Texas Longhorns with newborn calf in Bluebonnets

Texas Longhorns with newborn calf in Bluebonnets

Please note I have a new phone number...

512-517-2708

Alan Maki

Alan Maki
Doing research at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas

It's time to claim our Peace Dividend

It's time to claim our Peace Dividend

We need to beat swords into plowshares.

We need to beat swords into plowshares.

A program for real change...

http://peaceandsocialjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-progressive-program-for-real-change.html


What we need is a "21st Century Full Employment Act for Peace and Prosperity" which would make it a mandatory requirement that the president and Congress attain and maintain full employment.


"Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens"

- Ben Franklin

Let's talk...

Let's talk...

Sunday, February 3, 2013

No money for a not-for-profit health care system; but...

Minnesota Democrats who have refused to support single-payer universal health care or a public health care system are now going to invest over one-half billion dollars in the private, for-profit Mayo clinic.

For less than this amount of money the state of Minnesota could create a for free public primary health care system serving the needs of all Minnesotans simply by taking over abandoned buildings to be used as health care centers.

The now abandoned St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant situated on the beautiful picturesque banks of the Mississippi River could become the most modern specialized public health care center in the world rivaling the for-profit Mayo Clinic which would be more centrally located in the heart of Minnesota's most populated urban center.

Old factories are being turned into all kinds of apartments, offices and for-profit health clinics all over the United States and around the world as Democrats and Republicans sit idly by cheering on the demolition of abandoned factories here in the United States so real-estate developers and construction firms can profit in one way or another.

One billion dollars of tax-payer money pumped into the private for-profit Viking football stadium along with public infrastructure improvements required for the Stadium; one-billion dollars for a bridge over the St. Croix River that could be built for one-quarter of the cost built more modestly as a public works project leaving the for-profit sector out; a now abandoned St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant subsidized by tax-payers to the hilt the last 85 years to the tune over four-billion dollars (in today's dollars) and these elected public officials whose counterparts in Washington squander trillions of public dollars on senseless barbaric wars complain there is no money to create a National or State Public Health Care System but somehow always manage to use our public funds to invest in for-profit corporations from which we, as tax-payers, get nothing in return.

Tax-payers even funded the Ford Dam on the Mississippi River adjacent to the Ford Plant supplying Ford's operation with power for free with taxpayers even footing the bill to upgrade the hydro plant's new turbines and even building the thirty-million dollar training and research center attached to the plant all of which is scheduled to be bulldozed over leaving tax-payers to continue paying this unpaid debt for another thirty years.