PBS NewsHour on Thursday, December 12, ran an in-depth story on RIP Medical Debt, announcing the charity had passed the milestone of forgiving $1 billion in unpayable healthcare bills.
The NewsHour report ended with the book, END MEDICAL DEBT, written by the charity’s founders, edited by Judah Freed and published by Hoku House. The book educates readers about the historic causes and proposed cures for medical debt in America. PBS noted that each copy sold forgives about $500 in medical debt.
GREAT NEWS! As a result of the PBS NewsHour segment on RIP Medical Debt and the book, End Medical Debt, because each copy sold forgives about $500 in unpayable medical debt, as of Tuesday morning, the book had sold enough copies for RIP forgive a full $1 million in debt!
Please share this post and ask your friends and family to buy copies as holiday gifts for their friends and family. You will earn the heartfelt thanks of thosestruggling to pay medical bills causing hardship for their own families.
For your free copy of the ebook, please subscribe to the newsletter or blog in the column at right.
A Parable of Liberty Lost and Found is the fiction preamble of my nonfiction book, Making Global Sense, inspired by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Paine wrote Common Sense to spark national revolution. I wrote Global Sense to spark world evolution.
Thomas Paine began Common Sense with a parable about a remote community struggling to govern itself. He used the fable to show how various forms of government arise, to argue against hereditary monarchy, and to help create in America the first modern republic.
In updating his allegory in “A Parable of Liberty Lost and Found,” I aim to show how governments change when people and societies lose a genuine connection with Spirit, by whatever name we prefer for the divine creative force. We face this peril now, so I’m retelling Paine’s cautionary tale for us today. I’m adding an optimistic alternative ending to encourage the practical idealism of common global sense.
Paine published Common Sense in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776. This ebook excerpt from my unpublished book was released in Hawaii on January 10, 2018.
As an experiment, I’m offering this ebook to show a prospective publisher that there’s public support for my work, so the more readers I can report, the better. Therefore, if you are willing to help, you can get your own free copy by subscribing to my “Global Sense News” e-letter or by subscribing to my “Global Sense Blog” (use the form on the right). Your support is profoundly appreciated!
Read an Excerpt from: A Parable of Liberty Lost and Found
Imagine with me a small group of brave humans who settle a large, remote and unoccupied island paradise surrounded by a vast ocean….
More generations pass. Government makes basic choices that people once made for themselves. Government decides when to harvest the field and where to grind the grain. Government decides who can tend the sick and how much it costs to be ill.
Government sets all the rules for commerce and industry as well as personal conduct in the community and home.Habits of mindfulness that once ensured joyful harmony have been replaced by habits of dull obedience. Compliance with the government earns social approval and rewards, which satisfy most people’s need for safety and love.
Spiritual consciousness is left to a few mystics and faith healers. They are respected not revered, or tolerated as quirky amusements, but denied any real social influence.
A descendant of preacher Al Cartman, Horace B. Cartman, runs for president. His name is tainted. Voters reject him. In retaliation, he urges election reform. He says public funding of campaigns denies “freedom of speech.” The government should pay for running the elections themselves, of course, but paying for all campaigns across the island, even in remote districts, is unfair to those suffering taxpayers who care only about their own backyards, the working stiffs, struggling to feed their hungry families, bless them.
Cartman and his secret backers offer a new constitutional amendment. Any private person or group may contribute to any campaign — citizens, businesses, trade unions, civic clubs, religious groups, even charities — but taxes may not fund anything beyond election administration and vote counting.
Foes of the measure finally win one concession: Donation records become public documents. The provision is meaningless, however, because campaigns already routinely keep two sets of books. It’s a difference that makes no difference.
A campaign of united citizens buys time on the newfangled broadcast radio and television networks. Letters to the editor run in the newspapers with a plain-folks appeal, “All of them darn campaigns should be paid for only by those who care about them, not by everyone,” writes one man. “Taxes for election campaigns is unfair to all of us like me who never even vote!” The amendment passes by a slender margin.
Competition for campaign donations soon spawns rival political parties. Each party adopts a platform of proposed laws, which the party machine sells to voters like a bill of goods. Scoundrels readily sway voters with patriotic appeals, saying the other party is an evil threat to the nation and must be feared. Bigots use racial slurs to divide and conquer the opposition. Passions get aroused and manipulated in this game of graft.
Meanwhile, each party ensures all candidates running for office, whether for the congress or the presidency, first prove their loyalty to the gentry. Elections convince the common people that their democracy is real, but the campaigns are a pretense, held for sport, actually. The ruling class still rules, men still rule, no matter who wins any election.
The elites are more powerful than ever. Wealthy donors assume they own the politicians they help to elect. Politicians spend more time raising funds than passing laws.
Still, the legislators’ job is lawmaking, so they generate a vibrational energy field attracting more problems to solve with more laws, hoping they look good to voters. They never see their trap.
If you like this except from the middle of the story, if you are curious about all that happens on the island over many generations, their ups and downs, how the fable applies to our real lives today, please subscribe and download the whole ebook. Most folks tell me it takes about a half hour to read. I believe you will feel the time is worthwhile.
You also may download the ebook for free from iBooks app (search “Judah Freed”) or from Smashwords, Kobo, and Scribd, or Amazon at 99 cents (for now).
Thanks and blessings,
Judah
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FOUND this rare video today from the first 1986 Windstar Foundation“Choices For the Future” symposium in Aspen, hosted by John Denver. The video touches me because it’s still relevant to our world today, three decades later.
I attended the annual summer gatherings from 1988 until the last one in 1995, two years before JD passed. For most of those years, I was blessed to serve as the press room aide. I volunteered in the active Colorado Windstar Connections program, too. Connected my personal and spiritual growth with social and economic activism. Changed my life.
Hope you see for yourself what stirred my heart and mind:
Are you feeling electrified or electrocuted by the 2016 presidential election? Are you in shock? As a remedy of laughter and realism, please watch Bill Maher on HBO. I laugh because it hurts to cry.
SOME in the GOP wish they could dump Trump, but do millions of Americans wish to see Trump dump democracy?
Trump’s most fervent followers want Donald John Trump to be the 45th President of the United States, whatever it takes to get the job done, democracy be damned. This scares me because a Trump victory in the electoral college looks increasingly difficult or doubtful but not downright impossible. With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, The Donald is shouting about “conspiracy” and a “rigged” election.
Despite ample researched evidence that widespread vote tampering is not possible and is not happening, depute ample researched evidence that individual voter fraud is relatively rare, despite facts and logic, a Reuters poll show half of the electorate believes Trump about the election system begin rigged, The belief casts doubt on the entire democratic process, from local town councils to national government.
In a brazen act of hypocrisy and chutzpah, like a child having a temper tantrum, “man-baby” Trump refuses to accept the voting results will be valid “unless I win!” He plays the blame game to deny how he shot himself in the foot with his sexist, racist, and xenophobic outbursts.
Instead of thinking matters through, Trump’s most ardent True-Believer followers parrot his words, and some threaten to act on them by launching a violent revolution if he loses.
Why would Trump do and say such things, and why is all this surreal absurdity so dangerous for America and the world?
Donald Trump points at others for his problems instead of looking within himself.