Where are the millions of missing workers? This could be where

Probably the biggest mystery today regarding the economy is "what happened to all the workers?"
The first theory was that they were all living large on UI benefits, so all that was necessary was to cut off those benefits and "problem solved".

The reluctance of so many people to reenter the labor force is a bit of a mystery, especially after some 9 million people lost unemployment benefits in September. Economists had expected to see a pickup in labor-force participation by now.

“The most disappointing thing about [the jobs report] is that it does not really show much in terms of a return to the labor force following the expiration of the enhanced unemployment benefits in September,” said senior money market economist Thomas Simons of Jefferies LLC.
Now many are questioning the assumption that the expiry of some unemployment benefits would prompt workers to return.

Except cutting UI didn't drive the workers back. Now those same people who wanted UI cut are saying something about "savings from UI", but that makes zero sense since most of the people we are talking about couldn't save any money when they had a job.

Another explanation: Massive government spending, including stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits, have allowed more people to bide their time before returning to work. They can hold out for better job offers, the thinking goes.

Still, many economists are convinced the size of the labor force will swell in the coming months if the pandemic burns itself out and wages continue to rise. Many people, they say, will need the income
“The money won’t last forever and the U.S. is a difficult place to be voluntarily unemployed,” said chief economist Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics.

There are other theories about people seeking non-monetary rewards, and while that's a nice idea, we know that is hogwash.

How can hundreds of thousands of Americans simply vanish from society, and no one notice?

Well, I've come up with a theory. It's based on a known fact in American society today.
You see, hundreds of thousands of Americans vanish from society every year. Year after year.
We all know it, but we don't like to talk about it. We don't even like to think about it.

I'm talking about the homeless.

Remember when there were stories about an eviction tsunami?

For the one in every seven tenants in the U.S. currently behind on rent, however, the end of COVID could mean eviction. Marginalized tenants are especially at risk — one in five Black tenants, Latino tenants and tenants with children currently owe back rent.

“We have projections of 500,000 people living on the streets of L.A. if nothing is done to curb these evictions,” Trinidad Ruiz of the L.A. Tenants Union says — a catastrophic increase from the estimated 40,000 people currently without housing in the Los Angeles area. Without assistance, over 10 million people nationwide could find themselves without housing when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium ends on June 30.

First off I want to draw your attention to the math.
The top article says that 9 million workers are missing.
Now we find out that 10 million people nationwide were at risk of becoming homeless.
Those two numbers are suspiciously close.

That's not to say there is a one-to-one relationship between evicted/homeless/missing workers. What I'm saying that there is reason to believe that there is significant overlap.

Secondly, consider where the homeless generally come from.

the vast majority of people receiving homeless services in L.A. have held down jobs, some right up until the time they became homeless....
They found that nearly half (47%) of working age adults enrolling in homeless services in L.A. had worked in the four years prior to becoming homeless. And about one in five were working in the same quarter they showed up in LAHSA's system.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) had some record of employment between 1995 and 2018.

Now consider just how difficult it is to hold down a decent job while homeless. Not to mention how hard it is to get a new job while homeless.

You may point out that the eviction tsunami never happened.
Well, actually it did. The Eviction Tsunami is both ongoing, and dramatically under-reported, because "Fuck The Poor, Amirite?"

It is not the sudden surge of evictions that tenants and advocates feared after the Supreme Court ruled in August that President Biden’s extension of the eviction moratorium was unconstitutional. Instead, what’s emerging is a more gradual eviction crisis that is increasingly hitting communities across the country, especially those where the distribution of federal rental assistance has been slow, and where tenants have few protections.
...
In Indianapolis in late October, Pamela Brewer waited nervously for a hearing on her pending eviction in a courthouse packed with hundreds of other tenants. There, landlords have been piling new evictions onto a backlog of thousands of older ones from the pandemic that are just now being executed.

“The hallways were full, the outside was full coming up the steps, the foyer was full,” said Ms. Brewer, who is months behind on rent after losing her job on the assembly line at a home appliances manufacturer at the start of the pandemic. “You look around and everybody’s knees are shaking like, What’s going to happen?”

Those poor people should be afraid, because eviction courts aren’t about due process and getting a fair hearing. Eviction courts were created to help landlords make sure that those evictions are handled very quickly.
Much like the number of homeless, no one really wants to know the truth behind the tidal wave of evictions. Perhaps even more important, the people with money and power, the ones who own the media, don't care. At all.
That's why we aren't even close to knowing the scale of the problem.

The true extent of the crisis facing tenants is understated by the available numbers on eviction, housing advocates and experts say. “The eviction avalanche is absolutely here across the country,” said Katie Goldstein, a housing justice campaign director with the Center for Popular Democracy.

There is no national database of evictions, and the haphazard patchwork of local policies and record-keeping methods in courts across the country poses severe obstacles to creating one. One-third of all U.S. counties have no available court eviction data at all, according to New America, a left-leaning think tank.

And most tenants are forced to leave their rental units not because of formal eviction proceedings, but because they’ve been illegally locked out or their utilities have been shut off, or because they want to avoid an eviction being added to their record by leaving on their own.

A 2015 study from Milwaukee found that there were two of these so-called informal evictions for every one formal eviction. A recent survey of low-income tenants in Washington State found that one in five tenants were subjected to a method of informal eviction during the pandemic, compared with one in eight before the pandemic.

Finally we arrive at the terrible conclusion.
1. Those people who said that they were in danger of being evicted were telling the truth.
2. It happened, and now they've been unable to maintain a steady job while losing their homes.
3. Homeless people are invisible.

The simply fact is that we have absolutely no idea how many homeless people are in America today. When I say this I mean that we don't have a clue.

The 2019 Annual Homeless Assessment Report Part I (AHAR), published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), estimates that 53,692 parents and children experienced homelessness during the agency’s January 2019 count.

Congress and local communities use HUD’s homelessness figures to help inform determinations about priorities for funding, services, and action. Yet educators, service providers, and child advocates say other data sources provide a more realistic picture of homelessness.

The HUD figures, derived from a “point-in-time” count, are significantly lower than those released by the Department of Education. Public schools identified more than 1.5 million homeless students in the 2017-2018 school year according to preliminary data from the Department of Education, a 10 percent increase since the previous school year.

In addition, the landmark 2017 study Missed Opportunities: Youth Homelessness in America, from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago found that 4.2 million young people experienced unaccompanied homelessness over a 12-month period.

The HUD survey would be a joke if it had any humor value at all. Yet HUD is the most quoted official source.
We don't want to know how bad things are getting with the working class, so we don't make a honest effort to know the truth. Thus we come to laughable scenarios that have no reflection on reality.
Instead our culture obsesses over things that seem bizarre in a time where so many millions of lives are being destroyed: CRT, COVID vaccines, signaling virtue, celebrities, etc.
This certainly looks a lot like End of Empire.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

I'm young; I have plans to make, multiple layers now of setbacks to overcome, promises made to me by others long ago to see come due, and dreams to chase.

350,000,000 living anthropoids and ~9,826,675 km² of land aren't just going to sink into the sea (nor will rising sea levels treat them any differently from anything else at equivalent elevation), and while some will (in arguably one of the most tragic and bitter scenes of all of this) immigrate in search of greener, cleaner pastures, most can/will not...so WHAT NEXT???

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat @The Liberal Moonbat @The Liberal Moonbat ends on December 31,2021.

This week a report came out that over 100,000 currently enroled and counted NYC school kids are homeless. In NYC homeless children includes kids whose families float between relatives and shelters, no fixed addresses.

Think about this. Biggest City in a wealthy nation.

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NYCVG

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@NYCVG I'm afraid that information by itself is not of much use to me, as I'm most-of-the-way on the other side of the empire from all that jazz, kind of with the opposite problems; luckily, we DO have and own our own home...but in a place with no opportunities, no access, and scarcely even any ontological recognition (and my REAL home, then one I was dragged from years ago? It's been paved over by a hideous doppelganger).

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4 users have voted.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

So much of what we read is meaningless because it just parrots whatever press release comes across the medias desk. This is going to be a tough winter for the newly poor and homeless.

One thing out of all of this bleating about not finding enough workers is I can almost see the outlines of a general strike bringing the nation to a halt. We would need a strike fund for the workers with the most to lose. I doubt the wine and cheese liberals would be on board, because it would take money away from their pet causes and their wokeism precludes helping everyone in need.

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@Snode

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zed2's picture

I live in the outskirts of NYC and am starting to see signs of homeless people camping out in the woods around where I live. Something I had never seen before. It gets quite cold and wintry around here.

Its impossible to rent cheap anything around here. Rents are insanely high.

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@zed2 I keep my eyes open whenever we get near a town, and there are ALWAYS homeless near the railroad tracks outside of towns, no matter how small the town.

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zed2's picture

Wages should be high enough to rent places to live. Without a place to live homeless people remain so. Back in the 90s homeless families started having their children taken away during the Clinton Administration. In San Francisco the homeless population started to explode in the 90s. But families avoided the shelters because they were afraid of the Child Protective Services who sometimes decided to break up families and adopt out their children. The parents "crime" typically was just being poor. Its not like there were jobs for these unskilled people. There werent. Lots of people with advanced skills and even the employed are homeless now. Those that have cars and can live in them are lucky. Many dont.

If you live in an urban area you need a place to park a car to keep one, otherwise alternate side of the street laws, make it hard to keep a car if you are employed and work in the daytime your car may get towed away due to arbitrary laws that penalize owners who dont move their car every day. and require paying a large fine to ransom it out. All the poor people that I have known who owned vehicles in SF lost them this way. The fines multiply very fast..

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@zed2 how what displeases the well off becomes a law enforcement matter. Mental illness, homelessness, kids mouthing off in school, medical emergencies. Why solve the problem when you can dish out punishment. Much more satisfying.

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snoopydawg's picture

$20 billion could remedy this problem, but apparently the military needs the money more. Weird how the media doesn’t find this issue important enough to cover. Oh wait it’s owned by the military industrial complex. Never mind.

I tweeted this. Good essay.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg
I was thinking last night "whatever happened to that eviction tsunami that they were talking about?"
So I did some searches, and when I realized that the eviction tsunami was roughly the same size as the missing workers mystery, I knew that I had a working theory.
The more that I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Now I could be wrong. Hell, I really hope that I'm wrong.
But if I'm not, we've got an enormous problem in this country that will eventually destabilize society.
Someone in the media needs to pay attention to the pains of the working class.

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@gjohnsit

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NYCVG

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit The Richest Individuals On Earth: https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

They are as mortal as anyone else; most of them aren't particularly special (one thing the "hard work VS institutional advantages" argument ALWAYS misses is the Big Kahuna they both fear too much to acknowledge: LUCK); they have names and addresses.

So what now?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

snoopydawg's picture

@snoopydawg

People like what you wrote. And see where the problem is coming from. Not that will change anything but it’s nice to make people aware of what’s happening I think.

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since the pandemic lockdown because of the closing of children's schools and daycare centers. For decades I've wondered how the dynamic between taking care of young children and both parents being employed would work out. And I've felt the only entity to benefit from the second income was mortgage banks, who've made obscene profits while families struggled.

So I've wondered if the emergency lockdown would force young families to assess the costs of both parents working and decide to forego the benefits of having 2 jobs. And the vaccine and exposure factors may force some parents to opt out of public schools and daycare altogether.

An increasing number of jobs in the U.S. don't pay enough for housing, obviously. But in the households with 2 incomes where there are children, there may be a new awareness that school and daycare are unaffordable, both spiritually and physically.

This is not to disagree with gjohnsit's premise at all, because I'm sure he's right, but I've wondered if a lot of parents have decided not to go back to their low paying jobs because they just don't benefit the family.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Linda Wood

I think quite a lot of parents did make that decision to either be at home parents or to home school their kids. And democrats just screwed many people by cutting daycare from their giveaway to the rich bill. Want more people back at work? Make daycare and other things affordable to them. You know that if we can see that then they can too.

How many people still alive that know there was a time when only dad worked and families were well off before banks insisted that business makes obscene profits over everything else?

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CB's picture

Homelessness Is Becoming a Crisis of Epic Proportions in the United States
June 19, 2021

Can you imagine what it would be like to not have a home? For many Americans, this is not something that they need to imagine because it is a daily reality. Nobody knows for sure how many homeless individuals there are in this country, but recent estimates range from “fewer than 600,000 to more than 1.5 million people”, and everyone agrees that the number has been growing. Even as the wealthy engage in wild bidding wars over the most desirable properties, more impoverished Americans are being forced into the streets with each passing day. There has always been homelessness in America, but here in 2021 it is rapidly becoming a crisis of epic proportions.
...
Ultimately, the vast majority of Americans are just a few months away from being homeless themselves.

In fact, now that a nationwide eviction moratorium is ending, we are being told that millions more Americans could soon be forced out into the streets…

MILLIONS of renters face eviction as a nationwide ban is set to end in two weeks.

It comes as 5.7 million Americans – nearly 14% of all renters nationwide – had fallen behind on their rent in April.

The study by the National Equity Atlas revealed that tenants owed nearly $20 billion in rent, with low-income people among those worst affected.

...
During the pandemic, the federal government has borrowed and spent trillions and trillions of dollars, and the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into the financial system, and yet the suffering of those at the bottom of the economic food chain has gotten much, much worse.

Something is very wrong with that picture.

No matter what our leaders do, the homelessness crisis in this country just seems to keep escalating. Vast numbers of our fellow citizens will be sleeping on the streets tonight, and many more will soon be joining them.

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snoopydawg's picture

@CB @CB

when they get evicted. Either from being locked out of the homes like mentioned here or because they can’t afford to move it to storage places for numbers of reasons. And how much of it is still on their credit cards and they still have to pay them off? It’s a cruel system that is easily remedied.

Another thing is many people are homeless because of medical debt. Or bank fraud. Or…

Edited content. Not helpful.

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zed2's picture

people went. But they were unsuccessful. Without any means of asking them, they were just gone.

LA set up a really Orwellian system to track the homeless but most homeless people felt it lessenned their chances of getting help. Because most of them were deemed less deserving of help if they managed to navigate it.

Basically it was a system designed to eliminate "people who had done everything right" and/or connect them to crimes, etc. that lessened their eligibility to get any benefits. Thats always these tracking systems intent. Terminate people from any entitlement to aid.

It cannot - they are unwilling to address any of the root causes of homelessness. GATS made it so they are not allowed to help people. Dems have been lying about that to you all since 1995.

Everything changed radically in 1995 with the WTO and GATS.. WHat will they do in the near future? Probably something like Robodebt in Australia.

~https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=robodebt

in a cashless society everything will be based on your digital account. So it will all be tracked and controlled. If you have no money to buy luxury goods you wont be able to travel where you would buy them. You maynot be able to use toll roads, required by GATS to pay for infrastructure or the jobs seem to require they be bid out, to the lowest bidder internationally. The networking jobs too also mkust be farmed out to the firms that bid the lowest. Lots of that kind of work, putting remote villages on the net is being done in India and Africa. They have the most experience in it. Technically, the jobs, ae the same. Its just that communities looking to get jobs will lose out. The foreign worker are much much cheaper.

Sp, short summary, the world has changed. Govt procurement n trade deals requires infrastructure jobs be rewards for bidding the cheapest. This wil push wages down a lot as is its intent.

The AGP (agreement on govt procurement) which we signed just a few years ago is payback to the most unequal countries for playing our trade game. The jobs will likely be bid out which could prove embarrassing for the political class. The new toll roads will require a digital account with enough money in them to pay the tolls. Also when people make deposits - they have an income which may kick them off benefits. Rescission will come back in healthcare. Its a kind of clawback where service providers have the money that was paid to them for you clawed back, then they may have the option of rebilling you which will immediately debit the money from your account, Rebiolling somebody with a serious health problem back to the beginning of the policy could leave people with huge bills they must pay before they can use the card they need to use to drive down the road. Rescission's modern version is all digital. Its intended to keep the poor out of the new "smart cities" .Also it enables people tracking and health evaluation by GPS. By interpolation it can extract your heart rate from the minutest 2 mm motions of your bodyh due to your heart beat. This is very valuable to health insurance copmpanies in pricing your health insurance.

If it turn out you were not eligible for benefits while you had a serious illness and received treatment, you'll find that the benefits paid on your behalf get clawed back, like Australia's robodebt. They'll rebill you at the uninsured rate which is often much higher. Retroactively. It will keep the poor out of sight.

Collectively, there is a discussion going on about this kind of thing, look up "digital poorhouse" to find it. The phrase is from the book "Automating Inequality"

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@zed2

in a cashless society everything will be based on your digital account.

I'm VERY paranoid about eliminating cash. To me this issue is like COVID vaccines to other people.
Getting rid of cash removes anonymity in transactions. Getting rid of cash means all transactions are debt transactions.
That means that the government, and even private institutions, can simply cut you off from being able to function and live in society if they so choose.

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@gjohnsit TIA---Total Information Access,

Not Just for Scary fiction any more.

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NYCVG

CB's picture

@gjohnsit
to ensure people have been vaccinated and they're up to date? You cannot buy a plane or train ticket in Canada if you don't have a passport. BTW, the country is planning a digital currency.

Vaccine passports during the COVID-19 pandemic
North America

Canada:

No plans for a vaccine passport (grey)
Partial vaccine passport (yellow)
Vaccine passport or plans for a vaccine passport (blue)

United States

A map showing which US states have proposed or implemented (green), banned (red), or partially banned (yellow) COVID-19 vaccine passports. Gray indicates that the state has neither implemented or banned COVID-19 vaccine passports. Also included is states that have significant localities with COVID-19 vaccine passports (Aqua). Green includes states which have created a vaccine passport mobile application, but the application is not mandated to be used in the public or private sector. As of October 2021, no US states had mandated use of vaccine passports.

I believe COVID passports will be a gateway for digital currency in the world. The US is currently the leading bulwark against this (but only by conservative controlled States) due to the Constitution.

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@CB

I believe COVID passports will be a gateway for digital currency in the world. The US is currently the leading bulwark against this (but only by conservative controlled States) due to the Constitution.

You already know what I think - the pandemic will be done in a couple months.
If you want to know where I see the pressure for an all digital currency, look at the unsustainable, unpayable debt levels, and negative interest rates. Keep your eyes on the central bankers.

Here's a question worth pondering: if we had a bank holiday tomorrow, and this also meant the credit card companies (which are either partners with the banks or owned by the banks), how would you buy your food for the week?
Keeping in mind that a bank holiday means the ATMs won't function.
I'm betting that most people don't have any cash on them other than what's currently in their pocket.

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CB's picture

@gjohnsit
Did you know that the US has now more surveillance cameras per capita than China?

I don't think we'll see the end of this pandemic. We will just see waves of infections getting more shallower which each passage. The US curve is currently trending slightly higher instead of bottoming and flattening out and we are just at the beginning of the influenza season that will last until next May. The global curve is definitely on the rise. In any event we will probably see another virus hit before 2025.

There's just too many people on the face of the earth and we are messing up the place big time. It's time we stopped breeding and eating meat or they'll have to do something even more drastic. That's the word from the DAVOS crowd.

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@CB @CB
You have to keep people entertained.
So they have to keep changing what we must fear otherwise the customer gets bored.
Even if COVID somehow defies all historical trends and doesn't go away next year, the ruling elites would have to change the theme anyway.

After communism it was drug dealers. Then it was Islamic terrorists. Now it's a bad flu.
Who will be the next Hitler? Russia? China? Leftists?

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CB's picture

@gjohnsit
The sheeple are easy to herd. TPTB get to practice it every 2 years in the US.

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CB's picture

@gjohnsit

Here's a question worth pondering: if we had a bank holiday tomorrow, and this also meant the credit card companies (which are either partners with the banks or owned by the banks), how would you buy your food for the week?
Keeping in mind that a bank holiday means the ATMs won't function.
I'm betting that most people don't have any cash on them other than what's currently in their pocket.

A digital currency doesn't require banks, credit cards or ATM's. A $20 cell phone is all that is required. The Chinese no longer carry cash - they can transfer funds from phone to phone.

China has given away millions in its digital yuan trials. This is how it works
Mar 4 2021

GUANGZHOU, China — China is arguably leading the world in developing a national digital currency, a project it has been working on since 2014.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been spearheading work on the digital yuan, a so-called central bank digital currency (CBDC) that aims to replace some of the cash in circulation.

Real world trials are already underway in the world’s second-largest economy. Here’s what we know so far about the digital yuan or its official name — the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP).

What is the digital yuan?

It’s effectively a way for the central bank to digitalize bank notes and coins in circulation. The Chinese market is already very advanced in cashless payments. The digital yuan would be a way to speed that process up.

It will be legal tender in China and no interest will be paid on it.

“The use of cash is decreasing. Eventually cash will be replaced by something in digital format. That is one of the big drivers behind this,” Yan Xiao, project lead for digital trade at the World Economic Forum, told CNBC.
...

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@CB

A digital currency doesn't require banks, credit cards or ATM's. A $20 cell phone is all that is required. The Chinese no longer carry cash - they can transfer funds from phone to phone.

Unless it's a non-national currency like bitcoin, then it's no different from a credit card.

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CB's picture

@gjohnsit

Here's a question worth pondering: if we had a bank holiday tomorrow, and this also meant the credit card companies (which are either partners with the banks or owned by the banks), how would you buy your food for the week?
Keeping in mind that a bank holiday means the ATMs won't function.
I'm betting that most people don't have any cash on them other than what's currently in their pocket.

The NEW Chinese digital money system is run by the government. It's only similar to the private AliPay, WeChat Pay and Union Pay in that it uses a Q code for transactions. These payment systems are identical in function to our debit cards which use chips or magnetic strips.

The eYuan is a cryptocurrency and uses a wallet. They will supply digital "wallets" with chips that can be read for those who don't have a cell phone at minimal cost. This means you are effectively carrying on your person all the "cash" you possess. Money transfers go direct from wallet to wallet and don't need an internet connection. All these transactions will be recorded in the wallet.

Private banking services like AliPay can set up debit accounts on top of your cash reserves if you want to borrow funds but that function will require an internet connection unless you are preapproved.

China’s Digital Currency Is About To Disrupt Money

A lengthy article in The Wall Street Journal, China creates its own digital currency, a first for major economy, outlines the likely impact of Beijing’s initiative and the strategic possibilities it offers in terms of avoiding US blockades of its companies, how this will boost its role in international transactions, while allowing it to monitor its economy in real time.
...

The reason I put this together with the vaccine passports and video surveillance is these are gateway "drugs" to get the serfs "trained" just like in China. Canada, Australia and the EU are harbingers of what is to come in the US.

Never let a crisis go to waste. Full spectrum dominance is on the way. Brave New World indeed.

Maybe you can do a diary? You are very good at it. I still find it extremely difficult to find my words since my ischemic stroke last spring.

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@CB

next we will see the credit card companies step up and offer to include your health
information in their digital chips at no additional charge. Totally secure I'm sure.
Just ask Equifax Wink

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pswaterspirit's picture

Walmart is attempting to implement cashless pay in their stores now. Their latest remodels leave very few manned checklanes. Their self check requires you pay by card. The lines at the manned checklanes are long. They said it had to do with a change shortage. I have noticed, though in my travels to various stores to work on their inventory systems, that some stores have reverted back to normal while others have not. Apparently some communities took exception and stopped shopping there to the point they backed off, while others they are keeping up the ruse. I have never really shopped there with the exception of buying a snack or something to drink. I now am in the habit of packing my food so I don't have to. Winco a regional discount chain has seen a jump in sales because they only accept cash or a debit card. What I know is that every other chain did this for awhile in this area but most have gone back to normal and only 3 out of 5 walmarts I service are still claiming to be short on change.

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snoopydawg's picture

@pswaterspirit

2 of the 4 self checkouts says that due to the coin shortage people have to use cards to pay. Doesn’t make sense if you leave 2 others open to cash. And yes there seemed to be a sudden shortage of change just as the close down happened. I caught on to that right away, but not the checkouts..sometimes I’m slow but I usually get there. Thanks for the assist.

I started calling out the cashless system about 4 years ago and tied it to the stock market crash and the bail in banks got authorization to do from one of the omnibus bills congress passed. Dodd Frank made it so banks didn’t have to go before congress to get permission to help themselves to our money. You can look it up.

Remember when Obama told the banks to be grateful to him for standing in front of the people who wanted their heads after they crashed the global economy? Grrrr lots of bad thoughts to that wanker! Now he’s lecturing us on climate change whilst flying around the world causing more damage than we do all year. That’s after he failed to do a damn thing except for more drilling and fracking and more wars that are a huge effect on it.

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CB's picture

@pswaterspirit
has been changing gradually during the last year. There are only 3 rows of two cash registers left with at least 50 self checkouts at the one I go to. I use these lines to keep people working. They also pull people off the cash registers to ensure there is a full line waiting to use them to make it inconvenient.

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zed2's picture

People use cash as a way to get benefits they are not entitled to. They may pretend to be poor because they have some life threaening, expensive disease that makes them uninsurable. In a future where every expenditur is weighed against the economic benefit to employers of its cost, many peoples lives may not be deemed valuable enough to save. We're seeing that with COVID. You have to put yourelf in the oligarchys shoes.

Have you read Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost"? Suppose if very few people can afford services like healthcare because as things get more automated pay will plummet because humans will no longer be the cheapest ways to do much work, they have been up until nopw but thats changing due to AI tols that let us build up a method of doing very complex jobs by watching how highly skilled people do them in various ways. Basically machines are starting to learn like people. That will change society a great deal very quickly. Lets say that the most common 100 jobs will be automated enabling software to handle 90% of everything. People will only be called in when some exception occurs that requires special handling. That will reduce the need for people a lot. What will all those people do? They cant fix this because all these corporations have inveted a great deal in serving this market and if they were to just give people anything the US would get sued for the tort of "indirect expropriation" Look that word up. Basically its a regulatory taking of propoerty. Everybody here needs to understand it. Since 1995, the WTO, NAFTA, etc, its become very important. Now its the governments job to regulate themselves. To limit regulation. They are not allowed to intercede or interject themselves between corporations and their market, which they invested in and that gave them rights to it. Its too late now to go back tio the generousity of the last century. We were folled into trap and now we have to live in it. .

The worth of a human life, economically is rated in something called Quality Adjusted Life Years. This ishow they decide what kinds of rules to put on governments in areas like healhcare insurance. For exmple, Maine studied this question and decided that the risks involved with Dirigo Care were huge and so they decided to end it. Similarly, letters from insurance cmpanies promising a ISDS suit against Canada pursuaded Ontario to drop the idea of having no fault auto insurance, even though other Candian provinces had done it- the reason was they did it before the aforementioned trade instruments. Signing the country into NAFTA and the WTO shut the door to expansions in services by government. But it also coaxed a great many resource rich countries in the developing world back to the negotiating table at DOHA in November 2001. They were promised access to developed (rich) country services markets on a large (unlimited) scale. They know hey can do those jobs, for a lot cheaper. Businesses love this because they anticipate a lot of USiand having to leave jobs they have been priced out of. Africa is the big prize. Wges there are the lowest in the world. There are a lot of families with many children. Many young people with dgrees desperate to use their new skills. They are also people of means who can afford to go to schoolfor eight years or more, whatever it takes. Their labor is like those countries giving us money. They are still excited and idealistic about the corporate world. They have swallowed the Kool Aid.

The burden of living up to the past old promises like the New Deal programs and various laws that limit corporate flexibility is deemed too burdensome. Everything has changed. WTO rules say everything must be "not more burdensome than necessary" This "trumps" all our government "measures". It is the rule, what our politicins do is overruled by the new rules - they basically end the kind of government we all grew up with

Its a huge, global, massive change.

If something is deemed "more burdensome than necessary", like a rule or regulation at any level that limits trade, it has to be removed. If is deemed not worth it by the business class. They basically win all the issues that used to be determined by compromise between the two fake parties. They already know in advance what will be done and its only one thing./ Thius is why there never was any change that there would be "medicre for all" and also the reason they named it that was to help them KILL the real Medicare. Its the sme with Social Security. GATS put it on Death Row. They want out of all the promises that politicians made in the past. Especially the ones that historically mistreated groups are counting on. Because those jobs have already been promised away and the employers dont want to be bound by anything like what we have now. Because jobs in those places (where they are based) are maybe a100 years behind us in areas like work conditions.

So its as if they are giving away the jobs and rolling back the last 100 years of progress or so. You can see why they would hide this. But there is a bright side, we ended slavery by race, so slavery is prohibited unless people are duly convicted of a crime. So they cant make us like the Middle East kafala system which GATS Mode Four seems to be based on. somehow, tactfully. So our oligarchs want a ne America thats pro corporate 100%

They cant keep it up pretending its still 1990.. Now the gloves are comig off, thats what the future is all about, money is everything. Right now people expect that we will get special treatment in dozens of areas from government because they are Americans. But many people see that as unfair, and it may not survive legal tests because we made a deal to make money the onloy measurement, ending discrimination against foreign firms. We cant make them pay more while here, as much as $9 hour. More than ten times what they usually pay. Th market must determine the work's worth. Supply and demand determines wages. Not workers. This is basically not negotiable with neoliberals.

This will mean we cant award jobs to people just because we are Americans. Not when foreign companies take over whoile departments, because they bid lower. All sorts of laws which protect various people in various situations will have to go because otherwie we would have to force foreign copanies to change practices they might have followd since the Middle Ages. Instead of harmonizing the rules to the global norms we would be demanding they rise to us. Imagine if we did that with toxic chemicals. Europes laws are more stringent. But few European countries have mionimum wages like we do. They hve tigter worker unions, anmd healthcared, buyt the employer and workers have to workers might be ble to agree on wages. They need to look at the relationships i a prospective lighy look at the hole road that being taken. Wil jobs be slave-slaveover relationsips..or will hey be likle America before nafte and WTO they will not be like that againm. The trade deals lock they would out. zWe ot the first battle because we were deceived, we were misled by politicos wh did nt tell the trutgh. agree on wages. Many fctories are being pcked up and sent entirely to Asia. So no more jobs there. We cant have local content requirements, like LCRS when tax money is involved.
Similarly, the rising cost of heating is going to lead to the razing of much hiousing in cities. This will mean people will have to rent ne apartments, wich will lack controlled rents so theyu wioll be priced way out of the reach of millions of people. They will have to move out of the cities, unles their incomes rise a lot. Many businesses will lose all their employees because they will have to move. They knew this would happen - which is why they did it I'm sure

The cost of making up the difference between the market price of apartments and the old rents will be astronomical, thousands of dollar per month per family. A family might be paying $2000 a month rent for their current, old apartment but the same size apartment may now rent for $4500/month.

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3 users have voted.

So under Obama there were 3.9 million homes the banks foreclosed on. I think we can call these evictions. So 3.9 million households had to find a new place to live. I used to think of them as capitalist refugees. At the UN there were would be a crisis if a country declared it had that many refugees (actually more if you figure 3-4 people per household).

But really where did all of those people go? Was there enough lower cost rental property? We looked at selling our house a few years ago due to a lay off and rents for decent places were just as much as mortgage payments.

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9 users have voted.
TheOtherMaven's picture

@MrWebster

mortgage payments were beyond outrageous. Ten years ago in this area mortgage payments were on average lower than rent.

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3 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

CB's picture

What do you think?

The United States is in the middle of the worst shortage of workers in history. At the moment, every industry in the country is short-staffed and we are already seeing major disruptions occur due to the lack of qualified labor to perform the basic services our society needs. Many famous CEOs and business owners recently made the headlines complaining about the declining number of members in their staff. However, official numbers released by the federal government have been telling us a different story. They have been suggesting that there's no worker shortage, no unemployment crisis and that things are going fairly well in our labor market.

Recent data shows that there are currently tens of millions of job openings all across the nation. Employers have been so desperate to find new workers that they have been offering some generous bonuses, gifs, trips, and of course, dramatically raising wages to attract new employees. But even though all of this is happening, people are still not coming back. Nationwide, there are currently 100,450,000 people out of the labor force, up 38,000 from September numbers. October was the 14th straight month that the number of people out of work has remained above 100,000,000.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE-usFZyWWY]

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snoopydawg's picture

@CB

but if the tens of millions is true I think there’s a more nefarious something happening that big business is doing. Too many people have tried to get jobs only to be ignored by those desperately looking for workers. And they are refusing to increase their wages.

Also how many of the low wage workers died during the epidemic? Meat factories lost quite a lot of their workers. Might have had something to do with them not getting them PPE. Who knows?

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5 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

zed2's picture

Unemployment insurance in the US is so crappy and so short they make it more of a pain to apply than it could possibly be. I would be looking for a job or much more probably very well employed rioght now if they hadnt made it so most of the jobs I get called back from mare SCAMS. This is because the Indian temping companies have no intention of hiring any Americans, they just are holding sham interviews for jobs they already have picked workers for IN ORDER TO GET THEM WORK VISAS..

I must have gone to at least 30 of these fake interviews before the guy who was interviewing me clued me in. He was interviewing candidates as part of his job, he had just been laid off and was temporarily working for the company that was replacing his entire department.

Really. Its like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The plan is to evade the provisions of the WARN Act, hiding the huge number of people being laid off due to trade deals on services. They only get their severance if they spend 99months training the new employees. Their goal is to replace all the skilled jobs in the country with temps. Thats what Biden is there to facilitate. This is what neoliberaism is doing, globally.

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zed2's picture

People will be starving, Desperate for work. Facing an early retirement against their will, (They will get a final 9 months pay while training their (usually indian) replacements) do you see them demanding more wages? They have this process down to a science, they systematically capture the business processes that make up jobs. They are specialists in turning jobs into computerized interactions. As a web developer I have done a great deal of this. Building projects that deliver some service. So, anyway, the world is changing, fast. Look at the beginning here, this is trade expert Jane Kelsey.. The rest is in Norwegian. You can see Jane Kelsey's Oslo talk elsewhere. You can read her interpretation of TISA financial services chapter at Wikileaks

[Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OHU9rKfvsc]

The millions of jobs that are involved are sort of the payback for the world trade agenda and its supposed to be "the largest transfer of wealth in human history". .

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zed2's picture

It uses the digital songbun system (digital caste system) to track people it wants to arrest and also to cut people off from everything when it wants to.

It knows all and sees all. Because to do absolutely anything and everything you need your phone or "number" a number that uniquely identifies you that is used in everything. Its likely the primary key in a big database table.

Is it like the US-EU-Australian "ID2020" or "Lock Step Scenario" agendas? I don't know but it sounds quite similar.

Speaking of India. See this story. The US corporate state corporations pressured India into setting up their demonetization, with their government benefits keys to a digital ID system, which uses your biometrics, in its case, your eyes, to identify individuals. This is because as much as a third of the nation is illiterate. They have not had public education in many areas until relatively recently, and large numbers of women remain unschooled, or have to work at a young age so they set up "Aardhaar" so now it doesnt even require people know how to read to alienate all their rights.. (the big requirement) and go into debt, even encumbering everything they own away. (Credit inclusion scams) Ultimately, if education is privatized, Many people who are are born into debt and grow up in debt wont be able to afford to take time off of work for several years during childhood and get schooling, its quite possible so many may remain illiterate. Lack of ability to sign a contract is a big problem for the financial industry. Funding schools puts burdens on taxpayers who may be making nothing. Since politicians depend on votes, and voters will be being crushed by taxes, funding schools may become too burdensome and unsustainable for homeowners and communities.Redevelopment. There simply wont be the money available without people having any employment to pay for them! . This is perhaps why GATS rules have been set up to target all public services including primary education, We all should already know about how they are forcing a dismantlement of public higher education on a global scale. Because the hope is to save the good jobs for the recently graduated adult children of the very well to do (people of means around the whole world) who can afford eight years or more of costly higher education, Once they graduate the need to start work immediately or there is a very valid concern they will forget what they learned) in a world where most working stiffs at desk jobs are foreign "temporary" subcontractors who receive no benefits large numbers of locals will be struggling. Their costs of living and expectations are problematic as they have to be paid at least the local "minimum wage" So its expected they will go deeply into debt creating a huge windfall to banks. . That is the future that's being put in place. This process funnels lots of energy into resource extraction from that country. Natural resources, energy, minerals, water, even, can be sold off to pay down the debts. This is why the Bretton Woods System now is trying to reward some of the world's "Most unequal nations" for their support of the privatization of services. Approximately 80% of the jobs in any modern country. However only services that receive tax money or are under the rules of any organization that is under the control of one of the various levels of government, in the US Federal, state or municipal/local. are totally under the jurisdiction of the "rules based international trading system"

See this video: [Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZoKLMOjBQM]

The IMF global trade agenda. .. Because of the US-Gambling decision, very costly obligations can now be triggered invisibly, The Antigua case which we lost, really changes everything. Do people see how it works? Please read up on the implications of the US Gambling WTO dispute to once-public services.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud3fhqQkz90]

After we created and joined the WTO, We cannot maintain any laws or rules which serve as trade barriers. Many rules are said to be trade barriers, if they create barriers to a global race to the bottom that is today's norm. At the top of the list or trade barriers to be disposed of are the l;aws in rich countries thathave been protecting the interests of special groups within the rich countries, such as women unions, powerful groups, and various historically disadvantaged grops, who received special privilies under the old system. These groups, who still have a lot of voters are seen as standing in the way or trade liberalization, a very big problem to the corporate system.. To replace these special privileges, the WTO has created the LDC Services Waiver, to promote trade with the poorest nations. (those nations where average incomes are the lowest) Think of them as a form of affirmative economic support program. Its hoped that the LDC Service Waiver will give the poorest countries firms an opportunity to increase participation in the rich countries services. Since the one export they have in surplus is inexpensive formally educated labor, The rich countries have a shortage of educated labor. And because they are aging, people have not been having enough children. Industry wants to create a dis-empowered, immobile labor pool to support their investments in the richer countries. Since this labor's presence in the rich countries is dependent on their employment and they cannot switch jobs. Their visas depend on their employment for the company which has employed them for temporary labor. Their employers are the developing countries firms that has transferred them to their customers work sites in the developed countries. These workers may spend many years working as temps, converting jobs to be done remotely in developing countries over the Internet. The trade helps with the developing countries balance of payments. (their national debts)
There is currently a global war on cash being conducted by the US financial services industry on the rest of the world. With brick and mortar jobs going away the financial services, digital payments especially are being promoted as the replacement, a whole new digital El Dorado, or city of gold. The digital changes, however main purpose is saving labor and the change will reduce employment.

[video:https://norberthaering.de/en/category/war-on-cash/]

The huge Third World Debt (largely taxpayers money stolen by oligarchs from governments and taxpayers - now half the money in the world) and now stored in the former UK colonies "spiders web" of online bankingh tax havens. is a huge problem that is allegedly holding back global economic growth.

All rights in this new world boil down to money. In the new world of global commerce, information is power. Corporations are people. All of your rights may eventually be based on the economics. Money is the source of all rights. All corporations money is supposed to be equal.
[video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L49LxRaWdO4]

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zed2's picture

The debts which are being incurred in our names are a way that they could take over our future.

Read up on this war on cash at sites like this one.

The poor countries, eager to get advantages from the new digital totalitarianism, are helping enable this global shift.

Also the digital devices help track you and make it easier to determine how much money you have and your health status, especially. Without that information, they might waste money on you. Or insure you when in fact you are already sick and not somebody who under our current system, they should take a risk on. Maybe you are a cancer survivor, presenting a substantial risk that it may return, or have some other chronic illness that puts you at higher risk for costly illness. All the chemicals around us are creating a society where many many people are at greatly enhanced risks of illness and they know it. Their actuariual tables are used to determine who will cost too much. But for all their work to bear fruit in profits they need lots more information about you. And they need the laws they want giving them access to basically every conceivable piece of info about you.

Even your heart rate. which is calculate from tiny movements of your body measured 20 times a second. Old GPSs were accurate to a few meters. But now most phones have chips that are accurate to less than a centimeter. Via extrapolation they can calculate your heart beat. By combining all the data they collect, they basically can use all that data like a lie detector. Measuring aspects of your voice recorded by audio sensor and movements as measured by RTK-GPS and offloading and extermally processing the GPS signal data to determine your moving) location.

Your phone can give them a real lot of information. Statistically they will determine how environment impacts your health and longevity, and they and others willing to pay will be able to exploit it.

Some areas are so polluted they are unsafe, for example, is your home or workplace, or girlfriend's or boyfriend's located near one? Should insurers insure you? if your data tells them you are a person who lives or works there? Maybe no, as they are in business to correctly estimate your risk and price whatever services they sell you profitably. Otherwise they would lose a lot of money if they insured everybody, or the insurance would have to be total crap, or too expensive.

Its never been a good system, or even an adequate one. Its going to become a lot more arbitrary and many would say, unfair. But its the system we voted for, right? As, since 1995 there has not been any choice, and now its their way or the highway.

Its all about profit. Corporations are not charities. Social conditions are government responsibility, despite what they may tell us, or even what the WTO may tell us. People should demand more accountability from politicians. Or at least some. In the past, entire governments, and their families and relatives were held accountable and when dynasties changed, many heads rolled. Now there is no accountability for the deeds of governments. Or corporations. Which we have to remember are a legal fiction which were set up to protect the actual beneficial owners from financial liability. Now tax havens like Delaware hide the assets of millions of corporations in a vast spiders web of "Legal" financial secrecy. How can people not see that they are putting a system in place to literally steal the world from all of its people. And get away with it.

Politicians since they have no power to re-regulate now after having deregulated more and more (its a one way street) Are getting away with doing nothing, in a very real sense. Were you to make a lst of the things "we the people" who incredibly officially, at least on paper they still are supposed to work for.. want.. I guarantee to you they would no longer be able to do it due to trade rules. Thats the international law that blocking them. So they are basically being paid to act. Reality TV.

Right now they are getting paid but all responsibility has been taken away from them by trade agreements due to fear from the elite that they might - if under pressure, do their jobs and act "of by and for the people".. So WTO and other FTAs (especially the "negative list" US ones) limit that.

All they have to do is act as if they are doing something convincingly.

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zed2's picture

Covid is a means the very wealthy and powerful are using to put in place all sorts of "digital totalitarianism" because via trade deals they are also stealing a lot of rights from we the people. So they make much more money and lock in their gains - so pesky democracy (not to be confused wit the increasingly undemocratic Party) surveillance systems.

One of these many schemes is called ID2020, and there are dozens of others. Some of them are enumerated and explained at https://norberthaering.de/.

Elsewhere in this thread I try to explain why big corporations want this information.

One big reason is to price "health insurance" higher to high risk people. NOT BECAUSE THEY INTEND TO PAY OUT MORE TO THEM IF THEY GET SICK, though. They FULLY intend to weasel out of any obligations. They have very grandiose scheme to financialize everything. And undermine working people globally. Here in the US this was enabled by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act by the Clinton Administration in 1999. (They claimed that our joining the WTO required we dump it and expose our country to huge risks, and hid this aspect of it.it) So now we face a risk of taxpayers being stolen from - a very real risk. This would happen if we built up a huge debt and we were bitten by the system we set up ourselves. Say a balance of payments destroying financial hit stealing all of taxpayers benefits, like Social Security. If most jobs are being contracted out to foreigners the money may be going out of the country instead of into social security.

They claim that Americans dont have enough education or skills. And are not having enough rich children who stay in college and attain graduate degrees.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WUXTQL03hY]

A few years ago the very badly named "Affordable Care Act" was enacted to a huge amount of hype.

And many fairly wealthy sick people who insurance companies didnt want to unsure no matter what, rejoiced because finally thanks to "Obamacare" they could afford health insurance that had previously been denied them (and it was structured so poor sick people who couldnt afford doctors - still, even if they bought policies) actually paid the bill for it lowering the wealthy's costs tremendously.

But this was actually a sham and not intended to last, just to get the issue out of the news, and public eye, because in 1998 we agreed to, no actually pushed on the world a freeze on financial services regulation. So the ACA's new ability of high risk people to pay whatever is demanded and be insured is temporary, you can bet on it going back to how it was before fairly soon, and in fact its already started reverting to the way it was before. The media is downpedaling this. Suppose health insurance of adequate quality cost you and your wife or husband $5-6000 a month. This is for the minimum insurance you as a prudent person needed to purchase to avoid being plunged into bankruptcy - This is actually what it cost in 2009. in New york city which guaranteed good insurance to all who wanted to buy it and could pay for it. Not crap insurance. But a basic PPO cost older couples $4000-8000 a month. Really. Thats what it costs. Fee for service, what rich people used to buy, rich families buy insurance in bulk for all their family members. Usuallythrough a family trust. But such insurance is extremely expensive and virtually no normal people can afford it. It may not even be sold any more in the US. But if it was its cost may be astronomical. Those kinds of policies let you go to any doctor and they pay every bill. The really expensive policies offer modern healthcare,like what people in Canada get, or in Europe. Most importantly, they dont have caps on what they pay out that arbitrarily cut people off. Secret clauses have really hurt healthcare in the US thats delivered by US HMOS. Healthcare is getting more complicated so modern heathcare is becoming more expensive especially because of drug prices, which we set up and want. (In the TRIPS agrement in the WTO)

See the Sana Reid Smith video about TISA.

Why do Americans want real public health care. The kind we agreed never to have in the WTO.

No, its forbidden now. If we charge for any healthcare and didnt have it before we joined the WTO (19956) we cant do it. Thats Article 1:3 c of the GATS. It freezes all new services. Or regulation.

dont try to tell doctors how to practice. Like the US "mangled care" (HMOS) do. Thats why more and more healthcare providers are ditching the health insurance industry and only taking cash or checks. Or moving to Canada, for their mental health.

Providers are really sick of all the various clauses that insurance in many US states has now.

Suppose you get really bad care (The rate of medical mistakes in the US is among the highest in the world) Suppose you go into the hospital for a minor surgery they seriously and permanently injure you due to a careless medical mistake?

Suppose you are injured for the rest of your life. Can you sue them?

Is the insurance part of an employer provided plan? Yes? well then you may be out of luck. If you sue them, whatever money you won would go directly to your insurer first, if a subrogation clause applies. But basically its likely you could never get a lawyer to work for you on contingency, because their payment would be subject to being subrogated too.. You could not get a lawyers help, even in the most obvious open and shut cases.

This is because they have basically a license to kill. In the form of provisions of ERISA law that make systematic practices of insurers legal as long as they keep pushing the medicolegal standard of care down. Lower and lower. Now this is being done on a global scale and in fact, they fully plan to switch the medical standard of care they are held to from state to state as it suits them (some states are basically worse than 3rd wourld countries already) and eventually from the US one to foreign ones as soon as they can. Thats how the WTO rules on services trade set it up to be once they start trading patients as part of the GATS deal. US currently blocks your medicare funds from paying for healthcare in foreign countries but WTO officials have bluntly stated that thats prohibited and couldn't fly. Big foreign countries are banking on becoming the destination for Americans who need in-patient procedures. Thats what this is all pushing us towards. This will not be the wealthy persons medical tourism, it will be the poor persons, quite different, and its another one of the rewards, like peoples jobs hich is being traded to poor countries to bring them into the whole corrupt movie.

Where in the WTO does it say the ACA is forbidden if it changes the rules post 1998? And that the real rules may have to be "rolled back" to where they were in the 90s?

In the obvious place. Just look there.

Really.

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zed2's picture

the thing indicate? A vaccination card (what I have) is just an oversize piece of paper. Saying when and where I was vaccinated.

The UK went throuygh a whole circus trying top imply that Bluetooth could determine if somebody had been in close proximity with somebody else, it cant. Because its too variable, it depends very greatly on its environment.

Something picked up say a BTLE beacon, might be more than 30 feet away, or it might be right next to you. In other words, its a sham, saying you can tell if people were next to one another is a shameless lie. Especially when vehicles are involved, because they enclose the RF in a metal box and that makes it impossible to estimate distance/

People should realize a global capture is going on. Democracy is seriously endangered.

(BTW Democracy has nothing to do with the Democratic Party of today, nor the GOP)

Bluetooth's original inventors came out and stated that the technology could not tell anybody anything about distance between people. And was likely to give false positives say if two people were on opposite sides of a wall. .

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