Lloyd Lofthouse comments frequently on this blog and writes his own blog “Crazy Normal.” We know from his many comments that he is a Marine veteran and that he was a teacher for many years.
In this post, he shows another side of himself.
He hears that Trump wants to privatize the Veterans Administration. Lloyd thinks this is a terrible idea. So far, all of Trump’s ideas are terrible ideas, because he gets them from right-wing websites or Mike Pence. One is stupid and the other is evil; or both.
Lloyd writes:
It is clearly obvious to me that the Trump administration and the Koch dominated GOP plans to roll the U.S. back to a time right after Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War (1861 – 1865), back to the Jim Crow era of racial discrimination and injustice, back to a time when there was no income tax, and the federal government was weak, very weak, when it came to protecting the people and the environment from racists, liars, frauds and con-men like Littlefingers Donald Trump, who will never be my President, and back to a time when there was little to no job protection and more than 40 percent of Americans lived in poverty.
And instead of creating jobs, Littlefingers will soon be in a position, with possible support from the GOP dominated Congress to get rid of and/or bully most if not all of the 2.8 million civil servants that work for the federal government with a legal threat to legislate many of them into poverty.
The VA, for instance, employs almost 345,000 people at hundreds of VA medical facilities, clinics, and benefit offices across the country. They are mostly civil servants and few working Americans can survive on $1 a year.
This is what “draining the swamp” really means to Littlefingers, with a long history of contempt and obvious hate for the law and anyone with more power than he has, and soon he will be the most powerful person in the world with help from Russia. Littlefingers is clearly the Kremlin’s President of the United States, a clear-and-present danger.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Love ya, Lloyd!
Thanks Diane.
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YES…where are our laws on treason, sedition, Presidential powers, impeachment, on and on? Why isn’t Congress enacting them? A privatized America, a privatized world, ruled by the tRUMP and his buddy, Putin.
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“YES…where are our laws on treason, sedition, Presidential powers, impeachment, on and on? Why isn’t Congress enacting them?”
Because many of these laws you just wish existed.
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Read these two articles for a start, Mate. There are laws that disallow a sitting US president from doing his own personal investing (thus blind trusts are mandated) and making profits by doing business with a foreign government and/or their citizens. From Trump brand shoes made in China, to Trump Hotels worldwide it is not legal, nor ethical, to do what the Trumps intend to do.
1.) GOP ignores confirmation procedures, rushes ahead with Trump’s nominees
Apparently insisting on the procedures “fair and consistent application” doesn’t apply in this situation.
Alexandra Jacobo from Haaretz
2.) Trump said to name Jared Kushner as senior adviser to U.S. president – U.S. News http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.764006
Mate, read the biography of John Adams on this issue…”handkerchiefs from Paris for his wife”…hohoho.
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Thanks, Ellen. So then the problem must be that we don’t have money to suit him?
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What has happened to you Mate? You used to be more creative. Do you suggest we just roll over and let Trump and the radicals destroy our nation? What do you suggest?
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“What has happened to you Mate? You used to be more creative.”
Hm. I guess I have been aging quickly. 🙂
Also, I just got hammered in the past week for suggesting laws that would control the billionaires (the real movers and shakers of our country), trying to point out that it all seem to start with the Constitution being too vague and permissive, its open interpretation permitting Gates, Walton and Trump to flourish.
For me “we need to fight back Gates’ push of the Common Core” is incomplete. By the time CC and VAM are eliminated, our billionaire friends will experiment on our kids and teachers with something else—like robot teachers, 24/7 testing through smartphones and discipline delivered remotely. This never ends unless billionaires’ power is prevented, and that can be done only with new laws—laws that do not yet exist.
As Piketty suggests in his book, the very first law would be to implement an at least 80% tax on the rich.
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Thanks, Lloyd, for outlining some of the clear distinctions between a progressive vision and the regressive, market based charade of conservatives. Our veterans deserve our respect and care. While the VA has been rocked by scandals, privatization has the potential to make everything so much worse. We have only to look at the Draconian conditions in many privatized prisons where overcrowding and expensive healthcare needs are ignored. Our veterans deserve better, and so do our federal employees, whose incomes will be slashed in order that corporations profit.
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Great article by Lloyd. The privatizing of the VA would be an unmitigated disaster. Giving veterans a voucher of about $8,500 annually to pay for medical insurance in the private sector is a sick joke. That’s like throwing someone into a shark infested pool. It would give license to the private insurance companies to rip off veterans for fewer benefits. Will the insurance companies engage in their usual ploys of denial of claims and rescissions? Privatization will not save money, it will do the reverse; the VA administrative costs are much cheaper than the private sector which spends millions on advertising, denial of claims and paying some worthless CEO tens of millions of dollars a year in “compensation.”
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Ryan wants to subject seniors to marketplace madness with a voucher as well. Seniors cannot compete in the market, and this is the main reason Medicare was started in the first place. Ryan’s plan would more than double what seniors pay for less than half the healthcare they currently receive. It’s a horrible idea designed to produce more corporate profit, and nothing else.
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Ryan, who is young, does not understand he will be old soon, and that the Repub plan for health care is intended to shorten the life span of seniors, will also include him. These monster legislators who intend to skim enough of our money so they need not worry with their lifetime benefits, want to dump us all on the ice flow they created with global warming and climate change…it is all part of the whole of this reactionary putsch.
Today the LA Times reports that Americans life span had dropped last year from 78.9 to 78.8…bye bye boomers.
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a scheme to put every penny in very few pockets as we all learn to turn our heads and walk by the growing mass of homeless…or become homeless ourselves
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Lloyd, thanks for this report. You are again, right on. And public thanks should go to Susan Shannon who has led the LA battle to protect the vets and improve our local VA. Ask Howard Blume and the LA Times about this situation.
Although the Wadsworth VA in Westwood, California (a couple of miles from UCLA), is said to have the largest amount of land in the nation dedicated to vets care (and pretty good health care when they can finally get an appointment) and housing, much has been long been used for private companies enrichment. The same billionaires we read about here have tried for decades to get their hands on this land to build high rise condos for the ultra rich, and they continue to fight with their big time law firms to steal this site away from the VA and vets who need the help they were promised when they served their country.
Many of us have been fighting this for years, and some progress has been made. The VA did revamp some empty buildings into residences so that not so many old vets live under the freeway overpass abutting this VA.
I travel past this campus almost daily, and for the last few weeks a new young female vet has appeared living near the corner of Sepulveda and Wilshire, across from the VA and from the Federal Bldg. It has been freezing weather at night and we have finally had big rain storms…but this pale ‘too slim’ woman about 35years old sits on the concrete with the endless rumbling of the hundreds of thousands of cars passing overhead each day, with newspapers and cardboard boxes piled around her for shelter.
Is this the America Trump and Ryan and their greedsters want for any of us, particularly vets?
Seems like it is.
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Yes, Joe…and the same goes for Medicare which costs far less than privatized insurance-dominated health care. Single payer universal health care would cover everyone, as it does in every other industrialized nation. at the same rate we pay for Medicare.
The tRUMP will do away with it all, with his henchmen now including Paul Ryan and his greed mongers. However, more Repubs seem to be seeing how dangerous and demented this guy is. Cotton joined McCain and Lindsey Graham, and also McConnell spoke out last week in rebuttal to various of his tweet proclamations.
Last night he even had to tweet that Meryl Streep is a lousy actress since she spoke out against him at the Golden Globes and all the journalists from all over the world immediatey published her speech, which Diane has posted today. How far will he be allowed to go until he is recognized as a ‘terrorist’ loony?
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Some things should NOT be privatized. DUH!!! This CASH & CARRY mentality in these United States is our demise.
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I am so grateful that Lloyd posts on this blog as well as his own website.
Diane has given us a feast today. Lloyd’s post is a great follow-on to the Meryl Streep speech and to the knee-jerk put-downs of Streep by Trump, the twit –ter–er in chief.
It also fits with Diane’s post today about the book by Jane Jacobs.
Much to think about.
Our family has had some great experiences with the VA. Privatizing and “vouchering” those services would be a disaster.
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Laura,
My older brother is a vet and VA services have kept him alive.
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I had an uncle who fought in World War II. He came back from Southeast Asia with a skin disease, a virus, that was eating his fingernails and skin.
He lived to 96, but he wouldn’t have lived that long without the VA doing the research to treat that rare disease, that virus that was eating his skin, eating him alive, from killing him. Whenever he had a flair up throughout his long life, he went immediately to the nearest VA medical center where he was treated and kept alive.
He had to have these treatments even when he was in his 90s.
He told me that the VA medical staff submerged him in a vat filled with purple colored liquid. He didn’t know what was in that liquid but it couldn’t have been that toxic, because he had a very active life and lived to 96.
I was named for that Uncle, because I was born on his birthday. His name was also Lloyd.
Actually, I had three uncles who fought in World War II.
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Great story about your uncle…and to add to it, I had a classmate in Law School in the 70s who had fought as Special Services in Viet Nam and got sprayed by US forces with Agent Orange a sit rained down on the population, and he also had his legs almost blown off. He was treated first in Germany for two years, and thereafter at the Wadsworth VA hospital for decades, until his death, for the Agent Orange burns all over his back, and for physical therapy for his decimated legs. Who would want to have lesser medical services, or privatized limited vouchers for these military survivors?
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What Lloyd adds to this moment in time, is perfect…but, actually it preceded her speech; I read it when Lloyd put it up because I follow his blog, I Posted it at Oped News, that day because I saw what Diane and you see… the observable reality.
Both Lloyd and Meryl know how to use words to present the observable reality.
Observable reality is a term I use often; Bloom used it to denote truth.
We humans–once upon a time when our survival depended on knowing real from false– recognized what was in front of our eyes. Such vision saved our lives and benefited our society.
The ‘words’ of entertainment journalism present a n altered view of reality.
How else could a nation elect such a tragic clown.
The observable reality that people like Meryl and Lloyd present, offers a view of TRUTH!
Such observations, SO CLEARLY PRESENTED, help us to recognize the BEHAVIORS revealed by a person’s actions.
AS WE BOTH KNOW, Laura, IT IS ALL ABOUT BEHAVIOR.
As an actress, Meryl knows this, too, you see, because in a scene in which she is presenting “character” — there is no one standing on the stage and telling YOU who she is.There is NO NARRATIVE EXPLAINING that the person in FRONT OF YOU is a scoundrel, a charlatan … a sad excuse for a human being; the BEHAVIOR SAYS IT ALL!!!
I am playwright, you see, and as a dramaturge I can tell you what all screen writers –scene-writers– and playwrights know – – DIALOGUE is the baggage of the play! Watch what they DO!
WORDS are revealing in the mouths of scoundrels, “Believe Me!”
But ACTIONS speak louder than words, and Meryl nailed it.
So did Lloyd.
I have something to add… I will put it up here, when I am finished writing it.
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So if we wanted a general anti-privatization law, what would be its exact scope? Public education, VA, healthcare, social security, prisons? What else?
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Utilities are the getting sucked into the web of privatization, and it is not a great idea. Here’s an article that opposes privatization of six things. While they do not mention public education, we know better.http://www.alternet.org/economy/6-things-should-never-be-privatized
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One article I read cautioned against “privatizing things you care about.” It is pretty good advice.
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Well, I care about good food, but I grew up under communism where only the very few, small private restaurants and grocery stores provided quality food. 🙂
The real criteria may be of necessary size. Size, for example, works against restaurants: the bigger the chain, the worse their offerings. On the other hand, a cellular phone network is useless without wide coverage.
The above examples suggest that even if something is privatized, its size needs to be controlled for quality’s sake. Not to mention the side effect of big companies, that their owners will try to run the country against the people’s will.
So my work-in-progress qualification is “don’t allow privatization of those things which need to be inherently big, and control the size of everything else.”
This covers all 6 in the list you quoted, but I certainly would add the military, police, the internet, cellular and landline phone networks, railway, airway, postal system.
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Motor Vehicles
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Uh… we do have a guideline… it is called the CONSTITUTION ,a nd in its preamble it explains our mission TO PROMOTE THE COMMON GOOD! Public education, health care, and supporting our soldiers falls under this!!!!
Government DO YOUR JOB!
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“t explains our mission TO PROMOTE THE COMMON GOOD! ”
Susan, isn’t true that no big private company promotes the common good?
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Never said that. the query was about creating a law that would do the job.
Our laws exist for this purpose.
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All of these posts have left me bereft of hope for my future, my child’s future, and her child’s future. So many good points were made on such a dismal situation. I used to tell my children that we paid taxes for the common good. I told them that I could not afford to build a road but if we all paid our taxes one could be built. It would be everyone’s road.
I do believe we live in a great nation. I also now believe that that may not be the truth much longer. Let Congress work together to temper the coming tempest.
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Well said… but if we the people, demand our RIGHTS… from the CONSTITUTION — for the government “TO PROMOTE THE COMMON GOOD, we will make back our schools.
We need someone like Diane Ravitch, to be in charge of PUBLIC EDUCATION, someone who knows what LEARNING is all about, and what enables it…. like small class size, good, current materials and technology, great organization and programs in a safe school, with real educators creating lessons so that children LEARN.
Teachers know WLLL!
WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE!
I will talk about WLLL in my blogs.
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Well Lloyd I was going to stay quiet for once and save a few embarrassing errors in my posts. Then I had the misfortune of watching CNN to be greeted with an interview of Sen Cory Gardner. Gardner in the course of a five minute interview;, was going to show Iran who the boss was , tell Russia to get the hell out of Syria(they are already pulling out of Syria too costly) and Ukraine and force China to end the Nuclear program of North Korea .
So whether it be increased US military endeavors,which seldom have the desired result leaving thousands dead and tens of thousands injured. . Or it be massive increased spending on deploying weapons systems around the world, It would appear that after all the safety net social spending is eliminated we will have to not only shut down the VA but just let those vets fend for themselves in the totally free unregulated insurance market.
After all ” those vets volunteered for service and were shiftless anyway” THAT’S WHAT ONE OF TRUMPS DEPLORABLES TOLD ME. After she told me her 26 yr old son was to old for service .
Needless to say after my response, I won’t be going to their Forth of July barbecue with the house draped in flags ever again.
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like i said, too old
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Watch the whole thing…trust me
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Tell that deplorable with the 26 year old son that he isn’t too old. To join the air force, he has to be between 17-27, but the army will take him up to age 34; the U.S. Marines to 29 and the Navy to 34.
And just in case since deplorables only believe what serial lying Littlefingers Donald Trump says, here’s the link to that info at Military.com. let’s get this 26 year old in the Army or Marines and then ship him out to a combat zone ASAP.
http://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/join-the-military-basic-eligibility.html
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Lloyd,
I have noticed that the Trump followers are cult members. They believe whatever he says, no matter how blatantly he lies. If he says he won in a landslide, his cult believes him. The mark of a true demagogue.
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I’ve noticed the same thing. To these deplorables, Littlefingers walks on water.
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“They believe whatever he says, no matter how blatantly he lies. ”
I thought that’s characteristic of the authoritarian world view in general: once you accept somebody as a leader, you don’t question anything he says. After all, you don’t want to be the one breaking the hierarchical chain.
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Can’t tell them anything we no longer talk.
Yes I know well he was not to old.
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too old.
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As a Vietnam Veteran (1968-69, Mekong Delta), I have benefited from, and very much alive still, due to 8 years of V.A. healthcare including the past 6 years for chemotherapy due to Agent Orange (follicular lymphoma). The medical staff have been phenomenal, courteous and proficient. The NorCal V.A. facilities that provide my care are responsive, pro-active and are proudly (and appropriately) patient-centric. Having been a Kaiser patient before my time it he V.A. system, my first-person experience in both systems allows me to rate the V.A. to be on a particular with Kaiser on many levels but better in most. As well, I have seen close-up how the V.A. has improved and continues to do so. “dRUMPf” would do well to leave the V.A.under Secretary McDonald’s leadership, while getting his (= dRUMPf’s) congress-critters to fund and staff the V.A. adequately. BTW: The V.A. systems is, and could/should be, a worthy template for Universal Healthcare.
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“The V.A. systems is, and could/should be, a worthy template for Universal Healthcare.”
What a thought!
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Because of its size, the VA negotiates much lower drug prices with the big drug industry just like Costco does for its pharmacies. If the VA is privatized, that power will surely vanish so drug prices climb higher to profit the big drug companies more.
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I can’t tell if you guys have seen this, but some of you might “appreciate” the connection between the topic of military and public education.
Erik Prince played a significant role in privatizing military functions while his older sister Betsy is at the helm of a movement to privatize public schools.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/16/123025/506
The article also has gems on the religious right. In particular, it highlights the connection between DeVos and the Acton Institute which is described as
Acton Institute is a right-wing think tank which combines free market fundamentalism with Dominion Theology, or the belief that Christians should take control over the institutions of society and government. Acton Institute brings together Dominionists and business interests that have common interests, such as opposition to environmental regulation.
The article is not making this up: Acton itself introduces itself as
The Acton Institute is a non-profit research organization dedicated to the study of free-market economics informed by religious faith and moral absolutes.
http://www.acton.org/
Not surprisingly, Betsy’s husband said
“I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory.”
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