By Jon Miltimore, Carey Wedler and Laura Williams

The second round of presidential debates have come and gone, but familiar Democratic talking points remain largely consistent.

A total of 19 candidates sparred over two nights on CNN—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Tim Ryan, Steve Bullock, John Hickenlooper, and John Delaney on Tuesday; Michael Bennet, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Bill de Blasio, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Jay Inslee, and Andrew Yang on Wednesday.

Despite the good intentions of many of the candidates’ ideas, the proposed policies ignore basic economic realities.

1. Medicare for All

Healthcare was a prominent topic in both debates. While all or nearly all of the presidential contenders said they support expanding taxpayer-funded health insurance, Medicare for All was a source of contention among the candidates. The policy, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and supported by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris (who recently introduced her own version), drew fire from other members of the crowded primary field.

Former Congressman John Delaney pointed out that Medicare, on average, pays hospitals about 87 cents on the dollar compared to the $1.45 private insurers pay. Expanding Medicare to the entire health care system would put hospitals out of business and create a two-tiered system, similar to Brazil’s.

“If you start under-paying all the health-care providers, you’re going to create a two-tier market where wealthy people buy their health care with cash,” Delaney said, while people “like my dad, the union electrician,” will be “forced into an underfunded system.”

What We Say: Americans’ healthcare costs are out of control, but expanding the role of bureaucrats and lobbyists won’t improve access to care or health outcomes. Whenever wishful terms like “universal” and “free” precede policy suggestions, candidates are encouraging you to ignore the inevitable costs and trade-offs of implementation. Doctor shortages, long wait times, and lack of access to critical care will be made worse. Public plans are written by lobbyists to protect their own interests, not yours.

Medicare for All? Be Careful What You Ask For

No, My Study Didn’t Find Medicare for All Would Lower U.S. Health Costs by $2 Trillion

Why “Medicare for All” Would Mean Quality Care for None

2. Free College

Candidates on both evenings of CNN’s two-part debate made promises about “free” college, while some touched on the “cancellation” of existing student loan debt.

Several candidates, including Warren, Sanders, and Harris, have released plans to forgive all or part of the $1.6 trillion student loan debt. (Of the three, Harris’s plan is by far the most modest.)

Several candidates recognized these policies are unrealistic and offered alternatives. Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, for example, have laid out proposals to make it easier for student debt holders to refinance at lower rates.

“You’re going to hear a lot of promises up here, but I’m going to tell you this,” Klobuchar said. “Yes, I have bold ideas, but they are grounded in reality.”

What We Say: Government-backed loans are already the cause of huge tuition increases. Expanding the scope of government to “fix” the problems it created without addressing the disconnect between cost and value of a degree will further bury taxpayers under unpayable debt and other unintended consequences.

The High Cost of Free College

If Student Loans Might Be Forgiven, Why Not Borrow More?

Why Forgiving Student Debt Would Solve Nothing

“Free College” Will Do Little to Help Poorer Americans

3. Gun Violence

Candidates talked a great deal about gun violence and what they’d do to solve it. CNN host Don Lemon posed this question to the Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

“Mayor Buttigieg, other than offering words of comfort, what’re you specifically going to do to stop this epidemic of gun violence?”

Buttigieg and many other candidates offered various gun control measures, including universal background checks, red flag laws, and bans on “assault weapons.”

What We Say: Evidence suggests that bans on rifles like the AR-15 and mandatory background checks would have little to no impact on gun violence. In fact, actual data do not show this “epidemic of gun violence.” Gun homicides are down roughly 40 percent since the early 1990s.

Are AR-15 Rifles a Public Safety Threat? Here’s What the Data Say

California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds

4. War in Afghanistan

Most candidates openly asserted their opposition to the war in Afghanistan, now in its 18th year. Pete Buttigieg, a veteran of that war, vowed to end it within his first year in office and require Congress to vote on future military engagements.

“I was sent into that war by a congressional authorization as well as a president. And we need to talk not only about a president committed to ending endless war, but the fact that Congress has been asleep on the switch,” Buttigieg said. “And on my watch, I will propose that any authorization for the use of military force have a three year sunset and has to be renewed.”

What We Say: Buttigieg’s pledge to quickly end the conflict in Afghanistan sounds promising. However, recent history suggests following through on such pledges can be a challenge. Neither President Obama nor President Trump lived up to their words regarding a drawdown of forces in the Afghanistan theater. In fact, each expanded America’s wars once they were in the Oval Office. As of today, the War in Afghanistan alone has cost at least $2.5 trillion and claimed the lives of at least 3,459 coalition members, as well as untold numbers of Afghan civilians.

Why Does the Afghanistan Quagmire Never End?

How America’s Wars Cut Down American Liberty

Losing Hearts and Minds: The Drug War in Afghanistan

5. The Wage Gap

In Wednesday’s debate, candidates were asked how to “fix the wage gap” between men and women. Though some candidates deflected the question—Sen. Gillibrand used the question to attack former Vice President Joe Biden and Andrew Yang used it as an opportunity to plug the “Freedom Dividend”—candidates generally accepted the moderator’s assumption that women in America are systemically underpaid. Senator Harris, however, answered the question most directly and forcefully.

“Since 1963 when we passed the Equal Pay Act, we have been talking about the fact that women are not paid equally for work,” Harris said. “Fast forward to the Year of our Lord, 2019, and women are paid 80 cents on the dollar.”

Harris went on to explain that if elected president, she would force “companies to post on their websites whether they are paying women equally for equal work.” Companies that failed would be fined, she said.

What We Say: As economist Antony Davies pointed out in his coverage of the debates on Twitter, it is already unlawful for employers to pay men and women differently. People who cite a “wage gap” fail to account for a host of factors that explain why men on average earn more than women, including the number of hours worked, occupation, and work experience. An abundance of research, including a 2018 Harvard University study, suggests the wage gap is overwhelmingly, and perhaps entirely, about the choices men and women make.

Harvard Study: “Gender Wage Gap” Explained Entirely by Work Choices of Men and Women

The Equal-Pay Myth That Just Won’t Die

The Size of the Gender Pay Gap Matters

6. Criminal Justice

Some candidates came under fire for their track records regarding the entrenched injustices of the War on Drugs, and while it’s now acceptable for some candidates to speak about cannabis legalization, true reform seemed a distant dream for debaters.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard forcefully criticized Harris for being a drug warrior when she was California’s attorney general. “She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard noted. She also cited a particular case where Harris blocked evidence that would have freed a man on death row. “When you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not,” Gabbard said. “And worse—in the case of those on death row—innocent people? You actually blocked evidence that would have freed them.”

Harris is not the only candidate with a record of intensifying America’s abusive War on Drugs. Joe Biden, for example, has branded his 2020 campaign around combating racism despite his longstanding support of anti-drug legislation that targeted and destroyed minority communities.

What We Say: While some Democratic candidates (especially Sen. Corey Booker, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and Beto O’Rourke) have put legislative action behind their calls to scale back the failed War on Drugs, frontrunners like Biden and Harris carry the burden of direct contributions to America’s mass incarceration problem. We doubt their ability and willingness to challenge the decades-long War on Drugs, especially after building careers in the broken system.

7. Reparations

Race featured prominently in the Democratic debates. This included a discussion of financial reparations for slavery, an idea many Democrats seem open to exploring further but few currently support. CNN host Don Lemon posed this question to candidate Marianne Williamson, who has made reparations a plank of her campaign platform: “…you are calling for up to $500 billion in financial assistance. What makes you qualified to determine how much is owed in reparations?”

Williamson’s lengthy reply focused on healing divisions and redressing

the economic gap between blacks and whites in America, it does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with. That great injustice has to do with the fact there were 250 years of slavery followed by another 100 years of domestic terrorism….If you did the math today, it would be trillions of dollars. And I believe that anything less than $100 billion is an insult, and I believe that $200 to $500 billion is politically feasible.

Brave - The Browser Built for Privacy

Several other candidates on stage supported a federal commission to study the possibility of direct financial reparations, accepting the utility of such a solution even if they lacked Williamson’s economic bravado. While some viewers and voters will undoubtedly rejoice to hear such plans, there is no evidence such redistribution would meaningfully address history injustices.

What We Say: The blight of slavery cannot be erased by cash reparations by or to people now living. The US Constitution provides a framework to protect the rights of individuals, and efforts to impose collective punishment on individuals by assigning them a historical group undermine the ideals of American liberty and individualism. We also note that much more recent government policies that created and exacerbated race-based economic inequalities among persons now living (exclusion of black soldiers from the GI Bill, and of black families from federal housing programs, to start) would be a more appropriate subject of debate than centuries-old debts.

What’s Wrong with Reparations for Slavery

Reparations: The Problems with Social Justice Economics

The Case for Voluntary Reparations

What Did Not Come Up at the Debates: The Federal Debt

There were a lot of promises made during the debates, so many it was difficult to keep track of. Lots of “free” stuff—purchased at the expense of people who didn’t agree to it. Biden spoke of free community college and free universal pre-k. Harris and Buttigieg promised free four-year college. Sanders vowed to eliminate all the student debt. Everyone invoked “free” health care. More welfare benefits. The $1,000 “Freedom Dividend.” Billions in promises, stretching decades into the future.

Even some of the candidates on stage took issue with the proposed spending extravaganza. Delaney spoke of “fairy-tale economics.” Montana Gov. Steve Bullock quipped about “wishlist economics.” But economics—the science of incentives and tradeoffs—couldn’t have been further from the candidates’ focus.

Not one candidate or moderator brought up the harsh reality of the federal debt.

Every child born in the United States is already saddled with an enormous share of that debt, fueled by unchecked government spending, reckless borrowing, and ballooning interest payments. More capital devoted to interest on the debt squeezes out investments and economic growth, and reduces workers’ wages and productivity. So-called lockboxes of taxpayer funds have been emptied to serve short-term political purposes, looting the long-term security used to sell them to the public. The interest on the debt will consume 10 percent of all federal spending in 2020. The nation is overextended and teetering toward debt disaster, and no candidate seemed willing even to acknowledge the problem. Instead, they suggested new and even more extravagant spending programs, calculated to bribe voters into believing they’ll be the beneficiaries of an ever-worsening crisis.

Candidates on a debate stage are selling dreams, fairy tales of abundance where everyone can live at the expense of everyone else and the bills never come due. But ignoring the debt has the potential to destroy the world’s most productive economic system. Televised debate spectacles lose their sparkle when the lights go out.

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Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times.

Carey Wedler is a video blogger and Senior Editor for Anti-Media.

Dr. Laura Williams  teaches communication strategy to undergraduates and executives. She is a passionate advocate for critical thinking, individual liberties, and the Oxford Comma.

This article was sourced from FEE.org

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War, economic collapse, and personal devastation await Americans no matter who they vote for – and what we should do instead.

freakingnews.com

Tony Cartalucci, Contributor
Activist Post

A vote for Obama will bring war with Syria, Iran, and eventually Russia and China. The economy will continue to suffer in order to bolster the interests of off-shore corporate-financier interests, while the collective prospects of Americans continue to whither and blow away. A vote for Romney, however, will also bring war with Syria, Iran, and eventually Russia and China. The economy will also continue to suffer in order to bolster the interests of off-shore corporate-financier interests, while the collective prospects of Americans continue to whither and blow away. Why?

Because the White House is but a public relations front for the corporate-financier interests of Wall Street and London. A change of residence at the White House is no different than say, British Petroleum replacing its spokesman to superficially placate public opinion; when, in reality, the exact same board of directors, overall agenda, and objectives remain firmly in place. Public perception then is managed by, not the primary motivation of, corporate-financier interests.

It is the absolute folly to believe that multi-billion dollar corporate-financier interests would subject their collective fate to the whims of the ignorant, uninformed, and essentially powerless voting masses every four years. Instead, what plays out every four years is theater designed to give the general public the illusion that they have some means of addressing their grievances without actually ever changing the prevailing balance of power in any meaningful way.

The foreign policy of both Obama and Romney is written by the exact same corporate-financier funded think-tanks that have written the script for America’s destiny for the last several decades.

Bush = Obama = Romney

As was previously reported, while the corporate media focuses on non-issues, and political pundits accentuate petty political rivalries between the “left” and the “right,” a look deeper into presidential cabinets and the authors of domestic and foreign policy reveals just how accurate the equation of “Bush = Obama = Romney” is.

Image: Professional spokesmen, representative not of the American people but of Fortune 500 multinational corporations and banks. Since the time of JP Morgan 100 years ago, the corporate-financier elite saw themselves as being above government, and national sovereignty as merely a regulatory obstacle they could lobby, bribe, and manipulate out of existence. In the past 100 years, the monied elite have gone from manipulating the presidency to now reducing the office to a public relations functionary of their collective interests.

George Bush’s cabinet consisted of representatives from FedEx, Boeing, the Council on Foreign Relations, big-oil’s Belfer Center at Harvard, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Circuit City, Verizon, Cerberus Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, and the RAND Corporation, among many others.

Image: The Henry Jackson Society is just one of many Neo-Conservative think-tanks, featuring many of the same people and of course, the same corporate sponsors. Each think-tank puts on a different public face and focuses on different areas of specialty despite harboring the same “experts” and corporate sponsors.

His foreign policy was overtly dictated by “Neo-Conservatives” including Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Richard Armitage, Zalmay Khalilzad, Elliot Abrams, Frank Gaffney, Eliot Cohen, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, William Kristol, and Max Boot – all of whom hold memberships within a myriad of Fortune 500-funded think-tanks that to this day still direct US foreign policy – even under a “liberal” president. These include the Brookings Institution, the International Crisis Group, the Foreign Policy Initiative, the Henry Jackson Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and many more.

Image: A visual representation of some of the Brookings Institution’s corporate sponsors. Brookings is by no means an exception, but rather represents the incestuous relationship between US foreign and domestic policy making and the Fortune 500 found in every major “think-tank.” Elected US representatives charged with legislative duties, merely rubber stamp the papers and policies drawn up in these think-tanks.

Obama’s cabinet likewise features representatives from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, the Council on Foreign Relations, Fortune 500 representatives Covington and Burling, Citi Group, Freedie Mac, and defense contractor Honeywell. Like Bush’s cabinet, foreign policy is not penned by Obama sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, but rather by the very same think-tanks that directed Bush’s presidency including the Council on Foreign Relations, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, the International Crisis Group, and the Chatham House. There are also a myriad of smaller groups consisting of many of the same members and corporate sponsors, but who specialize in certain areas of interest.

Image: Obama, not a Marxist. A visual representation of current US President Barack Obama’s cabinet’s corporate-financier ties past and present. As can be plainly seen, many of the same corporate-financier interests represented in Obama’s administration were also represented in Bush’s administration.

And with Mitt Romney, “running for president” against Obama in 2012, we see already his foreign policy advisers, Michael Chertoff, Eliot Cohen, Paula Dobrainsky, Eric Edelman, and Robert Kagan, represent the exact same people and corporate-funded think-tanks devising strategy under both President Bush and President Obama.

While Presidents Bush and Obama attempted to portray the West’s global military expansion as a series of spontaneous crises, in reality, since at least as early as 1991, the nations of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and many others that previously fell under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, were slated either for political destabilization and overthrow, or overt military intervention. While the public was fed various narratives explaining why Bush conducted two wars within the greater global “War on Terror,” and why Obama eagerly expanded these wars while starting new ones in Libya and now Syria, in reality we are seeing “continuity of agenda,” dictated by corporate-financier elite, rubber stamped by our elected representatives, and peddled to us by our “leaders,” who in reality are nothing more than spokesmen for the collective interests of the Fortune 500.

Image: The International Crisis Group’s corporate sponsors reveal a pattern of mega-multinationals intertwined with not only creating and directing US, and even European foreign policy, but in carrying it out. ICG trustee Kofi Annan is in Syria now carrying out a ploy to buy time for NATO-backed terrorists so they can be rearmed, reorganized, and redeployed against the Syrian government for another Western-backed attempt at regime change – all done under the guise of promoting “peace.”

No matter who you vote for in 2012 – until we change the balance of power currently tipped in favor of the Fortune 500, fed daily by our money, time, energy, and attention, nothing will change but the rhetoric with which this singular agenda is sold to the public. Romney would continue exactly where Obama left off, just as Obama continued exactly where Bush left off. And even during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Bush Sr., it was the same agenda meted out by the same corporate-financier interests that have been driving American, and increasingly Western destiny, since US Marine General Smedley Butler wrote “War is a Racket” in 1935.

What Should We Do About It?

1. Boycott the Presidential Election: The first immediate course of action when faced with a fraudulent system is to entirely disassociate ourselves from it, lest we grant it unwarranted legitimacy. Boycotting the farcical US elections would not impede the corporate-financier “selection” process and the theatrical absurdity that accompanies it, but dismal voter turnout would highlight the illegitimacy of the system. This in many ways has already happened, with voter turnout in 2008 a mere 63%, meaning that only 32% of America’s eligible voters actually voted for Obama, with even fewer voting for runner-up John McCain.

Ensuring that this mandate is even lower in 2012 – regardless of which PR man gets selected, and then highlighting the illegitimacy of both the elections and the system itself is the first step toward finding a tenable solution. People must divest from dead-ends. Presidential elections are just one such dead-end.

Focusing on local elections and governance first, not only emphasizes the primacy of local self-determination, but affords us a grassroots-up approach to transforming our communities, and collectively our nation back into something truly representative of the people.

2. Boycott and Replace the Corporate Oligarchy: The corporate-financier interests that dominate Western civilization did not spring up overnight. It is through generations of patronage that we the people have granted these corporate-financier interests the unwarranted influence they now enjoy. And today, each day, we collectively turn in our paychecks to the global “company store,” providing the summation of our toil as fuel for this oligarchy’s perpetuation.

By boycotting the goods, services, and institutions of this oligarchy, we steal the fire out from under the proverbial cauldron – the very source of the current paradigm’s power. While it is impractical to commit overnight to a full-spectrum boycott, we can begin immediately by entirely boycotting corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Kraft, Unilever, WalMart and others by simply supporting local businesses and our local farmers market.

This “voting with one’s wallet” is a form of democracy that unlike elections, will undoubtedly shift the balance of power toward a system more representative of the people’s interests.

By creating self-reliant communities independent of the machinations of corporate-financier interests, we provide ourselves with the greatest form of insurance against instability and uncertainty – an insurance policy placed solely in our own hands.

3. Get Educated, Get Organized: Leveraging technology is a necessary step in eliminating dependency on other corporate-financier interests – such as big oil, big defense, big-agri, big-pharma, and the telecom monopolies. To leverage technology, people at a grassroots level must get organized, educate themselves, and collaborate to create local business models and solutions to systematically replace large multinational holdings.

Secret $1.8 Million Cryptocurrency Script

A recent interview by geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser with Seth Rutledge, featured on Stop Imperialism, explored the possibilities of developing local broadband networks. Community spaces dedicated to technological education, collaboration, and resource pooling are also an emerging phenomenon. Called “maker spaces” or sometimes “hacker spaces,” these grassroots initiatives serve as incubators for innovative, local small businesses.

Technology will eventually provide solutions to problems generally “solved” by government subsidies. Medicare, for instance, is a government subsidy to address the expenses and subsequent inaccessibility of medical care. Medical care, in turn, is expensive because the means to provide it are scarce. The supply of doctors, hospitals, treatments, biomedical technology, and many other aspects of modern health infrastructure are vastly outnumbered by demand.

Until technology can better balance this equation, people must organize to either defend temporary stopgap measures, national programs that provide care to those who can’t afford it, or create local alternatives. To cut programs people depend on for the sake of saving an economy plundered by special interests, and to specifically preserve these same special interests is unconscionable.

An organized political front that demands the preservation/reformation of these programs, as well as investment in the development of permanent technological solutions, needs not pass the hat around to the working or even productive entrepreneurial classes of society, but rather level taxes on parasitic financial speculation and market manipulation – thus solving two problems in a single stroke. Geopolitical analyst and historian Dr. Webster Tarpley has already enumerated such an approach in his 5 point plan for international economic recovery (.pdf) by specifically calling for resistance to austerity and a 1% Wall Street tax.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly people realize something is wrong, and that something needs to be done. To ensure that the corporate-financier elite remain in perpetual power, a myriad of false solutions have been contrived or created out of co-opted movements, to indefinitely steer people away from influencing the current balance of power and achieving true self-determination.

By recognizing this and seizing the reins of our own destiny, we can and must change the current balance of power. In the process of doing so, we must recognize and resist attempts to derail and distract us by way of the incessant political minutiae now on full display during the 2012 US Presidential Election. For every problem faced by society, there is a permanent, technological solution. For hunger there was agriculture, for lack of shelter, there was architecture; and no matter how daunting today’s problems may seem, there lies similar solutions.

We must realize that by endeavoring to solve these problems, we jeopardize monopolies as insidious as they are monolithic, constructed to exploit such problems. If we fail to recognize and undermine these interests through pragmatic activism, we will be resigned to whatever fate these special interests determine for us, no matter how cleverly they sell us this fate as one of our own choosing.

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Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at 
Land Destroyer Report.   Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.

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