Juggling Dynamite

Financial analyst, Author and former Goldman Sachs Managing Director, Nomi Prins sits down with EIR’s Paul Gallagher to discuss just how rotten the current financial system is, making a sobering case that we are far worse off today than we were before the 2007-08 crisis. Prins refers to her political and financial road map for 2017, (nomiprins.com) and discusses the important, combined role China and Japan can play in bringing the US back from the brink and into the new paradigm of investment in the real economy. Here is a direct video link.

Prins:  In investment banking, “If you are telling a client what their downside risk is…you might not make the sale…you’re not making money…so that wasn’t wanted.”

Big for-profit corps running our food and medical system (not health, but rather ‘sick-care’), while buying off government representatives and regulators, along with individuals abdicating personal responsibility for what we consume and feed our families, and how we care for our bodies…this is a toxic mix the world over, but the evidence is especially garish in America today.

Wendell Potter, a health insurance executive turned whistleblower, on the GOP failure to repeal Obamacare and what lessons the 2009 defeat of the public option – when Democrats controlled Congress – can offer today.  Here is a direct audio link.

All of this is connected to the need for thinking people to fight the industrial food system which is helping to make us sick and bankrupt. Above all else, we are what we consume.

It also connects with this chart, reminding that America spends far more on medical expenditures than other countries (measured at purchasing power parity), but US life expectancy is shorter than in many countries that spend far less.  See:  The problem with US health care in one chart.

If we are going to make our children and our nations strong and healthy, we have to start with how and what we are eating. Kimbal Musk is the founder of casual dining upstart The Kitchen, and is working to improve nutrition by expanding healthy and affordable dining options:

“[My brother] told me it was crazy to get into the food business; I told him it was crazy to get into the space business,” Kimbal jokes. “It’s working out fine.”  Here is a direct video link.

Indeed, Americans are facing a number of nutritional issues. More than a third of the country’s population is considered obese, while less than a quarter eat the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And being short on time or money can often lead families to settle for less nourishing options — a reality Musk is determined to change.

“It’s not as hard as people think. It’s just that people have lost the skill of cooking,” he says, adding that he keeps his own grocery budget low to understand what the average family can afford.  See:  Musk waging a war on America’s [industrial] food system.