 26 edition of Fox News' Hannity:
The present darling of the right wing, Dr. Benjamin Carson, is a distinguished neurosurgeon who went from the depths of Detroit poverty to the heights of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. But his current status among conservatives isn’t so much rooted in Carson’s redemptive rise from rags to respectability, as it is in the belief that he is, in the long winter of Obama, the one they’ve been waiting for.
Last week, Carson came under attack for comparing advocates of same-sex marriage with advocates of bestiality and the North American Man/Boy Love Association. He then cast himself as a victim of political correctness, besieged by white liberals — “the most racist people there are” — who could not countenance his heterodoxy and wanted to keep him on the “plantation.”
The plantation metaphor refers to a popular theory on the right. It holds that the 95 percent of African-Americans who voted for a Democratic president are not normal Americans voting their beliefs, but slaves. A corollary to the plantation theory is the legend of the Conservative Black Hope, a lonesome outsider, willing to stare down the party of Obamacare and stand up for the party of voter ID. Does it matter that this abolitionist truth-teller serves at the leisure of an audience that is overwhelmingly white? Not really. Blacks are brainwashed slaves; you can’t expect them to know what’s in their interest.
Benjamin Carson is that Conservative Black Hope of the moment. His rise began with a meandering speech that mixed policy, humor and victimization in February at the National Prayer Breakfast, mere feet from the president of the United States, who was forced to take his medicine in a way that Clint Eastwood could only dream of. When Sean Hannity interviewed Carson about his speech he dispensed with the policy and simply dubbed the segment “Lecturing Obama.”
Since the dawn of the Obama era, conservatives have been on the lookout for such a man. In 2004 they dispatched Alan Keyes cross-country to take up the mantle of the Conservative Black Hope and deliver an early knockout to Obama. Keyes had never lived in Illinois and his voters barely knew him, and voted accordingly. But it did not matter who he was. What mattered was their plan.
“We needed to find another Harvard-educated African-American who had some experience on the national political scene,” said Steven J. Rauschenberger, a Republican who was then a member of the Illinois State Senate. “We need that because the Democrats have made an icon out of Barack Obama.”
Having seen their icon thrashed in 2004, in 2009 conservatives looked to Michael Steele, the first African-American to head the Republican National Convention, to face off with the first black president. But Steele had an on-again off-again relationship with the party line, and was thus ill suited to be a Conservative Black Hope, even if the hip-hop Republican often talked like one.
In 2010, Allen West, a congressman from Florida, arrived promising to lead black people off the Obama plantation like a “modern-day Harriet Tubman.” More like Harriet Miers; West was defeated in the very next election.
In 2012, Herman Cain took up the cape and cowl, proclaiming that the first black president had “never been part of the black experience in America” and insisting that Obama was “not a strong black man.” But Cain was not a strong presidential candidate, and the wait for the Conservative Black Hope continued. Things were looking up at the Conservative Political Action Committee this year when a black Republican, K. Carl Smith, ran a session for attendees who were “tired of being called a racist.” Among those answering in the affirmative was a man who proceeded to defend slavery.
Not all black conservatives see it as their job to tell white racists that they embody the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. It is certainly possible to oppose Obamacare in good conscience. No one knows this more than Ben Carson. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore. Carson responded to that adulation by regularly giving his time to talk to young people, who needed to know that there was so much more beyond the streets.
I was one of those young people. I don’t doubt that Carson was a conservative even then. I knew plenty of black people who loved their community and hated welfare. But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist.
Now .. Ben Carson as well as, for some inexplicable reason since he is "a gifted doctor", being a kooky, anti-science creationist guy, says a flat tax would be good for the country .. well, perhaps he just hasn't taken the time to look into that .. as well as not being simpler (that's one myth about it) there is the more serious problem of inequality and economic growth ..
The Problem With Flat-Tax Fever
Rising inequality exacts a toll not just on those with lower incomes, but also on those much higher up the income scale. In their 2009 book, “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger .. http://www.bloomsburypress.com/books/catalog/spirit_level_hc_362 ,” the British public health researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document a range of social ills that are reliably associated with increased income inequality, both over time within nations and at any particular moment across a broad range of countries. Countries and times with lower inequality fare better on virtually every published index of health, well-being and quality of life. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/business/flat-tax-doesnt-solve-inequality-problem.html?_r=0
For more on the fact that excess inequality is not good for either the social fabric, the mental health or the health of the economy of any nation
is worth repeating, too .. .. umm .. this .. Occupy London Tour Shows Bankers Profiting Amid Poverty .. excerpt ..
“There is a groundswell of increasing concern with the scale of inequality,” says Richard Wilkinson, coauthor with Kate Pickett of the book, “The Spirit Level.” They make the case that more-unequal societies have lower life expectancies and more mental illness, violence, teenage pregnancies and incarceration, resulting in less trust.
The Ecology of Growth .. 15 October 2010 .. morsel ..
In their inspirational book The Spirit Level, .. http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level .. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that “we have got close to the end of what economic growth can do for us” in terms of quality of life. Within the industrialised world, it is income inequality rather than absolute levels of GDP that explains differences in a range of health and social outcomes (such as trust, the status of women, mental health, drug use, educational attainment, murder rates, life expectancy and obesity). And inequality even constrains the time we have to ourselves: “People in more unequal societies do the equivalent of two to three months’ extra work a year. A loss of the equivalent of an extra eight or twelve weeks’ holiday is a high price to pay for inequality.” .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69574113
and
There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored .. one bit ..
As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, phenomena usually described as "social problems" (crime, ill-health, imprisonment rates, mental illness) are far more common in unequal societies than ones with better economic distribution and less gap between the richest and the poorest. Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world. [ http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level ] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66013466
Soooo .. seems possible, even likely, the NYT article above has not been posted before .. and possible, even likely, Ben Carson would not be much more successful in the political sphere than GOPers Herman Cain, Michael Steele or Allen West were.
Ben Carson: "If the Lord grabbed me by the collar and made me do it, I would."
In an interview with Neil Cavuto, Carson defended himself by saying "Somebody has to be courageous enough to stand up to the bullies." Carson appeared on the Fox News program Hannity on Friday February 8, and was asked about a possible run for the White House. Carson responded: "If the Lord grabbed me by the collar and made me do it, I would."
Health savings accounts: just another greedy corporate scam
25 October 2011, 6.39am EST
[image inside] Day 15 of OccupyMN protest that has occupied Minneapolis. Meanwhile corporate greed continues unabated. Fibonacci Blue
[image inside] AuthorThomas Faunce - ARC Future Fellow at Australian National University
------ Disclosure Statement Thomas Faunce receives funding from the Australia Research Council to investigate the creation in Australia of an equivalent of the U.S False Claims Act that financially rewards corporate insiders who assist is revealing fraud on the public purse.
The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, Canberra, CDU, Deakin, Flinders, Griffith, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle. QUT, Swinburne, UniSA, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS and VU. ------
At a time when the “Occupy Wall Street” protests against corporate greed are proliferating in the United States and around the world, it’s ironic to read the floating of yet another corporate “get-even-more rich” scheme .. http://www.ratesonline.com.au/news/expert-plan-ahead-for-retirement-stability , this time related to Australian health care.
Deloitte Access Economics director Lynne Pezzullo has apparently been busy lobbying senior federal bureaucrats to create employer or self-funded health savings accounts (HSAs) like the present superannuation scheme.
The federal government would make co-contributions to the health accounts of low-income workers and the public hospital system would remain free only for delivery of emergency or essential health services.
Pezzulo claims the rationale for this comes from the fact that health spending has already risen to almost 10% of GDP, and because of the rapid growth of the health-care intensive 65-plus demographic.
Striking while the iron’s hot
Such proposals must be taken seriously in the present volatile political context where vested interests of many shapes and forms are jostling for policy traction, says Pezzulo.
Similarly, the pharmaceutical lobby group Medicines Australia has previously advocated a Medicines Savings Account (MSA) to replace the federal government’s cost-effectiveness and subsidy system under the referendum-supported Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
Pezzulo’s proposal draws upon examples of HSAs and MSAs in Singapore, South Africa, China and the United States.
These systems forcibly encourage citizens (called “consumers”) to jog, watch their diet, be compliant with medications and trade off disposable income so they can build up cash (that HSA and MSA funds invest in the stockmarket) for that “rainy day” when they are, for example, diagnosed with cancer, ischemic heart disease or hit by a bus.
Translated into “economics speak,” HSAs and MSAs purport to address major inefficiencies of health-care systems dominated by private health insurance.
These systems already abound with moral hazard (lack of incentive for healthy behaviour); escalating costs (premiums increase each year by 2% to 3% above the inflation rate); adverse selection (older people in smaller insurance pools) and; gaps in coverage (the poor and unemployed generally lack private health insurance).
Case study: Singapore
Since 1984, the government of Singapore has implemented an HSA scheme whereby employees and self-employed citizens must contribute 6% to 8% of their monthly salary to a personal Medisave account for costs of hospitalization and medical expenses.
Such contributions are tax-deductible and earn interest. Withdrawals require authorization and cash co-payment, particularly from patients choosing more expensive procedures or private hospitals.
Ostensibly to foster equity, Singaporean Medisave is complemented by the somewhat duplicitously named MediShield, a non-compulsory, catastrophic or prolonged illness insurance scheme, and the Medifund safety net to help the poor pay for hospital medical care.
Medisave allows the Singaporean government to boast its contribution to health-care costs is only 3.3% of GDP.
This makes the situation in Singapore sound like things are under great fiscal control. But that’s only until we start to look at the detail and wider implications of this kind of health-care system.
Increasing inequity
In Singapore, three quarters of health-care costs are paid directly by citizens to private corporations instead of to their government as taxes.
The poor of Singapore are forced into rationed second-tier health care. williamcho
What’s more, the experience with HSAs and MSAs in Singapore, South Africa, the United States and China over the last 20 years is that increasing numbers of people forego necessary and preventive care, often because they lack the experience, information or ability to call upon their HSA or MSA.
Meanwhile, fund managers increase profits by finding reasons to deny access. The insurance risk pool is depleted and those with higher risks are saddled with higher premiums.
Those who are uninsured (through unemployment, disability or poverty) are forced into rationed second-tier health care, eroding foundational social virtues such as justice and equity.
HSAs and MSAs provide personal financial windfalls to the investing fund managers and wealthy citizens who benefit from tax deductions.
They increase likelihood of fraudulent misappropriation, inappropriately high administrative costs and vulnerability to stock market volatility.
Medical bills, for instance, cause over 60% of personal bankruptcies in the United States.
Figures and facts
Nations that experimented with HSAs and MSAs in the heady days of financial deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s, are now realizing that health-care cost reductions are more efficiently organised through direct government intervention (to ration health services or providers) as well as universal coverage taxpayer-funded health-care systems.
World Health Organisation (WHO) and OECD’s 2008 estimates place health-care costs as percentage of GDP at 10% in Canada; 8.4% in the United Kingdom; 11% in France and; 8.9% in Australia.
Compare this to 17% of GDP in the corporatized U.S system.
These figures alone disprove the lobbyists’ frequent contention that the free market operates health-care more efficiently than governments.
As do the number of huge anti-fraud claims that have been recovered against private corporations involved in health care in the United States.
Asking Australians whether our universal coverage healthcare and medicines system is sustainable is like asking whether our police, primary and high school education system and military are sustainable.
That any government could claim a policy triumph by forcing citizens to fund health care individually, to basically tax to a corporate roulette wheel of stockmarket investment ten percent of their disposable income instead of to the political organisation supposed to represent their interests, highlights exactly what the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors are on about.
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Articles also by This Author [ with links ] 26 March 2013 Medical device sales: when a rebate becomes a kick back 27 January 2013 Life of Pi’s acidic island a warning for our warming world 17 December 2012 Here’s to hydrogen: Australia is missing the potential of solar fuels 29 August 2012 An affront to the rule of law: international tribunals to decide on plain packaging 22 February 2012 Evergreening patents: playing monopoly with solar fuels and medicine innovations
PS: Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire sees our Liberal's Tony Abbott ( who actually considered the priesthood early on ) as the ant's pants and has had a huge influence on the polls, which now suggest the 'almost' priest will almost certainly will win the election coming up .. the "almost" is a 'never be certain' human hope .. lol ..
DES MOINES, IA - OCTOBER 22: Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain speaks to a gathering of conservative Christians at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition Presidential Forum on October 22, 2011 in Des Moines, Iowa. Candidates Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum are scheduled to speak at the event, all hoping to gain support of the roughly 1000 in attendance in front of the January 3, 2012 Iowa caucus. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Photo: Scott Olson, Getty Images
The so-called flat tax is all the rage among Republican presidential hopefuls. Herman Cain .. http://tiny.cc/irjxxw .. was the first. Now, Rick Perry .. http://tiny.cc/vsjxxw .. and Newt Gingrich .. http://tiny.cc/otjxxw .. have come up with their own flat-tax proposals.
The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center .. http://tiny.cc/nwjxxw .. estimates that Cain's flat-tax plan (the only one that's been set out in any detail) would lower the after-tax incomes of poor households (incomes below $30,000) by 16 to 20 percent.
Meanwhile, 95 percent of households with more than $1 million of income would get an average tax cut of $487,300. And capital gains (a major source of income for the very rich) would be tax-free.
All flat-tax proposals benefit the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: Today's tax code is still at least moderately progressive. The rich usually pay a higher percent of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. A flat tax would eliminate that slight progressivity.
Nowadays, most low-income households pay no federal income tax at all - a fact that sends many regressives into spasms of indignation. They conveniently ignore the fact that poor households pay a much larger share of their incomes in payroll taxes, sales taxes and property taxes (directly, if they own their homes; indirectly, if they rent) than do people with high incomes.
Flat-taxers pretend a flat tax is good public policy, for two reasons.
First, they say, it would simplify paying taxes. Baloney. Flat-tax proposals don't eliminate all deductions. People with families will still be able to deduct their dependents while single people will pay a higher rate, businesses will deduct their expenses, and, in most plans, people with homes will still be able to deduct interest on their mortgages.
That means most taxpayers would still have lots of paperwork.
Second, proponents of a flat tax say it's fairer than the current system because, in Cain's words, a flat tax "treats everyone the same."
The truth is, the current tax code treats everyone the same. It's organized around tax brackets. Everyone whose income reaches one bracket is treated the same as everyone else whose income reaches that bracket (apart from various deductions, exemptions and credits, of course).
For example, no one pays any income taxes on the first $20,000 or so of income. People in a higher bracket pay a higher rate only on the portion of their income that hits that bracket - not on their entire incomes.
So when President Obama .. http://tiny.cc/7yjxxw .. calls for ending the Bush tax cut on incomes over $250,000, he's only talking about the portion of people's incomes that exceeds $250,000. He's not proposing to tax their entire incomes at the higher rate that prevailed under President Bill Clinton .. http://tiny.cc/qxjxxw .
Republicans have tried to sow confusion about this. They want Americans to believe, for example, that if the Bush tax cut ended, small-business owners with incomes of $251,000 a year would have to pay 39 percent of their entire incomes in taxes rather than 35 percent. Wrong. They'd only have to pay the 39 percent rate on $1,000 - the portion of their incomes over $250,000.
Get it? We already have a flat tax - flat within each bracket.
The real problem is that the top brackets are set too low relative to where the money is. The top-most bracket starts at $375,000 a year. People with incomes higher than that pay 35 percent - again, only on that portion of their incomes exceeding $375,000.
This means a doctor who's making, say, $380,000 a year pays the same income-tax rate as a plutocrat pulling in $2 billion or $20 billion.
Actually, it's worse than that because the plutocrats get most of their income in the form of capital gains, which are taxed at only 15 percent. That's why America's 400 richest people - who earned an average of $300 million last year, and who have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together - now pay at a 17 percent rate (according to the Internal Revenue Service).
The Republicans' push for a flat tax masks what's really going on.
Remember: The top 1 percent is now raking in over 20 percent of the nation's total income and owns over 35 percent of the nation's wealth. Under almost anyone's view of fairness, these are grotesque portions. They're especially large relative to what they were as recently as 30 years ago, when the top 1 percent raked in under 10 percent - and paid a top marginal tax rate of more than 70 percent. And these huge portions at the top continue to increase.
Simple fairness requires three things: More tax brackets at the top, higher rates in each of those top brackets and the treatment of all sources of income (capital gains included) exactly the same.
Not only fairness demands it, but also fiscal prudence. A truly progressive tax would bring in tens of billions of dollars a year from the people at the top who are in the best position to afford it.
Regressives are pushing the flat tax as a smokescreen. They'd rather not have anyone talk about the unfairness and fiscal absurdity of the current system.
Rather than merely oppose the flat tax, sensible people should push for a truly progressive tax - starting with a top rate of 70 percent on that portion of anyone's income exceeding $5 million, from whatever source.
Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." He blogs at www.robertreich.org. To comment, go to www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.
Ben Carson Is the Worst Thing to Happen to Us Since He Opened His Mouth
Earl Ofari Hutchinson Posted: 10/21/2013 11:33 am Author and political analyst
Dr. Ben Carson's shoot from the lip, crackpot quips, digs, and insults at women, blacks, Democrats, and especially President Obama are fast becoming the stuff of legend. This time he almost outdid his past inane cracks with the zinger that the Affordable Care Act is the worst thing .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/11/ben-carson-obamacare-worst-thing-since-slavery/ .. since slavery. Carson has parlayed his zany potshots into a plum spot as a Fox News Network commentator. This is the sorry case of a man who at one time had the respect of many for his moving, inspiring story of overcoming hardships to become a highly respected medical professional and who now has prostituted himself to grab a quick headline from a soundbite-driven, titillation media that hungrily eats up anything that someone like a Carson dishes out.
But it's also the case of a man such as Carson and his ilk that serve a calculating purpose. They get attention for the GOP. While they are zany, they also touch a deep, dark, and throbbing pulse among legions of ultra-conservatives who think that Obama and many Democrats are communists, gays are immoral, and that the health care reform law is exactly what Carson likened it to "slavery," meaning the tyrannical intrusion by big government into their lives. Carson actually went even further than the slavery dig and likened the health care law .. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/11/ben-carson-obamacare-worst-thing-slavery/ .. to the old communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union run by Lenin.
Mainstream GOP leaders can't utter these inanities. They must always give appearance that they are above the dirt, mud, and hate slinging fray. So they leave it to a well-paid stalking horse like Carson to do their dirty work for them. But that's only part of Carson's worth to conservatives.
He gives the illusion that the GOP is a race-neutral party that has a plethora of big name, African-Americans as their visible point men and women, and who speak with authority. The cast of shameless black panderers and hucksters that the GOP has trotted out and plopped in front of the TV cameras during the past few years has been both endless and embarrassing. But they still keep them coming.
The idiotic comparison of the Affordable Care Act to slavery was a perfect example of how the GOP craftily manages to weld race and its current signature hit issue of Obama, the health care law, into one package to play on right-wing hysteria over the law. The GOP understands the fundamental political axiom that self-interest rules politics as well, if not better, than the Democrats. Party leaders have long known that blue-collar white voters, especially male voters, can be easily aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues: abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and tax cuts.
For months before passage, they whipped up mania and borderline racism against the health care law. This was glaringly apparent in ferocity and bile spouted by the shock troops that the GOP leaders in conjunction with the Tea Party brought out to harangue, harass and bully Democratic legislators on the eve of the health care vote. For the months after passage of the act and its upholding by the Supreme Court the GOP has never relented in the drumbeat attack up on it. That includes the dozens of House votes to defund or outright kill it. And then everything it making it the prime bargaining chip in its fresh assault on government with the partial shutdown.
Carson fits neatly into this script. He's an African American with name identification and some admiration among blacks, though that's dwindling fast. We can be sure then that this won't be the last crackpot quip that we'll hear from Carson. Sadly, he'll continue to be the worst thing that happened to us since he opened his mouth.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC and a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson
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