Thank you, Beth, and thank you, Word Camp, for having me come today to talk about kind of a passion of mine. Bank robberies. Obviously, it's exciting to be here in Philadelphia with its rich history, and I'm not talking about even what happened in 1776, although that's obviously very important to most of us. Actually, 22 years after that, 1798, less than a mile from here at Carpenter's Hall, was the first bank robbery in the United States, so it's very exciting to be here in fitting. Obviously, bank robberies have kind of become part of American lore. We've all heard of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson, Jesse James, Willie Sutton. We could go on and on. I think what we hear less about is the people that died, and the FBI's Hall of Honor, excuse me, more than half of those that have fallen in the line of duty have been bank robbery related, so they've died fighting bank robbers. So what does all that have to do with WordPress? Photo blogging. Today, I want to take you through the last 10 years of kind of bank robberies in the United States, and kind of what we've done with WordPress, a network of WordPress websites called Bandit Tracker to help fight crimes. So let me take you back 10 years to this start. This was March 2017, and I got an email from a friend of mine. I had helped with a family blog, the email said, anyway, I'm writing to see if your buddy, the guy that told me to help me with your family site, would be interested in helping with the website for the FBI. That was kind of my response as well. I did kind of, considering myself a reasonable person, I did what any of you probably would have done, said, it's the FBI, they have their resources, I ignored it. So I was not a professional developer at that time. In fact, the primary successful website, I'd add up to that point in my opinion, being a San Antonio Spurs fans and being tired of watching the NBA refs help the Lakers win year after year, had started a site, nbarefsucks.com. So we had a lot of fun with that. Anyhow, you know, I just learned about WordPress, but I was excited about the capabilities and decided to take on the challenge. My first conversation with the FBI, the agent shared me a bank robbery site that Maryland and Washington DC had set up, and he sent me to the site. It was bankbandids.org, and this is what it looked like. And it was Mamba-based, and in 2007 even Mamba was kind of out of date. And obviously Mamba would grow up to be Jumla, but I was like, I know we can do better than this with WordPress. And I went and found some photo gallery plugins and actually found a theme. This was the WP magazine theme, 1.0 developer edition by Michael Polak at solostream.com. And I just kind of tweaked it to meet the FBI's requirements and we launched it. So really what I want to do now is just kind of take you through some of the things that we found are important, not just for photo blogs, but really for any website in general. Those things are obviously SEO, analytics, social sharing, quality media, scalability, and innovations. So to start, we'll start where the users start on Google with SEO. We kind of had it made, honestly. We had links from FBI.gov and from media sites linking to images of bank robbery suspects. You typed in bank robbery suspects were the number one result. Pretty easy, you typed in a bank name. We came up. But then something kind of changed. How many of you have had a Google penalty? Anybody? A few of you, anyhow. This was actually a little different kind of penalty. I received an email. It says, the suspect called just a moment ago. And that's what he can do to remove the active wanted information from him on Bandit Tracker. He claims he was arrested. Served time for his bank robbery and then the outstanding wanted notice for him made it difficult for him to find a job. So in researching that, I said, OK, let me check this out. Sure enough, I typed the suspect's name in Google, number one search result. And Google was nice enough to share an image of him robbing the bank as well for the prospective employers. Obviously, they were excited about that. So we didn't expect that people were going to vet their job applicants on Bandit Tracker. That wasn't our mission. It was to identify suspects. And that kind of gets into our next topic, analytics. Why are people coming to the website? I love this quote. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess. And that's never been more true than on Bandit Tracker. We found some really interesting things for our analytics, obviously Google Analytics. We had visitors from all seven continents, even Antarctica, which is not important at all to bank robberies, but it was kind of cool to know there's internet access in Antarctica. So I'm looking forward to the word camp Antarctica. And if I can get a direct flight from San Antoni, I'll speak. Not likely to happen, but we can try. But we found some other things. And I don't know if you guys have noticed, you have the question mark S equals, and then a term in a URL on your content. It's a term that's been searched on the website. And people searched everything on Bandit. They searched location names, they searched bank names. They typed people's names, a lot of people's names. And early on, I was interested in people doing searches. And really, there were so many names searched, I wanted to see names that were searched multiple times. And I found one. I said, hey, OK, why did this person search this name? And then when I looked at the user session, actually typed two other names in his searches. OK, well, and how did he get there? So we looked at the source. It was Google. Great, we could get a keyword too. So here we typed keyword, Fort Worth Crimes Stoppers March 2000. So now we have a place, a location, and names tied specifically to that. Excuse me. The location, actually, of this visitor was Mexico City, Mexico. So here's somebody from more than 1,000 miles away in a different country concerned about a specific crime event in Fort Worth in March of 2000. And obviously, I forwarded this information to the bank robbery coordinator there. That's what we in the FBI like to call a clue. So again, this was early on. It actually got a little more formalized later. And then I started receiving things like this from the FBI, a subpoena to testify before grand jury, just to have a more official way of supplying this information. They asked for the same things. In this case, they wanted everything related to the reckless robber or reckless bandit. And they wanted to know anything that was searched, the visitor's time and location, all the data that we could provide to them about that. Unfortunately, doing things this way, about the time I received this request, the reckless robber got a little too reckless and was killed in a shootout. Obviously, we would have preferred him emailing us saying, hey, can you take my wanted active poster off of the bandit tracker site? But again, he was a little reckless. Next thing I want to talk about, social sharing. Everything you post on social media impacts your personal brand. How do you want to be known? Early on again, it's 2007. Twitter had 1,000 users. I think Facebook had 12 million users. So not where it is today. So we started off with RSS feed burner. We could get you email updates. We did add Twitter, Facebook, and other feeds as we moved forward. Now, something that the FBI does to help brand the suspects and make it easier to share is they come up with nicknames or monocurs for any bank robber that's robbed three or more banks. In this case, it was the earlobe bandit. The earlobe bandit, they called him that because he wore the large gauge earrings in his ears when he was robbing banks. And he was arrested as a part of social sharing, as you'll see here. It wasn't this bank surveillance picture that led police to 19-year-old Anthony Blue. It was his own mother. It's very difficult for a mother to do what his mother did and actually turn in her own child. But she knows that this was the right thing to do. A family member alerted Blue's mom that he was on the website bandittracker.com. After seeing these pictures of the earlobe bandit, that's when she decided to call the FBI. We did talk to Anthony's mom who lives here in Garland and she didn't want to be on camera. But she did say that she does not regret her decision because it came down to doing what was right or wrong. But this is something she will live with for the rest of her life. He is not at all upset with his mother for doing this. He applauds what she did. He knows that she did the right thing and he stands by his mother 100% for her decision. Blue pled guilty Tuesday morning for robbing three banks in Garland, Rockwall, and Quinlan last June and July, stealing nearly $9,000. From the start, Anthony's really remorseful about what he did. Even the notes that he gave the tellers all said, I'm so sorry that I'm doing this. Blue's lawyer says he turned to crime to pay off his debts. Temi Mutasa, NBC. Thanks, mom. All right. Actually, I was watching this with my kids this week and my daughter said, it was probably a sister because that's a sister's job.  So as you can see, we had images of Anthony. You can't really tell that he has the gauge earrings in most of the images. And that kind of leads into what we want to talk about next. And that's getting quality media on the site. Quality is never an accident. It's always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of alternatives. We didn't want other victims to be in images. We didn't want tellers. We didn't want customers of the bank to be in images. And we were trying to find good images, obviously.  As you can see from the images here, first image, we have kind of a grainy magnetic tape that's been recorded over probably dozens of times. We had artist sketches. In fact, they called me from this bank and they said, yeah, we want to add this suspect to Bandit Tracker, but the cameras at the bank were out. I'm like, thanks for calling. How can I help you? And then obviously this last one was a digitized zoomed in version as well. Now, these suspects here, or this suspect, this was the ZZ Top Bandit. And this was his second career in bank robbery. He went from 2003 to 2013, dozens of banks, millions of dollars. It's his second career in bank robbery. He was arrested actually in served time in 1986 for bank robberies as well. But I'll get more into how he was arrested a little bit later. This to me was probably one of the most embarrassing situations I've ever been in. I was actually at a conference like this and pointed out as kind of the creator of the Bandit Tracker sites. And then the FBI went on to talk about this SIT rep or informational situation report from the FBI. And what it said was, recent intelligence derived from admitted bank robber revealed that he targeted banks in New Jersey based on information contained from the Bandit Tracker Northeast website. The website posts information about bank robberies in New York, New Jersey to include details. Suspect, bank name, method of operation. The bank robber admitted that he used the information contained on the site to research banks that had been previously robbed. He also viewed surveillance photos posted on the website. So obviously he went to the website. The suspect's not captured. It's a bad image. That's the bank I want to go rob. He was ultimately caught but I was in my seat sinking down during the conference like don't look at me. My intention was not to be an accomplice. There was another similar suspect that I heard did similar things. In fact, this suspect actually would plant weapons and things in two years in advance of his crime and go back and execute. And as you can see, it's actually a pretty good image. This is, we wish all banks had these cameras. But he's wearing the dust mask. He's wearing the protective goggles. And he's wearing the construction helmet. In which you can't tell, this is actually Azul, Texas here. The hair coming out of the construction helmet that is not his hair.  So this suspect actually came to be known as Israel Keys, arsonist, burglar, serial killer who fancied himself a bank robber. So this photo blogging is kind of serious stuff at times. Obviously, he actually committed suicide in jail a few months after he was arrested. Actually, and he was arrested in Texas for a murder of a young lady in Alaska. But 11, at least 11 people we know of that he killed, some of which aren't identified, but he only considered Americans people. So we think there's other victims in Mexico and or Canada that we'll never know about. Let's talk about scalability.  I'm kind of proof of that. We had a few successful launches in a number of regions after the first Texas bank robbery site we set up. And I thought we were doing good. We were cashing everything right, all was well, and then this happened. These are the pictures the FBI wants you to see. Faces of the people responsible for some of the 88 bank robberies in the Chicago area so far this year. Today the Bureau launches a new website, bandittrackershicago.com, to get these security camera pictures in front of the public as soon as possible. The faster we can put these photographs on the internet or out into the public sphere, the more people we have looking for these bank robbers, the better chance we have of solving these crimes and the better chance we get dangerous people off the street. While the FBI isn't seeing an increase in bank robberies, it is seeing more and more of the violent takeover style of robbery, like the one Tuesday in Calumet City. The expectations are very high as far as what the results are gonna be here. It will be almost as if you're adding more officers in regards to bank robberies. And the FBI needs all the help can get. Since 2001, the number of agents assigned to bank robberies is down 40%. And the FBI's solutions rate is down two, from 80% in the 1980s to 50% now. Bandit tracker is being run in conjunction with Texas based security firm Electronic Tracking Systems. For whatever reason, FBI headquarters has not released control of our external website to our office. So by the time we actually tried to get something up on our external website, it has to go to FBI headquarters. They have to put it in the right format. They have to place it on the website. And by that time, it's usually too late. This is instantaneous. The bandit tracker sites are active in a number of cities, including Little Rock, Arkansas, where they are quickly seeing results. And within two weeks, they had one of this violent group who was committing bank robberies there in custody, out of a lead from that website. A record Chicago hopes to be at FBI headquarters. Charlie Vaughn-Chahusky, NBC 5 News. So the Chicago FBI announced a big press release in Chicago. And this was 2009. 2009, I don't know if you remember, Rod Blagojevic was in the news. So the media said, oh, the FBI's doing a press release. They showed up in droves with cameras rolling. They get there and the FBI says, okay, we've got this new website coming up. The media hit early. I was actually at the kids' school, picking them up.  I said, well, let me check the caching real quick and the caching was set right. And no, you made it worse. We're gonna turn the website off. I said, don't turn the website off. The FBI's doing a big press release today. These guys have guns. Come on. They turn the website off. The next three days, I spent either, on the phone with the FBI explaining why the website went down or with companies saying, hey, can you handle big burst of traffic on the website, on a website. The agent that I worked with there, the bank robbery coordinator in Chicago, this was his feedback. The biggest thing we screwed up on was the site wasn't fully ready for the public's reaction once we went live. The site crashed twice due to visitors flooding the site. We received phone calls from the local media who were ticked off that they couldn't access the site. That really angered me. Ouch. So then the news media, the next day it was, traffic shuts down new FBI website. So that's, yeah. Not where you wanna be. I did find a good host. And I know everybody's heard it. We talk about finding a good host partner. It's critical if you want to prevent things like angering people with guns. But we did find a good host and then two years later, this was the result. This is one other reason that FBI officials say bank robberies may be down. A two year old website called BanditTrackerChicago.com. It is a group effort by federal and local law enforcement that allows bank robbery information to be seen much faster by the public and allows internet users to view bank photos, details of holdups and descriptions of the bandits along with a map that pinpoints where banks have been held up. Tonight an FBI spokesman credits tips from the website to the capture of some bank robbers along with work by the federal violent crimes task force. So we hope lower crime. Within two years the crime, the bank robbery rate in Chicago was lower. The bank robbery coordinator there, this was his feedback since then. I live each sleep bandit tracker. We've had it since May 2009. Love it. It is the hub for bank robbery information of Chicago in Chicago. So again, make sure that your host provider is a partner. Make them love the sites. Don't anger the clients. Next thing I wanted to talk about today was innovations. For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate. In our case the human interaction was often dangerous. The conflict obviously very real in bank robberies. But I've got actually a special agent in charge, Casey, talking about one case we had in Dallas that led to a lot of innovations. When I talked to Mr. Casey in preparation for this interview, he said, you know, people don't, a lot of people don't understand. They think of the FBI as investigating corruption and things like that. But in the scarecrow bandit case, you said, I actually feel like we helped save a lot of lives. Tell me about that. Oh, absolutely. I'm convinced that whether it was the life of a responding police officer, one of these bank robberies or citizen or bank employee or an FBI agent conducting the investigation, this was really a life and death situation. They had robbed 21 banks across the Metroplex. They were what we call takeover bank robbers. They go into the bank and they take the place over with weapons, get behind counters often, get in the vault often. So very, very dangerous crew. We saw a pattern of the use of long weapons. We suspected they were wearing bulletproof vests, which turned out to be true. Signaling, lookouts, switchcars, the whole deal. So the scarecrow bandits in North Texas were, they robbed over 20 banks, very dangerous group. As Special Agent Charge Casey said, they were wearing bulletproof vests. They had very weaponized, very dangerous violent group.  Actually, through their investigation, they found out that they actually left all of their weapons and bulletproof vests in the trunk of the car till they got to the bank, which actually kept people alive at the end. But for my part, it's like, what can I do to help capture these scarecrow bandits? What can I do on the website? So I kind of made an enhanced page. It was just scarecrow bandits and we put a gallery. Actually, this was at a press conference where they'd blown up a full-sized page of the website that Zach Casey is walking past. But I wanted to do more. I wanted to map all of the bank robbery locations that they had gotten into. Went to the WordPress repository. I didn't really find a plugin that worked for me. So I came up with one and I released it. The Google Maps Geocoder. For those of y'all that may have used it, I apologize for the people that are still using it. Stop. It doesn't work anymore. The feedback from the FBI at that time was great. Great job with the scarecrow banded page. Some of the best info on the scarecrow is coming from people viewing the site. Amazing how a crackhead can get on the internet, but $90,000 reward is very motivating. Yes, it is. And at the same time, I was making these changes. The FBI was doing some innovations of their own. Well, deal, so we were very concerned about that. And as a matter of fact, when we developed them as suspects toward the end, I thought the situation was so dangerous that I asked the director of the FBI for authorization from the attorney general, which was granted, to wiretap a cellular telephone that we thought was being used by one of the suspects without going to a judge, known as an emergency wiretap authorization. Not many of those done. So someone researching this case actually told me this was the first case of the FBI wiretapping a phone without a warrant. And I don't know that that's true. I think this is the first time they publicly admitted to a case of wiretapping a phone without a warrant. But they did have some other things as well. FBI's pushing for cell phone tracking. So the next time you're venting about the NSA, tracking phone calls and things like that on your blog, I just remember in some obscure way, WordPress has kind of led to a vetting that, hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea. What happened? It works. I mean, Scarecrow Bandit hit with 354 year sentence for holdups. Another Scarecrow Bandit, 29 life sentences. As one article put it, Scarecrow Bandits could be free by early 24th century after a pills victory. So they are in prison for a long, long time. Another thing I found in actually getting ready for this presentation, they actually are coming out with the Scarecrow Bandits movie next year. A fictionalized account of how these bandits were arrested and some of the cell phone tracking and tapping came about. So just diving a little bit more into innovation. Innovation really is about the adjacent possible. When something's innovated, what can be innovated as a result of that? Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way. At my house, it was daddy hook up your laptop, we wanna watch Netflix. Okay, actually I went to find an Apple TV. It's like, daddy needs the laptop for work. The Apple TV was sold out. So I came across another device, the Roku. Okay, this will work. It's got Netflix, it's got Hulu, the kids will be happy and I can do my work. But going to their website, registering, I saw the developer section. Hey, look, you can stream images and you can stream video to a channel there. And so I set up a suspect TV channel. Awesome, this is great. And it was more academic for me, hey, can I do this? At that time I had about 5,000 email subscriber to the Bandit Tracker sites. And I said, heck, if half those people ever get Roku and set it up, I'll have 2,000 subscribers to this channel. And then I got my first AWS bill afterwards and I'm like, why is my bill so high? And there's like 66 million images that have been streamed from your AWS account. And today we have actually over 35,000 active subscribers to suspect TV, just watching images of bank robbers streaming by, yes, exactly. And the FBI's been innovating as well. The FBI and police have a new tool to help capture bank robbers. Diane Rines live in downtown Phoenix to tell us about it. Hi Diane. Hey, good morning, that's right, we're just a little south of you guys to ride off of 7th Street and Lincoln. And you can see behind me, they are unveiling a brand new billboard here. And this is not a billboard that is selling you anything. This is actually a billboard that is going to be showing a gallery of suspects as you drive by. These are pictures of people who may have robbed a bank and they were caught on camera and now they're gonna be on a big screen here as people drive by on 7th Street and Lincoln. And this is called the Bandit Tractor. They're actually hoping that people when they see some of these pictures might be able to identify one of these suspects. This is run by the FBI, but to clear channel, teaming up with the law enforcement to make this possible. They have donated these signs. Yeah, so when the FBI calls, sends an email and says, hey, can we put your website on a billboard? Yes, yes you can, please. But this was a way to expose, bank robbers in a big way, literally, get the images on digital billboards. A couple of other quick things. I'm running out of time, I know. The Bandit Shield Initiative special agent, Dennis May from the Austin FBI office, he actually started this. He was very keen in getting the Bandit Tracker sites rolled out, but started kind of a best practices for banks and credit unions to follow, to not get robbed and to help capture bank robbers should they get robbed. Fake websites. I told you about the ZZ Top Bandit earlier. He went 10 years, 2003 to 2013, before he was caught by a fake website about a single bank robbery location that he robbed from the Shortener State Bank, and they called it the shortenerbankrobbery.com. He went there, they got some information about him and were able to arrest him. And actually, we had talked about this five years earlier and the FBI headquarters says, no, you can't do that. So the shortener state bank, people actually helped with that. They could do it, we couldn't. Riot robbery investigators of Texas, again, special agent May, detective Sean Scott from the Roundtrip Rock Police Department. They wanted to build a network of detectives from law enforcement state, federal, local law enforcement, and they did that. We actually built a buddy press site, onward press again for the robbery investigators. So when we started all this, 2006, there were 7,000 bank robberies in the United States. Last year, about 4,000. So we've reduced bank robberies in the United States, and at least in part, due to word press by over 40%. So thank all of you for your involvement with word press, and are there any questions? Thank you, that was an amazing presentation. Could you back up to the fake websites I didn't catch, something about an innovation, was it like a, was it copying the concept? So the fake website, in 2008, actually, the special agent called me and he said, look, based on the profile of this bank robber, who was getting his very, I mean, he was going into banks and clearing out everything. He was clearing out the vaults, clearing out all the drawers, getting all the money, and within three minutes he was gone. So in 2008, he's talking to me, saying, hey, could we set up a website that would attract this guy to read about himself? And said, yeah, we could do that. We'll set up a word press site, whatever. We went to headquarters with it, and they shut the concept down. Schwertener State Bank is a small bank in Texas, and was, I think they were aggressive, and they were like, what can we do to help? And so they actually set up the website themselves, and just monitored the traffic going to the site, and they said, hey, here's this person keeps coming from Fort Worth, and they ended up finding the suspect that way. Hi, really great, very interesting talks. I thank you for that. My question is going back to the situation that you guys encountered, where you had the barrage of traffic coming in, and your host shut you down, and you had to move to something that would scale better. I'm just curious what solution have you guys gone to, and what are you using now to set up curiosity? At that time, actually, at the beginning, we went to, when we actually did that, we went to, at that time it was Moso, I believe that was what it was called. It was Rackspace was just kind of coming out with a cloud solution at that time that we started using, and it worked really well for us. I kind of don't want to throw anybody else under the bus, but it was very, very frustrating when they shut the site off. Anybody else? Banks don't care about bank robberies until it happens. They are losing so much money in fraud and things of that nature right now that bank robberies like in the back of their mind, right? They're trying to get in front of the credit card fraud.  Nobody does anymore, right? It's like, why are we gonna have this million dollars and marked bills set aside for bank robberies and we can have that in circulation? So I would say for the most part, there's an investment there that they have to want to make and they lose so little money really on bank robberies compared to fraud and other situations. This is nothing to them? No. It was privately funded. The question was if the site was funded by the government. No, the site was not funded by the government. There was, they actually had, for me for a while they had, I was set up as a confidential human source, which means they can give me money and I take it. But there was, there was a sponsors as well for the, depending on the region, there was corporate sponsors who were covering the cost of having it developed and again, memorandums of understanding of how it was gonna be used. But the FBI posted all the suspects. I mean, they'd go in the bank and you would see the suspects on Bandit Tracker before you'd see it in the FBI's crime index even. Have you ever had any issues or had to put processes in place to make sure that you're publishing accurate data, like not putting somebody else's name or stuff like that? There was a few cases where they've made changes but that's exactly why I let the FBI do all the publishing, so I was kind of out of the mix. You'll see on a lot of the images it shows, copyright of a certain bank or whatever because it is from a bank robbery, but the FBI gets obviously rights to use that information. Have there ever been any efforts like to tamper with the site or sort of hack it or any malicious actors and like, if so, or how do you protect against that? There really hasn't been to my surprise and honestly I was kind of always waiting for that to happen. I do nightly backups just in case but really we haven't had any malicious attacks or defacing it besides ever. Okay, thank you.


This is a paper which we are doing with Channing and the Christ. It's about the Madimensional Poverty Analysis for Tanzania trying to use the wealth indicators and apply the fiscal dominance approach. The sort of motivating is that we saw that it's well known that the high economic growth will lead to poverty reduction. This is what happened in most parts of the world. But for the most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania, that is not what happened. For example, Tanzania has achieved very impressive economic performance including economic growth which has been growing at 70% since 2000 to date. And yet poverty has not gone down that much significantly. And then people wonder what is happening, why are there mismatch between high economic growth at one hand and still the level of poverty that remains the same. And what we are trying to do here, we want to try to understand. Is that because of what the time in economic growth? Or is that because we wrongly measure the poverty comparing to the economic growth and the wealth indicators? And we are saying measuring poverty and the concern with other indicators is really a very complex phenomenon. And although the poverty monetary, the one dollar per day, give a very good insights of all things that have been happening over time, that in its own has got a number of challenges and shortcomings. One is when you use poverty or monetary measures, it's not consistent over time and across space. That's number one. There are many, many challenges in terms of the methodologies which I cannot go through here. But more than that, there is more to poverty than money. And therefore poverty by nature is the dimension. And we are saying although measuring poverty using monetary measures, the dimension has a problem yet that can give even much more a better and accurate assessment of what is poverty. And this is what we have been doing here. And we are saying that the main challenge of using many indicators measuring poverty is that it's quite difficult to do the so-called upgrading the welfare. So waiting is a problem. You have to put a lot of assumptions in the subjectivity, whether education is better than health or what is important than housing. And we are trying to use an approach which does not suffer much from that normative or subjectivity, which is the first order dominance, which in a simple way it says it's better to be better. It's better to be not deprived than being deprived. If you have two populations, let's say in 1990 and 2000 and you have welfare indicators, you are trying to see whether the welfare in urban is better than in rural area. If you can do some sort of reallocation within urban area and yet urban areas tended to be better than rural area, then you can confirm that people in urban are doing by far better than those in rural area. This is what we are trying to do. And we are doing so using Tanzania demographic health service. For this service, we are defining four population categories. The households, the children under five and the young women. And for each population categories, we are defining five welfare indicators. For instance, for the household, we are defining water, sanitation, shelter, education and information. And what you are saying here, and also is not deprived from water, if the source of drinking water is from pipe, a tap or a well protected well. And the household also is not deprived as far as sanitation is concerned if the household is deprived in terms of sanitation, if the household does not have a flush toilet or ventilated improved ventilator. Also we are saying that the household is deprived in terms of shelter if his or her house is constructed using the flow material which are either made of dead sand, dank or planks. And in terms of education, the household is deprived if the head of household has not finished primary education. And in terms of information, if that household has no radio or TV. So those are the five welfare indicators we are using for the household level or children. And we are starting by doing some simple, this is a six year, trying to see what is happening with these five welfare indicators. So if we compare from 1992 to 2010 for the international level, we are saying that with the exception of water, all other indicators have done very well. You see that in 1992 it is only 2% of the sanitation, improved sanitation. But by 2010 it is 11%. As far as shelter it was only 11, 18%. By 2010 it is around 30%. By education it is only 31%. But by 2010 a big improvement is 60%. So the same can be said in terms of information. What really has not been improving is as far the access to water. And that is very well known back in Tanzania. In the recent report show that by 2025 station will be even worse. That there is rapidly urbanization and the government is not that much sharp to supply more water. This is as far the five welfare indicators. And then we are trying to combine all these welfare and see what happened if somebody is depriving all welfare indicators. Or is not deprived in all other indicators. And we are seeing that many people really exit out of poverty. It was 34% in 1992, around 15%. The people were depriving all welfare indicators. Those who were not, they were doing good in all indicators. It was only 1.6 in 1992, it is now 6.31. And these results compare very well with what we use in terms of monetary measures. Because we see from 90 to 2007 poverty has gone down by only 5%. And here we are seeing those who have been doing very well is only a difference of 5%. So there are some more very close. But when you decompose further you find that there has been a huge improvement for the rural area in terms of those who exit from the severe poverty. But more improvement in terms of in the urban area for those who are doing good in all indicators. That is what we see. And what is summarized that poverty remain to be a rural phenomenon in Tanzania. Thank you very much.


2019 will be a big year for Lake of the Woods County, partially because the world plowing competition will be driving into the area that summer. Our own Cheryl Moore has details on the impact the contest will bring to northern Minnesota. When you think of Lake of the Woods County, you might think of walleye and fishing, but soon, the world will also know them as a top plowing destination. First off, what an honor for the United States to host this worldwide competition for Lake of the Woods to get it is just really, really humbling. In 2019, we would be hoping to bring anywhere from 30 to 30 two or three countries to the contest. The world plowing competition has been around since 1953. Last year was in Kenya, and this fall it will be in Germany. But come 2019, the competition will hit Lake of the Woods. This meeting was held in Badet to discuss logistics of the competition. It's very much about how the plowing looks when it's plowed, how straight it is, how little grass is showing or how little stubble is showing. While it is a competition, it also celebrates the art of plowing. There will be a weekend of festivities including a parade of tractors and a blessing of the plows. Lake of the Woods is looking at all of northern Minnesota to help pull everything off. We're working with neighboring communities on different activities and housing. You know, we have a ton of details to work out as far as, you know, making sure that we have proper security, making sure that medical is covered, making sure we have the right infrastructure. Lake of the Woods has taken this as an opportunity to share with the world what the county is all about. They're living by the World Plowing Organization's mantra, which is to let peace cultivate the land, to help aid in their planning. So many countries descending on the area is fantastic and so many different cultures, different languages, families arriving, friends arriving, and you know, meeting all those people, getting to know them, creating lasting friendships. You know, there's lifelong friendships have been created through plowing. Minnesota is such a welcoming state to bring them to the Midwest, to Minnesota, and just to roll the red carpet and to share some really great experiences with them is going to be a very special time. We have to go back to the World Association now, tell them what do we think? Is America ready for the, for the kindness next year? And there's no question America is ready and Lake of the Woods, Woods will be a really good experience. Reporting in Badet, Shawmar, Lakeland News. As you can imagine, a competition of this size will require many volunteers. So if you'd like to get involved, you can contact Joe Henry through email. We have that information with this story online. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation Final Expense Insurance Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we follow the adage of measure twice, cut once, put in a formal process in place like set the goals, develop a plan to reach them, put the plan in action, review the results and repeat the process periodically. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia. Final Expense Insurance, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This by Amy Fontanier updated August 30th, 2020 in prior presentations. We talked about insurance in general, moving on to the life insurance, keeping in mind the two major categories of life insurance, that being the term insurance or the pure insurance, the one that we always want to be comparing to and then the permanent insurance. Keeping that in mind, we're now looking at what is final expense insurance then? How does that fit into the picture? Well, final expense insurance is a whole life insurance policy which falls into the permanent insurance type of things as opposed to the term insurance type of thing that has a small death benefit and is easier to get approved for. Final expense insurance is called, quote, funeral insurance, or quote, burial insurance or simplified issue whole life insurance or modified whole life insurance goes by many names here. So all our marketing terms that the insurance industry uses to sell small whole life policies with a face value death benefit of $2,000 to $50,000 to deal with most likely the death expenses of my modest funeral, my modest $50,000 funeral. There is no difference between final expense insurance and normal life insurance other than the fact that the insurers sell smaller policies to make it more affordable says Richard P. Sabo, a financial planner and insurance fraud expert in Gipsonia, Pennsylvania. So he's basically saying that the other insurance is similar. If you have standard insurance, it's a similar type of setup. It's just that basically these types of insurances are sold at the smaller kind of chunks possibly for marketing purposes or for specific needs. So final expense insurance has a death benefit designed to cover expenses such as a funeral or memorial servicing, service embalming and casket or cremation. So obviously the goal here would be saying if you're going to die, you're gonna say, well, I don't want to basically leave the people that are gonna be taking care of the funeral costs with the bill on that. So possibly have some insurance related to that. Although you might just have normal insurance, which of course they could use normal life insurance, which they might be able to use in part for that purpose as well. So however, the beneficiaries can use the death benefit for any purpose from paying property taxes to taking a vacation.  So quote, they market the funeral expense insurance to people who are older and starting to think about their funeral costs and they make it look like they need to do it in order to take care of their families, end quote, says Sabo. So it's kind of sad that they might market basically a product which maybe someone doesn't really need because they might already have life insurance, but basically as a way to say you need to take care of kind of your family. So they're kind of playing on people's sympathies at that point in time to sell possibly something that may not be necessary if they're already covered by like normal kind of life insurance. So quote, some people already own existing life insurance policies that can go towards paying final expenses. So do they really need a new policy, end quote. Another situation where funeral expense insurance may be redundant is if someone has already prepaid their funeral expenses, he said. So in other words, if you've already kind of set up your funeral plans and prepaid them, then setting up the insurance along with it is kind of redundant. But you can see whenever there's just death involved, obviously you get the situation where you can kind of play on people's emotions and the guilt and whatnot of leaving people with a situation of handling debt and so on. So basically you wanna make sure that you're looking clearly at these kind of situations to see if you're actually covered in what your actual goals are and what tools you need to deal with them. And once again, you probably want to be talking to somebody, not just the insurance broker who's gonna be making a commission on whatever policy but possibly to say a third party like a financial planner or a CPA firm or a lawyer or something like that that you're paying just for their advice maybe. And then take that as a tool to then talk to the people that actually make money from you purchasing financial stuff like insurance for example. So how does final expense insurance work? Let's say you're retired, no longer have life insurance through your employer and don't have an individual life insurance policy. So you might have had life insurance through your employer that was only there during the time that you are working. So you don't have that at this point in time and you don't have an individual insurance policy. You also don't have a comfortable nest egg and are worried about the financial burden you'll leave on your spouse and or kids when you die. You contact a life insurance agent and start the application process which includes answering a few basic questions about your health. The death benefit is great but the premiums are not affordable because of your age and health. So clearly you're beyond the age of normally getting life insurance or getting a good rate on the life insurance because usually you're buying the life insurance in the middle of your life when you might have more debt and whatnot but it's less likely that you're going to die at that point in time, right? So unfortunately they don't issue policies with a death benefits that's small enough to make the insurance premiums fit your budget. At this point you might give up and assume you can't afford life insurance. Final expense life insurance is designed to solve this problem. The insurance companies build these policies to absorb the risk of some serious medical issues. End quote says Anthony Martin, CEO of Choice Mutual a financial expense life insurance brokerage company. Quote, this means that most seniors despite poor health can still secure a policy. So obviously one of the issues of getting a policy at that point later in life is that you might have health conditions and so on at that point in time. So there might be specific conditions then where the insurance tool is specialized for that particular situation. So smaller death benefits, the smaller death benefit of funeral expense insurance makes the premiums more affordable as Savo notes above and the policy is permanent. So no matter when you die, your heirs will get the death benefits you want them to have as long as you've paid your premiums. So it may not cover everything such as paying off a large mortgage but final expense insurance will at least help your loved ones pay the bills. Bills directly related to your death bills they'll have a harder time paying without your income or anything else.  So in other words, you would think that the policy might be designed for people in specific situations because obviously normal life insurance is often there for when you're in the middle of your life, possibly having more mortgages and whatnot and people that are growing up that are reliant upon you.  You have more assets than liabilities at that point in time. And if that's the case, then of course if you die then they could take, they could pay off with whatever assets or whatever arrangements you've actually set up given you have the money to set that up without the need for the insurance. So that might be one case. The other case might be that you have normal insurance already that's life insurance that covers any kind of expenses that you might need and therefore not need any other insurance, a redundant sort of insurance at that point which might be more expensive or not really necessary given the fact that you're gonna have to qualify for it at a point in your life when you're less likely to get a good rate for the amount of benefit that you're going to have.  You would think that might be a niche kind of area where it could be appropriate. So the table below highlights the pros and cons of final expense insurance. It also shows how the moniker is just a marking term. So the pros, policies are available to applicants with poor health. So that could be useful. The application process doesn't include a medical exam which could be good, only a questionnaire and prescription history at most. On many policy premiums never increase. This is true for many types of life insurance. So the insurer cannot decrease your policy's death benefit unless you borrow against the policy's cash value or request accelerated death benefits. Also true for other types of life insurance. Your errors can use the death benefit for any purpose. Again, a standard feature of life insurance. The death benefit is guaranteed as long as premiums are paid and you don't have a term policy, also a standard feature of any whole life insurance. The death benefit is not taxable, also a standard feature of life insurance. You can buy a policy with a death benefit of $50,000 or less and that's all some people need or can't afford. So what are the cons then? Some insurers put confusing or misleading information in their marking materials. So this is also true for other types of life insurance. So they might be saying, they might try to sell added insurance to people that aren't in that kind of niche situation and possibly plan people's emotions in that way which wouldn't be good using marketing tools. Some insurers provide incomplete information about these policies and their marketing materials. Also true for other types of life insurance because the policies have relatively low death benefits, you could lose money if you live a long time and pay more in premiums than your beneficiaries will receive in death benefits. So clearly if you buy some, the death benefits that have a fairly low payout at the point of death, then obviously you might be paying in more money in premiums than you would get from the death benefits.  Some people let their policies lapse which means their heirs won't receive the death benefits.  That's also true of other types of insurance. Some final expense insurers use marketing scare tactics based on high average funeral cost and plays a senior's fear of burdening their loved ones. So that would be the most kind of distasteful kind of thing that you could see obviously happening, people playing on their emotions and whatnot at that point at the point of death and whatnot. So you wanna make sure that you're thinking clearly about it when you make these kinds of decisions. Some insurers steer consumers without major health problems toward more restrictive and expensive policies even though they can qualify for better coverage. So clearly if you don't need that kind of insurance, if you can get other kind of normal life insurance coverage and that might be suitable. So it might be kind of coverage that you would need under particular situations and circumstances. Understanding final expense insurance, as with any type of life insurance, the premiums for final expense insurance depend on your age and health. Where allowed by state law, they may also depend on gender. So you would think gender, why is gender a factor? Because typically women might live longer and so therefore from a statistical kind of calculation you would wanna take that into consideration for the risk factors and so on. So the older and less healthy you are, the higher your rates will be for a given amount of insurance. Men tend to pay higher rates than women because of their shorter average life expectancy. Well that's not fair, I don't wanna pay more but it's just the calculations of the numbers. What if I say I'm a woman, so that's not good. Anyway, and depending on the insurer, you may qualify for a lower rate if you do not use tobacco. So it's always got that tobacco component in there. Some insurance companies issue final expense policies to people from birth to age 85. However, depending on the policy and the insurer, there may be a minimum age such as 45, a maximum age such as 85 at which you can apply. The largest death benefit you can select may be smaller the older you are obviously because you can imagine the death benefit that would be paid out by the insurance company might be smaller as you get older because you're more likely to die sooner. Policies might go up to $50,000 as long as you're younger than 55 but only go up to $25,000 once you turn 76. Some insurers offer the same maximum death benefit to all applicants regardless of age. As mentioned earlier, final expense insurance is a type of whole life insurance. Whole life policies are pretty easy to understand as far as permanent life insurance goes. Once you have your policy, the premiums cannot increase, the death benefit cannot decrease. Unlike a term policy, a whole life policy does not expire when you reach a certain age. So it just continues on which is obviously the point for a death policy to pay final expenses.  So when you apply for the final expense insurance, you will not have to deal with a medical exam or let the insurance company access your medical records which can make things easier. However, you will have to answer some health questions. So I hate when they ask me those self, gotta answer self whatever. Because of the health questions, not everyone will qualify for a policy with covers that begins on day one. Guaranteed issue, a special type of final expense insurance. Applicants with serious health issues will only qualify for a policy that does not require medical questions and exam or medical records. We talked about this a bit more in a prior presentation. So if you're in that particular situation, they can't get any insurance that basically would have the exams which might be a more expansive, meaning normal insurance might be a little bit more expansive even if you have conditions. So you might wanna look into that before but then you could go to the guaranteed issue. So these guaranteed issue policies always have a two to three year waiting period before benefits will be paid. So on those kind of policies, if they're not gonna give you an exam or something like that, then there's gonna have this waiting period that you've gotta live out that waiting period in order for the insurance to kind of kick in. So if the insured dies during the waiting period, the beneficiaries will not receive the policy's death benefit, they will however, receive a return on the premiums the policy holder paid plus interest usually at an annual rate of 10%. For more on guaranteed issued policies including how life insurance companies can afford to offer them, read our piece on guaranteed issued life insurance. So Investopedia has that, we talked about that in a prior presentation. Real life example of final expense insurance. Let's check out the example. Using Choice Mutual's online quote tool, we found that for a 68 year old man, this being Investopedia in California, a $25,000 final expense insurance policy with health questions and immediate coverage might cost $156 to $180 per month while one without questions, a guaranteed issue policy with a waiting period might cost $234 to $345 per month. Obviously more risk being taken on if they're not gonna be going through the exam process and that kind of stuff. Let's say that the man has congestive heart failure and only qualifies for a guaranteed issue policy with a two year waiting period. So now they're not gonna, he can't qualify otherwise because he's got this serious health condition so he has to do the one, the more expensive one that has the waiting period. So he's gotta live, you gotta make it through that two years, make it through the two years. If he buys the most expensive policy with a $345 monthly premium, after two years, he will have paid $8,280 in premiums. So two years of paying those premiums, $8,280. His beneficiaries will come out ahead if he dies between the first day of year three when the waiting period ends and the end of year six when the premium paid will be about equal to the death benefit. So then you gotta work out, he's gotta make it past the two years and then the death benefits minus the amount of premiums he paid in would be kind of the gain on that scenario, that kind of morbid scenario. So people who are healthy should not buy from a company that only sells guaranteed issue policies because they will pay an unnecessarily high price and coverage will not start on day one. So obviously if you're relatively healthy, you'd like to buy normal insurance through the whole medical questionnaire and exam if necessary, even if you have issues that might still be cheaper than buying a policy that doesn't have that stuff because the insurance company will take on more risk and therefore charge higher premiums. So they may not even want to buy a final expense policy according to Sabo. The caveat is that they have to be healthy enough to qualify. Sabo says that a 68 year old non-smoking male in California could get a $25,000 guaranteed universal life policy for about $88 per month. That's much better. This policy would expire at age 100 so it does provide less coverage than a whole life policy. So if you live past 100, then it's gonna be an issue, but that might be the case. I'm going to that 121 line. So you'll want to take your own health and budget into account when deciding whether a trade-off like this is worth it.  You can buy a policy that will cover you to age 121. There it is. I'm gonna live to 122 though. What about, that's the maximum protection or age 100 or to a younger age if you're trying to save money and don't need coverage after say age 90. It costs less than final expense insurance because it doesn't have a cash value component. So again, the term insurance, the pure insurance is often what you want to be comparing everything to because that's the cheaper kind of policy that doesn't have all this other kind of stuff that is going into it, although you have to designate the term that will be covered. When regular life insurance is better. So quote, if you can afford to buy a larger policy to meet the company minimum death benefits, then you are better off buying regular life insurance. So under those conditions, if you can afford it then the regular life might be the way to go. So Sabo Martin agrees. He says that the most insurance carriers require a minimum face value of $50,000 to $100,000 on traditional whole life or term insurance. So the higher face amounts will lead to higher premiums than some people can afford, even though the cost per $1,000 of coverage is less than that of a final expense policy. He said that many of his clients who could easily qualify for a traditional whole or term policy choose final expense because they only want $20,000 or $30,000 of coverage and claims on these policies are often paid faster than claims on larger policy. Sabo explains that many life insurance companies have raised their minimum death benefits to $50,000 because it is not worth the time to process the application and do all the underwriting for smaller policies. Quote, some companies specialize in final expense insurance and have created a system and underwriting to sell smaller policies and make smaller profits, but they are doing volume, end quote he says. So basically, you might have an insurance, he's saying that basically a normal insurance policy might be, this is my interpretation, a normal insurance policy might be better, but typically you're gonna have that higher death benefit, which is good, but the higher death benefit will possibly have higher premiums. So possibly you just want to have the premiums that are enough at death to pay for the funeral costs, which means you want the lower payouts because that will often result in cheaper premiums, which means you might still get these, you know, the final insurance in order to do that, but it's usually not worth it to the insurance company to have those small policies. However, if you are specializing in a company that sells those kinds of insurance policies, you can kind of streamline because all of your insurance is gonna be doing that one thing and you could possibly make the process of the registration faster to do so, but then you have to, it's a volume game, they gotta sell a lot of policies in that case. In between option, so we've got the graded benefit, final expense insurance, there's a third type of final expense insurance and that's the graded benefit policy with a partial waiting period. The type of policy might pay 30 to 40% of the death benefit if the insured dies during the first year the policy is enforced and it might pay 70% to 80% if the insured dies during the second year of the policy in is enforced. If the insured dies after these first two years, then the policy would pay 100% of the death benefit. So now you've got that two year kind of thing with the waiting period, but now it kind of phases in type of thing. So if you have health conditions that are only semi serious, you might qualify for a graded benefit policy instead of a guaranteed issue policy. Examples include entering remission from cancer in the last 24 months, having congestive heart failure or being treated for alcohol or drug abuse in the last 24 months. By comparison, a more serious condition such as a terminal illness, currently being in cancer treatment or having had heart surgery in the last 20 months would only allow you to qualify for a guaranteed issue policy where you'll have to wait at least two years for any coverage. No single insurer offers the best final expense insurance across the board says Martin. It's important to get offers from multiple insurance companies to find the ones that view your health most favorably. Those companies will likely offer you the best rates, trying to qualify for a policy that has health conditions is another way to keep rates down. So in other words, if you can qualify for insurance that has the health conditions, that's usually beneficial to the insurance company because it lowers risk by them knowing what those conditions are. And so that's usually the way to go if you can. Even if you have a less than ideal answer to a health question, it does not mean every company will reject you. Some may offer you immediate coverage with higher premiums and graded benefit policy or a guaranteed issue policy. Sometimes choosing the least expensive policy for which you qualify makes the most sense. However, if you are working with an experienced life insurance broker who sells policies from lots of insurance companies instead of an agent who only sells company insurance, your broker may be able to advise you on which companies are easiest to work with. Some provide better service to applicants and policy holders than others according to a Martin. That said, some people will need to choose the least expensive option, even if the customer service might not be very good.


Hello there. Welcome back to Understanding Design. This is the seventh and last session of our course. By now, we have had discussion on various aspects of design, and we've seen how design interacts with human activity in diverse ways. It is concerned with users in their context. It makes technology accessible to all. It impacts society and the environment, and is often a collaborative effort. But beyond this, there is something intrinsic to design, something that brings design into existence. That element is innovation. Innovation is the buzzword today, and everyone speaks of it as an absolute necessity for success. Just like design, there are many ways that innovation is defined and perceived. Every organization talks about bringing in innovation, not only to products they create, but processes by which they manufacture and sell their products. Creative people think of innovation as new ideas, as a way of making new connections between materials, as ways of using and reusing them, or new ways of communicating. Some talk of innovation as something new, a novelty, as something that never existed before, like a new technology, or a new application of an existing technology. Take the internet. The technology existed for many years in research organizations and labs. Way before, it became the workplace for anyone seeking some information and getting it instantly. I wanted to share with the world that thoughts, feelings, photos, work, you know, so many things. Today, we cannot even imagine the world without the www dot, can you? So now we come to our theme for the day, innovation by design. We need to understand innovation and how design enables innovation. We have with us, once again, my colleague, Professor Chakravarti, who will speak to us about this very crucial aspect. He works in the field of product innovation, so that's what he will talk about. Welcome back to understanding design. Could you elaborate on the meaning of the phrase innovation by design? I mean, isn't all of design innovation? Well, innovation by design is a practice of using design tools and methods to create user-centered novel products. At the core of this process is empathy for the user and innovative use of technology to arrive at solutions. The process is widely recognized as design thinking. The key elements are empathize, observe, ideate, prototype, and test, right? Yes. So would you say ideas are the most important after empathy? Yes, they are, but it is hardly enough to have an out-of-the-box idea unless we are able to give it a concrete shape. Anyone can come up with ideas. Many of these ideas may have the potential to radically change our surroundings. I read somewhere that every seed is a promise of a tree, but not all seeds become trees. They need to be nurtured. Exactly. For a product design idea to be successful, it has to be manufactured and distributed, and it has to reach the hands of a large number of users for its potential to be realized. Yes, of course. Innovation actually comes into its own when it makes an impact. When we see a large number of delighted users, we can say we have an innovation. The satisfaction of these many users is the ultimate test of innovation in design, isn't it? I'm sure that you appreciate how challenging innovation by designers and also why every idea that sounds good may not turn into an innovation. In order to translate ideas into tangible products, what the designer requires is a comprehensive understanding of the needs of the users and how they could be satisfied. Users, again, we've already spoken about different kinds of users. Now, let's talk about different kinds of innovation. Yes, there are many types of innovation. We could have radical innovations where a completely new technology replaces an old one. Like what we saw with the coming of solid-state audio players like the iPods that swept away all our old walkmans. Now we don't even need a separate music player. It's all on our phone and the music is available online. It could be innovation at different stages of product development. For instance, there could be innovation in manufacturing to reduce the cost of a product. A good example is the Tata Nano car where innovative manufacturing reduce the cost drastically to make an affordable small car. You'll find material on this in the resources tab of module seven on the cost platform. Another category of innovation could be in the distribution chain, a packaging idea of making miniature packs at low cost to meet several products accessible to consumers of lower income groups. Like the miniature sashes of shampoos, coffee, masala, chutneys. You know, we see them hanging all over local shops and roadside stalls. These reached all over the country even in areas that were not regarded as potential markets for such products. As the idea caught on, a number of other household products became available in affordable small packaging. Like the short recharge for your mobile phones. Yes, we can see how innovation traverses across various domains. We also have business process innovation in the popular supermarket chains in our cities and small towns. They make purchases in bulk and keep the prices low by taking support of special softwares. They sell in large quantities through special offers and promotions across different consumer segments, all of which result in brisk business. And if I may add, there is also user-centered innovation. Take for example, the gaming consoles that use motion sensors that detect human gestures. Such games compel players to respond with body movements in order to play. As they keep playing, the players develop greater skills and precision and that takes them through the next level. Sports, dance and fitness are other popular workout games. These benefit users in multiple ways because they let them stay fit even as they are playing indoors.


So obviously Kirsten Sinema is one of two U.S. senators obstructing her party's entire agenda, basically, and they're growing increasingly frustrated with her, because this is a negotiated process, right? So if she supports the reconciliation bill, then in turn progressive lawmakers support the bipartisan infrastructure proposal, which she wants passed. So she says, I don't support that price tag. So they ask her, what do you want to sacrifice? Well, what's your counter proposal? And she gives them nothing. It's a process and she's not participating in it. She's just obstructing. And she's even doing this to Joe Biden. So as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams explains, the president keeps begging her, tell us what you want. Put a proposal forward, Kana said in a CNN appearance Tuesday night. How do you compromise when Sinema is not saying anything? Earlier Tuesday, Sinema, who frequently says she won't negotiate through the press, met with President Joe Biden at the White House to discuss her position on the reconciliation package, which is known as the Build Back Better Act. But even during the closed door meeting with Biden, Sinema refused to clarify why she opposes the popular measure according to Politico. Previous reporting has suggested that Sinema, who's received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the pharmaceutical industry, opposes democratic drug price reforms and proposed tax hikes on the rich and large corporations, but she hasn't said so publicly. And part of this is on Biden as well. Basically, in order to push Manchin and Sinema in the correct direction, it's been progressives doing all of the work. It's been them saying, listen, if we don't get both of these bills in tandem, we're not going to support your bipartisan infrastructure proposal. But I mean, ultimately, this is Joe Biden's agenda, and he's done next to nothing to try to influence Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. He's rarely used his bully pulpit. He's only tacitly hinted at two individuals obstructing his party's agenda. So he definitely bears some of the blame as well. But getting back to Sinema, the reason why she's like this is very clear. The reason why she's not stating specifically why she doesn't support the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package is because she's doing exactly what her donors want her to do. She doesn't have any specific objections in particular that she's vocalizing because she's against all of it because there is going to be no negotiations for her. Her donors say jump, and she says, how high? And if you think I'm being hyperbolic, this article from The New York Times basically tells you everything that you need to know about Kirsten Sinema. So Jonathan Wiseman of The New York Times reports, as Sinema resists the budget bill, she is set to raise money from business groups that oppose it. Now, the article goes on to explain, under Ms. Sinema's political logo, the Influential National Association of Wholesaler Distributors and the Grocers Pack, along with lobbyists for roofers and electrical contractors and a small business group called the Escorp Political Action Committee, have invited association members to an undisclosed location on Tuesday afternoon for 45 minutes to write checks for between $1,000 and $5,800 payable to Sinema for Arizona. So this is why she's not negotiating with her colleagues because she's talking it over with her donors, she's negotiating with them, and they're very clearly telling her what to do, they're very clearly influencing her actions. Just to like put this into context for you, in a week where her party is trying to hash out the final details of this reconciliation proposal, she's not doing anything to help them. Behind closed doors, she's having a fundraiser with these groups who specifically oppose all of it. She doesn't care about what's in the bill. If her donors tell her that she can support it, then maybe she does, but if they say no, she's going to listen. And this is specifically the result of corruption because believe it or not, when she was running for Congress during the Democratic Party primary, she wasn't against lowering the cost of prescription drugs. But then she got elected, took a bunch of pharmaceutical money, contributions in the general election, and all of a sudden she had a change of heart. And if you don't believe me, the Daily Poster actually shared one of her old campaign ads saying before Kirsten Sinema threatened to blow up Democrats' Medicare drug negotiation bill, she demanded that everyone have access to the lowest cost prescriptions, watch this ridiculous ad from Sinema's 2018 Democratic primary campaign. And again, look at what she says here and juxtapose that with what she's doing right now. And now, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the pharmaceutical industry later, the lowest cost prescriptions and fix what's broken in the system, not go back to when Arizonans had no say about their health coverage. I'm Kirsten Sinema. I sponsored this message because every American deserves quality, affordable healthcare. And now hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the pharmaceutical industry later, she does a complete 180. And that ad wasn't even that good. Any Democrat who says that they support affordable healthcare, that's basically code for I support not single payer healthcare. Because when we're talking about healthcare, I mean, the goal should just be healthcare, not I support affordable healthcare. It should be I support healthcare for Americans, period, because what is and isn't affordable is subjective. But I mean, that's neither here nor there. You can see clearly that the rhetoric has changed. And it's because she has been corrupted.  She is blatantly corrupt, doing fundraisers that she knows the press is going to talk about. And she's doing this all in a week when her party is trying to hash out the details of this bill.  You can't do anything. You can't control me. My donors control me. She just is shameless. And it's gross. Now, I think that this attempt by Corey Bush, which we're going to show on many Hassan's program, it's going to fail because this person, she's been hollowed out. She has no soul. She has no compassion or decency. All she cares about is abusing her donors, but Corey Bush at least makes an attempt to appeal to her humanity. And even if I don't believe this is going to work and get through to her, I still think this is really important because this is exactly what people should be in Congress to do to represent the people who put them there. Take a look. You know, I think sometimes we forget, you know, we can forget our own struggles. We can forget where we came from. And I just want to say that every bit of struggle that she's ever faced in her life, that everything that she's ever seen or heard from a constituent, everything that she ran on to be able to end up in this in the seat that she's in to not forget that. Because let us not think that there is no way that we could ever be in that position again. And if it's not for you, caring enough about people who are not in your situation in your, your, your comfortable situation right now, that's what we have to look at. It is sickening to me that there are people who will just push aside those that need these deep housing investments. What we're talking about is saving lives right now. We need that prescription drug reform and to say, oh, you know what? You can continue to have to worry about whether you're going to pay your rent or get the life-saving medications that you need because you know what? My donors are the ones who have me here. You know, it's sickening, but I am speaking to her humanity and I hope she hears me. I hope she hears me.  They deserve for you to pay attention to them and put them first, public servant. You also serve the public humanity first. Yeah, I mean, that's well put. Unfortunately, Kirsten Sinema is going to see that and disregard it entirely. She doesn't care at all. In fact, I honestly think that she gets off on being unnecessarily cruel.  The entire Democratic Party of Arizona currently is against her because of what she's doing. Not only this, but her refusal to abolish the filibuster, which is why we have to pass bills using reconciliation in the first place. Because you're not going to get 10 votes from Republicans. So the only way they can get anything accomplished is through budget reconciliation. But even when it comes to that process, she's against it. So at this point in time, she's just an obstructionist Republican. She's not a Democrat. She's a Democrat in name only, but she's such a conservative that she doesn't belong in this party. And the only benefit to having her in the Democratic Party currently is so that way Democrats can say they have a majority. But if you're not actually going to help your party, why are you even there? In fact, why are you there? Period.  Why are they to hire you? Why are you in Congress? There are people with needs. There are people who are suffering currently, who are unhoused, who need their medication and you're blocking them. People may die as a result of your inaction and obstruction, but she doesn't care. And she's just probably behind closed doors laughing it up. It's just it's sick.  But I think that by now everyone knows that about Kirsten Sinema. She's truly shown her true colors and it's not pretty.


Bro, it took me years and years and years to get here. And if you think that you're gonna make more money than a doctor, a lawyer, and an engineer combined in your first year, it's impossible, bro. It's impossible.   You have to show up every single day to practice. You have to show up every day and then once you get really good at it, then you will get your opportunity.