- Obamacare Plans to Ration Healthcare and Enrich Big Providers
-
- After House passage in November, the Senate is now about
to pass a stealth scheme to ration care and enrich insurers, the drug cartel,
and large hospital chains, the way Washington always works.
-
- It plans market-based solutions, featuring cost-containing
measures, mostly affecting working Americans, the poor, elderly, and chronically
ill to make a dysfunctional system worse, under the guise of reform, the
most dangerous and deceptive word in the language to take cover from when
announced.
-
- Besides enriching providers, Obamacare will force millions
to pay more, get less, with millions still uninsured and left out. Employers
will be able to opt out of providing coverage, but since insurance for
most will be mandated, those without it will have to buy it or face hundreds
of dollars in penalties, whether or not they can afford it. Even with a
public option, looking less likely, insurers will get to skim off the cream,
charge what they wish, profit handsomely at low risk, and leave Washington
stuck with ones industry doesn't want. For providers, it's a win-win under
any version being considered.
-
- Most disturbing are planned Medicare cuts, around $400
- $570 billion, depending on which numbers are most accurate, and these
are for starters, a foot in the door if enacted, toward the long-term aim
ending Medicare, then Medicaid and Social Security because, at $106 trillion
in unfunded liabilities, budget constraints can't sustain them.
-
- The Congressional Budget Office's June 2009 "Long-Term
Budget Outlook" suggests a nation in decline, eventual hyperinflation,
possible bankruptcy because of a greater national debt than during the
Great Depression and near-surpassing WW II. The administration's solution
- end entitlements over 100 million Americans rely on, but it still may
be too little, too late given an overstretched budget, a weakening dollar,
and foreign investors looking for safer returns on their capital, so are
less willing to fund Washington's excesses.
-
- In Obama's America, the least advantaged will carry the
load, not privileged elites, but don't expect congressional opposition
to stop him or news reports to explain it.
-
- Obama's Permanent War Agenda
-
- As president, he heads an imperial enterprise presided
over by a war cabinet engaged in lawless militarism, aggressive wars, the
permanent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the planned conquest of
Eurasia, and world dominance overall, with a defense budget exceeding the
rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies.
-
- Yet, as a candidate, he opposed imperial militarism,
promised limited escalation only, and pledged to remove all combat troops
from Iraq by August 31, 2010. Then on February 27, he said:
-
- "As a candidate for president, I made clear my support
for a timeline of 16 months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging
to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure
that we preserve the gains we've made and protect our troops. Those consultations
are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat
brigades over the next 18 months. Let me say this as plainly as I can:
by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."
-
- Not so fast according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates
who told reporters that up to 50,000 will remain, and Obama himself then
suggested year end 2011 and maybe later - as always, depending on conditions
on the ground to provide an out for the real agenda, permanent occupation
with a reduced force if possible.
-
- He also promised two more brigades maximum for Afghanistan,
or 10,000 troops. Instead, he ordered 17,000 sent initially, then after
his December 1 announcement, the number reached five-fold his original
pledge, likely heading higher in the new year as political promises are
made to be broken.
-
- Besides the Afghan escalation, he's also destabilizing
Pakistan to balkanize both countries, weakening them to control the Caspian
Sea's oil and gas riches and their energy routes to secured ports for export.
The strategy includes encircling Russia, China, and Iran, obstructing their
solidarity and cohesion, defusing a feared geopolitical alliance, toppling
the Iranian government, perhaps attacking its nuclear sites, eliminating
Israel's main regional rival, and securing unchallenged Eurasian dominance
over this resource rich part of the world that includes China, Russia,
the Middle East, and Indian subcontinent.
-
- Like his predecessor, Obama also plans more - unchallengeable
global control, the strategy first revealed in the 1998 US Space Command
document, Vision for 2020. Later released in 2000 as DOD Joint Vision 2020,
it called for "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface
and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information
systems with enough overwhelming power to wage and win global wars against
any adversary, including preemptively with nuclear weapons.
-
- With other means as well, including propaganda, compromised
NGOs, Color Revolutions for regime change, expanding NATO eastward, and
various other ways for unchallengeable control - including over resource
rich parts of Africa like Nigeria, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo,
South Africa, and Somalia on its strategic Horn adjacent to the Red Sea,
Suez Canal, and vital commercial waterways. War rages there with America
backing Transitional Federal Government (TFG)/African Union forces to keep
the Islamist resistance from regaining power - the same forces under which
Somalia had its only stability in the last two decades or more.
-
- Closer to home, the June 28 Honduran coup deposing democratically
elected Manuel Zelaya was a coordinated State Department - Pentagon project
working closely with Honduran commanders and top opposition political figures
to establish a de facto dictatorship. The staged November 29 presidential
election was meant for closure with a new president/oligarch taking over
on January 27 as Zelaya can't succeed himself.
-
- According to Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Director
Larry Birns, the episode represents Obama's "First Latin American
Waterloo" as Washington's "solution" remains a "profound
problem for much of the rest of the hemisphere, as well as for long-term
ties with such major regional actors as Brazil, Argentina, and the Venezuelan-led
ALBA nations." They won't recognize an illegitimately elected leader,
so for now, call it stalemate with round two to come, involving a determined
popular resistance against fascist coup plotters they want removed and
out of power.
-
- Obama's overall Latin American policy is just as troubling.
It allocated half a billion dollars in military and related aid to Mexico's
right-wing Calderon regime and to militarize the nation's border. Plan
Colombia supplies more, billions for new weapons and technology on the
pretext of fighting drugs trafficking and protecting regional security.
Not so. It's about lawless imperialism and raw power, not drugs or other
subterfuge.
-
- During his late June White House visit, Colombian president
Alvaro Uribe gave the Pentagon access to seven new military bases, plus
nine others currently stationing US forces supplemented by the April 2008
Fourth Fleet reactivation after a 60 year hiatus.
-
- Meant to militarize the continent and intimidate Venezuela,
Ecuador, Bolivia, and other center-left governments, the move sparked outrage
and concern with Hugo Chavez saying:
-
- "They are surrounding Venezuela (and regional nations)
with military bases (and may) soon start sending thousands of North American
soldiers to Colombia. (They're) contract soldiers who are nothing more
than paramilitary mercenaries and assassins. Airplanes, radar, sophisticated
weapons, bombs - and, of course, they say it's to fight drug trafficking."
-
- Given past coup attempts against Chavez and the June
Honduran one, perhaps also to topple leaders not firmly in Washington's
camp to give America regional dominance, not diplomatically but with raw
power under a rogue leader like the others.
-
- Travesty in Oslo - Peace Prize to a War Criminal
-
- In choosing Obama, the Nobel Committee's October 9 announcement
followed its long, ignoble tradition by anointing another war criminal,
a man heading an imperial war machine, disdainful of peace, and currently
escalating America's global dominance agenda, potentially threatening planetary
survival.
-
- Yet, the corporate media defended the award and practically
gushed over Obama's acceptance speech. On December 10, New York Times writer
Jeff Zeleny highlighted his claim that "some wars (are) necessary
and just....in the fight against oppression."
-
- The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson said "President
Obama accepted the Nobel for peacemaking
- by delivering an eloquent, often grim treatise on the
nature and necessity of warfare (and) drew a clear distinction between
the world as we would like it to be and the world as it is."
-
- Unsurprising, the Nation magazine concurred on National
Public Radio's "All Things Considered" with editor Katrina vanden
Heuvel (a notorious Obama and Democrat party flack masquerading as a progressive)
praising the speech's "humility and grace."
-
- According to the magazine's political writer, John Nichols:
-
- "The president's frankness about the controversies
and concerns regarding the award of a Peace Prize to a man who just last
week ordered 30,000 US new troops into the Afghanistan quagmire, and the
humility he displayed....offered a glimpse of Obama at his best. As such,
the speech was important and, dare we say, hopeful."
-
- For what, more war?
-
- In Oslo, Obama's message was clear - expect permanent
wars in the wake of his Afghan escalation, widening it to Pakistan, threatening
Iran, destabilizing Eurasia, militarizing South America, claiming "all
responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear
mandate can play to keep the peace," then saying warriors should be
honored "not as makers of war, but as wagers of peace."
-
- "War is peace," Orwell's message and why the
award legitimizes wars and the leaders who wage them.
-
- Torture as Official US Policy Under Obama
-
- Given a year of betrayal and failure, continuing the
Bush torture policy is unsurprising despite Obama's January 22 Executive
Order (EO) directing the CIA to shut its secret prisons network and close
Guantanamo "as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from
the date of this order." That was then. This is now with a new president
as lawless and ruthless as George Bush, and in some respects much worse.
-
- Guantanamo is still open. "Black site" torture-prisons
remain active globally, and the practice continues virulently as official
US policy, despite international and US laws prohibiting it at all times,
under all conditions with no allowed exceptions.
-
- The Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 bans:
-
- -- "violence to life and person, in particular murder
of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
-
- -- carrying out sentences or executions "without
previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording
all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized
peoples;" and
-
- -- caring for the wounded and sick, including by an impartial
body like the ICRC "offer(ing) its services to the Parties to the
conflict."
-
- At least two US laws are also explicit - the 1996 War
Crimes Act and 1994 Torture Statute. The Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum calls torture a crime against humanity
- a "particularly odious (offense and) a serious attack on human dignity,"
(the result of) government policy (or) condoned by a government or a de
facto authority." For decades and under Obama, America is a serial
abuser in defiance of the law and civilized human behavior.
-
- Gutting Constitutional Cruel and Unusual Punishments
Prohibition and Due Process Protection
-
- The Fifth Amendment says no person shall "be deprived
of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Fourteenth
Amendment holds government subservient to the law and guarantees due process
respect for everyone's legal right to judicial fairness on matters relating
to life, liberty, or property. The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and
unusual punishments.
-
- No longer after the Supreme Court in mid-December, at
the behest of the Obama administration, upheld a lower court decision declaring
torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention and directing
future courts, by presidential order, to treat "suspected enemy combatant(s)"
as non-persons with no rights or judicial standing.
-
- Henceforth, torture-extracted confessions will be admissible
in civil or military commission trials, despite earlier High Courts ruling
them unconstitutional. In Brown v. Mississippi (February 1936), the Court
ruled that:
-
- "The rack and torture chamber may not be substituted
for the witness stand" in citing Fisher v. State (November 1926) stating:
-
- "Coercing the supposed state's criminals into confessions
and using such confessions so coerced from them against them in trials
has been the curse of all countries. It was the chief iniquity, the crowing
infamy of the Star Chamber (the notorious 15th - 17th century English court),
and the Inquisition, and other similar institutions. The Constitution recognized
the evils that lay behind these practices and prohibited them in this country....wherever
the court is clearly satisfied that such violations exist, it will refuse
to sanction such violation and will apply the corrective."
-
- The Constitution also affirms judicial fairness for everyone
under the law. No longer after the High Court acquiesced to Obama's request
to deny it to administration-declared non-persons.
-
- Obama's War on Labor
-
- On March 30, Obama told Detroit's auto giants: "We
cannot....must not (and) will not let (this) industry vanish," then
laid down a clear marker that labor, not business, must take the pain through:
-
- -- fewer jobs;
-
- -- less pay;
-
- -- reduced benefits, including lost pensions and free
retiree healthcare; and
-
- -- gutted work rules, including health and safety on-the-job
protections, on top of everything sacrificed in 2007 negotiations when
the UAW leadership sold out to management, then muscled the rank and file
to go along.
-
- The fate of the nation's auto workers is spreading nationally
as low-pay/few or no benefits jobs replace once solid manufacturing ones,
increasingly offshored to low-wage countries leaving fewer opportunities
for skilled workers at home.
-
- For decades, America's organized labor has been in decline,
especially since the 1980s, but the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) offers
hope. After failing in the 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses, March 2009
House and Senate bills aim to restore worker rights at a time they're seriously
eroded, given that 90% of employers oppose unions with government on their
side. If pressured to offer more, nearly half threaten to close plants
and other work sites. Many coerce, threaten and/or bribe workers to be
union-free, and around 30% illegally fire pro-union employees and get away
with it.
-
- EFCA offers hope by creating a level playing field. If
enacted, it will enforce fair collective bargaining and let workers freely
decide, by majority vote, whether or not to form a union, without fear
of employer retribution. It's the first pro-labor bill since the 1935 Wagner
Act let workers bargain on equal terms with management, and a reversal
of decades of lost rights.
-
- Thus far, House and Senate bills are stalled in committees,
and despite earlier administration support, getting the required 60 Senate
votes won't come without as much Obama pressure as he's applying on healthcare.
His silence shows non-support and the likelihood that EFCA is dead in 2009,
perhaps in the 111th Congress, and the 112th one to follow.
-
- Targeting Public Education for Destruction - Reinventing
No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
-
- Enacted in January 2002, NCLB claimed it would close
the achievement gap between inner city and rural schools and more affluent
ones by setting high reading and math standards, then testing to assure
they're achieved. However, the law's real aim is to commodify education,
end government's responsibility for it, and make it another business profit
center, thereby depriving millions of the nation's youths (mostly disadvantaged
ones) of the education they deserve.
-
- Reauthorizing NCLB stalled in Congress for good reason.
It's long on testing, school choice, and market-based reforms, but short
on real achievement. It's built around rote learning, standardized test,
requiring teachers to teach to the test, assessing results by Average Yearly
Progress (AYP) scores, and punishing failure by firing teachers and principals,
closing schools, and transforming them from public to charter or for-profit
ones.
-
- Obama plans to invent a failed policy, rename it, claim
NCLB's shortcomings are fixed, and have his education secretary, Arne Duncan,
do for the nation what he did to Chicago as CEO of the city's public schools
- deny their students real education as repeated underperformance results
showed, and no wonder. During his tenure and continuing today, privatization
schemes continue, inner city schools are being closed, remaining ones are
neglected and decrepit, classroom sizes are increasing, and children, as
a result, are sacrificed on the alter of marketplace triumphalism.
-
- Obama-ed promises more of the same:
-
- -- favoring charter or for-profit schools over public
ones;
-
- -- running them by marketplace rules;
-
- -- requiring state laws conform to federal ones, in violation
of the 10th Amendment mandating "powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved
to the States, or to the people;" education isn't mentioned in the
Constitution;
-
- -- linking teacher pay to student performance as determined
by standardized tests that measure rote memory, not real learning;
-
- -- putting Washington bureaucrats in charge of undermining
states, local school boards, and the right of parents to decide what's
best for their children;
-
- -- requiring federal mandates be followed to qualify
for funding;
-
- -- creating a two-tiered, class and income-based system
favoring affluent school districts over inner-city ones; and
-
- -- effectively destroying public education in Obama's
America.
-
- Promoting Dangerous Vaccines for a Non-Existent Threat
-
- For months, Obama officials and the complicit media hyped
a fake Swine Flu threat. Then on June 11, the WHO declared its highest
Level 6 influenza pandemic alert followed by its Director-General, Dr.
Margaret Chan, warning that H1N1 is "unstoppable" while admitting
that most cases are mild, no different than seasonal flu, and many people
recover unaided.
-
- Many experts, including the world's foremost authority,
Dr. Viera Scheibner, in her writings and on The Lendman News Hour, warn
that all vaccines are ineffective, dangerous, and often cause the illnesses
they're designed to prevent, and no wonder. Their harmful toxins include
mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, phenoxyethanol (antifreeze), and squalene
adjuvants known to weaken the human immune system, making it vulnerable
to serious auto-immune diseases like paralysis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis,
ALS, severe allergies, arthritis, encephalitis, and many others.
-
- Disturbing evidence suggests that Swine Flu vaccines
were bioengineered, are extremely dangerous, potentially lethal, and must
be avoided. So why did Obama declare a public health emergency in October,
and why are his officials stoking fear to encourage, then perhaps mandate,
that everyone take them - ones rushed to market without safety testing
that are already causing troublesome problems and reported deaths.
-
- It's no coincidence that a declared emergency coincides
with an economic crisis causing millions to lose jobs, homes, savings,
and better futures. Or that drug giants see a profit bonanza from the global
vaccination campaign. Perhaps a diabolical depopulation scheme also, based
on the flawed assumption that global economic sustainability depends on
reducing world numbers drastically because available resources are inadequate
for 6.8 billion people (by US Census Bureau estimates), and they're taking
up space anyway so get rid of them, including millions of Americans. Obama
may be heading a global cabal to do it.
-
- Denying Budget-Strapped States Financial Help
-
- At a time 48 of the 50 states have growing budget shortfalls,
and a new Pew Center on the States (PCS) report shows 10 in fiscal peril,
the Obama administration is denying needed aid, forcing them to freeze
hiring, cut jobs, lower wages, and impose austerity by gutting welfare
programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services
at a time they're most needed. Ahead expect extended hard times that will
impact the disadvantaged most while official Washington steps up imperial
madness and more handouts to the rich.
-
- Growing Poverty, Hunger, Homelessness, and Numbers of
Uninsured
-
- Under Obama, like his predecessor, America helps the
rich at the expense of all others, especially the least advantaged. The
data are alarming and growing worse:
-
- -- state budget deficits are in free fall due to the
worst decline in tax receipts in decades, and conditions in 2010 and 2011
may get worse;
-
- -- revised 2008 US census data show 47.4 million Americans
(one in six) below the poverty line - a conservative estimate compared
to others placing it much higher based on a more accurate definition of
poverty;
-
- -- USDA data show food stamp use at record highs at a
time 49 million Americans (again one in six) experience hunger, including
17 million children;
-
- -- up to three million experience homelessness, including
many low-wage earners and others at risk in case of an unexpected financial
burden like a missed paycheck or health emergency;
-
- -- a 2008 OECD report on inequality and poverty ranked
America highest among its 30 members, only ahead of Mexico and Turkey;
-
- -- a 2008 Working Poor Families Project study shows these
households keep getting poorer as the wealth disparity between rich and
all others widens;
-
- -- other reports show disturbing evidence of economic
duress affecting growing millions of Americans while officials and media
reports hail recession's end and credit Obama for achieving it - at a time
the true picture is dire for a growing majority;
-
- -- at least 50 million are uninsured; thousands more
join them weekly; and
-
- -- unemployment tops 20% with all excluded categories
included.
-
- Overall, it's America's dark side that politicians and
media pundits suppress at a time Wall Street is having a party, courtesy
of bailout billions, licensed fraud, manipulated markets, and Washington
turning a blind eye while millions struggle to get by and many more can't.
-
- Legislation to License Pollution, Fraud, and Unbridled
Speculation
-
- Introduced in May, HR 2454: American Clean Energy and
Security Act of 2009 (ACESA) lets corporate polluters reap huge windfall
profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel, yet does nothing
to address environmental issues. On June 26, the House narrowly passed
it, then sent it to the Senate where it remains stalled.
-
- Ahead of the House vote, Obama lied in hailing the "historic
proportions (of this) legislation that will open the door to a new, clean
energy economy." Polluters love it and with good reason. So does Wall
Street lobbying hard for passage.
-
- If enacted, it will increase speculation through a new
carbon trading derivatives bonanza with a potential market value of up
to $10 trillion annually according to some estimates - so watch out for
the mother of all bubbles Wall Street is lobbying hard to get passed.
-
- It's a scam that, according to Catherine Austin Fitts,
will "make the housing and derivatives bubbles look like target practice"
as well as license pollution and fraud. More evidence of official corruption
under a crime boss president, who promised UN Climate Change Conference
(COP 15 Copenhagen) participants that America plans substantial greenhouse
gas cuts over the next decade while concealing his real commitment and
that of the conference.
-
- Purportedly for a draft treaty replacing Kyoto's expiration
in 2012, it's a power grab, according to some, including former Margaret
Thatcher advisor, Lord Christopher Monckton. He warns of an unprecedented
transnational government scheme under an unnamed, unelected UN body, empowered
to intervene in the financial, economic, tax, and environmental affairs
of all signatories and thus violate their sovereignty. He warned Americans
that "unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your
democracy and your prosperity away forever."
-
- It will also further a global carbon trading derivatives
scheme huge enough to "make the housing and derivatives bubbles look
like target practice," and be another betrayal by a president promising
change.
-
- On December 7, AP reported that:
-
- "The Environmental Protection Agency took a major
step (today) toward regulating greenhouse gases, concluding that climate
changing pollution threatens the public health and the environment,"
and that carbon dioxide should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
-
- According to some, this ruling may let Obama bypass Congress,
and effectively pass the cap and trade bill without the consent of the
Senate. According to others, however, doing so would be a lawless impeachable
act. At issue is whether he'll risk it.
-
- The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement's (ACTA) Assault
on Net Neutrality, Consumer Privacy, and Civil Liberties
-
- Launched in October 2007, secret negotiations continue
for a new intellectual property enforcement treaty that if adopted will
subvert Net Neutrality, privacy, and personal freedom, and pressure all
nations to comply under universally binding top-down rules overriding national
sovereignty.
-
- What's been leaked so far includes:
-
- -- a proposed top-down enforcement regime requiring ISPs
to disclose customer information;
-
- -- mandating ISPs cooperate with right holders to remove
infringing content;
-
- -- new anti-camcording rules; and
-
- -- network-level filtering to enforce a three-strikes-and-you're-out
rule against consumers found three times to have infringed copyrighted
content; the penalty - Internet connection termination.
-
- These provisions way exceed current treaty obligations
by imposing binding copyright demands requiring that:
-
- -- ISPs police copyrighted material and deter unauthorized
storage and transmission of alleged infringed content;
-
- -- ISPs terminate Internet access of alleged repeat offenders
or be liable;
-
- -- alleged infringed material be removed;
-
- -- digital rights management (DRM) rules be enforced
relating to systems that identify, track, authorize, and restrict access
to digital media - purportedly to protect and enforce copyrights, patents,
trademarks, and other intellectual property forms; and
-
- -- global Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rules
be imposed relating to intellectual property that will effectively censor
online content, subvert free expression, invade privacy, deny due process,
and undermine innovation.
-
- If ACTA is adopted, consumer Internet communications
and content will be monitored, threatening privacy, civil liberties, and
a free and open Internet.
-
- Empowering Agribusiness Under the Guise of Enhancing
Food Safety
-
- In July, the House passed the 2009 Food Safety Enhancement
Act (FSEA) and referred it to the Senate, where the 2009 FDA Food Safety
Modernization Act (FSMA) is being considered. It's been passed out of committee
for debate by the full body, perhaps before year end or sometime in January.
-
- If enacted, it will empower agribusiness and adversely
impact small farmers and food producers. While omitting effective food
safety reforms, both House and Senate versions impose costly, burdensome
regulations that will put many small growers and producers out of business
for greater industry consolidation.
-
- Included will be new standards based only on a "reason
to believe" food may be adulterated, misbranded or otherwise in violation
of the new law. In other words, suspicion alone, without proof, will prohibit
food sales or recalls as well as force area quarantines if ordered, not
applicable to food giants because their officials staff the FDA, the enforcing
body they control. In addition, imprisonment and/or heavy fines may be
imposed for failing to register a facility, misbranding, not conducting
a hazard analysis, or failing to fill out the required paperwork - all
of which greatly burdens small operators without staff enough to comply.
-
- For effective food safety, measures should target agribusiness
and imports, not the nation's safe local food system. Obama's plan does
the opposite.
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