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February 2, 2016

Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All Consultant Sets The Record Straight; transcript 2

By Rob Kall

the failed economic paradigm, easily bought health care economists, declining life-expectancy for 40% of American women compared to increased life-span for the wealthy and Europeans with Single-payer. Under-insured profile: failure to fill prescriptions or see doctors, bankruptcy, Details of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all plan. Debunking Hillary Clinton's spin on the Sanders plan and Paul Krugman's spin

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Gerald Friedman explaining benefits of single payer healthcare
Gerald Friedman explaining benefits of single payer healthcare
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The continuation of my interview with Gerald Friedman, economist consultant on Medicare for all/ Single payer for the Bernie Sanders campaign.

audio recording of the interview is here: Podcast: Gerald Friedman, Bernie Sanders' Single Payer Healthcare Consultant, Debunks Attackers

Rob: Okay, Gerry, you want to talk a little bit about what Chuck said about economics and economists?

Gerald: Oh, economics is a very sad discipline. I much enjoy economics. I enjoy doing it and I also think that it's vital for our society's well-being that we have good economic analysis, but the profession is in a very sorry state, and I think that a lot of the better economists would acknowledge. The dominant paradigm, the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm in economics, is not only completely unrealistic, but has been thoroughly discredited. I mean, even people like Alan Greenspan had to admit after the economic crisis hit in 2008 that, ah...and he said this is no surprise that, oh my God, everything that I was thinking was wrong. I didn't think this could happen. Well it did happen. It does happen. The dominant paradigm is a failure. Why do people continue to teach it and to work within it? I think that part of it is, again, as Chuck said, you have to follow the money and huge chunks of money that for 40, 50 years had been put into subsidizing right wing economic, conservative economists. Graduate students wanting to work within the dominant conservative paradigm -- groups from the Koch brothers, the Mellon Foundation have been paid economists.

There was an analysis by one of my colleagues on the graduate students, Henry Epstein on graduate students and, now, this is not easy to do because the economics profession, still today, has... it used to have no code of ethics, no requirements to disclosure of funding sources. Now there's a weak little code of ethics that was adopted by the American Economic Association. But what my colleagues did was they went to corporate reports for the leading financial companies, CitiGroup, Bank of America, and they looked at in those reports which economists they paid to do studies, analyses, whatever, and they found that, I believe it's 13 of the 15 economists who were most prominent and testifying for bank deregulation in the years before the financial crisis, had been paid by the financial services industry. The other two, I'm not sure who they are, but maybe they were paid by some other companies that weren't big enough to be entered into my colleague's study.

And some of these are egregious. For example, an economist at Columbia wrote a paper, Financial Stability in Iceland. He was paid $250,000 for that paper by the Icelandic Banking Association. When the Icelandic banks went bankrupt and took the country with them, Mischum, the economist, changed the name of this article on his resume to Financial Instability in Iceland. I mean, did he give back the $250,000? I don't think so.

When you get to the health insurance debate, the amount of money on the other side is enormous and their willingness to pay off people, to give people what... yeah, you may say, given the stakes, relatively small amounts of money. You pay an economist $100,000 and you can probably get them to do anything you want. Most of them. I've never seen $100,000. Nobody's ever offered me that and if they did I would... I mean, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts pays me a salary. I don't really need a whole lot more.

Okay, but most academics aren't... we're not rich people and the amount of money on the other side is huge. Think about it. If I go out and say we can save $600 billion next year by establishing a national single payer plan. That is $600 billion of income to people.

Now, a lot of it is money that goes to people who... billing and insurance clerks who mostly don't like their jobs. They quit those jobs a lot. They're not very well paid. They could... the plans for single payers have provisions for retraining, unemployment insurance. They may be a lot better off, but nobody is going to pay Steve Helmsley, the Head of United Health Care, $48 million under a single payer plan. He is paid $48 million. The head of the Center for Medicare Services who, basically, is in charge of healthcare finance for half of the American population, is paid $175,000. That's what's his government salary. Public servants don't get paid that much like CEOs. How much would Steve Helmsley be willing to put into hiring economists and other people for the private health insurance industry? If I were him, I'd put in at least $47 million if it came to that. And you go beyond that. The top health insurers have a market evaluation of a trillion dollars? That's how much it's worth to stop single payer.

Rob: So, you're saying that there are huge amounts of money available to buy economists to make reports saying whatever is wanted?

Gerald: That's right. That's right and if you can't say it honestly, then you obfuscate, you hand wave, you throw around numbers that may or may not be relevant. You write a report like the six pages that Kenneth Thorpe put out. And, you know, if you're a big enough name, or whatever, then people will put it into Vox. They'll-

Rob: Are you saying that Thorpe is engaging in unethical behavior?

Gerald: No. No. First of all the standards of ethics in the economics field are really loose, so you can't really say that about anybody. Secondly, I don't know the man. It's possible he believes what he wrote. I can't dispute it. It's possible. It's different than what he used to write, but okay, maybe he changed his mind. I can't say. I would never say that somebody that I don't know deliberately did it, but if he didn't, there will be other people who... if he did it honestly, certainly there will be other people who will do it for money. Maybe it's the economist in me, but I believe that if you wave enough money at somebody, you'll get some behaviors that you want. Not from everybody. There will be some people who will never change their views just for money. There will be some people who will believe that the world is flat and the private health insurance system is better than single payer. There will some who will believe that and there will be some who will believe the world is round and private health insurance is better than single payer, I guess, although they are both equally ridiculous ideas from my perspective. Maybe Kenneth Thorpe really believes this, but there will be other people who will find their way to saying what the rich want if the rich pay them enough for it.

Rob: Now, you talked about "the failed economic paradigm." What is that economic paradigm?

Gerald: Well, the basic idea of orthodox economics is that the operations of so-called free markets will provide for full employment and the optimal distribution of output without any conscious political intervention. So, you set the system up, you establish property rights, you establish police, you establish systems of currency, etc, and then you just walk away and people acting on their own self-interests will produce the best economic outcomes possible. There you go.

Rob: That's Keynesian economics right?

Gerald: Oh, no. Keynesian is different. That's orthodox economics going back over a century. It's what's called Neoclassical Economic Theory. You might say it's associated with Leon Walras, a French economist, who himself didn't really believe this and was a socialist. So, it's very strange. It's associated with the ideas of Kenneth Arrow, who absolutely does not believe it. But Milton Freidman is the most prominent... was the most prominent advocate of this. Keynesian is different. Keynes said that left to its own devices, free markets will lead to unemployment, underutilization of economic resources, waste and inefficiency.

Keynes challenged this orthodox idea and, in the 1970's, there was a major shift in economic thinking in the United States away from Keynesian economics towards Milton Freidman's style. Just leave the economy alone. Let businesses do what they want and everything will be okay. That's the dominant view and it's been associated with reducing taxes on the rich, reducing government regulation, as in health care, until the Affordable Care Act [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act], the deregulation of interstate trucking, of airlines, of telecommunications, of banking. We saw, and we're still seeing today, because the economy is still not doing very well" we've seen the results. The results have been, for 40 years, have been slower economic growth, higher levels of unemployment, wage stagnation.

The United States did much better for almost everybody during the 30 years after World War II than in the 40 years since. The 30 years after World War II, the period that we call the New Deal Regulation when banks were tightly regulated and there were all sorts of government interference in the economy, the country got richer. Prosperity was widely shared and we became environmentally cleaner. Those were the golden years. Still, lots of economists, including conservatives, will freely call it the golden age. Oh! that was The golden age!

The golden age was a period of high taxes, especially on the rich, active government interference on the economy and since then we've had a period of deregulation, starting before Reagan. You know, a lot of people associate this with Republicans and Ronald Reagan. I wish that were true, but it's not just the Republicans. It started with a Democrat, President Jimmy Carter. That's when we started deregulation, started cutting taxes on the rich and raising them on the working people. That's the period when unions went into steep decline. It started with Carter, continued under Reagan and Bush, continued under Clinton. It was Clinton who put in the coup de gr- ce to banking regulation by pushing through repeal of the so-called Glass-Steagall Act from 1933 [term refers to 4 provisions of the Banking Act of 1933]. And then deregulation, of course, is when these policies continued under Bush and have largely continued under Obama. So, this has been a bipartisan agreement on economic policy, a policy that favors the rich.

The only Americans who have done better under the deregulation policies of the last 40 years are the very rich and it's actually astonishing how much better they've been doing. The richest 30,000 Americans now own about 12% of the United States. The richest handful of Americans own more than the bottom 50% of Americans. The Walton family, that owns Walmart, they are richer than 150 million Americans.

The gap between CEOs and the average workers has exploded! The very rich are the only ones who have done better in the last 30 years...ah, 40 years. And when I say the very rich, I'm talking about the top 1% of 1%. They're the ones who have really flourished. Everybody else, the middle class, I should say the upper middle class, has kind of been stagnant. The middle class has lost a little ground and the poorest Americans have seriously lost and which shows up in life expectancy. Declining life expectancy for 40% of American women, the poorest 40% of American women have a shorter than they had 20 years ago. These are the canaries in the coal mine that are telling us that the air is unsafe, that life in our deregulated environment is unsafe for working people and their families.

Rob: Let me get this straight. You're saying that the health care policies we now have have led to a decrease in life expectancy for 40% of women who are in lower income?

Gerald: Yeah, the poorest 40% of women. This isn't my own research. I'm actually a little bit embarrassed about it. It's a study that was done out of the Bookings Institution by Barry Bosworth. I'm embarrassed because I did look at those data, but I didn't break them out by gender and when you don't break them out by gender what you find is that the bottom 40% have had stagnant life expectancy because the bottom 40% of men have slightly longer life expectancy and the women have shorter life expectancy and when you average it out, it's flat. So I didn't break it out by gender and say, oh!, this is terrible! How is it that almost half of Americans have not benefitted from increases in life expectancy that have happened over the last 30 years? But when you break it out by gender, it's even worse because women have actually lost ground.

The richest people have actually added 3-4 years of life expectancy and which is, in Europe and Canada, increases in life expectancy of 6 years, pretty much for everybody. So, Americans have lost ground. Even the rich Americans have lost ground, but the poorest women have lost absolutely. Some of this is changes in health care policy. Like I said, prices are rising. Americans are not getting more health care than 40 years ago, but some of the services have been redistributed. You know, the rich are getting more, the poor are getting less.

If you're on Medicaid, it's difficult to find a provider. If you have health insurance through your employer, over 80% of employer provided health insurance have deductibles and the average deductible ranges from $1300 for an individual up to over $2000 for a family. So, you think about going to the doctor when your throat hurts, or when something's bad, and then you think, hello, I haven't met my deductible, so I'm going to be paying the whole cost. I'm going to be paying $100 to go to the doctors. Is it worth it? A lot of people say no. A quarter of Americans did not see a doctor last year when they thought they needed to because of cost. Many people, about"

Rob: These are insured Americans? You're talking about insured Americans?

Gerald: Most of them are insured. Only about 10%. Among the uninsured, the figure is more like 60%, but among the insured, it's over 20%. Among the insured Americans, almost 20% did not fill a prescription because of cost. They went to a doctor, they got a prescription. The doctor said you need to take this and they didn't take it, or they took it and they stretched it out, which, I don't know which is worse.

Rob: I understand. I'm hearing different numbers, different percentages about the number of people who are insured, but who are underinsured. Could you explain what underinsured is and give me your estimate on the underinsurance?

Gerald: Underinsured refers to people who have health insurance, but it is inadequate for the types of health problems that they run into. Often this is because they have such high deductibles. So, you have health insurance, but you don't use it and you don't go to the doctor because your deductible is too high, or your co-payment is too high, or you may have cost sharing. So, you may have to pay 20% of hospitalization. You may have health insurance that covers you for ten visits to physical therapy, but not after that. So, if you have a real problem, your insurance is inadequate. Most of the people who go bankrupt because of medical problems, medical costs, most of them have insurance.

How many people are underinsured? It depends on your estimate, on how you estimate these things, but probably over ..." are underinsured. These are the people who, of those who have health insurance, over 20% did not go to a doctor last year because of cost. Almost 20% did not fill a prescription because of cost. These are people who are definitely underinsured. If you can't afford to go to the doctor, but you have health insurance, then what good is your health insurance? Health insurance companies love this! You pay the money in and then you never take anything out. They think you're great. They love you! They set up plans with high deductibles and high co-pays precisely to discourage you from using health insurance.

Rob: Now, let me just ask... with the plan that you have done the analysis on, the one that Bernie Sanders is advocating and Hillary Clinton is saying is impossible, what would people pay for a doctor's visit and for a prescription?

Gerald: Nothing. Nothing, there would be no copays, no deductibles. We would be like other countries. Ninety-eight percent of health care costs, approximately 98% of health care costs, would be covered under the Sanders plan. What wouldn't be covered would be cosmetics, some cosmetic surgery and some truly elective procedures, like some types of dental work, over the counter drugs, things like that. Band-Aids wouldn't be covered. You have to buy those on your own, but 98% of medical costs would be covered without copays and deductibles.

Part of the point of this is to encourage people to go to the doctor when they're sick because we believe that modern medicine helps keep people healthy and productive. It helps children grow better if they're not sickly all the time because of infections that could be cured. You know, we're a rich society. People should not be in unnecessary pain. That's the motivation here.

Now, it will mean that because we do away with copays and deductibles, as Kenneth Thorpe points out, and he's right about this, it will mean that people will be spending more on medical care. In some areas we will be spending more money because people will be going to the doctor when they need to. That will bring benefits. People will be sick less and Americans are sick about twice as many days as people in Britain. Some of that is unnecessary. Some of it is that we live in a very stressful society. We have inequality. People worry more, maybe that contributes to it, but some of it is that we just don't take care of problems because it's expensive to go to the doctor. So, if we do away with the copays and deductibles, people will go to the doctor. They'll take care of the problems. They'll take care of the diabetes. They'll take care of small infections before they become big infections and they'll fill prescriptions when they need to.

This country is filled with senior citizens who stretch out their heart medication and other medications. They take half a pill when they're supposed to take one pill because they can't afford to fill the prescription again, and not just seniors. This country is filled with poor mothers who get a prescription for themselves and for the children when everybody's sick and they fill it for the children and they don't fill it for themselves. That's why these people die young or die prematurely. It's a terrible thing. It also lowers productivity because people end up not being able to go to work or they go to work and they don't work well. Children go to school, but they can't learn because they're not feeling good and they miss days of school. It's been shown that when you put children into Medicaid and Medicaid isn't great health insurance, but it's something. When you put them into Medicaid, their learning increases at school.

It's not all health care. The problems we have go far beyond health care. People don't have enough to eat. Poor people have inadequate quality of nutrition because of poverty. When you lower the income of the poorest people, as has happened in the United States over the last 40 years, the real income has gone down and when you do that with people who really have very little to start with, they have to cut back on essentials. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing a generation of poor Americans. When I talk about poor Americans, a majority of American children will have a period of poverty before they turn 18; will have some period where their family is in poverty. And during that period, they will not have enough to eat. Even when they're out of that poverty, there are lasting legacies of malnutrition, inadequate nutrition, inadequate health care. These have all contributed to decline in life expectancy for women, stagnant life expectancy for lower income men and the widespread sense of frustration and anger in America which Donald Trump has been tapping into. Bernie Sanders has also tapped into it. I like his approach much better because he has real solutions.

Rob: Let's talk a little bit about... because we don't have much time left and I want to cover this. Hillary Clinton has been making claims about Sanders' plan. Can you straighten us out on those claims?

Gerald: Awww, I really wish Hillary would just talk about her own racket. She does have some positive things to talk about. She does have a wonderful record as Secretary of State in many ways. She should just focus on that and lay off these bogus attacks on Sanders which are generally inaccurate and also not constructive for her, or the Democratic party or the Democratic process. She's picked up on right-wing charges like, oh my God, Bernie Sanders is going to raise taxes for 95%, or more, of Americans. Bernie Sanders is going to be lowering taxes because when you talk about taxes, you should talk not only about what the government charges, but that the government required us to buy health insurance. What we pay in premiums to Anthem, Blue Cross, United Health Care, whatever it is; what we pay in premiums is as much a tax as what we pay to the federal government on April 15th. When you take account of what we're paying in premiums, taxes will be lower for most Americans.

Second, when you talk about taxes, you should talk about what we get under Sanders' tax proposal, well his total economic proposal. People would get free college tuition at public institutions, people would get better infrastructure, better roads, cleaner water, cleaner air. People on Social Security would be getting real cost of living increases. The minimum benefit on Social Security would be raised to get people...the disabled and the elderly out of poverty. People would get family leave provided through the Social Security system so, when your spouse, or your children are sick, or you have a newborn baby, you'd be able to stay home and take care of people.

So, yeah, some taxes would go up including some payroll taxes on working people, but what people would be saving on private taxes exceeds what they'd be paying in public taxes and they'd be getting benefits for it. Except for the very rich. It's true, the richest 1%, for sure, and maybe 3% of Americans will be paying more in taxes, significantly more, and since a lot of them don't send kids to public universities, you know, they take time off or they'll need medical leave, but maybe they wouldn't get that much benefit from some of these programs. But they would still get the benefit of living in a more comfortable society, a healthier society and they would get the benefit that all of us get from the Sanders economic program.

It's not just about taxes and spending and government regulations, the $15 minimum wage and all, but it's about faster economic growth. Under the Sanders economic program, the rate of unemployment will drop to below 4% and the really meaningful rate, which is the proportion of Americans who have jobs, will shoot right back up to where it was before the economic crisis of 2007-2008. Actually, it will go back to the rate it was the last time we had genuinely full employment, which was in the late 1990's, under Bill Clinton. People will have jobs; the economy will expand. We'll have $20,000 increase in median family income under Senator Sanders' program.

Rob: That's compared to a drop in income in the last 10-20 years, right?

Gerald: Exactly. Exactly, yes. You know, if you look at the congressional budget office projections for the next 10, 20, 30 years, which is basically assuming we continue to do what we're doing, which is mostly what Hillary Clinton is talking about at this point, which is better than what the Republicans are talking about. If we continue doing what we're doing, it's really astonishing. The congressional budget office is projecting that the share of Americans with jobs will continue to decline. Real income will grow at a very sluggish rate that by historic standards is dismal. We'll continue in this. Are we out of the great recession now? Maybe. But we're not into any meaningful recovery and that's pretty much what they're projecting for the future, that we'll continue to stagger along. We're doing better than Europe where they have full blown austerity, but that's a pretty low bar. Millions of people don't have jobs. Millions of people don't have full time jobs. Millions of people have jobs that they have only because wages are so low and they're not increasing and that's what Hillary Clinton is offering.

It's better than what the Republicans are offering, but Bernie Sanders is offering a real alternative. What are the Republicans offering? I mean, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, they're pulling the whole Republican party along with them, are offering what the Front National in France and what some of these other right-wing Neo-Fascist groups in Europe are offering. They go to the working class and they say, yeah, things suck! You guys have been screwed. Blame them. Blame the Syrians. Blame the Mexicans. Blame the Muslims. They're offering xenophobia. I find this very scary this election year because it seems like the last years of the Weimarer Republik in Germany, a period when the left was not able to get across to the public a positive message of economic revitalization through restricting capitalist avarice. Instead, people turn to xenophobia, hatred, nationalism and that's what's happening. Donald Trump is strongest in the areas and among workers who should be rallying to Bernie Sanders. He's strongest in places with low wages, stagnant job opportunities, people who are really not going anywhere and are mad about it. They are right to be mad.

I mean West Virginia! West Virginia is filled with people who used to belong to the United Mine Workers and had good jobs as miners, coal miners. That industry is gone and there's nothing there to replace it, so they're sitting there, miserable with high rates of disability, insurance coverage, high rates of supplemental nutrition programs, welfare and supporting Donald Trump. I mean, they haven't lost their jobs because of Mexicans. Their wages are not down because of Mexicans. They've been screwed by an economic program that has abandoned working class Americans to transfer wealth to the 1%. I hope that they will start listening to Bernie Sanders instead of Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton isn't offering very much better. She's offering more of the same and if that's the message the Democrats take, they'll probably win the election, but they won't have a viable program to govern, to make this country better. Maybe Hillary doesn't want that. I don't know. I'm hoping that she will be listening to Bernie Sanders and realize that all the energy that's going into his campaign and the millions of people who are donating, that's something she should be paying attention to and maybe there's a possibility to really change this country. Paul Krugman and some of the other...

Rob: Yeah, what about Krugman? Krugman has been attacking Bernie and his plans.

Gerald: Yep! Yep! Yep, because it's not politically viable. This is the message of despair, because if single payer is not viable, then we don't have any solution to our health care problem. The Affordable Care Act is not a solution, it's a band-aid. I support it. I'm happy we got it, but it's not a solution. It leaves tens of millions of people without health insurance and doesn't control costs. So, if we can't fix the health care system with the only solution that is a solution, single payer, because it's not politically viable, then we should just throw in the towel. The same for...

Rob: Wait a second! Wait a second. Is single payer not politically viable?

Gerald: Oh, I think it is! It would help if people like Paul Krugman would get up and say we need to do this, but even without Krugman, if people demanded... you know, in 1958, people like Krugman would say, oh! we can't go fast on civil rights! We can't overturn segregation in a generation! We have to go slow. Well, when kids started sitting on the lunch counters and people started protesting in the streets, within 6 years, we had the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Within 7 years, we had a Voting Rights Act [of 1965]. When people get out there and demand it, this is still a democracy and we can still govern ourselves as free people. Krugman has forgotten that. Hilary has forgotten that. She's been around for so long that she's like, oh! God, nothing can make that much of a difference, all we can do is nibble at the edges. No, no, no. In 1932, the president of the American Economic Association pronounced in his presidential address that the labor movement was dead. You know! In 5 years, we had the sit down strikes in Flint and we had the CIO. Things happen when people get out there in the streets demanding it. That's what happened with...

Rob: Has Krugman said anything about your analysis?

Gerald: Has... sorry? Has...

Rob: Has Paul Krugman said anything about your analysis?

Gerald: No. No, I don't know whether he's actually gotten into the details that much. The problem with Krugman is that he knows and he has written that single payer is better; that economically I can't imagine that he would have that much to disagree with in my analysis because I basically just put numbers on what he has said.

Rob: It might be what you're saying that Krugman, who has a Nobel Prize in economics, is not talking about economics, he's talking about politics, which he doesn't have a Nobel Prize in.

Gerald: Exactly. That is absolutely right and that is exactly what he says. He says, in at least one of these columns, or blog posts that he's had that, yeah, if we could do it, single payer would be better, but it's not politically viable and liberals should concentrate on other things that we might be able to accomplish rather than the impossible. That's like telling African Americans in South Carolina, in 1960, oh! you can't get integration, you can't get voting rights, that's too difficult. Why don't you just concentrate on getting the walls of your colored restrooms painted? Or get cold water in your colored water fountain rather than trying to end segregation? I mean, that's what Krugman is saying.

Rob: We've got to wrap up now. Anything you want to finish up with?

Gerald: Oh! no, just that it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and great to talk to you. Chuck.

Chuck: Absolutely, Gerry. It's been a thrill just to get a wonderful presentation from you. Thanks so much for all that you do and I agree with you that what we're up against, it really is a... the politics of despair, fear mongering, cynicism and I think that once people...and you and I see this in the classrooms. I mean, we talk to our students and they want to get rolling. They want to...this is about their future, too, especially and we've got to tap into their energy and get back to what is part of our American DNA. We can do this. We will do this. Absolutely, so thank you so much.

Gerald: Thank you and thank you Rob.

Rob: Thank you



Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


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