Our President...

DSL Internet Connection...

My "regular" DSL AT&T internet access ENDS on June 24th. I've had it with those lying, cheating bastards. I'll have irregular access via my apartment complex clubhouse WiFi and cell phone. But my AT&T DSL access is kaput on 6/24. Probably I'll weaken at some point and sign up with a different DSL provider but at this point I'm willing to endure a lot of inconvenience in order to be beholden to NOBODY... especially AT&T... F_CK'EM. I'll accept the Pyrrhic victory at this point.  

It's just money... a random collection of thoughts on the subject.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.”

Pretty much everything I understand about economics came from Paul Krugman...

This from Paul Krugman's August 23, 2009 column "All the President's Zombies":

"Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good."

"Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming."

"...the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years."

"...most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains."

"...politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came."

Per capita United States GDP-2008: $47,000. [ CIA - World Fact Book https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html ]
...so that's like $188,000 for a family of four-- or about 9 times the poverty level.    So how can we not be able to "afford" health care for everyone?

Some old thinking that's still relevant today:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”