Bernie Sanders praises the government of New York for making its own hand sanitizer, which is made by prison inmates who get paid 65 cents an hour
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
March 11, 2020
Bernie Sanders just said the following:
“I just learned a few moments ago that in New York State the government is doing the right thing. They are manufacturing disinfectant, for hand washing, to make sure that everybody will be able to get the Purell or whatever they need.”
“What they’re saying is, they are telling the manufacturers today to stop the price-gouging. And they’re manufacturing it. And we are prepared to say that to the pharmaceutical industry: stop ripping off the American people.”
Slate just reported the following:
“New York Will Use Prison Labor to Make Hand Sanitizer”
“The incarcerated workers typically make 65 cents an hour”
Bernie Sanders is in favor of using prison labor that makes 65 cents an hour.
This is not the first time that Sanders has praised prison labor that makes horribly low wages. The prison known as “Cuba” makes it illegal for its 11 million inmates to move out of the country, and it pays its doctors only $40 a month. The condition that Cuba forces these doctor-inmates to live under is so horrible that their homes get running water for only one hour per day. Sanders thinks such a system should be a role model for the U.S.
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Here’s a bunch of horror stories from the Canadian health care system that Bernie Sanders wants the U.S. to copy
Bernie Sanders recently said the following regarding his health care plan:
“The system is going to work similarly to what exists in Canada, and what we are going to see is an expansion of Medicare where almost all doctors are now in Medicare to cover every man, woman, and child in this country.”
Since Sanders want the U.S. to copy the Canadian system of health care, here are some examples of what he is talking about:
When Robert Bourassa, the premier of Quebec, Canada, needed cancer treatment, he came to the United States and paid for his health care with his own money.
And when Canadian Liberal MP Belinda Stronach needed cancer treatment, she also came to the United States and paid for her health care with her own money.
And when Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams needed heart surgery, he, too, came to the United States and paid for his health care with his own money.
If Sanders gets his way, and the U.S. adopts Canadian style health care, where will Canadian politicians go when they get sick?
And that’s not all.
Here are some horror stories about Canadian health care as reported in the New York Times:
Canada’s Private Clinics Surge as Public System Falters
The Cambie Surgery Center, Canada’s most prominent private hospital, may be considered a rogue enterprise.
Accepting money from patients for operations they would otherwise receive free of charge in a public hospital is technically prohibited in this country, even in cases where patients would wait months or even years before receiving treatment.
Dr. Day, 59, says. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
Canada remains the only industrialized country that outlaws privately financed purchases of core medical services.
Canada has a national doctor shortage already, with 1.4 million people in the province of Ontario alone without the services of a family doctor.
The median wait time between a referral by a family doctor and an appointment with a specialist has increased to 8.3 weeks… Meanwhile the median wait between an appointment with a specialist and treatment has increased to 9.4 weeks
Average wait times between referral by a family doctor and treatment range from 5.5 weeks for oncology to 40 weeks for orthopedic surgery
And Sanders is proud of this?
And there’s still more. This is from the Toronto Sun:
Wait times for knee- and hip-replacement surgery at Southwestern Ontario hospitals are among the longest in the province
People who go under the knife to get their knees replaced in Strathroy have waited an average of 671 days for surgery
Stratford is running the second-highest wait in the province for those needing a hip replacement: the average wait there was 364 days.
In London, the region’s largest medical centre, patients waited an average of 307 days to replace a knee and 299 days to replace a hip
Caption from above photo: Judy Congdon shows how difficult standing is with her bad left hip. Congdon will wait two years for a hip replacement in London, Ont.
Londoner Judy Congdon waited more than a year to have her right knee replaced when her Strathroy surgeon told her he’d have to replace her left hip next. Told last year to expect surgery in September 2017, her date in the operating room was cancelled, and the surgery delayed a second year
I really don’t understand why Sanders thinks this is a good role model for the U.S.
And there’s still even more.
KOMO TV, a Seattle, Washington affiliate of ABC News, reported:
Some Canadian mothers forced to give birth in U.S.
SEATTLE – A problem in Canada’s hospitals is sending scores of pregnant women south of the border to have their babies.
Carri Ash of Chilliwack, B.C. was sent to the U.S. to have her baby after her water broke on Sunday, ten weeks ahead of schedule.
“And they came in and said ‘you’re going to Seattle,'” she said.
Ash’s hospital couldn’t handle the high-risk pregnancy. Doctors searched for another hospital bed, but even hospitals in Vancouver, B.C. didn’t have a neo-natal bed.
“So two provinces didn’t have enough room, so I have to go to another country,” said Ash.
Ash was sent to Swedish Medical Center where, nurses told KOMO 4 News, five Canadian women have come to have their babies in the past six weeks. Some were even airlifted at up to $5,000 per flight.
And a woman from Calgary, one of the wealthiest cities in Canada, had to travel to Montana to give birth to her identical quadruplets.
“We always regret when we have to transfer a baby or mother to another jurisdiction for care,” said Canada’s Health Minister George Abbott.
Aidan Nassey was born premature in Canada and developed breathing problems before his mother could even hold him.
“It was terrifying. And he was taken away and that was it,” said Courtney Nassey, his mother.
There wasn’t a hospital in western Canada that could take in Aidan, and a helicopter had to rush them to Seattle.
Vicki Irvine crossed the border to see her daughter, Carri Ash, give birth.
“You can’t even have a baby near home. It’s horrible,” she said.
Irvine and Ash are questioning Canada’s priorities when it comes to health care spending.
“I think it’s ridiculous that we can have the Olympics but not enough beds so I can have a baby,” said Ash.
The family says there is one benefit to their neo-natal nightmare — the newborn will have dual citizenship and, so far, they like what they see on this side of the border.
If Sanders’s health care plan gets adopted, where will those Canadian women go to give birth in the future?
The above article mentions a Canadian woman who had to go to the U.S. to give birth to quadruplets. Here is more info on her situation from canada.com
A rare set of identical quadruplets, born this week to a Calgary woman at a Montana hospital, are in good health and two of them were strong enough to be transported back here Thursday.
The naturally conceived baby girls — Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia — were delivered by caesarean section Sunday in Great Falls, their weights ranging between two pounds, six ounces and two pounds, 15 ounces.
Their mother, Calgarian Karen Jepp, was transferred to Benefis Hospital in Montana last week when she began showing signs of going into labour, and no Canadian hospital had enough neonatal intensive-care beds for all four babies.
There was no room at any other Canadian neonatal intensive care unit, forcing CHR officials to look south of the border.
Let’s take a look at some population statistics to put that into perspective.
Canada has a population of 37 million people.
And yet according to the last paragraph in that article, there was not a single hospital in all of Canada that could accommodate that woman giving birth to four babies at the same time.
Meanwhile, Great Falls, Montana, which is right across the Canadian border, only has 59,000 people, and yet somehow, it was able to accommodate this same woman when she gave birth to four babies at once.
So a relatively small U.S. city is able to provide health care that cannot be obtained anywhere within the entire country of Canada.
And Sanders wants the U.S. to copy Canada’s system?
In January 2008, the Globe and Mail reported:
More than 150 critically ill Canadians – many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages – have been rushed to the United States since the spring of 2006 because they could not obtain intensive-care beds here.
Before patients with bleeding in or outside the brain have been whisked through U.S. operating-room doors, some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care.
If the U.S. adopts Sanders’s plan, where will Canadians such as those go when they need that type of health care?
Below is a video of John Stossel’s TV special “Sick in America.” In the video, he talks about some of the problems in U.S. health care. But then he goes on to show why the U.S. should not switch to the Canadian system. Here are some examples:
19:41 A Toronto man who had a hearth attack waits and waits in an emergency room because there are not enough ICU beds to give him the treatment that he needs.
20:15 A young girl who has seizures does not have a regular pediatrician, and cannot get a bed at a hospital.
20:23 “More than a million Canadians say they can’t find a regular family doctor. Some towns, like this one, hold a lottery. Once a week, the town clerk gets this box out of the closet. Inside are the names of everyone in town who wants a family doctor. She pulls out one slip, and then calls the lucky winner.”
Stossel then goes on to explain that in order to avoid such long waiting times, some patients have gone to private clinics where they spend their own money on health care, which is illegal in Canada. Even though it’s illegal, it’s actually quite common.
21:36 A businessman makes money by helping Canadians travel to the U.S. to get the health care that they can’t get in Canada. One such example was a woman who had a blocked artery that prevented her from being able to digest her food. She was starving to death. She’d lost 50 pounds. Then she hired the businessman to help her, and she traveled to Washington state and got the health care that she needed. The American doctor said that she would have died within a few weeks if she hadn’t gotten treatment. However, the Canadian government considered her care to be “elective.”
22:11 Stossel shows that at veterinary clinics in Canada, which are privately run and privately funded, animals can get medical treatment immediately, without having to wait. All of the latest high tech equipment is available and ready.
Here’s the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liz2tXypFAY
So the next time that Sanders or anyone else tells you how supposedly wonderful the Canadian health care system is, and that the U.S. should copy it, you can show them these examples.
Poll: What do you think of Denmark’s long term welfare policy for able bodied people?
This New York Times article is from six years ago, but I just found out about it.
The article talks about able-bodied people in Denmark who have been on welfare for a very long time.
It says these able bodied adults get more money from welfare than what many full time workers get from their jobs.
Here’s one example from the article:
It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.
It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.
Here’s another example from the article:
Robert Nielsen, 45, made headlines last September when he was interviewed on television, admitting that he had basically been on welfare since 2001.
Mr. Nielsen said he was able-bodied but had no intention of taking a demeaning job, like working at a fast-food restaurant. He made do quite well on welfare, he said…
… Mr. Nielsen, called “Lazy Robert” by the news media, seems to be enjoying the attention. He says that he is greeted warmly on the street all the time. “Luckily, I am born and live in Denmark, where the government is willing to support my life,” he said.
So when you hear Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and other American politicians say they want the U.S. to be like Denmark, please ask yourself if the two people cited above by the New York Times are how you would want your own able bodied children to behave when they grow up.
The Democratic Socialists of America supports the same policies that have destroyed Venezuela’s ability to feed itself
The New York Times just published this article, which is titled “The Millennial Socialists Are Coming.” The article talks about the growing popularity of socialism among Millennials, and points out several examples of socialist candidates beating long term Democrats in primary elections.
The New York Times article includes this link to the constitution and bylaws of the Democratic Socialists of America. Here is a brief excerpt from it (the bolding is mine):
“We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”
Let’s take a look at what those two bolded parts manage to achieve when they are adopted in the real world. Specifically, let’s take a look at what’s currently going on in Venezuela, which I have previously described in great detail in this lengthy and well sourced blog post, which I have titled, “The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.”
The Democratic Socialists of America claim that they “reject an economic order based on private profit.” That’s exactly what Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was doing when he started implementing price controls on food in Venezuela in 2003. These price controls caused shortages of food. Anyone who understands Economics 101 knows that price controls cause shortages.
The Democratic Socialists of America claim that they support “popular control of resources and production.” This is exactly what Hugo Chavez did when he had the government seize more than 10 million acres of farmland from private owners. As a result of these land seizures, food production fell substantially.
Before Chavez died, he appointed Nicolas Maduro to be his successor. After Chavez died in 2013, Maduro continued Chavez’s policies.
In 2018, all of Chavez’s food policies are still in effect. The profit motive has been taken away from food production. Ownership of the means of producing food has been collectivized.
Because the Venezuelan government adopted the exact same polices that are supported by Democratic Socialists of America, most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.
And you don’t have to take my word for this. My blog entry that I mentioned earlier contains a very large number of links to sources which document exactly how this happened.
One thing that’s interesting about the links in my blog entry on Venezuela is that many of my sources are links to articles in the New York Times. And yet the current article form the New York Times on the Democratic Socialists of America makes absolutely no mention of the the kinds of horrible disasters that happen when such policies are adopted in the real world.
And before anyone goes and mentions the Scandanavian countries, I would like to point out that those countries have by no means adopted the polices supported by the Democratic Socialists of America that I quoted and bolded above. They have not abandoned the profit motive, and they have not turned their means of production over to collective ownership.
On the contrary, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark all have thriving private sectors with huge corporations that make massive profits.
In just three minutes, Jordan Peterson gives the most accurate description of 21st century Marxists that I’ve ever heard
In this three minute video, Jordan Peterson says that is is morally reprehensible for anyone who knows anything about 20th century history to support Marxism in the 21st century.
I’ve never heard a better criticism of 21st century Marxists than what’s in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p2QfjaSIUo
Here is the text of his speech:
The fact that the post-modernists dare to be Marxists is also something that I find I would say not so much intellectually reprehensible as morally repugnant. And one of the things that the post-modern neo-Marxists continually claim is that they have nothing but compassion for the downtrodden.
And I would say that anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of 20th century history who dares to claim simultaneously that they have compassion for the downtrodden and that they’re Marxists, are revealing either their ignorance of history that is so astounding that it’s actually a form of miracle, or a kind of malevolence that’s so reprehensible that it’s almost unspeakable, because we already ran the equity experiment over the course of the 20th century, and we already know what the Marxist doctrines have done for oppressed people all over the world. And the answer to that mostly was imprison them, enslave them, work them to death, or execute them.
And as far as I can tell that’s not precisely commensurate with any message of compassion. And so I don’t that think the post-modern neo-Marxists have a leg to stand on ethically, or intellectually, or emotionally. And I think that they should be gone after as hard as possible from an intellectual perspective – an informed intellectual perspective. And this is fundamentally a war of ideas.
And that’s the level of analysis that it should be fought upon. And not only is it a war of ideas, I think it’s one that can be won, because I think that especially the French intellectual post-modernists are a pack of – what would you call them? Well we could start with charlatans – that’s a good one. Pseudo-intellectual would be good. Resentful would be another.
And then I would also consider them highly – they’re highly deceptive in their intellectual strategies because almost all of them are Marxist student intellectuals and they knew by the time the gulag archipelago came out, and even before that, that the nightmares of the Soviet Union and Maoist China were of such magnitude that they had completely invalidated any claim to ethical justification that the fundamental Marxist doctrines had ever managed to manifest. And so, it’s a no go zone as far as I’m concerned.
Intellectually, the game’s over. We’ve already figured out that there are finite constraints on interpretation. And we also understand why those exist, and how they evolved, and from the perspective of political argumentation, there’s absolutely no excuse whatsoever in the 21st century to put forth Marxist doctrines as if they are the balm that is administered by the compassionate to the downtrodden.
Sorry.
Tried that.
Didn’t work.
We’ve got a hundred million corpses to prove it. And that’s plenty for me. And if it’s not enough for you, then you should do some serious thinking – either about your historical knowledge, or about your moral character.
Bernie Sanders says Uber’s employees are treated unfairly, so why does his campaign use Uber for 100% of its taxi rides?
Bernie Sanders has criticized Uber for not having the same government regulations, worker protections, and employee benefits as regular taxi companies.
However, public campaign records show that Sanders’ campaign has actually used Uber for 100% of its taxi rides.
I would love to hear Sanders explain his hypocrisy.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 