What is ObamaCare?

From Infowars


Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
April 10, 2012.


Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.

It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.

Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.

I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.
These events are Kafkaesque in themselves, but they are ever more so when one considers that these extraordinary violations of the US Constitution fail to be overturned in the Supreme Court. Apparently, American citizens lack standing to defend their civil liberties.

Yet, ObamaCare is before the US Supreme Court. The conservative majority might now utilize the “judicial activism” for which conservatives have criticized liberals. Hypocrisy should no longer surprise us. However, the fight over ObamaCare is not worth five cents.

It is extraordinary that “liberals,” “progressives,” “Democrats,” whatever they are, are defending a “health program” that uses public monies to pay private insurance companies and that raises the cost of health care.

Americans have been brainwashed that “a single-payer system is unaffordable” because it is “socialized medicine.” Despite this propaganda, accepted by many Americans, European countries manage to afford single-payer systems. Health care is not a stress, a trauma, an unaffordable expense for European populations. Among the Western Civilized Nations, only the richest, the US, has no universal health care.

The American health care system is the most expensive of all on earth. The reason for the extraordinary expense is the multiple of entities that must make profits. The private doctors must make profits. The private testing centers must make profits.The private specialists who receive the referrals from general practitioners must make profits. The private hospitals must make profits. The private insurance companies must make profits. The profits are a huge cost of health care.

On top of these profits come the costs of preventing and combatting fraud. Because private insurance companies resist paying and Medicare pays a small fraction of the medical charges, private health care providers charge as much as they possibly can, knowing that the payments will be cut to the bone. But a billing mistake of even $300 can bankrupt a health care provider from legal expenses defending him/her self from fraud accusations.

The beauty of a single-payer system is that it takes the profits out of the system. No one has to make profits. Wall Street cannot threaten insurance companies and private health care companies with being taken over because their profits are too low. No health-provider in a single-payer system has to worry about being displaced in a takeover organized by Wall Street because the profits are too low.

Because a single-payer system eliminates the profits that drive up the costs, Wall Street, Insurance companies, and “free market economists” hate a “socialized” medical care system. They prefer a socialized “private” health care system in which public monies flow into private insurance companies.

To make the costs as high as possible, conservatives and the private insurance companies devised ObamaCare. The bill was written by conservative think tanks and the private insurance companies. What the “socialistic” ObamaCare bill does is to take income taxes paid by citizens and use the taxes to subsidize the private medical premiums charges by private health care providers in order to provide “private” health care to US citizens who cannot afford it.

The extremely high costs of ObamaCare is not “socialistic medicine.” ObamaCare is high-cost privatized medicine that guarantees billions of dollars in profits to private insurance companies.

It remains to be seen whether such a ridiculous health care scheme, nowhere extant on earth except in Romney’s Massachusetts, will provide health care or just private profits.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Syria: NATO Genocide Approaches

From Land Destroyer Report.


UN Syria Report Co-Authored by Director of US Corporate Think-Tank
by Tony Cartalucci

November 30, 2011

Blatant lies told by alleged "human rights activists" led to ignominious NATO-sanctioned brutality and ultimately brought BP, Shell, Total-sponsored Petroleum Institute representative, Abdurrahim el-Keib, into power in Libya. Now, these same corporate-financier interests, through their same networks of propaganda, duplicity and deception, are laying the ground work for a repeat performance in Syria...

Read more...

Guest Post: Corporate America Really Really Cares About Its Employees (Really) - A Distributed Rant

Guess what corporate establishment? Everybody is learning to fking hate you and wait for you to be totally wiped off the earth...

From Zerohedge



Corporate America Really Really Cares About Its Employees (Really)

Scrape away the Human Resource Department rah-rah about "our mission" and how much your loyalty is "valued," and what's left? A paycheck and a sucking sound.

Let's state the heretical obvious: Corporate America, you suck. We could count the ways--subverting democracy via your lobbying and campaign contributions, your sabotage of competition via regulatory capture, and so on--but what really matters is how you treat your employees.

We know: you really really care about your employees. Really. The propaganda would be laughable if it wasn't so bald-faced. Do corporate managers really believe in the Big Lie theory, that the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell?

Here is reader C's experience of Corporate America's transition to wonderfulness and caring. An outlier or "what everybody inside knows"?

I occasionally read your postings linked to Jesse's Cafe Americain and I just want to confirm what you posted about corporate bankruptcy. (The Bankruptcy of Corporate America) I was disappointed with the Reagan administration which imo was the beginning of the takeover of our government by corporations and elites. Still, having a new family, I was fortunate to get an union job at the big telco and now work in the belly of the beast.

At first it was a great place to work, proud of our knowledge & expertise helping customers, but after 2-3 mergers, the overlords have increased our workload 100% (shutting down depts. in other parts of the country and giving us their work), reduced benefits, monitor everything and have rolled out methods & procedures that have totally dehumanized the workforce; we're just button pushers. Nearly everyone there is now miserable and it's a soul crushing, mind-numbing existence. Sorry that I have nothing good to say about it all, just hoping & praying for it get swept away and that my preparations to be free of the system work out ok.
Correspondent K.R. recently submitted this account, and some advice for young people:

In March 2000, I was working for a fairly large biotech company in pharmaceutical development, many of my co-workers were PhD's. When I got out of my car in the company parking lot one morning I saw many of my coworkers walking back the their cars. I asked "what's the matter?" What we discovered that morning is that if your swipe card that gave you access to the building did not work you were laid off. If your card worked and the door opened, you still had a job.

Best advice I could give a young smart person? Skip the corporate rat race altogether. Do not get car payments, mortgages and all the other debts that chain you to your debt enslavement. Enrich your life, work for yourself or for an important cause. Nobody should waste their life on corporate Amerika...


Read more.

Truth hurts Lies kill -.Real truth behind the phony wars by Dr. Dahlia wasfi.

From 9/11 Blogger.

Dr. Bob Bowman: "When you have fusion of industry and government you have fascism."

Dr. Bob Bowman puts it well at 14:10 in this video. He gets out of the left/right baloney and manages to state the real problem.

Competition: Paper vs Metal

This opinion below by Max Keiser is important because it reveals the tragic fallacy of a lot of mainstream republican and even some libertarian thinking in the U.S. The government can of course play a role in helping to spur competition as opposed to bailing out the giant corporations who control the world and caving in to their every whim.

From Max Keiser.


Competition is the ultimate regulator. In the USA and UK, the FSA, SEC, SFO – supposed regulators – are the playthings of the kleptocrats and so we don’t have any true competition. Free market competition produces more social justice than top-down government fiat for sure. But there is also a role for government in helping to spur competition. Not only can they enforce laws but they can also protect the public domain – in the example of the environment – the government should continue protecting as much of the public domain as possible (expanding parks, etc.). This is the domain bought and paid for by the public via wars, taxes and hard work. And corporations should be happy to compete in the areas open to them to compete. Obviously, in the case of energy, had the government simply enforced regulations and protected our common wealth and public domain, corporations would have been forced to compete for alternative means of generating energy and we’d already be well past fossil fuels and combustion engines by now. But by subsidizing grossly inefficient corporations like energy companies we get a situation in the U.S. like Nigeria: oil driven kleptocrats bent on eco-holocaust and proliferating poverty. Corporations that need more of the public domain to survive are by definition non-competitive, inefficient corporations that should be left for dead.

Here is the video which accompanied the opinion:

The Corporate Mugging of America

The politicians left and right are largely fooling themselves or at least fooling the population that cutting a few billion dollars here or there will solve our debt problem. It is a charade. As Nomi Prins says:

"Much of the debt problem, most of the debt problem, arguably all of the debt problem has happened because of this imparting of debt to bailout Wall Street, to subsidize the financial system, to go back and forth between the Fed who buys the debt, the treasury increases the debt, the Fed buys the debt, and has a sort of back and forth ball going between them which only decreases our value as a nation, our entire you know, book, our balance sheet as a nation, and the Fed will continue to do this. We know that when June comes along the fed is going to go from QE2 to QE whatever..."

Of course our biggest industry, which is the war and empire industry, the death industry, is also another state financed and furnished industry which ends up costing us more then it is worth. Corporations like GE are paying little or no tax, while the government baffoons try to soak out more money from unions, entitlement cuts, or with increased taxes for the middle class to pay for their bailing out of the Wall Street and corporate war machine. The status quo in America cannot continue successfully, but it will most likely continue, possibly leaving America, and perhaps the world in ruin.

The corporate entity, is it pathological? The answer is yes.

The text I quoted below is from the movie Human Resources now on Cryptogon.

From Cryptogon

The corporate entity, is it pathological? The answer is yes. Why? Because it drives toward profit regardless of the broader implications. It doesn't matter if your drive towards profit induces pain and suffering, generates black lung disease in a mine, or pollutes the environment, or literally destroys the society. It doesn't matter. You are forced by the nature of the social relations inside and among corporations in the market system to pursue, to accumulate, to pursue profits.

He could have added as well that the drive towards profit might also make you want to start wars or imprison more people, two of America's most important industries.

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Is Lost to Tax Loopholes

From Bloomberg.

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

Google’s income shifting -- involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” -- helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

US Doom: ‘The nation is killing itself’

From Russia Today.

“Keiser Report” No. 84: Defeat the NWO!

From Keiser Report.

The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations

From The Big Picture.


Every generation or so, a major secular shift takes place that shakes up the existing paradigm. It happens in industry, finance, literature, sports, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, travel, communication, etc.

I would like to discuss the paradigm shift that is occurring in politics.

For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.

The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power. The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.

This may not be a brilliant insight, but it is surely an overlooked one. It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing...

Some of Blackwater/Xe’s Corporate Clients: Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Deutsche Bank and Barclays

From Cryptogon and The Nation.


...One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm...

Supreme Court: Corporations Can Buy Judges

Another example of how America, bathing in the acid of corporate corruption, won't have a pretty future. Unless of course you like the idea of living in a corrupt third world police state.

From Washington's Blog

You've heard that a recent Supreme Court decision said that corporations can give unlimited funds to politicians.

But did you realize that it said that corporations can give unlimited money to judges?

As William K. Black - professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis - pointed out last week:

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allows businesses to make unlimited political contributions to judges and politicians. When judges are elected, the need for these contributions inherently turns judges into politicians. Sympathetic judges are corrupt businesses’ most valuable allies. Corporations and their senior officials can commit civil or criminal wrongs with impunity if their case is assigned to a friendly judge. The Robber Barons often had judges on their payrolls. Judges can serve a corporation as both a shield and a sword. They can declare statutes and regulations unlawful. They can issue favorable decisions when corporations sue their critics, which can intimidate, tie up, or even bankrupt the critics...

Democracy Game Over - The Nine Are Abroad

The recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to allow corporations to donate at will to political campaigns in the U.S. by drawing on First Amendment rights intended for individuals is obscene. I'm not surprised however since my view of the state of this country is grim indeed. It seems as if these black robed agents of doom have truly decided that corporations 'deserve' rights at a time when individual rights are being taken away. The evil generation is pushing, pushing pushing...at all sensible foundations.

I know I've read all the opinions about how this represents "freedom" for the corporations. Who the hell wants to give giant corporations the power to advertise at will against their political opponents? Are you all mad? Yes you are. That's my opinion. Should corporations have voting rights as well? Why not just do away with democracy altogether and let the corporations rule over us completely? The only silver lining I have read about is where some claim that this law will change little since corporations already spend as much as they want for their candidates in covert ways anyway.

Corporations are for-profit organizations by nature. They are NOT individuals. The blurring of this obvious distinction seems to be more then just an intellectual mistake, but rather (like the FBI manipulation of Bin Laden's face to look like a political opponent) an in your face act of bravado evil, and a smiling admission of having sunk to new grotesque depths.

Justice Kennedy writes of a democracy for corporations in his majority opinion:

"Favoritism and influence are not … avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.”

He is speaking of a democratic responsiveness towards corporations, not individuals. The 'rights' of the corporation are his concern. One commentator describes this in an article in this way:

"according to the Supreme Court, when corporations spend billions manipulating elections and obtain the desired results, this is “democracy.” This Orwellian characterization of democracy could have been dictated by the hedge funds, financial institutions, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations that routinely inject billions into American politics in return for favors from both corporate-controlled parties."

Even if you believe the skewed and bizarre notion that corporations should have democratic 'rights', (And I can see the idiots making this brilliant point over a latte in the Harvard Law School cafeteria) still there is nothing democratic in letting them spend as much as they want. Individuals are limited as to what they can spend, why shouldn't Coke Cola, JPMorgan or Chevron also have limits?

Eugene Volokh says in a New York Times opinion section that corporate money has always been in politics anyway, in the form of media corporations. Sure, but that is bad enough! The corporations already control the media. Now you want them piling money into non-stop advertising to grease the wheels even more for their bought and paid for politicians?

It must be noted, despite how much the corrupted, weak and misguided fake democrats have caved in to lobby pressure in a thousand and one ways, it is the old seething bile mouthed brontosaurus of right wing fake conservatives on the court who are bringing on this totalitarianism of corporations.

One Ring to Rule Them All.

BIG NEWS: EURO HEALTH CHIEF SAYS SWINE FLU A SCAM!

Perhaps there is yet hope for civilisation, at least some are calling a spade a spade and crawling out from under the disgusting web of dumb corporate manipulation and corruption we live under. Too bad we had to pour out so much money to these scumbags first before we realized what was going on. Maybe we can suck some of the money back through lawsuits. At least the truth is being revealed.

Read here how Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe has "accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisations's decision to declare a pandemic. This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring 'enormous gains', while countries, including the UK, 'squandered' their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease."

Notice how also in the article in disgusting pig like fashion the UK Department of Health says that "although the disease appears to be on the wane it cannot rule out a third surge and urges all those entitled to the jab to have it." Nothing here is also being said about the health risks of such a 'jab.' No mention is made that with every vaccine there is a small bit of thimerosal poison injected into you. Read here and also here what happened in Sweden for the sake of the drug companies profits.

-UPDATE: Read also this post concerning reports of nerve diseases after vaccine shot in Canada and elsewhere.-

Nonetheless, corporate newspapers like the New York TImes are still encouraging you to get the 'jab.' I guess that isn't too surprising since Raul E. Cesan former president of pharmaceutical corporation Schering-Plough sits on their board of directors. Schering-Plough just happens to be one of the makers of swine flu vaccines.

Still it seems like big news, if it gets through the corporate news net, that an important european health official is now calling swine flu a scam.

I would say it won't be long before the same is said about the body scanners, after we've squandered millions on those, and the wars we fight as well. It's my opinion we live in an age ruled by a corrupt generation who believes in self-serving greed as the most powerful force in the universe, and manipulation of the public, the road with which to get to their nirvana of wealth and power. That has always been around, but today the green slime of corruption is simply leaking from all corners as we descend deeper into economic misery and political tragedy.