Until this week, the lies about death panels were some of the worst spread by Sarah Palin and the Republicans to scare seniors about health care reform and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Now there's a real death panel, and John Boehner is in charge -- it's the Republican legislative campaign to undermine the ACA. Boehner and the Republicans want to give our health care back to the insurance companies, kill strong consumer protections that end the worst insurance company abuses and sentence more than 30,000 Americans a year to death because they can't afford health insurance.
As one of the first acts of the 112th Congress, the Republicans plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and all the benefits and consumer protections that are making a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans right now. What are they replacing it with? Nothing. They're referring that question to a bunch of committees that will deliberate for months and play political football with our lives and health. What does that really mean? It means letting the insurance companies off the hook so they can run roughshod over consumers and deny our care and jack up our rates whenever they please.
Here are some of the things that will happen in the real world if the Republicans are successful with repeal:
- Seniors who received $250 checks from Medicare last year to help buy prescription drugs will have to return the money to the Treasury Department.
- Seniors will lose the 50% discount on brand-name drugs when they have reached the "donut hole" of their prescription-drug plans - a benefit worth more than $12,500 over 10 years to those who qualify. Instead of closing over the next several years, the "donut hole" will stay open permanently.
- Seniors will stop receiving no-cost annual physicals, mammograms and cancer screenings under rules that had just taken effect this week. Also, a voluntary program to enable seniors to live independently would be wiped out, forcing more people to crowd into nursing homes.
- Millions of consumers, including children, will be denied coverage and care due to pre-existing conditions and branded "uninsurable." Health plans will go back to kicking young adults off their parents' coverage instead of providing benefits until age 26.
- Many Americans with sick family members will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection when insurers restore lifetime and annual caps on benefits.
- Health plan premiums will resume their double-digit increases as insurers return to grabbing however much they want from your premiums to pay for excessive profits, CEO pay, an army of lobbyists and a bureaucracy that turns away the sick. New programs to block unreasonable rate hikes would be dismantled.
- Taxpayers would pay hundreds of billions of dollars in excessive fees to private health insurance companies that enroll seniors in Medicare Advantage plans at much higher costs than if the government provided benefits directly. The Medicare trust fund's projected solvency will give back the 10-year extension it got from the ACA.
You can see an excellent overview here of what we will lose if the ACA is repealed. You can also see the district-by-district impact of health reform here.
After a century of legislative and political combat, working families and small businesses finally won and ended the insurance companies' stranglehold over our health care. Naturally, Boehner wants to roll back the new health care law and let the health insurance companies resume their reign of terror. That's why Boehner and his band of corporate shills, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a raft of presidential wannabes, have made repealing the law the Republican Party's top priority for 2011.
The Congress needs to fix the economy and create millions of jobs to put American back to work, but instead Cantor prefers to make bogus claims about an election mandate to repeal the health care law. Nevermind that 68% of Americans favor consumer protections such as allowing people under 26 to remain on their parents' plans, and 60% don't want health insurers to turn away sick people. Cantor isn't deterred by facts because his mission is partisan politics, not governing.
And so is this typically understated comment from Boehner:
"I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country... That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care."
Wow. Sounds like the end of the world as we know it.
Boehner and his fellow Republican repeal-mongers dismiss economic projections they don't like, such as those showing that the ACA will create millions of new jobs, that the law now requires insurers to use a new minimum acceptable percentage of premium dollars for actual medical care instead of profits and bureaucracy, and that the ACA will reduce the federal budget deficit.
The Republicans are kowtowing to right-wing extremists, corporate executives and billionaire investors who secretly spent millions of dollars to help Republican election campaigns last fall, including deceptive ads attacking the health care law. Those deceptions continue still. The ACA protects consumers from the worst health insurance company abuses and provides seniors with better health care through the Medicare program.
Thankfully Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats in the Senate will stop Boehner in his tracks. However, when you cut through the political hyperbole, the GOP's search-and-destroy mission is serious business. The repeal vote in the House scheduled for next week is part of an all-out assault on the new law in the Congress, the courts and state legislatures. And it's an assault with well-funded corporate sponsors.
Everyone already knows that the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health insurance industry and other profit-hungry corporations. In case there was any doubt, the Republicans have begun hiring insurance and health care industry lobbyists for key positions on committees and members' staffs. So far, two health care industry lobbyists have joined the powerful House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care legislation. One of them was named staff director. In addition, a top lobbyist from the medical device industry has joined Boehner's staff as policy director, a post he will undoubtedly use to try to roll back the new tax on medical devices that is part of the ACA. Expect to see more hires like these.
If that picture isn't disturbing enough, look at the cynical demagoguery of GOP presidential hopefuls, like Fox News personality and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has been running TV commercials trashing the health care law and offering a petition to demand that Congress repeal it. It turns out that Huckabee hired a notorious scam artist to help him with the exploitative ad campaign, which is nothing more than a front to raise money. Three days after Think Progress reported about the scammer, Huckabee was forced to fire the guy. A few months ago, Huckabee, a Baptist minister with a pre-existing condition of his own, said it was OK for health insurance companies to turn their backs on people with pre-existing conditions. Like Boehner, he's the new face of the Republican Party on health care. He works for the insurance industry and other big corporations, not the rest of us.
The interests of middle class and working families are of no concern to Republican Party leaders. To them, it's just smart business to spend political capital on protecting the financial interests of the billionaires and big corporations who make up their base -- the "haves and the have-mores," as President George W. Bush famously described them.
And yet, these are the same Republicans who complain about having to wait a few weeks for their health benefits to take effect while they rush into the 112th Congress with a plan that will revive working families' fear of going bankrupt because of crushing medical expenses and of getting dropped from your insurance if you're sick.
President Obama spent much of Wednesday huddled with a group of business executives, an effort The New York Times said afterward "went a long way to reset the tone of the relationship between Mr. Obama and corporate America" in the eyes of the corporate chieftains who attended.
That's all well and good, if the problems with today's economy were rooted in a lack of warmth and fuzziness between President Obama and corporate CEOs. But they aren't. For decades, the interests of corporate lobbyists—the people acting on behalf of many of the executives at the White House meeting—have been at odds with the interests of working people. The White House "making peace" with corporate CEOs, to use The Washington Post's description of the meeting, is one thing. But Wall Street needs to make peace with those of us who have been forced, as a result of the conservative policies they promoted, to live through a decade of stagnant wages, unemployment and underemployment. Wall Street needs a reset with working America.
Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that this meeting delivered much for working-class people. The Post reported that "after the meeting, several chief executives said their conversation with the president was constructive and open as they discussed education, trade, taxes and jobs. But the executives and Obama remained vague about specific outcomes they expected from the meeting."
And one of the few specifics reported from the meeting is highly disturbing. Bloomberg reported that the CEOs had their hands out for yet another tax cut:
While Obama has called on the CEOs to spend the $2 trillion in cash their companies have accumulated on job creation, the executives said much of that is earnings from overseas sales that are retained abroad to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax. U.S.-based multinational corporations pay corporate income tax on earnings when they are brought back to the U.S. If the revenue remains abroad, either in cash or investment in overseas facilities, the money isn’t taxed.
Obama said he would consider the issue and asked what the executives would be willing to give up in other corporate tax rates to make sure it remains revenue neutral.
Actually, in many cases the earnings involved are not necessarily from "overseas sales." Many multinational corporations have created elaborate schemes to ensure that domestic sales are credited as foreign ones in order to avoid paying corporate income tax. It's how Google avoids paying billions in corporate income taxes to the United States and the United Kingdom.
President Obama has rightly pledged to go after this tax dodge and sent some proposals to Congress last year that Citizens for Tax Justice said were "steps in the right direction." Businesses have countered with demands for a "tax holiday," The Financial Times reported in October. Again, at least until now, the Obama administration has resisted. One reason, as the FT notes, is that there is no guarantee that the money coaxed back into the U.S. will actually be used for investment and job creation.
We've been here before. In 2004 the Bush administration and the Republican Congress gave corporations a tax amnesty on profits sheltered overseas. The benefits for workers were negligible. Gannett News Service reported earlier this year in a story about Sen. Barbara Boxer's support for an offshore tax break:
A Congressional Research Service analysis published in January 2009 found that 10 of the top dozen companies that took advantage of the 2004 break cut jobs. Hewlett-Packard repatriated $14.5 billion and laid off 14,500. Pfizer repatriated $37 billion and cut 9,000 jobs in 2005.
California-based Oracle and Intel also repatriated foreign earnings. The money helped Oracle acquire two U.S. companies and helped Intel build a new factory
.
The Business Roundtable, a champion of the tax amnesty idea, says of the money that came back to the U.S. as a result of 2004 holiday, 25 percent went to capital investments and 23 percent to hiring and training new workers. Even that positive spin suggests the country doesn't get very much for coaxing businesses to do less than what they should be dong as corporate citizens.
Corporations succeed in the United States not simply because of what they do on their own. Their success depends on the quality of public schools that prepare their workers, transportation networks that move goods and people, agencies that help keep people healthy and safe, and efforts to ensure that each American is able to maintain at least a minimal standard of living. All of these are government functions that corporations undercut when they engage in schemes to avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to struggle with the consequences.
The businesses that profit as a result of the public commons that We the People provide should not have to be given special inducements to pay their fair share toward supporting that commons. (As it stands now, contrary to conservative claims to the contrary, the truth is U.S. corporations pay some of the lowest tax rates of major industrial powers.) That is the starting point from which President Obama should begin in building a new tax framework in which businesses and Main Street can profit together in a new economy.
Even as corporations are seeking a tax holiday, these same corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing congressional candidates opposed to government initiatives that would stimulate the economy and stoke the demand that would coax their hoarded cash off the sidelines. Instead of egging on, tacitly or otherwise, the anti-spending crowd, these CEOs could still choose to back a real economic stimulus—not just cross-your-fingers-and-hope-they-trickle-down tax cuts, but real investment in the economy's future.
Lew Prince, a small business owner in St. Louis, recently penned an op-ed that offered a more Main Street perspective on what businesses need to prosper:
We shouldn’t borrow billions more dollars from China and Saudi Arabia to give to the wealthy. Instead the wealthy should pay their fair share. We need adequate tax revenue to invest in our economy. More tax cuts at the top won’t create jobs. But we will create jobs and strengthen our economy by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, public transit, levees and water and gas pipelines. We will save and create jobs by investing in education and clean energy research and manufacturing now growing much more rapidly in other countries.
Now that Obama has met with business executives, his next step should be a summit meeting with the unemployed. And then let's have a real debate in which business executives and their conservative benefactors are called to account on whether they are really interested in the fates of American workers or just in their own balance sheets.
robert shumake detroitProgressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
A leaked costume test from MGM's completed-but-shelved remake of 1984's 'Red Dawn' has found its way online. It's not much, but thanks to MGM's.
Whether your starting a new business or rethinking an existing one, 2011 offers fresh possibilities and a new start. If you're launching a new business, there.
robert shumake detroitProgressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
A leaked costume test from MGM's completed-but-shelved remake of 1984's 'Red Dawn' has found its way online. It's not much, but thanks to MGM's.
Whether your starting a new business or rethinking an existing one, 2011 offers fresh possibilities and a new start. If you're launching a new business, there.
robert shumake Until this week, the lies about death panels were some of the worst spread by Sarah Palin and the Republicans to scare seniors about health care reform and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Now there's a real death panel, and John Boehner is in charge -- it's the Republican legislative campaign to undermine the ACA. Boehner and the Republicans want to give our health care back to the insurance companies, kill strong consumer protections that end the worst insurance company abuses and sentence more than 30,000 Americans a year to death because they can't afford health insurance.
As one of the first acts of the 112th Congress, the Republicans plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and all the benefits and consumer protections that are making a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans right now. What are they replacing it with? Nothing. They're referring that question to a bunch of committees that will deliberate for months and play political football with our lives and health. What does that really mean? It means letting the insurance companies off the hook so they can run roughshod over consumers and deny our care and jack up our rates whenever they please.
Here are some of the things that will happen in the real world if the Republicans are successful with repeal:
- Seniors who received $250 checks from Medicare last year to help buy prescription drugs will have to return the money to the Treasury Department.
- Seniors will lose the 50% discount on brand-name drugs when they have reached the "donut hole" of their prescription-drug plans - a benefit worth more than $12,500 over 10 years to those who qualify. Instead of closing over the next several years, the "donut hole" will stay open permanently.
- Seniors will stop receiving no-cost annual physicals, mammograms and cancer screenings under rules that had just taken effect this week. Also, a voluntary program to enable seniors to live independently would be wiped out, forcing more people to crowd into nursing homes.
- Millions of consumers, including children, will be denied coverage and care due to pre-existing conditions and branded "uninsurable." Health plans will go back to kicking young adults off their parents' coverage instead of providing benefits until age 26.
- Many Americans with sick family members will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection when insurers restore lifetime and annual caps on benefits.
- Health plan premiums will resume their double-digit increases as insurers return to grabbing however much they want from your premiums to pay for excessive profits, CEO pay, an army of lobbyists and a bureaucracy that turns away the sick. New programs to block unreasonable rate hikes would be dismantled.
- Taxpayers would pay hundreds of billions of dollars in excessive fees to private health insurance companies that enroll seniors in Medicare Advantage plans at much higher costs than if the government provided benefits directly. The Medicare trust fund's projected solvency will give back the 10-year extension it got from the ACA.
You can see an excellent overview here of what we will lose if the ACA is repealed. You can also see the district-by-district impact of health reform here.
After a century of legislative and political combat, working families and small businesses finally won and ended the insurance companies' stranglehold over our health care. Naturally, Boehner wants to roll back the new health care law and let the health insurance companies resume their reign of terror. That's why Boehner and his band of corporate shills, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a raft of presidential wannabes, have made repealing the law the Republican Party's top priority for 2011.
The Congress needs to fix the economy and create millions of jobs to put American back to work, but instead Cantor prefers to make bogus claims about an election mandate to repeal the health care law. Nevermind that 68% of Americans favor consumer protections such as allowing people under 26 to remain on their parents' plans, and 60% don't want health insurers to turn away sick people. Cantor isn't deterred by facts because his mission is partisan politics, not governing.
And so is this typically understated comment from Boehner:
"I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country... That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care."
Wow. Sounds like the end of the world as we know it.
Boehner and his fellow Republican repeal-mongers dismiss economic projections they don't like, such as those showing that the ACA will create millions of new jobs, that the law now requires insurers to use a new minimum acceptable percentage of premium dollars for actual medical care instead of profits and bureaucracy, and that the ACA will reduce the federal budget deficit.
The Republicans are kowtowing to right-wing extremists, corporate executives and billionaire investors who secretly spent millions of dollars to help Republican election campaigns last fall, including deceptive ads attacking the health care law. Those deceptions continue still. The ACA protects consumers from the worst health insurance company abuses and provides seniors with better health care through the Medicare program.
Thankfully Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats in the Senate will stop Boehner in his tracks. However, when you cut through the political hyperbole, the GOP's search-and-destroy mission is serious business. The repeal vote in the House scheduled for next week is part of an all-out assault on the new law in the Congress, the courts and state legislatures. And it's an assault with well-funded corporate sponsors.
Everyone already knows that the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health insurance industry and other profit-hungry corporations. In case there was any doubt, the Republicans have begun hiring insurance and health care industry lobbyists for key positions on committees and members' staffs. So far, two health care industry lobbyists have joined the powerful House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care legislation. One of them was named staff director. In addition, a top lobbyist from the medical device industry has joined Boehner's staff as policy director, a post he will undoubtedly use to try to roll back the new tax on medical devices that is part of the ACA. Expect to see more hires like these.
If that picture isn't disturbing enough, look at the cynical demagoguery of GOP presidential hopefuls, like Fox News personality and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has been running TV commercials trashing the health care law and offering a petition to demand that Congress repeal it. It turns out that Huckabee hired a notorious scam artist to help him with the exploitative ad campaign, which is nothing more than a front to raise money. Three days after Think Progress reported about the scammer, Huckabee was forced to fire the guy. A few months ago, Huckabee, a Baptist minister with a pre-existing condition of his own, said it was OK for health insurance companies to turn their backs on people with pre-existing conditions. Like Boehner, he's the new face of the Republican Party on health care. He works for the insurance industry and other big corporations, not the rest of us.
The interests of middle class and working families are of no concern to Republican Party leaders. To them, it's just smart business to spend political capital on protecting the financial interests of the billionaires and big corporations who make up their base -- the "haves and the have-mores," as President George W. Bush famously described them.
And yet, these are the same Republicans who complain about having to wait a few weeks for their health benefits to take effect while they rush into the 112th Congress with a plan that will revive working families' fear of going bankrupt because of crushing medical expenses and of getting dropped from your insurance if you're sick.
President Obama spent much of Wednesday huddled with a group of business executives, an effort The New York Times said afterward "went a long way to reset the tone of the relationship between Mr. Obama and corporate America" in the eyes of the corporate chieftains who attended.
That's all well and good, if the problems with today's economy were rooted in a lack of warmth and fuzziness between President Obama and corporate CEOs. But they aren't. For decades, the interests of corporate lobbyists—the people acting on behalf of many of the executives at the White House meeting—have been at odds with the interests of working people. The White House "making peace" with corporate CEOs, to use The Washington Post's description of the meeting, is one thing. But Wall Street needs to make peace with those of us who have been forced, as a result of the conservative policies they promoted, to live through a decade of stagnant wages, unemployment and underemployment. Wall Street needs a reset with working America.
Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that this meeting delivered much for working-class people. The Post reported that "after the meeting, several chief executives said their conversation with the president was constructive and open as they discussed education, trade, taxes and jobs. But the executives and Obama remained vague about specific outcomes they expected from the meeting."
And one of the few specifics reported from the meeting is highly disturbing. Bloomberg reported that the CEOs had their hands out for yet another tax cut:
While Obama has called on the CEOs to spend the $2 trillion in cash their companies have accumulated on job creation, the executives said much of that is earnings from overseas sales that are retained abroad to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax. U.S.-based multinational corporations pay corporate income tax on earnings when they are brought back to the U.S. If the revenue remains abroad, either in cash or investment in overseas facilities, the money isn’t taxed.
Obama said he would consider the issue and asked what the executives would be willing to give up in other corporate tax rates to make sure it remains revenue neutral.
Actually, in many cases the earnings involved are not necessarily from "overseas sales." Many multinational corporations have created elaborate schemes to ensure that domestic sales are credited as foreign ones in order to avoid paying corporate income tax. It's how Google avoids paying billions in corporate income taxes to the United States and the United Kingdom.
President Obama has rightly pledged to go after this tax dodge and sent some proposals to Congress last year that Citizens for Tax Justice said were "steps in the right direction." Businesses have countered with demands for a "tax holiday," The Financial Times reported in October. Again, at least until now, the Obama administration has resisted. One reason, as the FT notes, is that there is no guarantee that the money coaxed back into the U.S. will actually be used for investment and job creation.
We've been here before. In 2004 the Bush administration and the Republican Congress gave corporations a tax amnesty on profits sheltered overseas. The benefits for workers were negligible. Gannett News Service reported earlier this year in a story about Sen. Barbara Boxer's support for an offshore tax break:
A Congressional Research Service analysis published in January 2009 found that 10 of the top dozen companies that took advantage of the 2004 break cut jobs. Hewlett-Packard repatriated $14.5 billion and laid off 14,500. Pfizer repatriated $37 billion and cut 9,000 jobs in 2005.
California-based Oracle and Intel also repatriated foreign earnings. The money helped Oracle acquire two U.S. companies and helped Intel build a new factory
.
The Business Roundtable, a champion of the tax amnesty idea, says of the money that came back to the U.S. as a result of 2004 holiday, 25 percent went to capital investments and 23 percent to hiring and training new workers. Even that positive spin suggests the country doesn't get very much for coaxing businesses to do less than what they should be dong as corporate citizens.
Corporations succeed in the United States not simply because of what they do on their own. Their success depends on the quality of public schools that prepare their workers, transportation networks that move goods and people, agencies that help keep people healthy and safe, and efforts to ensure that each American is able to maintain at least a minimal standard of living. All of these are government functions that corporations undercut when they engage in schemes to avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to struggle with the consequences.
The businesses that profit as a result of the public commons that We the People provide should not have to be given special inducements to pay their fair share toward supporting that commons. (As it stands now, contrary to conservative claims to the contrary, the truth is U.S. corporations pay some of the lowest tax rates of major industrial powers.) That is the starting point from which President Obama should begin in building a new tax framework in which businesses and Main Street can profit together in a new economy.
Even as corporations are seeking a tax holiday, these same corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing congressional candidates opposed to government initiatives that would stimulate the economy and stoke the demand that would coax their hoarded cash off the sidelines. Instead of egging on, tacitly or otherwise, the anti-spending crowd, these CEOs could still choose to back a real economic stimulus—not just cross-your-fingers-and-hope-they-trickle-down tax cuts, but real investment in the economy's future.
Lew Prince, a small business owner in St. Louis, recently penned an op-ed that offered a more Main Street perspective on what businesses need to prosper:
We shouldn’t borrow billions more dollars from China and Saudi Arabia to give to the wealthy. Instead the wealthy should pay their fair share. We need adequate tax revenue to invest in our economy. More tax cuts at the top won’t create jobs. But we will create jobs and strengthen our economy by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, public transit, levees and water and gas pipelines. We will save and create jobs by investing in education and clean energy research and manufacturing now growing much more rapidly in other countries.
Now that Obama has met with business executives, his next step should be a summit meeting with the unemployed. And then let's have a real debate in which business executives and their conservative benefactors are called to account on whether they are really interested in the fates of American workers or just in their own balance sheets.
robert shumake
robert shumakeProgressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
A leaked costume test from MGM's completed-but-shelved remake of 1984's 'Red Dawn' has found its way online. It's not much, but thanks to MGM's.
Whether your starting a new business or rethinking an existing one, 2011 offers fresh possibilities and a new start. If you're launching a new business, there.
robert shumakeProgressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
A leaked costume test from MGM's completed-but-shelved remake of 1984's 'Red Dawn' has found its way online. It's not much, but thanks to MGM's.
Whether your starting a new business or rethinking an existing one, 2011 offers fresh possibilities and a new start. If you're launching a new business, there.
robert shumake The idea of making money on line is always welcomed by most people. Who wouldn't want to earn on-line and to be getting an income from this source hence, improving financial freedom? There are just lots of methods that one can come out with when it comes to on-line money making. First of all, it's important to research the sites that you are going to join or participate. Are they legit sites, need a minimum sum or stuff like that.
In any situation for on-line money making, organizing one's interests would be very helpful to shortlist the different methods available. There are lots of methods like getting paid to blog, writing articles and gaining from ad revenue, being paid a revenue share for writing, writing sites for clients to outsource, writing letters to submit to a bank of other letters for customers to choose from, paid to review sites, affiliate programs and many more. The list is just endless and there are just enormous ways of on-line money making. In my own personal observation, I notice that there are lots of people liking the idea of paid to blog. That is one of the best methods of earning money.
A lot of people are saying that it's best to not invest in any money at all for your on-line quest. To shed your dollar means something is not right. That's the general rule. There are perhaps lots of people out there making it in their best interest to only participate in free to join websites. However, I think there are legit sites out there with a low minimal fee like for instance, to purchase referrals and gain a bigger ads view per day. This is evident in PTC or what they call Paid to Click programs. There are just aplenty; some are still running while others are either already closed down or total scams. Therefore, be vigilant when choosing your programs. Next off will be the payment options. Choose the right kind of option. There are lots of people using Pay-Pal as well as Alert-Pay. Read the FAQs of each site and get to know their policy and what kind of payment options they are offering. Some only pay in checks so do take note in this kind of situation, you cannot use your Pay-Pal account to receive earnings.
In a way, this on-line money making method and/or various free to join websites can be your ideal work from home idea and some people are so successful that they have been making it their full-time job. However, if you are starting out, it's best to not resign your job for different people success vary definitely. Normally for a site that you are going to work for, say in writing sites, forums or anything at all, there will most probably be a community talk there. It can either be through their Help section, special forum panel and there are even some sites where members can leave testimonials. You can roughly estimate from there; whether the site is worth working for or not. Most sites cite in their terms and conditions that the registered member is an independent contractor. Read the clause and make yourself understand all the terms and words being used. In other words, do your research well.
Some money making sites are even providing a chart on article statistics or traffic coming to which article of yours. This instance is very familiar with Associated Content website and I totally dig this feature. It is a great analyzer for me, really. Summarily, with a little or lots of efforts, honest sites are there and they do pay members whom work hard. Do your research and never give up. Good luck for your quest..
robert shumakeProgressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
A leaked costume test from MGM's completed-but-shelved remake of 1984's 'Red Dawn' has found its way online. It's not much, but thanks to MGM's.
Whether your starting a new business or rethinking an existing one, 2011 offers fresh possibilities and a new start. If you're launching a new business, there.
robert shumake
robert shumake Until this week, the lies about death panels were some of the worst spread by Sarah Palin and the Republicans to scare seniors about health care reform and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Now there's a real death panel, and John Boehner is in charge -- it's the Republican legislative campaign to undermine the ACA. Boehner and the Republicans want to give our health care back to the insurance companies, kill strong consumer protections that end the worst insurance company abuses and sentence more than 30,000 Americans a year to death because they can't afford health insurance.
As one of the first acts of the 112th Congress, the Republicans plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and all the benefits and consumer protections that are making a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans right now. What are they replacing it with? Nothing. They're referring that question to a bunch of committees that will deliberate for months and play political football with our lives and health. What does that really mean? It means letting the insurance companies off the hook so they can run roughshod over consumers and deny our care and jack up our rates whenever they please.
Here are some of the things that will happen in the real world if the Republicans are successful with repeal:
- Seniors who received $250 checks from Medicare last year to help buy prescription drugs will have to return the money to the Treasury Department.
- Seniors will lose the 50% discount on brand-name drugs when they have reached the "donut hole" of their prescription-drug plans - a benefit worth more than $12,500 over 10 years to those who qualify. Instead of closing over the next several years, the "donut hole" will stay open permanently.
- Seniors will stop receiving no-cost annual physicals, mammograms and cancer screenings under rules that had just taken effect this week. Also, a voluntary program to enable seniors to live independently would be wiped out, forcing more people to crowd into nursing homes.
- Millions of consumers, including children, will be denied coverage and care due to pre-existing conditions and branded "uninsurable." Health plans will go back to kicking young adults off their parents' coverage instead of providing benefits until age 26.
- Many Americans with sick family members will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection when insurers restore lifetime and annual caps on benefits.
- Health plan premiums will resume their double-digit increases as insurers return to grabbing however much they want from your premiums to pay for excessive profits, CEO pay, an army of lobbyists and a bureaucracy that turns away the sick. New programs to block unreasonable rate hikes would be dismantled.
- Taxpayers would pay hundreds of billions of dollars in excessive fees to private health insurance companies that enroll seniors in Medicare Advantage plans at much higher costs than if the government provided benefits directly. The Medicare trust fund's projected solvency will give back the 10-year extension it got from the ACA.
You can see an excellent overview here of what we will lose if the ACA is repealed. You can also see the district-by-district impact of health reform here.
After a century of legislative and political combat, working families and small businesses finally won and ended the insurance companies' stranglehold over our health care. Naturally, Boehner wants to roll back the new health care law and let the health insurance companies resume their reign of terror. That's why Boehner and his band of corporate shills, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a raft of presidential wannabes, have made repealing the law the Republican Party's top priority for 2011.
The Congress needs to fix the economy and create millions of jobs to put American back to work, but instead Cantor prefers to make bogus claims about an election mandate to repeal the health care law. Nevermind that 68% of Americans favor consumer protections such as allowing people under 26 to remain on their parents' plans, and 60% don't want health insurers to turn away sick people. Cantor isn't deterred by facts because his mission is partisan politics, not governing.
And so is this typically understated comment from Boehner:
"I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country... That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care."
Wow. Sounds like the end of the world as we know it.
Boehner and his fellow Republican repeal-mongers dismiss economic projections they don't like, such as those showing that the ACA will create millions of new jobs, that the law now requires insurers to use a new minimum acceptable percentage of premium dollars for actual medical care instead of profits and bureaucracy, and that the ACA will reduce the federal budget deficit.
The Republicans are kowtowing to right-wing extremists, corporate executives and billionaire investors who secretly spent millions of dollars to help Republican election campaigns last fall, including deceptive ads attacking the health care law. Those deceptions continue still. The ACA protects consumers from the worst health insurance company abuses and provides seniors with better health care through the Medicare program.
Thankfully Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats in the Senate will stop Boehner in his tracks. However, when you cut through the political hyperbole, the GOP's search-and-destroy mission is serious business. The repeal vote in the House scheduled for next week is part of an all-out assault on the new law in the Congress, the courts and state legislatures. And it's an assault with well-funded corporate sponsors.
Everyone already knows that the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health insurance industry and other profit-hungry corporations. In case there was any doubt, the Republicans have begun hiring insurance and health care industry lobbyists for key positions on committees and members' staffs. So far, two health care industry lobbyists have joined the powerful House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care legislation. One of them was named staff director. In addition, a top lobbyist from the medical device industry has joined Boehner's staff as policy director, a post he will undoubtedly use to try to roll back the new tax on medical devices that is part of the ACA. Expect to see more hires like these.
If that picture isn't disturbing enough, look at the cynical demagoguery of GOP presidential hopefuls, like Fox News personality and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has been running TV commercials trashing the health care law and offering a petition to demand that Congress repeal it. It turns out that Huckabee hired a notorious scam artist to help him with the exploitative ad campaign, which is nothing more than a front to raise money. Three days after Think Progress reported about the scammer, Huckabee was forced to fire the guy. A few months ago, Huckabee, a Baptist minister with a pre-existing condition of his own, said it was OK for health insurance companies to turn their backs on people with pre-existing conditions. Like Boehner, he's the new face of the Republican Party on health care. He works for the insurance industry and other big corporations, not the rest of us.
The interests of middle class and working families are of no concern to Republican Party leaders. To them, it's just smart business to spend political capital on protecting the financial interests of the billionaires and big corporations who make up their base -- the "haves and the have-mores," as President George W. Bush famously described them.
And yet, these are the same Republicans who complain about having to wait a few weeks for their health benefits to take effect while they rush into the 112th Congress with a plan that will revive working families' fear of going bankrupt because of crushing medical expenses and of getting dropped from your insurance if you're sick.
President Obama spent much of Wednesday huddled with a group of business executives, an effort The New York Times said afterward "went a long way to reset the tone of the relationship between Mr. Obama and corporate America" in the eyes of the corporate chieftains who attended.
That's all well and good, if the problems with today's economy were rooted in a lack of warmth and fuzziness between President Obama and corporate CEOs. But they aren't. For decades, the interests of corporate lobbyists—the people acting on behalf of many of the executives at the White House meeting—have been at odds with the interests of working people. The White House "making peace" with corporate CEOs, to use The Washington Post's description of the meeting, is one thing. But Wall Street needs to make peace with those of us who have been forced, as a result of the conservative policies they promoted, to live through a decade of stagnant wages, unemployment and underemployment. Wall Street needs a reset with working America.
Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that this meeting delivered much for working-class people. The Post reported that "after the meeting, several chief executives said their conversation with the president was constructive and open as they discussed education, trade, taxes and jobs. But the executives and Obama remained vague about specific outcomes they expected from the meeting."
And one of the few specifics reported from the meeting is highly disturbing. Bloomberg reported that the CEOs had their hands out for yet another tax cut:
While Obama has called on the CEOs to spend the $2 trillion in cash their companies have accumulated on job creation, the executives said much of that is earnings from overseas sales that are retained abroad to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax. U.S.-based multinational corporations pay corporate income tax on earnings when they are brought back to the U.S. If the revenue remains abroad, either in cash or investment in overseas facilities, the money isn’t taxed.
Obama said he would consider the issue and asked what the executives would be willing to give up in other corporate tax rates to make sure it remains revenue neutral.
Actually, in many cases the earnings involved are not necessarily from "overseas sales." Many multinational corporations have created elaborate schemes to ensure that domestic sales are credited as foreign ones in order to avoid paying corporate income tax. It's how Google avoids paying billions in corporate income taxes to the United States and the United Kingdom.
President Obama has rightly pledged to go after this tax dodge and sent some proposals to Congress last year that Citizens for Tax Justice said were "steps in the right direction." Businesses have countered with demands for a "tax holiday," The Financial Times reported in October. Again, at least until now, the Obama administration has resisted. One reason, as the FT notes, is that there is no guarantee that the money coaxed back into the U.S. will actually be used for investment and job creation.
We've been here before. In 2004 the Bush administration and the Republican Congress gave corporations a tax amnesty on profits sheltered overseas. The benefits for workers were negligible. Gannett News Service reported earlier this year in a story about Sen. Barbara Boxer's support for an offshore tax break:
A Congressional Research Service analysis published in January 2009 found that 10 of the top dozen companies that took advantage of the 2004 break cut jobs. Hewlett-Packard repatriated $14.5 billion and laid off 14,500. Pfizer repatriated $37 billion and cut 9,000 jobs in 2005.
California-based Oracle and Intel also repatriated foreign earnings. The money helped Oracle acquire two U.S. companies and helped Intel build a new factory
.
The Business Roundtable, a champion of the tax amnesty idea, says of the money that came back to the U.S. as a result of 2004 holiday, 25 percent went to capital investments and 23 percent to hiring and training new workers. Even that positive spin suggests the country doesn't get very much for coaxing businesses to do less than what they should be dong as corporate citizens.
Corporations succeed in the United States not simply because of what they do on their own. Their success depends on the quality of public schools that prepare their workers, transportation networks that move goods and people, agencies that help keep people healthy and safe, and efforts to ensure that each American is able to maintain at least a minimal standard of living. All of these are government functions that corporations undercut when they engage in schemes to avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to struggle with the consequences.
The businesses that profit as a result of the public commons that We the People provide should not have to be given special inducements to pay their fair share toward supporting that commons. (As it stands now, contrary to conservative claims to the contrary, the truth is U.S. corporations pay some of the lowest tax rates of major industrial powers.) That is the starting point from which President Obama should begin in building a new tax framework in which businesses and Main Street can profit together in a new economy.
Even as corporations are seeking a tax holiday, these same corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing congressional candidates opposed to government initiatives that would stimulate the economy and stoke the demand that would coax their hoarded cash off the sidelines. Instead of egging on, tacitly or otherwise, the anti-spending crowd, these CEOs could still choose to back a real economic stimulus—not just cross-your-fingers-and-hope-they-trickle-down tax cuts, but real investment in the economy's future.
Lew Prince, a small business owner in St. Louis, recently penned an op-ed that offered a more Main Street perspective on what businesses need to prosper:
We shouldn’t borrow billions more dollars from China and Saudi Arabia to give to the wealthy. Instead the wealthy should pay their fair share. We need adequate tax revenue to invest in our economy. More tax cuts at the top won’t create jobs. But we will create jobs and strengthen our economy by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, public transit, levees and water and gas pipelines. We will save and create jobs by investing in education and clean energy research and manufacturing now growing much more rapidly in other countries.
Now that Obama has met with business executives, his next step should be a summit meeting with the unemployed. And then let's have a real debate in which business executives and their conservative benefactors are called to account on whether they are really interested in the fates of American workers or just in their own balance sheets.
robert shumake detroitProgressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
A leaked costume test from MGM's completed-but-shelved remake of 1984's 'Red Dawn' has found its way online. It's not much, but thanks to MGM's.
Whether your starting a new business or rethinking an existing one, 2011 offers fresh possibilities and a new start. If you're launching a new business, there.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake detroit
