Despite being tired of politicians and Fox, I just finished watching a Town Hall with Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders aired on April 15, 2019, on Fox, a confrontation that lured me.
In Reality
In fact, I am apolitical – yet not impartial – because I report to the truth, in humanity’s best normalization of it, which upon investigation is far removed from what politicians on either side of the aisle believe to be the truth.
The truth and remedy related to our current problems do not come from more downstream suboptimizations of those problems. Instead, a better normalization of truth lies upstream and is best described by using Albert Einstein’s verbiage: the definition of the theory determines what can be discovered.
We must first establish America’s theory before we can determine the pathways to its exploration. And I have yet to hear any politician state what we stand for and what we do not, what our rights and obligations are to contribute to the theory, and how we must evolve in accordance and respect to our dynamic equilibrium with nature we depend on for survival. Our constitution falls miserably short in defining those principles, but thankfully, is not the gatekeeper either.
I have aligned with some 70% of the American population who instinctively sense the conundrum of endless bandaids applied to the open wounds of political ineptitude as the impetus to disenfranchise from the current role and the state of politics. They do not vote because real leadership and new direction seldom come from pay-to-play performers. We can learn a few valuable lessons about real leadership from Singapore, as China did.
May I remind you, I went to Congress and saw the circus in action. We should ban some of Congress’ wild animals, too.
The Son Of Noam
Bernie Sanders is the ultimate activist politician, an admirer of and closely aligned with political activist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky. Noam is a world-renowned critic of the dealings of The United States, both on the world stage and on our internal affairs.
I too was a great admirer of Noam’s vast knowledge and dissenting insight I first learned about three years ago, until at the end of one of his recent speeches a student asked him the following question: assuming you are right in your assessment of our problems, what can we, the next generation, do to fix these problems?
Noam did not stumble, he has done a few too many lectures for that to happen, and he answered: anyone can write a new and better system for society on a napkin in a coffee shop, and short of that, he suggested students stand up and fight against every individual occurrence of the malfeasance he just described.
You Lost Me
The duality of Noam Chomsky’s answer bothered me. For one because an intellectual with the stature and repertoire of Noam, having dissected these topics all of his professional career, should be able to do better than to deliver such a wide gamut of possible solutions, his answer as disturbing and lacking in core competence as a Chinese restaurant serving pizza and fries too.
So, what is a visitor to said Chinese restaurant to do? Use the tactics of activism to complain about how the pizza and fries are not quite top-notch? Or tell the restauranteur how to make better Chinese food? Most people will simply accept the mediocrity that comes with visiting a restaurant unable to pick its core competence.
Clearly, for the sake of survival, the Chinese restaurant had already decided to walk the dull knife-edge of a choice for all — and thus a choice for nothingness, yielding a strategy equally as empty in promise as the napkin paired with activism.
Debilitating Activism
Bernie Sanders made some valid points as to what the undesirable outcomes of our current systems are, if you can even call them systems. Watch the video and judge for yourself. According to my readers, I should be running things in DC.
The best example of Bernie acting like just another tinkerer at the bottom of our economic food chain is when he called out the CEO of CVS pharmacy stores acquiring healthcare company Aetna and receiving a $500M in bonus for the transaction.
Now, in the face of the acquisition, the remuneration appears indeed egregious, and easy for the general population to be mad about considering the massive expense (now 18% of GDP) and poor delivery of healthcare. But the real problem with this transaction is how healthcare companies are becoming even more anticompetitive than they already were.
Reverse, Reverse
Like how Evicore, which evaluates treatment decisions for patients on behalf of many healthcare insurance companies, was acquired by Express Scripts, which in turn was acquired by Cigna.
The real danger, of course, not in what executives get paid to conjure up this kind of land grab, but how such acquisitions will impact the choice and integrity of healthcare services to patients. I can highlight many other examples in the healthcare industry that force 30,000 patients per year to swallow an institutionalized poison pill of healthcare denial. Healthcare, in general, no longer about health or care, no matter what marketplace-construct trades that service.
We need a President who can see the forest through the trees, and understands how to traverse and fix the root cause, and not mislead the public on the campaign trail by selling proverbial bandaids as the cure for societal cancer.
Any serious candidate for the Presidency — again — from either side of the aisle, must lead with an ounce of cause that saves The United States and the world from innumerable pounds of ill-formed consequence.
We need a President — for once — who can establish higher-order policies that determine the excellence humanity can discover.
I welcome you to my masterclass for policy-makers, Bernie.
