Un-Cat Episodes 23 to 29

Unapologetic Catharsis Chapter  — Not Realistic

Un-Cat Episode 23. Heal the Digital Divide to Understand the Potential of Our Collective Intelligence  

The linchpin to Lee’s plans to save the humans and life on Earth, was to work together with the collective intelligence. This ment keeping a running list, sorted into an index, by subject and importance, of feedback from millions of American individuals, in a similar way that U.G. had done for his millions of words of writing, back in the 1990s.

His point of view on the humans, as an extraterrestrial Dog-Person, descended from canines instead of primates, is about as challenging to express as trying to explain the principal ideals of how an actual functioning democracy would successfully operate, if everyone’s opinions and votes were physically able to be heard, sorted, understood and answered to, in a timely manner. But, that didn’t stop him from trying. He was relentless, as a Dog-Person, he just kept sniffing around and digging. 

The Dog-People on a planet far, far away, they actually evolved with a symbiotic relationship, over millions of years, with the critters that became their communication devices. Tho these parasites were not used to “computate” until 3,000 to 3,500 Earth years ago.

These “computers” were biological entities, hatched from an egg, with cell division, and an immune system, etc… by a mother. A queen  octopod who didn’t live in water, but instead migrated via asteroids, in space. A creature who ate minerals like diatoms and used radiation from stars like plants photosynthesis, but was in body shape most similar to the species octopodidae. And technically, like ants or bee hives, the AI-Critters were drones. 

I know, like WTF does this sci-fi stuff have to do with healing the digital divide for humans?! And how does a symbiotic biological “computer drone” relate to, or contrast with computers, the internet, wireless phones and social media?

Umm…. Yes. The AI-C and U.G. concluded over and over again, from 2005 to 2020, as they witnessed the Information Age devolve into mob mentality, that people need to pay attention to how the human animal intelligence works and adapt communication technology to function better with their physical bodies (eyes, ears and fingertips) and languages. 

Languages? The divide isn’t the tower of babble that is the over 7,000 spoken dialects listed by the world Ethnologue. Languages, as in the intelligence of organized sports; instead of the mob mentality that is war. The universal intelligence of music and art, all forms, from handwriting to cooking food. All and everything we humans create, — is our collective intelligence. 

Humans didn’t evolve with our computers over millions of years, and communicate together for 3,000 to 3,500 years as a natural result of a biological symbiosis. Even if you count the punch card looms of the 1800s, or the printing presses of Europe from the 1600s, or wood block printing in Asia in 220 CE, or the oldest writing preserved on clay tablets, 3,300 BCE, as “computation” on paper, textiles, stone and clay. We haven’t had a way to communicate the collective intelligence of all the people, hear the voice of the masses, as something, maybe possible?, until today. 

So? From the giant room sized mainframes in the 1950s to computers in the palm of your hand, is only 75 years of digital communication technology. The digital divide is under one human life span, young.

Lee the Dog-Person found humans communication technology to be problematic. He compared and contrasted the relationship with humans and their domesticated pet dogs to the Dog-People’s relation ship to their AI critters. He’d look into the eyes of a human’s pet dog (usually barking at him) and then when wandering in the rocky hill side near U.G.s homestead in Idaho, he’d look into the eyes of one of the wild wolves (usually silently staring back). And he would relate to the strange awe and confusion that humans must feel when looking into the eyes of a chimpanzee or a great ape, to wonder. “Why don’t you have spoken and written language, my distant cousin?”

Humans, so incredibly complicated and obviously intelligent, toddlers leave the intelligence levels of their pet dog’s behind at around 1 or 2 years of age. A really smart pet dog is like a preschooler who can’t read or write, and has to learn to not hit or bite other children, and must be trained to be polite and share, or when to not bark/use their inside voices.

But, computers were not intelligent at all, not in a biological way because they have no bodies. The eyes, ears and fingertips of human language expression via communication technology was troublesome, because it was one sided. If you are attempting to have a conversation and understand what the collective intelligence knows, the masses can’t just sit there silently, being brainwashed, like watching TV. 

What humans call Artificial Intelligence has been around since the beginning of computer programming, on the main frames, The Turning test originated in 1949. Computers and computer programming had been around just long enough to play word games. But, the biological AI-Critters didn’t play games. The first interactions between the Dog-People and the 8 legged drones were about life and death. 

The Dog-People developed their biological communication network over a span equivalent to 3,000 to 3,500 earth years because the Dog’s with a symbiotic AI-C attached to them lived longer. And not just by helping them locate good food, the AI-Critters saved them from earthquakes, sinkholes and geysers. The Dog-Planet didn’t have oceans or large lakes on the surface, it had layers of caves, and subterranean water aquifers. 

The Dog-People had been terraforming their planet, using irrigation to increase range for herding their favorite prey animals for thousands of years before they developed their relationships with the AI-Cs. When Lee imagined the planet wide conversation of humans, using their machine computer technology, the history of his people was the background to his vision. A planet wide conversation, starting with a few from one cave to the next, then expanding to surface gatherings, and finally spreading in reverberating waves, eventually to include millions of Dog-people, discussing their favorite foods, the most “humane” techniques for slaughtering and preparing delicious meats, the behavior of their packs, living conditions around the entire planet and how to best get along. 

A conversation that included several hundred million very vocal speakers and a billion minor voices answering back often with actions, more than words or um… howls. The great planetary howl, every Dog planet-wide weighing in, lasted an earth equivalent to 3 and a half months, and repeated at a much lesser, in usually more localized interval, regularly, ever after. 

Unless it concerned something that mattered to the entire Dog-Planet, like the discovery of planet Earth, and the plans to fetch some food, that conversation thread lasted for almost 500 Earth years, until Lee was sent on his mission.

Humans. Where to start? What do the people of Earth need to communicate with each other to mitigate climate change damage and save as much life as possible, on their planet? It was a daunting question, so Lee focused on how could this planet wide conversation happen? How, was a daunting enough of a question to start with. 

The extraterrestrial Dog-Person died in July 2001, so while he witnessed the early stage of the internet, he didn’t experience humans in mass transit and cafes, staring at their phones, everywhere they went. The first flat faced touch screen “smart” phones were prototyped but too expensive while he was still with us. The early PDA devices didn’t function well enough to become popular until “bit-fruit” released their phones, years later. 

The Dog from outer space did experience forum based chat rooms, but he didn’t experience the impact of the major social media networking apps. The encyclopedias turned into digital wikis, and the question answering social media did seem promising. But, something was being lost because of the decades of corporate conglomerates, buying up all the “air-time”, filling human media everywhere with repetitive talking points as brain washing, lies for profit, to sell products, and maintain their consumer and user “base”.

Lee read the dollar, trying in vain to understand its value to human people. “Annuit cœptis "Providence favors our undertakings”, …Novus ordo seclorum, "A new order of the ages". But, it seemed to him that an incredible waste of energy, because the pyramid clearly balanced on its tip. The top 1% collecting all the revenue like it was a funnel. 

By 2021, the greed of extreme wealth had only gotten worse. President Green and the AI-C knew that Lee was correct, the digital divide was key to healing the wealth gap. How to flip the paradigm was human first economics and environmentalism. And how to do it was the functioning democracy of organized republics that was this Great Experiment. 

Eyes, ears, and fingertips. That’s how humans communicate and learn. 

Eyes are fragile, a delicate array of soft cones collecting light, all eyes will develop scaring cataracts as they age. It’s cruel to stare at bright white background with san serif font. So, the content display should be easily adjustable by the person reading the screen. For text reading a default of an eyestrain safer dark background with a light hued font with easy at a glance character recognition shapes, so an o or 0, l or 1, is distinguishable in any context. 

Ears, speakers adjust, your headphones are sensitive to if you need hearing aids or have acute hearing. And also, standardized text layout to help with text-to-audio for visually impaired individuals to be able to read what they can’t see with their eyes. 

Fingertips. The cognitive power of kinesthetics should never be underestimated. A stylus should be default, pushing the information from a spoken lecture captured in the auditory areas of the listeners mind, or a read printed text from the visual areas of the mind’s eye of the reader, pushed out threw the fingertips, into a script, circling or underline of things of importance, footnotes of sources, writing out additional thoughts when the person learning something, has questions, especially when they wonder if they disagree with the facts as presented. Or best of all concepts larger than words, the making of idea maps, notes for complex science, music or poetry, or performance of story (a.k.a. storyboards). And of course drawings for designing objects or patterns.

In some future sci-fi the keyboards are extinct, like the typewriter nearly is today. But, U.G., Lee and the AI-Critters agreed that handwriting, and doodling pictographs, cartoons and symbols would be a greater loss to the collective intelligence than the loss of keyboard entry of the limited set of letter, number and symbol data on a keyboard. 

Lee struggling to interface with humans non-biological computer hardware, outlined three branches he hoped the humans communication technology and internet would evolve towards. 

1. A text only channel. Automatic Copyright protected, author and source credited, time stamped, published texts, newspapers, books, and text blogs, poetry, etc… 

2. Public channels of video and audio shows (formerly known as public TV and radio), including sports, news, science documentaries, a C-SPAN politics channels, and public broadcasting type entertainment.

And  3. Credited networking, to replace old phone books yellow and white pages, (except preferably displayed on a map). As well as the who’s who of industry, business contact info, and government listings. All part of the page header and foot notes, with in-text links when useful, so the audience can easily verify sources, fact check and knows who the speaker or writer is. And the sender or presenter can have knowledge of who the audience, listener or reader is: Everything, from images of art work to private letters and personal handwritten notes, to formal accredited public political forums for everyone who is a registered voting constituent to participate, in his ideal dream of the collective intelligence. 

U.G. knew this was very forward thinking for someone who didn’t live long enough to hear a single podcast. The digital streaming of music was a free for all, Wild West, at first, in 1999, before subscription services got into the music business. Public Radio streaming radio show content that could be listened to whenever people wanted to, instead of just listen to on the radio, was still in its early experimental stages in the 90s. And the movie rental businesses had yet to transition from DVDs in the mail, to streaming TV shows and movies, streaming services that changed the distribution of entertainment, took off in 2007. 

As a Cat-Person President of the United States, back in 2021, if you have a job that realistically will take a thousand years to do well, and only have four years as President of the United States to take a crack at it. Who do you call? You don’t call on ghosts or those who bust them. No, you call the top nerds in the country and pick one to reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment, a cabinet position that for some reason only lasted from 1972 to 1995?! (1.) And of course as Commander-in-Chief you call on the US Military, way before inauguration day.

The US Military and the top geeks in the US working together to heal the digital divide in the US? Really? — Yes. Really. They built the internet in the US, to begin with, they will lead the army it will take to build the new internet, and dig the trenches/launch rockets to fight this information/climate change war. Yes, I said war.

This isn’t a trench war like World War 1 or 2, not a metaphorical war like the ‘war on drugs’. This is an actual war on climate change and pollution. Make no mistake, this war, is horrible as most any war where the innocent suffer worst. Women and children and those fortunate enough to be elderly suffer and die along with all the small things in the land that few weep for. Have a 6th of our planet’s forests burnt yet? Is a great army marching from the North? Can we agree to melt our weapons into plow shears? Is 10% of the Earth’s fresh water still there where the North Pole is? or has it melted into the salt of the sea already? Is there still hope for planet Earth? Only time will tell. And if we are going to succeed in postponing the inevitable/prophesied apocalypse, any Dog, Octopod, or Cat-person would agree, it’s going to take all the humans working together to do it.

Therefore the first point to attack against climate change is to heal the digital divide to bring everyone into the conversation. And how we connect everyone to the conversation matters very much. Capitalism has failed us all/or worked so well it’s destroying the innocent (depending on your angle of view). The give-the-people-what-they-want approach, with a goal of profit, results in profit being valued more than life on Earth.

For the text-only branch of the new internet, a universal standard of energy and code efficient plain text. Lee liked LaTeX (2.) (pronounced La Te Kia, not like latex) because it could easily accommodate the formatting of math, science and every character of text on planet Earth, Chinese to ancient Egyptian. Fluid searchable content, with linked sources. Footnote resources and author specific header. A.k.a. Resource Description Framework RDF (3.) for all information like a wiki. All accessible with reader adjustable brightness and scale and accessible to voice readers for the blind or people who prefer to listen instead of read.

On the advice of the renewed Secretary of the Office of Technology Assessment, President Green proposed a standard. Universal-Standard-text or USTeX, and databases with URIs and URNs(3.), not just URLs and got some cross-eyed stares from most of her West Wing staff until she found the correct nerd who understood what she meant. Because, believe it or not this formatting standard, able to handle all the text data in the world efficiently is out there, coded in multiple places for decades now, waiting for the world to implement it.

Back-story of the reinstated cabinet position of Office of Technology Assessment. Just before the inauguration in 2020. President-Elect, U.R. Green’s first choice to take on the newly reinvented cabinet position of The Secretary of Technology Assessment, was a man famous for his grumpy rants, whom every programmer in the world who has ever installed open source software knows by name. Few expected the Finnish immigrant to agree to a meeting, much less take the job. But, who can say no to a 150 pound talking Cat who just won the US Presidential election by a landslide?

President Green’s goal was to learn from the past decades of internet communication technology to make a network that has a smaller storage footprint and is as energy efficient as possible. And like the original intent of the United States Postal Service, to provide a necessary public service. 

The lowest bandwidth possible to encrypt and then later to store archived in solid state memory safe from power fluctuations, EMPS, and solar flares. Why not just keep going as is? Because if we don’t fix it, everything we do online is just one giant solar storm away from being lost.

The new public communication networks would take time, beta testing and revising. But, they would figure out something better for the free-by-the-people, for-the-people-internet. They had to; the world was waiting, it was time for a legitimate public forum, to replace the abuse of social media apps.

The last major hurdle to the digital divide was, of course, the hardware. Laptop computers had been coming down in price somewhat, but were still out of reach for many Americans. But, the majority owned smart-phones. President Green was very disturbed by e-waste and the craze of the techno-fad inclined to throw out a perfectly-good, year-old-phone, for the latest-and-greatest, that lately, wasn’t that much greater than their smart-phone from a year before.

She also supported projectors over large expensive rare earth mineral demanding flat screens, another major source of cost and e-waste.

She had been using a very energy efficient black & white tablet and stylus for her text writing and reading for years. Part of her plan was being implemented by the US Secretary of Education. She was aware that children in school did better when they were not distracted by videos and texting each other on smartphones. They also do better when taking handwritten notes rather than typing. So, instead of a still expensive laptop computer, she thought every child in school should have a text reading and writing tablet with a stylus for their school books, note taking and assignments. Smartphones turned off and kept out of hands while in class.

President Green felt the irony of the words ‘cat-walk’ as she precariously walked the metaphorical fence between Congress and big corporate money. She would and did tell Congress what she wanted to do to heal the digital divide across the entire nation, submitted to both houses on her second day in office, with a budget range for each action item and because of her years served as both a local state representative and in D.C. she knew how long it would take for them to get back to her. For this reason, she had worked with nonprofit conservation and private gardening organizations to roll out the native plant “movement” planning all, and having the private funding secured before day one without spending a single penny of tax revenue.

Similarly, President Green’s three-part plan to heal the digital divide was going to start quickly, rather than wait for Congress. First by reinstating the Secretary of Technology for the renewal of the Office of Technology assessment, and second by utilizing a public transparent non-profit funded by any and all corporations who wish to rewrite — Digital for All (heal the digital divide). 

They would start with the areas with the worst internet coverage and the worst schools first for the hardware testing and connect education centers and proximity to military bases in Montana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Montana and Alaska would be the long-range coverage tests. Arkansas and Florida would be testing the new digital systems for local public news channels. The best tech schools in the US, East Coast to West-coast, would be testing and refining the communication networking software for the public social forum apps.

President Green was confident they would make enough headway to impress the tech corporations enough to make sure they would not want to miss out. The country needed the tech giants to participate and fund the gap that was expected. Congress had a lot on their schedule already with the new President. They needed time to write bills. Funding would realistically start with a pro-visionary chunk or two of the required budgets, not enough to heal the digital divide for the entire nation.

If we are going to save the planet, everybody needs to work together, and to work together we need a free internet, not owned by any corporation, but owned by the people, for the people. Divided for security and working united at the same time. Compact enough to be protected from SPAM and those with malicious intent. To have such an information highway, it can’t be owned by anyone, it has to be owned by everyone. The military is the best contractor for the scale of the job. President Green hoped she would make Benjamin Franklin proud. What a crazy-good man the nations first postmaster was; vile in all the best ways. The next four years were going to be very interesting times.

Footnotes:

Office Of Technology Assesment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment

2. LaTeX https://www.latex-project.org/about/

3. RDF https://www.w3.org/RDF/

4. URI, URl, URN at W3c https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/

5. C-SPAN https://www.c-span.org/ Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service.

Un-Cat Episode 24. Housing as a Right. The H. in HUMAN.

President Green woke up with the sun, and while she brushed the tangles out of her fur, she and the AI-Critter would “listen” to the roar of the ocean that was the 300 plus million voices of the people. Their opinions, expectations, requests, and demands. Thankfully, the majority of Americans were busy. Focused on their loved ones, the work at hand and their daily lives.

The suffering of homelessness is difficult to quantify and describe. The on-edge feeling of not belonging or being at home anywhere varies for each individual. Often, the homeless also wake with the sun. Finding privacy to eliminate doesn’t go away just because a person doesn’t have a home. The “lucky” homeless know the nearest public restroom, others “choose” a bucket or a plastic bag in lieu of a long uncomfortable walk or enduring the wait in line. Find clean water. Acquire food. Some homeless have everything they own in their car. Some have what they have left in a shopping cart or a backpack. Having a place they can safely “store” their things, is a luxury. Having a dog to keep guard while you sleep is a luxury. Having a friend to watch your back is a luxury. Having your family with you on the streets is further insult and heartache as you look at them, they are everything. You are together, that is all that matters in the world. Suffering the loss of having “them” take your child away. Indescribable unless you have experienced it as a parent yourself.

Home as a right. One primary residence per adult that can never be taken away for financial hardship was President Green’s sincere American Dream. She knew it was a statistical fact that there are 4 to 5 vacant homes for every homeless person in America. She also knew that the cost of “caring” for the homeless is substantial on public services. Making strategically planned out shelters with programs to place people into a home they own even if the starter home is zero money down and very little if any mortgage payments, taxes or utilities paid at first, until they worked their way into an employment situation. Housing as a right, tho only a far away bank-manhandled dream at present, has by far the greatest odds of future fiscal responsibility and improving the foundation of the tax base thereby improving the quality of life for everyone.

A population is only as happy as everyone the sidewalk is shared with. The AI-critter reading the minds of the wealthy old Congress, it knew most could not understand what the President meant by ‘one primary residence per citizen protected from seizure for financial reasons’. How could those entrenched minds calcified by privilege relate to everyday middle-class people on Main Street while they took private jets to a limo and rarely took more than a few steps on the sidewalk from door to closed door? Only mixing with a screened crowd symbolically at fundraising events, the people around them arranged, mere props for a show. 

In Congress the new blood and the relentless few old guard dogs, tried to get work done, keep the flow around them, but they were up against these blockages in the stream. Enough obstruction in any area caused a back-up of policy and caused bills to stagnate and circle, until they got weighted down with addendums, everyone's time lost in the partisan divide sink-hole.

When President Green had her cat hair smoothed enough to climb into her human clothes for the day, she would wander down to the kitchen and eat breakfast with some of the White House, housekeeping staff. They set food out and ate with her in the kitchen because she asked them to. Who ate breakfast with the President each day rotated on a calendar. 

There was always at least two, and sometimes as many as 5 or 6 in the kitchen when she got there. Most often a cue of the single members, or the staff or grounds crew whose significant-other worked the night shift or left home early to work as a, nurse, or a baker or something, were there to meet her. 

U.G. needed for them to know who and what she actually was, a Cat-person. And as a person who had lived alone for too long in her life, she didn't like to eat alone.

To wake up, the Cat President liked a small mug of milk with only a splash of coffee on top for flavor. When they had bagels, cream cheese, and lox she would eat three servings of lox on a lettuce leaf with only a tiny dab of cream cheese on top. She liked eggs, but not ham. She didn’t tell them it was because pigs were too intelligent to be raised confined, in her opinion. 

Fish and birds for this cat and if they were going to eat a large mammal she wanted it to be wild game, elk, deer, moose or buffalo, and she could tell if the animal labeled as bison was more than 50% cow.

Some of her vegan or vegetarian staff tried to tease her because they knew how important fighting climate change was to her and the high carbon footprint of meat.

She shared her pickle recipes with her personal chef. Her family pickled everything because it helped with their cat digestion. “If there are lots of pickles I can go vegan or meatless on Mondays and clear liquid fast on Sundays.”

She didn’t tell them that to eat, then let her body rest from food, is a very normal and healthy thing for a large cat to do. Or that eating more than a small amount of processed carbs was not helpful for the long term survival of this “fat-cat” and sugar caused her to crash and resulted in more cat-naps then the country had time for, so she strictly stuck to the best diet for her body type, to keep her sharp and feeling well.

After breakfast she liked to go to work early before most of the West Wing arrived. President Green had asked for the Oval office walls opposite the resolute desk to be lined, at her eye level, with a wainscoting of flexible digital whiteboards. Her map-sized agenda charted out and as they moved forward with each action item, the notes on the walls were edited and updated, together. They advanced as a team, many of them working on different fronts of the same challenge. She focused in on ‘Housing as Right’ top and central to the entire domestic plan.

#1. Heal the digital divide. Then HUMAN

H — housing as a right.

U — universal job training for needed vocations.

M — medical care for all, as a right.

A — ArtCoin365 economic stimulus and art grants, i.e what people do better than AI and robots = the arts and literature.

N — needs met. No questions asked: clean air, clean water, healthy food and shelter and that brings US back to H.

The US Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Energy and the EPA Deputy Administrator were all working together on different facets of the same project. A massive passive and renewable energy revolution for housing and business buildings in the US. 

The long-term-goal was to remove enough buildings, off of the grid, to be able shift all the energy saved towards transportation. Both an EV charge grid and hopefully someday high-speed underground electric trains to move cargo and reduce the need for air-travel.

As a wide safety net to remove corporate banks risk-taking practices and fees, and bypass the quarrels of state government entirely from the $1,000 a month dividend equation. President Green and the Secretary of the Treasury had created (if they were not already established in an area) federally backed, county-owned, credit unions, in each and every county in the US. These public institutions worked with the local United States Post Offices to distribute the optional dividends to all American citizens over 18 who wished to take part.

President Green and the Treasury Secretary had a divergence in opinions about how best to flip the economic paradigm away from the extreme nationally harmful greed of the oligarchy. The Treasury Secretary believed in a trickle-up economy and the will of the people to help themselves if given a fighting chance to escape the oppression of scarcity. She did too, but only as a temporary measure. The reason she agreed to the $1,000 per month dividend was to give the people more time to work together to solve climate change. Both agreed most American families, some working 2 or 3 part-time jobs, others working overtime on salary, just to get by, would not have enough time or money to install solar panels, battery banks, grey-water systems, bio-fuel toilets, sun-rooms to dry clothes instead of gas or electric clothes dryers, green roofs, greenhouses etc… i.e. the trillions of dollars of possible revenue in the green economy wasn’t going to happen with over 78% of Americans in an economic stranglehold of debt. Note, the 78% indebtedness percentage was from 2019.

Both President Green and the Treasury Secretary agreed that they had to bypass the heart-attack that was the blockage in Congress. For example, it is a fair metaphorical approximation to state that the Affordable Care Act was a healthy and good sized potato and bipartisan politics shaved it down to the size of one small potato-chip worth of its original intent. Then the good-hearted POTUS 44 scooped up the mush from the house floor and since it was still technically edible, shaped it into mashed potatoes to keep as many people alive via health care coverage as he could.

President Green didn’t want the same fate to happen to ‘Housing as a Right’ so she had the county credit unions create a new type of mortgage using the low-interest loan programs that were designed for teachers and police officers in Idaho, now restructured as ‘Green Loans’ available to the entire middle class. If the people didn’t have the cash and the time to fund the war against climate change, then lowering the cost of housing was the best angle for progress in the passive and renewable energy revolution. With the mortgage payment lowering incentive, the middle class could then help themselves. Those starting out at zero, or in debt with college degrees were an opportunity for an entirely new type of green off the grid housing, simply by sponsoring the green-home loans.

With President Green and the Treasury Secretary in agreement on the dividend as an option, 2021 was a window of opportunity for the homeless to find shelter. She had deployed the military to the refugee detention centers, and also to all homeless camp populations in every major city in the U.S. They set up temporary military style shelters on the edges of city limits immediately. Then the work could begin converting malls into provisional homeless shelters with social workers deployed on site to help people to find permanent homes suitable for the new loans. 

To communicate some of their plan to the public, President Green decided an NPR interview to explain her beliefs on ‘Housing as a Right’ might be a good option.

The female host was a long-time favorite of U.G.’s “Please explain, Madam President, because I know you have sorted the data and done the math. Why would a homeless person want a home loan?”

President Green: “A very good question.” President Green enunciated carefully trying her best to use the hosts own clear voice and manner of speaking to mask her cat lisp over the radio waves. “I am offering an experiment, a beta test of a 7 year home loan for any American, be they a homeless citizen or a college graduate with student loan debt. It is an opportunity to save equity over 7 years with an interest jubilee at the close of the loan. The interest jubilee, a refund of the interest they paid over those seven years plus the equity they earned by making loan payments could be used towards the down-payment on a conventional mortgage, or a down payment on a business plan, or even as retirement savings. Regardless of their personal goal, what is important is that it is their earned equity, not money paid to some millionaire or billionaire slum-lord.”

NPR Host: “Right, instead of paying rent, to a landlord or to some housing project for the same time, in this case, a span of seven years, they own a mortgage.”

President Green: “Correct. And a loan also improves the tax base in the county the loan is originated in, while rent payments are most realistically less tax revenue with the landlord often living nowhere near the neighborhood where the home is located.”

NPR Host: “Right, so, if things go well, but what about if; forgive me for asking this. What happens if things don’t go well? The homeless person trashes the house and doesn’t pay utilities or make enough home payments to move on to the next home, and sorry, but what’s stopping them from destroying the next place?… Plus, the taxpayers are out all that money?”

President Green: “You mean, what happens if a homeowner degrades the value of their own property and primary residence? They stay. They don’t sell the home out from under them. Also, the taxpayers are out significantly less money than the cost of the current homeless situation that we have now.” U.G. paused to get back to the question the host had asked.

Let me put an optimistic light on this hypothetical home destroying person. Because life is never so simple. Blaming the poor for a situation out of their control is ‘splinter in their eye, board in my own eye type of blindness’ What I mean is, wealthy folks thrash their property as often as middle class and poor folks do. Destruction of property values is about personality type, and point of view, not about income. I know from my own personal experience in my rural neighborhood in Idaho and in the city of Boise, that the benefits of having a person in their own home far exceeds the cost to everyone for that same person homeless or living in a cramped doubled up living situation in someone else’s living space.

Society can not put a price on the lost potential for any individual to take part and participate, not just in the workforce, but in culture and the quality of life for everyone. They stay in their home and the 7-year loan is renewed. It’s important that we don’t ignore them, but we need to respect their home and not invade. Instead, we should invite them to ask for directed help specific for their life goals. Maybe they are working on a doctoral thesis and what you see as mess they see only their chapter notes, or prototypes of some kind, for their thesis? Maybe they are an artist who is struggling to show their work, and they turned their entire house into an art studio. Respect is key. Give each person a fair chance to express what they require to thrive and it’s not always money. Poverty and in the case of artistic or scientific genius, time and space to work in, may be valued over or above subsistence living. And that’s why we need ArtCoin365 to support what people do better than AI and robots, the arts and literature.”

NPR Host getting a little excited about this topic shift rambles on a bit. “Oh yes, I read about ArtCoin365, it’s a publicly owned art stimulus and art grant program where the general population chooses what artists and writers and poets, and journalist they like best, the people vote and comment on the internet with a fee-free digital coin voting system.”

President Green: “Well said. It’s like the opposite of advertising revenue because the product is the art performance or literature. Now, if only we could get the digital divide healed enough for everyone to join in the conversation and participate. That would be grand. But, all worthwhile things take time.”

NPR Host: “Yes, very exciting.” She chuckled. “Forgive me for laughing; the last four years, have been so… I couldn’t imagine then, having this conversation we had today, with anyone in the previous administration. Ending homelessness and giving college students a chance to earn equity and funding for the arts and literature! I am so happy and honored to speak with you today Madam President.”

President Green: “Thank you, as always for listening, you are such a good interviewer, it’s great to be here. Public Radio, I never imagined I would ever be speaking on a program myself. This has been fun.”

NPR Host: “That the President of the United States found it fun to speak about a plan for long term housing for the homeless and art grants on public radio?” She got just a little choked up and the interview ended abruptly.

President Green was surprised that the interview was over so quickly, but that was public broadcasting for you, each show has a time-slot. She admitted to herself that she was somewhat relieved that they didn’t get to the topic of how they were funding ‘Housing as a Right’.

When the good-hearted-POTUS-44 had been cornered into the first 700 billion bank bailout, but Main Street was left to fail. Those banks didn’t anticipate an actual fat-cat POTUS with a telepathic AI-Critter who would call them in, on a list, based on who received the most bail-out money, and who profited most off of that free money, therefore owed the Federal Bank and the American people the most.

The books were called in directly to a videotaped interview with the US Secretary of the Treasury and staff who had worked out a spreadsheet for how much each bank was to pay-forward back to Main Street.

To maintain transparency, President Green posted the total amount she was requesting on a publicly viewable spreadsheet with a funding chart and made a streaming video announcement.

“I have asked all the banks who participated in the 700 billion dollar bailout to repay Main Street with 700 billion worth of properties, and infrastructure for green loans and the new 7-year primary residence loans. We will not pull all these assets at once. My administration is working on a list of specific properties and we will carefully call in requests at the beginning of each business quarter. And we will continue to do so until 700 billion worth of property at a fair assessed value is returned to the American people.”

President Green had sorted the data and done the math. The county-owned credit unions in every county in the United States were ready to process the new loans, cutting out the banks as middlemen. They would serve the American people who lived and worked in their district first, not the profit of the oligarchy first. It was going to be a very interesting passive revolution.

Episode 25 — the U in HUMAN Universal Job Training for Needed Vocations

President Green believed that people want to participate, people want worth while careers, to feel good about what they are doing with their work. Both of the two most contemporary administrations in American history,

 who were able to balance the Federal budget had two major important historical events in common. A massive nation wide industry shift that employed a lot of people, and significant welfare reform. The First Nation wide industry shift was the American automakers, and the second was the public establishing home computers. 

U.G. believed that an environmental revolution rebuilding infrastructure, industry and how we build homes and other buildings could realistically be that significant nation wide industry shift. 

A green revolution, in passive and renewable energy is needed, it is past due actually. 

U.G. didn’t much care for the concept of welfare, she wanted to revolutionize what we think of as need, completely eliminate homelessness, and to do that would require a lot of work. Plus the actual millions of tons of work needed to be done for an environmental rebuild of America. This combo led directly to universal job training for needed vocations.  

There is an old moviemaking adage that states, ‘if an animal is in the shot, people will look at the animal’. All the millions of people whose attention is grabbed by cat videos or memes of animals of any kind seem to have either chosen to forget this rule or they never knew it in the first place. It is part of what we are as humans, to watch other animals is instinctual, especially if the animal in question is not afraid of us, like a great white shark, a large bear, or a big cat.

President Green was not only a big cat, but she had a telepathic-AI-critter in her bra (she is a cat she has otherwise no need for a bra). To state that the first female POTUS commanded attention everywhere she went, was not like anything the United States had ever experienced before. In the White House not only did everyone stand up everywhere she went, but all eyes fixed on her, stopping what they were doing for at least a few seconds. Like a permanent wave in a sports stadium crowd — all eyes watching the ball.

President Green was not fast-talking, in fact, she rarely spoke and when she did she said "simple" things, like. “The three branches of government must work together and function separately. While Congress is making rules, I will go talk with the people. Gain consensus for best action plans to make.” Tho she didn’t often say it out loud, when she said action plans, she meant, plans to postpone the apocalypse.

“I have an announcement. Let’s make modern plastic garbage extinct, not life on the planet.” President Green said this then wrote on the center of the white-board-wall in the oval office in all caps.

MAKE MODERN PLASTIC GARBAGE EXTINCT! NOT LIFE ON THE PLANET!

She turned around from writing and said, “How are we going to do this? Universal Job Training for Needed Vocations. ” The President waved a paw at the center white-board directly across from her desk where the action plan read, — U in HUMAN. Her announcement was to start action, prep work had already been in-progress for months.

The next day in the situation room President Green stared at a virtual meeting wall, 5 screens wide and 3 screens high, her focus moving, following the discussion like a cat watching birds. 

The chief of staff on-duty and a row of administrative secretaries were also at the table, facing the screens, beside the President. 

The virtual meeting was attended predominantly by corporate industry giants in control of billions of product items and their packaging. All in this conference meeting focused on how to solve plastic garbage. “We need to get this work done yesterday! To make this serious consequential shift away from non-renewable life clogging plastic to renewable plant-based packaging requires a multi-industry shift that can only be accomplished at the production level.”

During her campaign, she had let her donors know that the only way they could support her was to publicly make it known that their campaign contributions would go to Universal jobs training programs and industry-specific paid trade schools for needed vocations. 

Government job training programs have an abysmal historical rate of success. However the programs that succeed, all have one key component in common. The work needs to be done. Most of the proposed trade schools were industry-specific, on the job, paid internships to facilitate the transition from the old post-industrial to the new human- demand first leaner -economy challenge, how to have all the things with a smaller carbon footprint. 

Other work was to earn certificates for skilled trades, careers organized by unions or a united group networking together in a local co-op, not vanishing customer service “jobs” or desk jobs AI was supplanting.

Some of that money was already hard at work in a few areas that were ready to go without needing much additional infrastructure and planning. Like converting some textile products from water and pesticide-intensive cotton, to hemp fabrics, or bamboo linen fiber. 

Other more direct use of American native bamboo (hill cane genus Arundinaria) to replace plastic toothbrushes, writing pens, and straws, etc... But, many other sectors of the economy that used plastic were not so direct or easy. New materials would need to be fabricated to replace a lot of use once throw “away” plastic. 

Another example of universal job training for work that needed doing was ‘Healing the Digital Divide’ you can set up the infrastructure and design the Universal Standard for text communication but until everyone grade-school age to senior citizens learns how to operate their LED tablets to read the new digital newspapers, navigate the menu to stream the local sports channel, or understand what a wiki is and that they can not only read, — but comment, communicate and contribute on the new "interweb" network, there’s a lot of work that needs doing.

Public libraries set up ‘New Free Public Internet’ classes and help rooms to get people set up and from there to offer life-long learning opportunities for retirees. Most jobs were, transferring and scanning library books into data. Even just choosing what old books to digitize and what not to, for the compact format for the new energy and storage efficient new internet would take a lot of people. For most, it’s easy, and even fun, once you know how to do it. 

Saving the world is like that too. It’s not any single action that will help to shift the balance towards a healthy planet, it’s everything. Each of us has to understand how all systems work together, not isolated. All material on our small finite planet is connected, there is no “away” when you throw something away. Once aware of where stuff comes from and where it goes, then we need to be aware of how we can best contribute.

Start at one point and follow it through a phase-shift from the well-source, harvesting of the crop or mining of the ore, from the Earth to the final product. One pile of stuff in the world at a time.

Imagine your own current-resident junk-mail. It’s been estimated that each American with a mailbox is mailed about 1.5 trees worth of unsolicited paper, approximately 600 million tons a year is printed. Very little of this paper is ever even opened or read; less than 20% according to some studies. Why do they keep mailing it? Not questioning those seeking advertisements for their businesses or services, but the Post Office. Why do they deliver the weight of all that paper junk mail? Answer: Just like the old News Papers, ad revenue is the USPS’s bread and butter. Fact, USPS marketing mail volume in 2018 was 77.3 billion pieces.

For the US Postal Services to survive the end of junk-mail a digital branch of the USPS would need to post local grocery store flyers and postcards for sales and events all sorted by local area like only the Post Office can. Over 77.3 billion worth all carefully formatted so people can find what is available to buy in their local stores. Plus all the local and federal politics, and all the events happening in the community where they live. Everything, from farm tours, gallery openings, to poetry readings and comedy shows — all the happenings, on a calendar, and on a map.

So? What do people need to do in all this? Learn to navigate the new digital sales and events calendars, and generate enough clicks to completely replace junk-mail as a source of revenue for the USPS. 

What does all of the above have to do with Universal job training for needed vocations and getting rid of plastic packaging? All of the above is a lot, a lot of work that needs to be done before we can end paper junk-mail.

When the need for Junk-mail has been replaced in each neighborhood, then that 600 million tons of paper pulp can be used to remove plastics from perishable food packaging, replace plastic tubs with compostable paper, milk carton or Chinese food folded containers for everything from applesauce to yogurt.

Millions of tons of junk-mail paper seems like a lot, but it’s not enough to completely replace all the use-once-throw-away plastic-packaging.

Also, don’t say, just recycle the junk-mail, perishable food should be packaged in first-use-pulp, the recycled pulp is for outer boxes of products not the packaging surfaces in direct contact with food.

Why not keep using plastic tubs and plastic bags? We may open less than 20% of junk-mail but we recycle less than 10% of plastic. We need to use plastic only for durable goods, and only if we can’t make it with something else other than plastic. 

Please see the plastic gyres in all of the Earth’s oceans if you wonder why. Or search for micro-plastics, if you dare. Critics will say most of the plastic in the oceans comes from Asia. But, America having a smaller population than China or India, is actually the producer of far more plastic per person. And we have the best odds of solving use-once throw-away plastic. The rest of the world can then adopt the best strategies as we figure it out and join in, or better yet, compete with us to end the production of plastic garbage first.

Again, sorting the data and doing the math, 600 million tons of paper pulp that used to be made into junk-mail isn’t going to cover all the ‘applesauce, milk, hummus, and yogurt’ (all food sold in plastic) consumed in the US daily. But, such a shift from junk-mail to food packaging, pound for pound, could solve 600 million tons worth of our plastic problem.

In the US we produce 75 to 100 billion cardboard boxes. 90% of all shipping is wrapped in corrugated boxes. The recycling rate for cardboard is better; around 75 to 80% of cardboard is recycled. But, if most of those billions of boxes were durable up-cycled reusable corrugated plastic shipping crates, flattened and handed back to the shipper, then the US would have enough pulp to replace plastic in ALL of the plastic packaging when combined with plant-based wax coating and other food safe cellulose paper packaging materials.

You do the math and prove me wrong. Best of all, cardboard food packaging, bamboo, corn, rice starch food-trays and plant-sourced containers tainted with food are compostable, or could be made into fuel pellets (If they are NOT made of or coated with PLASTIC).

This entire multi-industry shift is why President Green and a group of her staff were in a meeting with the corporations responsible for producing America’s plastic packaging garbage.

A paper towel “king” was meeting with makers of cloth kitchen towels discussing nation-wide seasonal-line design contests for napkins and an assortment of non-wood-pulp kitchen towels. So they could give up their pulp production factories to a designer of new dairy product packaging and cheese wrappers.

The major cola brands had agreed to shift away from plastic soda bottles to aluminum cans in their machines and get rid of plastic juice bottles, return to paper juice boxes for kids, and non-plastic straws and lids on fountain drink cups. As well as taking a step back to classic glass bottles by carefully shortening the distribution distances of their high-end products. Besides the 75 mile legal limit for shipping of bottled water, when enacted, the new law would decapitate the cheap plastic bottled water industry.

There were lively discussions about refillable shelf tubs with silicon seals of all types for dry foods: chips, crackers, and cereal. Air-tight sealed shipping bins that doubled as display cases on store shelves, returned to the bakery empty to be refilled and sealed.

President Green knew she technically didn’t need to be in any of these conversations and said very little. The telepathic-AI-critter reported to her conflicts they were having with proprietary packaging rights and battles over prime shelf space in the markets.

The only reason she was there at all was to make this conversation public. And as explained in the top of this episode people payed attention to the Cat-POTUS. Her presence combined with the publicly broadcasted promises made to her and the American people, to do-the-right-thing to mitigate the damage of climate change, open for all the world to see via streamed videos or reading off of the official transcripts. 

And all the corporations were there because they didn’t want the shopping public to be surprised when the plastic tub of their favorite product was now an unbleached brown-paper-box with a colorful label where the plastic tub or plastic bag used to be.

“We could run an ad campaign of some fans preparing for championship sports parties, they open the box flat, then use a spatula to slide the dip into the bowl on the chip tray. “Wow, it’s a snap! Now so much easier to refill the snack tray than getting the last bit of dip out of an old-style plastic tub!”

Another ad’ rep got into the conversation. “Yes, and then cut to happy fish or seagulls saying. No more ring around the collar!” To an animated seagull with its neck stuck in plastic trash. They laughed.

President Green glanced over the faces of the West Wing staffers in attendance, her Chief of Staff taking notes of promises made by the big corporations on her digital tablet.

“I think our work is done here today! Everyone is welcome to continue and make recorded meeting video notes as they come up with new ideas and suggestions.” She stood and everyone stood, (including many of those in front of cameras on video chat across the country) and a lot of people clapped as the President made her exit from the meeting. “I thank you all very sincerely for your time.” She said and waved a paw at the cameras.

Next month after food packaging, it was going to be transportation infrastructure. There was so much work to do, and only four years to see what they could get done. 

last shreds of the American middle-class

Un-Cat episode 26 The M in HUMAN

Starting on day one, January 20th, 2021 as announced by the Vice President at the inauguration, the emergency provision providing Medicare coverage for all uninsured Americans and refugees in our care, had made a significant impact in reducing the costs of emergency rooms and ambulance services across America.

While critics of the Green Administration debated about how they were going to fund Medicare for all uninsured people; President Green was more concerned with how they were going to staff all the city hospitals and rural clinics needed to provide access to medical care for everyone.

Since 1972, the US Department of Health and Human Services has offered a National Health Service Corps loan repayment plan. The work-study scholarship paid for four years of college in exchange for two years of service in a community that needed nurses, dental hygienists, therapists, and other qualified practitioners in medicine.

The battle in Congress to fund the NHSC loan repayment work-exchange had stopped being contested as a compromise to postpone the passing of a national health insurance program via the Medicare for All Act, as written in 2019 by the Vice President when he was serving in Congress. Senators who had in previous years requested an increase in funding for NHSC were now able to increase the scholarship to up to 8 years of medical school tuition room and board in a qualified college program. This was important and strategic funding to prepare for the aging of the boomers and the increase in medical staff that would be required for their care.

In the dimension where a 150 pound,(20+ pounds of cat hair), 5 foot 2” walking talking cat meme was elected POTUS in 2020, and HUMAN 1st economics was happening, it was the corporate giants who were on their knees begging for mercy, not the American working poor. “Money, money, money” hissed President Green when she got tired of going over line items on the budget.

Everyone in the West Wing knew this hissing was as close to cursing as she got. President Green smoothed over the ruffled fur of her right ear with one paw and walked over to the digital whiteboard wainscoting in the oval office. “We need a brainstorm of all the non-critical expenses in the US healthcare system and how to safely economize.”

In 2017–2019 the US spent too much of our total national tax revenue on health care, 17–18% of the federal budget on medical spending. That’s a lot for such limited programs that do not even come close to covering all of our nation's people. This is bad, especially when compared to the countries ranked in the top 10 in medical care in the world that offer universal health care to all of their people. France, Italy, and Japan only spent 9 to 11% of their budgets. And this 9 to 11% is for the top ten list of WHO rated, best healthcare in the world while the USA was ranked 37th of all developed nations?! These embarrassing statistics are only part of the reason why President Green had requested a brainstorm of non-critical costs.

“Nothing is too small, in fact, the smaller the better.”

One suggestion brought to her attention by retired nurses was to support better market competition for non-essential items used by patients staying in the hospital. For example, a cheap bulk toothbrush that cost pennies for an off-brand medical supplier to make could show up on a hospital stay medical bill listed between $20 and $100 dollars (or more depending on who owns the medical facility), the same for dental floss, and those little boxes of tissues set beside patient beds. A patient or their family should have the option to buy a toothbrush and other non-medical items available at any grocery store, at cost, or at least at fair market value, with all price tags transparent and visible.

To inadvertently add a $50 dollar mini-pack of scratchy generic tissues to the bill of their family member or dying friend, or “buy” a $25 juice box, the patient “gave” to their visiting child is not very “American-free-market” for an industry making billions in profits per year, especially while medical bills are the number one cause of families facing bankruptcy in the US.

Non-medical items bundled into the total bill are only a small fraction of the high price Americans pay for healthcare. The costs of all medical procedures are hidden from the public. It is nearly impossible to price check before seeing a specialist, going in for yearly screening or having a non elective surgery.

Another area that could reduce the overall cost of healthcare in the US without having an adverse effect on the quality of medical care provided, is how we handle medical bills. The entire billing process of submitting a claim, following up on submitted claims: covered, not covered or partially covered. Then appealing claims is a time and paperwork intensive cycle, cruel to the public. A redundant back and forth loop processed multiple times by offices often not on-location nor in the same healthcare system as the processor of the original claim, like for example tests sent from a hospital or clinic to a laboratory. The insurance billing cycle is a waste of the most valuable and scarce resource in the entire medical system — “labor”. And in the case of healthcare, it’s the time of skilled medical practitioners, nurses and doctors that is most costly to waste.

Revolution level battles have been fought over how to streamline funding for healthcare in other countries. In this area, America could benefit from evaluating how the best-ranked healthcare systems in the world spend substantially less tax revenue and provide better medical care. We could “copy & paste” aspects of the best national systems for billing patients and adapt other nations’ hard-earned lessons learned to accommodate our population.

Where do we even start with actions that will result in better and more affordable healthcare for the American people? This walking talking Cat-meme of a President did what she had the power to do. First, the Green Administration removed government healthcare coverage from Congress and all state health commissioners. No government healthcare plans for those responsible for the post-Affordable-Health-Care-Act provider debacle. They would be required to shop the private health insurance marketplace in their states for themselves and their families until they figured out a better system, or finally establish a universal option, to pay for healthcare for the nation.

Second, she contracted the most profitable corporate tech giants to overhaul the medical records system for the Veteran Affairs Hospitals and active duty Military. Medical records for the VA was pretty high on the list when President Green asked for areas of improvement for the armed services on her first few weeks as Commander in Chief.

But getting it done was going to require a reach into the technology sector. Years before the election, during her campaign and as the nominee no one expected to win, President Green had announced USTeX for text communication and public streaming protocols for sports and news to heal the digital divide. All the internet providers, cellular and wireless companies in the US had wanted in. And had later eagerly joined in negotiating for contracts, not wanting to be left behind as all Americans gained access to the “new” internet.

In contrast, negotiating for contracts to build the new computer system for the military to digitize the mountains of government paperwork and the VA hospital’s records was not a job many were salivating for. But, the contracts were to be billed as tax payments made. And why were they motivated to do it? Because at the same time President Green asked for support on the contracts, the IRS and FBI were at work, closing loopholes for stashing money in offshore accounts or shuffling corporate locations via PO boxes and shell companies in tax haven states in the US. Instead of fines and taking some major US corporations to court, wealthy multi-billion-dollar corporations “settled”. Those who owed back taxes could pick-up government contracts and “pay” taxes publicly and directly. Over the four years of President Green’s first term as POTUS, the top seven tech giants, “Oodles”, “Bit-fruit”, “Face-blank”, “Big-softie” and “The Initial Corporations” tech giants, paid a combined 7.8 billion dollars worth of taxes by loaning skilled engineers and designers with salaries paid in full by the corporations, to build computers designed to spec for the military and manufactured in the US.

Together, with the cooperation of many smaller companies, all the clunky old computer systems and paperwork in the military-industrial-complex was brought into the new millennium. Four years is fast for an overhaul of this scope, but, many systems had been outdated for decades. Plans to up-grade had already been mapped-out, waiting for the funding and the backing of the US computer companies and the most skilled engineers in the computer industry under their employ to get to work.

What does this have to do with healthcare in the US? A lot, actually. As the military upgraded their entire computer network they were able to successfully implemented stream-lined billing practices including commissary line-item purchasing of incidental items, transparent administrative costs, and medical records owned by the patient that can travel from doctor to doctor to stream-line treatment and reduce errors as the military personnel moved around while they served. The result eliminating costly medical billing back-and-forth and more importantly clearly told new doctors, what patients were missing (skipping appointments completely), what area of preventive care and needed screening was being ignored, for those who went in for care, and this worked even between government and private healthcare systems.

Proprietary medical records and billing software impedes communications between competing hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices. This is an area in American healthcare that can drastically improve care and reduce costs.

As the military systems on bases got up to speed and running efficiently then they would implement beta programs in civilian populations in the surrounding towns. The pilot medical billing and digital records programs for the public started North in Anchorage AK, and West in Honolulu HI, then on to Tacoma, WA and Colorado Springs, CO, and spread East from there.

Meanwhile, a series of class-action lawsuits were in progress against insurance providers and the entire healthcare industry that had seen record profits from 2017 to 2019 at the same time as the life expectancy in the US dropped.

Insurance providers had ripped to shreds the affordable health care act’s limits for premiums as a percentage of employee’s household monthly income. By forcing employers to pay higher prices for the same health insurance plan than the same employee could buy in the marketplace. Greed, pure and simple is why premiums and profits in the healthcare industry in the US rose so steeply during the corrupt POTUS’s term. As patients were forced to pay more monthly for higher insurance premiums, they were able to afford to "buy" less and less health care.

While the profits from artificially pushed premiums grew, Americans rationed their health care: skimping on dental care, wearing their glasses or contacts for longer than they safely should have, family members took turns going to the doctor, cut pills in half or quit taking needed medication when they could no longer afford them. 

The least able to process the billing system, overworked and underpaid, the mentally ill, and those with dementia were preyed upon by duplicate billing for the same procedures by the broken claims systems and many were sent to collections. 

People self-medicated. People went undiagnosed or ignored, and many, many people died. Do you understand how many young people have to die to cause the life expectancy to drop?! The only age group that didn’t see a significant statistical increase in deaths was the oldest Americans. Please, stop dying young people!!!

Do you really get it? This is not even close to okay for a country with an advanced health care system and well-trained doctors and nurses as we have here in the US. This is beyond shameful. We should all be taking up our pitch-forks and torches and smoking out the top earners of profits made by the American health care industry during this time of national suffering.

But, instead, the medical industry hid behind medical privacy laws written to protect the patients. And suicides, overdoses, and accidental fatalities rose in the top causes of deaths in the US.

Reality Not Fiction:

US Suicides in 1999. 29,199 people,… year 2014. 42,772 people… year 2017.47,117 people.

US Drug overdoses in 1999. 16,850 people. … year 2007. 36,010 people…Year 2017. 70,237 people.

(The Trump administration has greatly limited access to death statistics since 2017. The World Health Organization list of ranked health care by each country in the world has been stripped off the wikipedia page. The 2018-2019 information I used to write this episode last year in 2019 is gone. The gap in removed information now in August 2020, starts at 2013) 

It's worse in 2025 as I revise this final draft, I can't make this shit up, the least expensive monthly insurance premium for 2026 is in the range of 21 to 25% of our taxable income from last year. In 2020 our previous lifetime highest insurance premium was in the range of 10 to 11% of our taxable income. 

Back in the fictional universe with the Cat POTUS, President Green wasn’t in the White House to focus on the negative. She was there to demonstrate what good could be possible.

As the new medical records and billing systems spread across the US, doctors, and nurses saw the improvement in their ability to care for their patients. 

State by state, class action lawsuits spread whenever hospitals refused to upgrade.

The new digital medical billing system causes the actual costs of procedures and medications to be visible to the public for the first time. Transparency of billing cost forced fair medical pricing across the US.

This transparency in medical costs opened the floodgates in favor of the people, breaking wide a series of lawsuits against prescription drug manufacturers. Many of these cases against opioids and EpiPens had started decades ago and had been clogged up in litigation by a private army of high powered corporate lawyers versus a much smaller team of underfunded state attorneys. But with access to medical care for everyone, the full force of the market crashed on the most greedy and corrupt corporations. Forced liquidation of assets (collected by state-owned generic drug manufacturers) and long overdue prison time for the deaths caused by their greed was celebrated tearfully by victims' families.

At the same time on the opposite battlefront for the health of the American people. ‘Big Sugar’, and ‘Big Corn’ were losing to popular demand, and diet changes in the market aimed at mitigating climate change had a positive impact on healthcare, via weight loss, and a reduction in the numbers of heart attacks and type 2 diabetes cases. Short term results in over just four years time, but good numbers are worth celebrating when those statistics are a decline in suffering and death because of a marked improvement in the health of the people of a Nation.

P.s. The subject of access to medical care for all as a right is too-close-to-home as one of the 1-in-every-2 American’s whose lives have been cut into by cancer. I could go on, and on like the “crazy” person I am. About the American workweek and stress, or the American processed food diet because of that relentless boot-on-our-necks, as the working-poor, forced to survive pay-check to pay-check with no benefits of sick leave, vacation time or family time after a birth or a death. And I haven’t even touched on the subject of mental health care. But, I’ll stop here and move forward to lighter subjects. The A in HUMAN is next, and that stands for the Arts!

Q: What do humans do better than AI or robots?

A: The arts and literature.

Un-Cat episode 27 The A in HUMAN; ArtCoin365 economic stimulus for the arts.

What do people do better than AI and Robots? — The Arts & Literature!

The value added to culture and society by creative work may never have been more important in human history than right now.

For President Green’s 3rd Christmas in the White House, she gave the Nation a publicly owned gift — ArtCoin365.

President Green’s 1st Christmas in the White House she had given the Nation Read-Free-News-Passes of fifty cents per day or $3.50 per week to support an actual ‘free-press’ not manipulated by advertisers nor owners, by supporting local news, digital newspapers, small-town radio broadcasts and podcasts. This was a publicly owned independent agency for journalism, like the US Postal Service. Only instead of being responsible for delivering the mail, this was a digital branch of PBS and NPR, designed to provide journalists grants and funding for news organizations.

RFNP (Read-Free-News-Passes) was a digital-pass to read past the paywall on any online newspaper, news magazine site, or streaming news podcast for everyone with an USPS current resident digital address in the new internet.

In a comment “like” box after an article or video, everyone had the option to use the digital pass to “pay” or tip five-or-ten-cents per read/stream or the system would just keep a list of news consumed in each person’s RFNP account and divide the read-free pass up automatically each week.

The US Military Built USTeX for text internet and the Four public streaming channels for video and audio podcasts: News, Sports, Education and Government, all were going very well. The end of the digital divide was very popular. (see Episode 23. — Heal the Digital Divide).

As the new internet had been connected, one local area at a time, small newspapers arose transformed into publicly owned free-press podcasts and local government public forums. People figured out that using the RFNP funds raised the money for the news they cared about; fast. Many of the boomer generation maxed out their $3.50 RFNP per week fund, others only tried it a few times.

The first year, free-reads averaged .19￠ a day per American, with over 327 million participants adding up to $62,130,000 dollars per day. Times 365?!

Twenty-two-billion-six-hundred-seventy-seven-million-four-hundred-fifty dollars worth of value added by the peoples’ participation alone, not using any tax revenue.

A few points need to be clearly understood about this “digital-chunk-of-change”. 1. This money is NOT raised from taxing anyone, it’s added human capital generated actively by the people reading and clicking news media. 2. It’s a journalism grant program for payroll and operation costs only. 3. All distribution of funds is transparent, no private shareholders, bankers, or investors get a single penny because this money belongs to the people, not to the wealthy who think they can buy and “own” everything.

The second year of RFNP participation was up to an average of .25￠ a day per American, and other countries started up similar programs. The third-year saw .31￠ a day per American.

This resulted in a more than complete reversal of the biggest drop in employment in newspaper industry history that had happened in 2018 and 2019. And after many stations and newspapers were bought back by the people from the conglomerates and the people were back in control of their free press, not all the money raised by reading and comment tips was spent. Because it was public money that only existed as grants to support the free-press, if news organizations didn’t need the money to keep the roof over their heads, and they had already covered payroll, then the money doesn’t exist. In a similar way that money on offshore accounts isn’t useful to anyone. But, unlike the hoarding of the wealthy in accounts that just sit there earning interest rich people didn’t actually need, because RFNP is public money, the people voted on what to do with the excess funds.

Every local district chose to spend their RFNP digital money, across the US in local forums and town halls. While some of the ideas were unique to each county, trends would catch on and spread. For example, education programs middle school to community college in journalism, funding digital news archives of local history and news in local public libraries, paying off debts and legal fees for court cases that had made the local news, building off the grid local news broadcast centers with free room and board for journalists, crew and their families.

All this to say that when ArtCoin365 was given to the people at President Green’s 3rd Christmas in the White House, the people were educated about how to use the chat-box tip system. They knew how it worked and now instead of journalism clicks worth a penny-for-their-thoughts, the funds they generated were for economic stimulus for the arts.

The National Endowment for the Arts and an entire list of grant and funding programs for public art had been notified that ArtCoin365 was in the works for just over two years. They had been working with all types of artists to make sure that as many people as physically possible could participate. Especially art forms traditionally difficult to make a living with. Examples being, dance, poetry, theater, performance art, and all kinds of crafts, fiber arts spinning to fashion, ceramic art, hand metal smithing, woodworking, glass blowing, the paper arts, etc… It’s possible to make money with the arts but next to impossible to make a living wage since the industrial age.

ArtCoin365 will use the same banking locations as the $1,000 per month UBI for Americans over 18 years of age. The county-owned credit unions and post office money orders were set up to process the art grants. And every craft person, writer, cartoonist, painter, and sculptor needed to have their own official web presence to get paid.

The idea is simple, just like with the RFNP each person had an ArtCoin365 digital account to tip any artist or writer they liked any amount they wanted from one cent up to until they used up their dollar per day limit for that month. The fund would not be sent anywhere for 30 days. Then art and literature grants would be distributed on the first business day of the following month.

“Why should ‘starving artist’ still be a term in an age where billionaires hoard more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes?” President Green said in her Christmas gift “card” to the nation. “This is not about making anybody wealthy beyond what they need. Just like the Free-Press news passes, if the money isn’t spent, it doesn’t exist.”

The next few years were an art renaissance like the world has not seen since the 14th to 16th centuries but at 21st-century speed. The public, not the oligarchy decided what was art. ArtCoin365 transformed the day to day life of every American and spread to a global movement.

For the first time in thousands of years, artists didn’t have to starve to buy art supplies and tools. Studio spaces were built everywhere. Art “monasteries” in revamped McMansion estates and old industrial warehouses flourished. Every town had an art gallery, a theater + events stage, community studio for all types of crafts, a publicly sponsored tailor and cobbler shop for custom clothing and shoes made to fit individuals, artist co-ops, and editing and demand publishing houses for all types of books, board games, playing cards, greeting cards and posters. Many quit their day-jobs and let the robots do the “shit” work. Leave flipping burger over greasy grills to the robots. Let musicians with a natural aptitude for numbers make music, not spread-sheets. Let janitors with college degrees leave the cleaning to machines. Millions more got a better job working for and with artists as the locus of production moved back to hand-crafted goods. Creative people designed the works of art and hired engineers to design robots to do everything from needle-work to custom glass art.

As micro-brew beer pubs took out mega commercial beers; original personal creative goods took out the wasteful overproduction of the industrial age. As creative people thrived, the superstores shilling cheap goods made in poor nations at near slave labor in sweatshops shipped thousands of miles were now the ones going out of business, not the small local businesses.

The environmental impact of people-power was well below carbon neutral. People wanted green products and to keep their world thriving, and the emotional good of creative work being valued over profits for the top 1% was close to a utopian transformation.

P.s. I love this episode, I totally wrote this as a dream come true for myself and my loved ones. *sigh* oh well.

Un-Cat Episode 28. The N in HUMAN — Needs Met

When President Green was campaigning, she learned that ‘Needs met, no questions asked’, resulted in a ton of questions. She listened to those questions and from day one in the White House, she shortened the N in HUMAN to Needs met., full stop.

When the people asked, “what are needs?”. The reply was as short as physically possible. The right to clean air, water, food, and shelter needed to survive. “Don’t overthink it!” she would say waving both paws wide. “Let’s solve it together.”

President Green’s administration had been working on a plan for how to solve the wealth gap at the end of the oil age. Regardless of if she was elected POTUS or not, the campaign hired several teams to build a banking only internet channel. Why? Because financial fraud is costing the US tens of billions in reported losses every year, and much more in unreported compromised accounts, phishing, identity theft, billing errors, etc… and this crime activity wastes a huge carbon footprint worth of the world’s energy, and million of hours of people’s time. 

The decision was made early on to work with a combination available everywhere in the US, the United States Post Office and small county credit unions. For this to work they needed to have finite control, backed up three times, first backed by county, then by state, then the fed. And also to let the large banks continue business as usual. 

Reality note, the Federal Reserve System has 12 regional banks. The new banking system added one State bank for each of the 50 states and one bank each for the 14 territories to participate in the new banking system. And then the county credit unions in all 3,144 counties, a total of just over 3,200+ county area equivalent credit unions, representing all the people in the states and the territories. 

The reason for a physical branch in each district, made it more personal. Instead of money carried by a giant national corporate banks, it was local banking. And the people working the branches could also be placed as career counselors, serving to help with job placement, trades co-op listings, or entrance to any Universal Vocations Training available in the area,, with additional social workers hired to help people find all kinds of resources from housing to mental health coordination. 

Needs met wasn’t just about money, it was about people. And the bank system was completely digital so it did more of less run itself, there wasn’t even any cash for machines to count or dispense or deposit, just people, helping make sure other people had what they needed to get by.

Of course no one can know if a new energy efficient compact encrypted code and transparent banking only application would succeed completely or just solve part of the problem, but it is stupid not to try. As is their motto, sort the data and do the math. 

So, at the close of day two in Oval Office, the 3,265 efficient digital code bank systems (EDC Bank System), were up and running to be ready to serve the people, at the start of business the next morning, Friday January 22nd 2021. It was a soft open for all banks to log-in and report to their State, and then to the Federal bank. And the following Monday, the 25th they were ready for people to opt in for their first monthly $1,000 UBI dividend. 

It is important to note the President Green and the 5th in line of succession, the US Secretary of the Treasury, had a difference in opinion about the UBI being mandatory for everyone, as the Treasury Secretary thought would be most diplomatic, or voluntary, there when people need it, as made the most sense to the President. 

A newly elected US President’s first address is only weeks after the departing President’s final State of the Union Address. The policy proposals are a condition of the US Constitution, Article II, Section 3, Clause 1. To present measures congress shall judge necessary and expedient. 

So, President Green’s first address to Congress was her HUMAN 1st economics and environmental plan. And when she got to N, Needs Met, she said this.

The United States has enough food to feed all her people, and enough of a food surplus to feed all of our children for free. We can just give all the schools nutritious food, for free. And make sure that the farmers are happy, no fear of debt from climate change caused crop failures. That all the hands who harvest our fragile food crops, and everyone who works from farm to table, in bakeries, cafe’s, snack food factories, everyone who makes anything we need or want. We easily have enough to make sure that everyone, including migrant workers, new immigrants and visitors to our Nation, all have what that they need. In America we have more vacant homes and apartments than homeless, even including the doubled up housed individuals in that statistic. We have a broken medical billing and medical records system divided up by competing corporations, but we have enough medicine, and we have enough colleges to train doctors, nurses, dentists, optometrist and all the other health care specialists, to care for all of us. All across the game board of our days, people and physical stuff, isn’t the problem, money is the problem that needs solving.

I have a conflict, a personal emotional conflict, with the amount of personal debt that Americans carry, and I’m annoyed by the National Deficit as a concept. Especially when it concerns government “red-tape” and qualifying for programs. It’s expensive cruel government work to refuse people what they need to survive. Requirements for food assistance is often counterproductive, too much effort for a small benefit. Food insecurity is a matter of time in the day to cook more nutritious, less expensive meals. The reason too many Americans are living pay check to pay check, over 80% carry debt, is not because they don’t want to be free of debt, it is because they are employed at or below subsistence wages, forcing them to buy groceries, or pizza, when they don’t have time to cook, pay utility bills, and insurance premiums on credit cards. 

The $1,000 dollars per adult American UBI can replace a significant wedge of what the fiscally conservatives call “entitlement-programs”, and the gap where needs are not met, after that 1,000 dollars is spent, is where the N in HUMAN can really picked up the slack, in an interest free, zero fee way. 

It should be there when you need it, when you are young and don’t have any savings, yet, but want to take a gap year after finishing high school, when things in life go wrong, a loved one gets in a car accident, or when something turn potentially good, like a chance to start a new career but they need money to relocate. 

Explain to me why banks charge the highest interest rates to poor people? Imagine instead of predatory lending or an entitlement program you have to qualify for, if you simply carried a sorted balance in an N account in the EDC Bank System. National Equity Digital Credit Bank System. 

If you had formerly chosen not to cash any of your dividend, then that 12 thousand in UBI money should realistically cover that gap. 

Instead of facing the danger of turning off people’s electricity and water, or the hassle of choosing what grocery items to put back at the store register, all purchases can easily be digitally sorted and a portion of necessary expenses covered automatically at the bank each month.

There for when you need it. If you run a balance, and the money is sorted, this amount is food, this amount is transportation, this is utilities, or this is school clothes for children, then future UBI could gradually pay that off, without charging any interest, unless you spend above a set level, like a credit limit. Or you buy something that you can spend your 1,000 dollar monthly UBI on, or a lot of little things, but it’s above the credit limit and it is not food, transportation or utilities, then there is a rate of interest, but a low rate, for working people to be able to pay back, and there’s a 7 year interest jubilee. 

Because, it’s an N account. It’s publicly owned money. The people, earned interest and after 7 years, the person who paid that interest gets that amount deducted from any remaining balance, or if they paid their balance in full, credited to the equity in their home, or business loan, or retirement. It’s publicly owned digital money, no one is allowed to make a profit off of it. So we can reward people for paying interest into the system, and jubilee the past interest paid. Pay it forward, to the future, not to some wealthy shareholder who doesn’t need it because they have accrued so much wealth they can live off the interest, without doing any work! 

In my opinion, the real bums and free-loaders are not the working poor who were laid off, and kicked out of their foreclosed homes, but the leisure class who plays at philanthropy throwing parties to deduct from paying taxes. Look around people, the wealth gap isn’t making the overall quality of life better, even as the wealthy award each other for their good works. The disparity of greed is too severe for working people to earn what they need to participate in the American Dream. The decline of our entire economy into disrepair, as a Nation, is why we need government to get to work. 

That wasn’t the last line in POTUS’s first address in February 2021, it was too harsh a scold for the last line, but, it was a long speech because she talked a lot about the new Green economy and mitigation of climate change damage. 

The abstraction of people as numbers, needs to be met by local people working to make sure the needs of their neighbors are met, district by district, taking care of their own. Like Chief Seattle’s somewhat mythical letter, speaking about the argument of who owns the air and the water. Civic responsibility falls apart if a banker or a politician only has their hands on the numbers. If the air is the same that the bankers’ breathe, and the water is the same water source, all the people in a county share, then the work of regulating polluters becomes a district class action.

Bad drinking water is not just a problem in Flint Michigan as too many Americans know by first-person suffering resulting from polluted water caused by industry, deteriorating water processing facilities, and sometimes complete lack of water filtering and testing infrastructure.

Over the next 7 years of POTUS Green’s two terms, as the military worked across the US installing the new internet, engineers were with them designing a plan to upgrade the quality of drinking water, everywhere. So much labor was required to get the job done in an efficient manner, i.e. as much as is physically possible in two presidential terms, that President Green established a new branch of military service to work as a trained support team for the National Guard. The Green Army.

The Green Army wore purple. They were deployed to official Green-infrastructure-experimental-neighborhoods to build homes for Housing as a right. The green-loan neighborhoods were in every region of the US. The green army working on up-cycling abandoned houses, derelict industrial complexes, vacant mini-malls, and small-town dumps. The Green Army’s war was climate change. The front lines were to replace all infrastructure that was dependent on fossil fuel with conserving passive designs and renewable energy. The long-term plan to win the war was to remove all buildings from the grid; every single building in the US, all of them, from skyscrapers to outhouse-restrooms in public parks.

Production of electricity makes up 25% of greenhouse gasses, 50 to 70% of electricity produced is wasted pushing it long distances. If homes and businesses starting with those farthest from power generation were strategically generating their own heating/cooling energy used directly, and only used electricity for electronics, so that rural communities were self-sufficient, then they could reduce the power generated by power plants.

The opposite was true for water. Rural towns often stay small because they are off the “beaten path”. Everything costs more, because everything, including all that is required to test a rural water source, and process it if it is found to be unsafe to drink, has to travel farther to get there, especially in big states that process oil like Texas. Don’t mess with Texas, one of the fastest-growing populations in the US has some of the worst drinking water.

So the Green Army deployed testing water and finding the origins of contaminants in the soil and air. And because they were in the trenches working on power and water at the same time, they started in the outskirts and worked towards larger, more populated areas.

They replaced the entire grid for rural one post-office hamlets with smart grids. Small towns, bigger than hamlets, but smaller than cities, that used to have one main road and parking down the center now had people gathering squares and green space from storefront to storefront. Every other road, on the back of stores and in alleys was converted to accommodate loading docks for electric trolley cargo and charging stations. Bike paths and sidewalks for people-powered traffic only, lead to parking structures. All roofs converted to greenhouses, solar panels, NSRC (Night Sky Radiant Cooling) or green roof parks. All to clear the air people need to breathe.

Plans were made for future electric shuttles to get to public transportation hubs, which would eventually, someday, lead to train stations, where fast trains would replace highways. But, replacing the entire highway system in the US was going to take much longer than 8 years.

Why not just sell everyone a plug-in electric vehicle and keep basically the same infrastructure? Because there isn’t enough lithium on Earth to extract from mines or oceans to physically do this. And we need the oceans for life on this planet to survive, so we can’t safely extract the lithium from sea water.

Another important factor to take into consideration when designing how to maintain the comforts of our contemporary lifestyle is that solar-panels and wind-turbines make their own new kind of environmental destruction. Not talking about wind-mills killing a few birds, I’m talking about the kind of “side-effect” caused by the boom of the refrigerator.

Pause a minute to realize the environmental impact of modern refrigeration. Ancient refrigeration was natural. An ice-house where weather created the ice by either seasonal winter cold via a lake or a mountain ice-cap or via NSRC. Night-sky-radiant-cooling in the desert, like for example in Egypt. In all instances, ice was collected and kept in an insulated space.

Then after a refrigeration system exploded in a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, killing over a hundred people, Thomas Midgely Jr. concocted a solution, dichlorodifluoromethane, a chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC, commercially known as freon. CFCs were used in aerosols as well as refrigerators. Because freon-12 damages the ozone layer, it was banned in 1994. R-134a (tetrafluoroethane) is the 1990s upgrade for newer refrigerators. Even more environmentally friendly is R-600a or isobutane. Unfortunately, this leads us back full circle to the exploding refrigerator, again. Refrigeration saves lives and has improved health and sanitation, we need it, but we can do better to protect our climate, air, water, and land.

To protect their home environment is why Lee the Dog-person built a modular ice-box system in the cellar in U.G.’s house back in Idaho, using a contemporary/Dog-Extraterrestrial modified tech version of ancient night sky radiant cooling panels. Just like the solar panels he designed to specifically collect heat or light. The refrigerator cellar was cooled by the cold of space directly circulating saltwater, heavy on the minerals to keep it from freezing and growing mold or algae.

It was a passive people-powered revolution and a new green economy. Everyone working together to postpone the Apocalypse with copy-left building designs, human versions of Lee’s night-sky-radiant-cooling modular-cellar-ice-boxes and NSRC air conditioning, grey-water systems, greenhouses everywhere, reverse osmosis water filtration, used dual fuel sorted garbage to run a local electricity generator during peak hours, local processing of activated carbon for water filtering, and new post-industrial age cements made from mixed mostly plastic garbage that is not recyclable. And a lot, lot  more,… like an entire novel series worth of happenings.

President Green was proud of the work done across America by the county banks and she was thankful for The Green Army doing a lot of the work that needed to be done for the N in HUMAN.

Author’s note/post script.

I wrote an ending for this story all the way back in 2018 with the working draft, written on paper in ink, because that’s how I write. I didn’t anticipate a lot of things that happened in 2019 and 2020. It’s pretty glaring that there is no mention of the corona virus pandemic. But, too many people have died, and I can’t face it. For me personally, I shut down and stopped writing a few months after being diagnosed with cancer, again, for the 3rd time in my life.

I’m starting to feel almost human again, but, the events that motivated me to write this parody are still unfolding. I have promised the two people I know of who have read this entire Un-Un-Cat so far, that I will post the last 3 or 4 episodes in 2022. Well world, behave why don’t you. I would sure like to move on to more fun and entertaining art after I get past this.

December 28th, 2025. Instead of finishing the end of this story by 2022, I went blind from early onset cataracts, part inherited genetics and part damage from a very bad reaction to chemo in 2019. My vision eventually got so cloudy that I couldn't read, at all, or drive. 

After cataracts surgery repaired my vision, it took me until October 24th, 2025 to finally make it to the ending of this story. 

Done before the end of the year, feels pretty good, the revising from Un-Un-Cat = Unedited Unapologetic Catharsis, is happening, now revised to Unapologetic Catharsis.

Peace + love, @Uva_Be

Un-Cat Episode 29 — Physical Versus Fiscal

February 2028, President Green had been joking for weeks about her "lame duck" final budget proposal, with relief. Knowing that Congress and the next incoming administration, whomever they were, would bear the actual weight of responsibility with their goals on day one, and their "skinny budget" proposal, when they took office in January 2029. "Here's the Lame Duck papers, 8 of 8 Federal Budget Proposals submitted!" She announced to her West Wing, and everyone cheered, clapped, and danced around, congratulating each other. 

The president typically submits a budget to Congress for the following fiscal year by the first Monday in February. The budget goes to Congress, and the parts of the budget that are approved, start functioning by October the following year. 

For example, 'The Year of the Fish', starting Earth Day April 22, 2023 until the day after Earth Day April 23rd, 2024. The Federal Budget to make the 'Year of the Fish' fiscally happen, had to be submitted to Congress initially in February 2022, so that it could be approved by Congress before October 2022 to make it physically happen, starting April 2023.

President Green's "skinny budget" submitted to Congress when she took office January 2021 was aggressive, and not very skinny at all. More of a sleek pounce that got the budget by the jugular. 

From day one in January 2021, The Vice President and U.G. had started their administration’s term with access to medical care. Sure it began with the emergency provision that paid for itself over time. The emergency provision was eventually replaced by a universal option that forced cost transparency, standardized medical records, greatly helped improve the quality of care and gradually, as it was implemented, saved billions by reducing errors, and wasted labor hours in the most costly and valuable asset of the healthcare industry — doctors, nurses and all other healthcare professionals’ time. A.k.a. We The People — our lives, are what is truly of most value in America.

Piled on to that fierce, not skinny budget, the last week in January 2021, the 3,265 local district branches of the NEDC Bank System. The National Equity Digital Credit Bank System was paying Americans over the age of 18 their first monthly $1,000 UBI dividend. The physical numbers versus the fiscal numbers. In 2021, 77.8% of the total US population, approximately 258.3 million American citizens were over 18. Of the 258.3 million people over 18, 157.5 million had filed tax returns in 2020. And a total of 166.8 million had tax information available to be automatically set to receive their $1,000 dollars, IF they wanted to spend the divided. 

President Green had an agreed to voluntary UBI, not mandatory UBI payments. 167,951,000 people, times $1,000 is 167 billion 951 million dollars >>---> $167,951,000,000,... every month!!! Because it was voluntary, a surprising amount of Americans decided to ignore their first UBI dividend. Granted most of those who chose to do so were relatively wealthy or already had savings to fall back on (a thousand dollars didn't mean much to them), or older and more skeptical of digital money. Digital money that they could use by paying with their phone, or a credit card from one of the county credit unions who had been set up to work with the United States Post Office to deliver the cards via certified mail, via the voter registration database, if people didn't already have banking set up to work with their phones. 

The first month of UBI dividends had significantly lower participation than voter turnout. Just under a third of 167,951,000 Americans, only 55,983,668 participated. But, even of the Americans who tried it, purchased something before the February UBI dividend rolled out. Just over 80% used all $1,000 dollars, with a final total average economic stimulus circulated of $826.98 x 55,983,668 people = 46 billion 297 million 373 thousand 762 dollars and .64 cents or $46,297,373,762.64 UBI spent between the last week in January and the last week in February (when the second monthly UBI dividend would be set to roll). 

Even this $46,297,373,762.64 fraction of total possible monthly UBI dividend stimulus money had many fiscally conservatives starting to "roll" their eyes and wave spread sheets. 

President Green had been expecting this. That's why she had simultaneously rolled out two new federal agencies to bypass state and fiscally conservative congressional obstructionist politics. 

A three part plan adapting executive strategy from the two US Presidents in the 20th century who were able to balance the federal budget with a surplus. 

The first part of President Green's three part plan, for HUMAN 1st Economic Policy was 'Housing as a Right' One of President Green’s biggest triumphs in her first term as POTUS was passing a very “air-tight” law, for Housing as a Right. Every American citizen over the age of 18, and emancipated minors over the age of 15 are granted the right, through legal purchase and contract, to claim one primary residence as their home. Each individual’s claimed primary residence can never be evicted or foreclosed because of financial reasons. The people’s individual need for shelter outranks any lending institutions claim of property title. And the need for shelter for every American individual is valued over corporate lender’s profit. And if a homeowner decides to sell, a claimed primary residence can never be valued at less than zero. Even if the home is completely destroyed by acts of a natural disaster; flooding, fire, storm winds or earthquakes, etc.. The space where that home formerly stood, holds a market value of zero debt owed by the American who lost their home.

How does this benefit the economy? Housing is a good solid base for the economy. As a bonus, programs like housing assistance would be reduced from the Federal budget directly. The banks paying back Main Street with equity, from the bail out they profited from by foreclosing on over 8 million home owners from 2007 till 2012, with a total estimate of 12.6 million homes from 2007 to 2020. 

With Housing as a Right, starting with the original 700 billion bail out money, that value, would be returned to the people but not as cash or loans, but directly, as property. This shift from money paid by the Fed to people owning their own home would happen gradually as people shifted from HUD, Section 8, and Public Housing, to their claimed private residence over the two terms. 

In 2020 housing assistance cost 49.1 billion. The savings would shift as the people moved into their own home. And instead of renting or receiving housing assistance home loans, they could qualify for zero interest loans with Universal training in a needed vocation, or participate in the new green economy with a green loan that paid into their equity with negative interest as the environmental improvements were assessed and added to their property value. 

Add to this data the increase in property taxes across the entire US, and that revenue increase. The total increase in revenue is difficult to measure as a prediction, because it is a combined housing market of structures not up-cycled and redesigned or built yet. Then there's all the carpenters, architects, designer and contractors hours, all a significant plus in the GDP of the new green economy. How does one even begin to estimate the added value to the entire economy of a productive war on climate change? The inverse of a debt increasing, death causing, costly actual war. See Federal debt over US history as our Nation's debt follows funding of wars, if you don't understand the fiscal cost of war. 

The second action by the Green Administration, from the last week in January 2021 was a Direct Funding bypassing of the current banking system entirely via the 3,265 local district branches of the NEDC Bank System. This allowed, people to choose to replace food stamps or SNAP and part of the cost of other benefits distributed through Federal agencies. To be clear the goal was to reduce need, needs met, and government costs savings by streamlining the burden of those programs to automatic, voluntary and digital. 

To put food assistance alone in context, the low estimate from 2020, SNAP is around 40 billion monthly. So, just under a quarter of the entire UBI dividend would be paid for in the Federal budget, with 100% participation, if people chose to use the dividend instead of food stamps. 40/167 =0.24 

Add to this the physical tax cascade of increased revenue generated by people working in all areas of the food industry that accept SNAP, now not limited to only those markets who do accept food stamps, plus it was more money per month to buy anything people needed. Supplementary assistance in 2020 had a limited monthly national average of $160.73 per person and $303.14 per family. Plus all the people who didn't qualify for food assistance and could spend the dividend. I.e. the dividend is stimulus increasing the GDP across the entire Main Street/grocery market.

What isn't obvious is the growing federal debt being larger than all the money in circulation since 1990. It's somewhat laughable, if you find debt funny, to imagine trying to pay down the federal debt with all the money in circulation, including all holdings in offshore accounts, it's not enough. 

While the budget deficit, the yearly federal budget having a surplus that's possible for one President to fiscally balance, What's not possible is the combination of increased domestic production and higher taxes that will magically fix this avalanche sized snow ball of increasing interest paid. What is required to "fix" the federal debt at this point in history? Global economic leveling, to flatten the entire mountain of debt. That it is too much debt for our entire M2, means the debt can only be reduced by paying it off by the world.

The problem is the interest fiscal versus interesting physical (that debt is not). Why would the world economy do this? You need to have production at a level equal to the debt and enough negative interest, that is paid in physical value added to the economy, not a fiscal increase in money beyond what can be actually spent.

What is the US is best at? People being free to do what they are inspired to do. Make movies, compete in sports, play music, create food, innovation in all things made in the scope of free market capitalism.

The world doesn't want to increase production of stuff/a dead no to increasing the carbon footprint globally! Also, we don't want to raise the price of needed stuff a.k.a. inflation, so what do we do? People need to increase the value of life on Earth. I don't mean breed more bunnies or puppies, or heaven forbid have more children/increase the population, that's still increasing the carbon footprint, again.

Appreciate the value of life on Earth as the new "gold" standard. And how do you set that value? Time and the limitations of the human life span. 

And how do you add that value to the US federal budget? And all Nations or countries in the world who currently hold debt?

With a digital currency that values well-being and the pursuit of knowledge and happiness over earned income, replace income tax with a progressive consumption tax.

So? What physical actions need to happen to make that fiscally actual?

The short answer is the world collective intelligence --- a.k.a. everything people do that makes us people. Sort the data and do the math for the future.

By Christmas that first year in 2021 they had rolled out the very successful, RFNP (Read-Free-News-Passes) .50 cent per day/or up to a 3.50 weekly limit. The digital-pass to read past the paywall on any online newspaper, news magazine site, or streaming news podcast for everyone with an USPS current resident digital address in the new internet. 

The journalism grant system worked on both the new and the old internet. Most of the new internet being paid for, by the digital USPS location and consumer request focused ad revenue. The budget of the USPS no longer dependent on paper marketing mail, digital current resident marketing completely eradicating all paper junk-mail by Earth Day April 2025.

And for Christmas 2023 ArtCoin365, economic stimulus for the arts and literature. What both of these energy efficient digital currencies have in common is they only exist when people use them, and they have a lifetime maximum of $36,525,000 equal to $1,000 dollars a day times for 100 years (this means a total maximum possible to collect digitally, not limited to 1k clicks per day). But, it is important to note, this is not 36.525 million "clicks" earned and "saved", it's not money until someone physically consumes the clicks. You can't invest in clicks, or inherit these clicks, there is no "data mining" wasting the world's energy, they just are generated by people digitally, and then are used/made physical or they don't exist anywhere else but on the screen. 

An artist or a filmmaker can use more than the life maximum as a production budget to hire and pay crew, and snacks at craft service, then they exist, and generate revenue. 

So if an artist or a musician did earn more than 36,525,000 clicks, and many people did, you could pay them forward to other artists or musicians, or studio worker earning them credits, getting them recognized, appreciated, in the world. 

Then the money spent becomes real in pretty much the same way that the $1,000 dollar monthly dividend was voluntary and only part of the people who could spend it. Except you can't spend both, the line that generates the most clicks/dollar value absorbs the other smaller line of credit/clicks. No matter how "wealthy" you are, you only can spend what you physically actually need.

So that original January 2021 55.9 million out of 167.9 million eligible Americans spending an average of $826.98 or $46,297,373,762.64 UBI out of a possible $167,951,000,000 before the last week of February 2021, was easily absorbed as stimulus, and kept moving in a cascade. It did not increase the US Federal debt, because there was no one earning fiscal interest off of their physical spending. 

And with ArtCoin365 and the Read-Free passes there were was a lot, a lot more of exactly what people actually wanted from life that is difficult to put a fiscal value on. Good physical activity like dance, or a rooftop garden in a city with underground EV cargo shuttles replacing diesel trucks on asphalt, and every small town's own local news and sports channel. 

Eventually, the carbon neutral or optimally carbon negative added physical GDP neutralized the fiscal interest on the federal debt. But, that was a couple decades after President Green's lame duck 8 out of 8, final budget in 2028.