Secular Talk: Pressure Your Congressman and Sign Petition to Support Medicare For All

This was put up on the 27th March on the Secular Talk YouTube channel, so I don’t know if this is still going through Congress. In this clip, Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski reports that not all Democrats in Congress are complete sell-outs, and some have responded the proper way to the failure of TrumpCare: they’re now pressing for Medicare for All. John Conyers has proposed it in the House of Representatives, and the awesome Bernie Sanders is proposing it in Senate. 72 Democrats have backed it, but this is less than the total 192 Democrats in the House.

The bill also has the backing of National Nurses United, Brand New Congress, and the Justice Democrats group of progressive Democrats.

Kulinski recommends that his viewers should get on to their congressman, if he’s a Democrat, and urge him to vote for this bill. He also urges them to make it clear that if he does not, then they will vote against him in the next election. He gives the example of a comment from a politico that what really gets things going at Congress is when the phones start ringing.

There is also a petition up at the Justice Democrats’ website supporting the bill, which Kulinski also urges his viewers to sign.

Kulinski states that now is the time to introduce this bill, as they have the support of 55 per cent of the country. One of the leading Democrats, who does not support it is Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi wants to lead the Democrats, but believes that giving everyone proper access to medical care is a step too far. Kulinski also states that those Democrats, who don’t want to support Medicare For All, but maintain that they should just stick to supporting Obamacare are sell-outs. He makes it clear that Obamacare is a great step forward, but it is at heart a right-wing solution. It was proposed by Newt Gingrich way back in the 1990s, and various forms of it have also been backed by Richard Nixon and the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s. It’s an improvement, but still has very severe drawbacks.

Kulinski goes on to urge his viewers to point out to their Democratic representative that they can even rub the Republicans’ noses in it by citing Trump back at them. Trump said in a speech that he believed in Medicare For All. Quote: ‘If a nation can’t look after its sick people, then it’s over. I believe in Medicare For All’.

He makes it very clear that this reform is needed. There are 53 million people, who cannot afford medical insurance in America. Every other developed country has some form of free medical care. It is also bizarre and iniquitous that the country can find billions to fund the war in Syria, and give massive corporate bail-outs and subsidies to the banks and big business, but then states that Medicare For All is too expensive, and the existing Medicare budget needs to be cut.

Secular Talk: Harvard Poll Shows 51 Per Cent American Millennials Don’t Support Capitalism

In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses the astonishing news that according to the Washington Post, just over half of American young adults don’t support capitalism. The papers reports that a poll by Harvard University of young people aged between 19 and 29 found that 51% of them did not support capitalism. Only 33% said they supported Socialism, however.

Kulinski states that this finding made him wonder if they were even more liberal than he was. He states that he’s not a Communist, and is largely opposed to it, although many of his viewers are Communists. He’s in favour of the mixture of Socialism and capitalism found mainly in the Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Europe. He then goes on to consider that maybe most of the people polled are also in favour of such a mixed economy, but that the questions were badly worded so as to make them sound like they were in favour of total nationalisation when they weren’t.

America is one of the most capitalist nations on Earth, so it’s amazing how far leftward the country has moved. This might have something to do with the fact that for decades, the free market capitalism espoused and so militantly promoted by Reagan, Bushes snr and jnr, Bill Clinton et al hasn’t delivered. Unemployment is growing. The TPP has resulted in more jobs being exported abroad. 20 per cent of Americans could not afford healthcare before the introduction of Obamacare, and the Republicans have fought tooth and nail to repeal that. In many ways, Obama’s a Conservative politician. He receives much of his funding from Wall Street, Obamacare was originally a Conservative idea from Richard Nixon’s administration, supported by Newt Gingrich, amongst others. On gun control he’s hardly more restrictive than George Dubya. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans screaming that he’s everything from a Communist to a Nazi to a radical Muslim. The accusations are ridiculous, and so are they for making them.

And much of this corruption come from the corporate funding of politics. Corporations fund politicians’ campaigns, so that their policies reflect those of their big business sponsors, rather than the American people. 80 per cent of Americans want gun control. Very many others don’t want to see cuts to Medicaid and social security. But the politicians don’t want gun control, and are doing everything they can to cut the Medicaid and social security budget.

And as a result of all this, the approval rating for Congress fluctuates from 9% to 20%. And a Harvard study declared that America was an oligarchy, rather than a proper, functioning democracy.

This has no doubt got America’s corporate masters hopping mad. You can expect even more of them to start putting pressure on our politicos in Britain to start privatising even more stuff, like the Health Service, so they have a few more nice little earners should Bernie Sanders, or someone very like him, get in. Which now seems increasingly possible.

And I dare say that the Tories over here are also worried. After all, they’ve taken much of their free market ideology from the American Republicans and Libertarians. The same goes for the Blairites in the Labour party. They took over the Chicago school’s nonsense, and followed Bill Clinton’s line in refashioning the Democrat party to look like a slightly paler version of the Republicans. Blair and the leading lights of New Labour were a part of the Reaganite network, the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. If capitalism, or at least, its free market variant is looking increasingly rocky in the American homeland, then you can bet that its cheerleaders and supporters are grimly contemplating the fact that this anti-free market mood might just cross the Atlantic and come over here.

And that will be no bad thing. Frankly, the day can’t come soon enough.

Secular Talk on Alex Jones’ ‘Libs Are Demonic Villains Who Want Blood’

This is yet another piece from Secular Talk, and I’m reblogging it because it answers some of the accusations the American far right throw at anything even vaguely liberal or left-wing, as well as showing just how peculiar their opposition to Obamacare is.

Kyle Kulinski is here commenting and taking apart an interview on Alex Jones’ Infowars programme with a right-wing documentary film maker, Joel Gilbert, who has produced a movie, No Such Thing as Utopia, attacking the left and its economic and social doctrines. Jones and his guest accuse liberal policies of devastating the economy and deliberately attacking the family, leaving millions of families without fathers. Deprived of paternal guidance, the boys from these broken homes turn to crime. It was liberal policies, of course, that has left Detroit the wrecked, dying city it now is. They claim that liberals are all secret Marxists intent on a entering and corrupting mainstream political parties, like the Democrats. And then Alex Jones goes off on a mocking sneer about how liberals are like ‘gangster-type felons’, extremely bloodthirsty wanting to inflict a genocide, but in public affect a simpering attitude of ‘But I’m so Liberal!’

As for Obama, they claim that his intentions were ‘never good’, and that he only intended to cut the deficit in half.

It’s rubbish, of course. Kulinski challenges them to name one Marxist policy the Democrats have. There isn’t one. They are, in his view, centrist corporatists. As for the devastation of Detroit, that’s often been claimed by the right to be due to ‘socialist’ policies and the trade unions. The simple fact is that it was wrecked by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The corrupt, corporatist system destroyed middle class, factory jobs that kept people employed. This meant that all the jobs were exported abroad. It wouldn’t have matter, who the people of Detroit would have voted for – Democrat, Republican, Fascist, Centrist, Communist. And the economy’s going to remain like that until another industry comes into to revive Detroit.

He also tears into the Republican accusation that Obamacare is a Marxist policy. In no way is it. This may surprise you – it certainly did me – but it was first suggested by – wait for it! – Richard Nixon. It was also supported by Bob Dole. Newt Gingrich supported it during the Clinton administration. Even the far right, all-American Heritage Foundation made notes on it.

Obama himself has honoured his promise to halve the deficit. Bush left the country with a staggering debt of $1.4 trillion. Under Obama, it’s gone down to $480 – $460 billion. As for Obama’s supposedly evil intentions, Kulinski states that it’s ridiculous, but the stance is also shared by people on the left. Everyone rationalises that what they’re doing is good for the country.George Bush, with whose policies Kulinski radically disagrees, thought he was doing his best for the country. Even Joseph Stalin rationalised his monstrous crimes against the Soviet people and the countries he conquered in this way.

And if you want to point to Detroit as an example of what liberalism does, how about Mississippi as an example of the effects of Conservatism. It is the poorest, most obese state in America, with the lowest levels of education and the highest rates of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. He also adduces the Scandinavian countries – Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland. They have the best middle classes in the world, best standards of health care, best social safety nets and they’re people all self-report that they are the happiest. And they’re incredibly liberal.