Big Brother Insurance

Many are saying this government funded health insurance plan is the first step to nationalized medicine with a socialist bent. It’s not socialism at all, but Big Brother.

The Democratic House plan is to mandate that all citizens have medical insurance and the insurance companies are going to drop the pre-existing clause. This is what the insurance companies want, they’ve already said as much.

The Democratic House plan includes new taxes on health insurance benefits (ha what benefits), taxes on sugared drinks and alcohol. Not only will we continue to pay exorbitant prices for medical insurance, if this plan passes we’ll all be paying more of our taxes into the insurance companies. This is not socialism but oligarchy.

Thomas Jefferson believed one role of government was to prevent corporations from “taking the bread out of the mouth of labor who has earned it”.

It’s up to the government to ensure healthy competition amongst these insurance companies and to prevent them from turning medical insurance into industrialized mega-corporations; consolidation of too much market share leads to exploitation, which is why the price of health insurance is too high and prohibitive to so many.

Supposedly this government funded plan is intended to promote competition amongst insurance companies to bring down the cost of health insurance. Healthy competition keeps prices low. We don’t have healthy competition and that’s why our economy is so sick and insurance premiums too high.

Why is it that the only way we can get out from under the merciless control insurance companies have over us is by paying more?

In addition to the sinfully extreme cost of medical insurance Americans are forced to pay now, the American taxpayer will be forced to pay even higher premiums and drug costs. Why does an inhaler in Canada cost $12 a month while the very same inhaler costs $160 a month in the US?

The insurance companies are not going to lose money, no matter what plan the federal government creates. As a matter of fact, they’ll be making more money and we still won’t see equality in health insurance; and that‘s the plan of the corporate crooks, the minority who own our government, Big Brother, there‘s no socialism about it.

　

　

Health Care or Profit Care?

According to a report on the News Hour, health insurance companies came out and said if the federal government mandated all citizens have health insurance, they’d drop the pre-existing clause; a pre-existing clause is one where people with pre-existing conditions are unable to obtain health insurance or have to pay a higher premium for scant coverage.

Evidently we are not all equal when it comes to health insurance, only the healthy can have insurance, all those with sickness and injuries need not apply.

During his campaign the president said he was not in favor of mandating all citizens have health insurance, now the president is taking it under consideration. The change in the president’s stance could mean one of two things-first step to nationalizing health insurance is to make sure all have health insurance or the president may be leaning towards the insurance company’s desires.

We need to stop being hysterical and understand that today all political issues are approached on a purely emotional level.

In the earlier part of the twentieth century Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Freud was instrumental in the pioneering of mass marketing. During his study Bernays said if you understand the group mind it is possible to manipulate and control people’s desires without them even knowing it.

Demagoguery is controlling people politically through emotions, that’s what the capitalist crooks and their political puppets are doing and we don’t even know it.

You can bet the insurance companies approach all aspects of their business in a cold hearted calculating way and they don’t let emotions interfere with their decisions as to who lives and who dies.

Kings and heads of state used to come to the US for treatments and operations because we had the best in the world. What happened? The capitalist crooks have seized medicine for profits.

Taxing for Transportation

Opportunity is knocking, nationwide transportation reform is banging on the door.

With the decimation of the manufacturing industry and the desperate need to end our dependence on oil, an obvious choice would seem to be the complete overhaul of the nation’s mass public transportation system to be more efficient, convenient and create more lasting jobs.

Unfortunately this choice doesn’t seem as obvious to this administration pumping billions into GM who will eventually make small cars the public wants. Far cry from better public transportation.

Why don’t we don’t see more Democrats seizing the moment to bring this issue to the forefront? And why isn’t reduction on foreign oil more urgent to our politicians?

With Orwellian double speak we’re told we’re addicted to oil. Well excuse me for living and not to worry, just as soon as I cure my addiction to food, then I’ll move on to my oil addiction.

Modern day life depends on oil and they’ve made it that way. The USA put a man on the moon and created the Internet. Is there any reason why we can’t have and maintain better public transportation? Necessity being the mother of invention has been a cornerstone of development in our nation; whatever happened to it?

The answer to all these questions is that Big Oil is in control; this is why the crucial issue of oil dependence is not being addressed or mentioned.

FDR said you couldn’t do anything with the Oil companies and you couldn’t do anything without the Oil companies. During FDR’s time there were hundreds of oil companies, today they’ve been concentrated so that there are just seven or eight, and we can do even less with them.

As of the last week in May, the national price average for a gallon of gasoline is two dollars and fifty cents. This price has been rising as the summer has been approaching. The oil companies are putting more barrels of oil into reserve so there’s less oil for sale.

The only transportation reforms in Massachusetts our politicians can come up with are higher taxes on gasoline and toll roads. The governor wanted to install chips in our inspection stickers to track the number of miles we drive so they can send us a bill for our road usage.

Using Orwellian double speak, the politicians tell us higher gas tax means we’ll drive less and reduce our oil consumption. This places the blame and burden of oil dependence on the backs of ordinary American citizens and not at the door step of the capitalist crooks in Big Oil along with their paid off puppet politicians where it belongs.

Government Motors Keeps On Truckin'

The Treasury Department along with the auto task force is calling the shots at GM so that we the tax payer now own about seventy percent of “Government Motors“.

The leader of this auto task force Steve Rattner is a hedge fund operator whose firm, according to an article in the Nation magazine is “deep in a pension-fund bribery scandal“. Isn’t that nice, some of the larger bond holders in GM are pension-funds.

We’re giving GM billions, up to fifty billion by some estimates and how do they thank us? By shipping jobs to China and Mexico.

GM was going manufacture a small compact car in China and then ship them back to the US for sale. The UAW kept up the pressure to keep this from happening and now part of the bail out plan includes GM manufacturing a compact car here in America.

Interviewed on the Newshour Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked if he was going to pressure GM not to ship jobs to Mexico, which the Secretary refused to answer, stating it is important to remember that they’re restructuring GM to come out as a viable company in the future without government control. This is their story; government take over to restructure, creating a more viable company providing American jobs in the future, even the president’s press secretary recites this same line.

Why are these people calling the shots at GM? Why isn’t our government demanding GM keep jobs in this country? Why doesn’t the tax payer deserve a vote on how this bail out is handled or even allowed to occur for that matter.

It was Steve Rattner who fired Rick Wagoner the CEO of GM. If that doesn’t’ beat all, a corporate crook firing a corporate crook. As seventy percent owners in this new and improved GM corporation we should do some firing of our own. First lets fire whoever is responsible for the restructuring plan which included shipping jobs to China, South Korea, Japan and Mexico.

Corporate Crooks Win Again

As is always the case the issue with credit cards is once again skewed to make it look like it’s the little people who are wrong while the capitalist crooks receive none of the blame.

From the time of the Depression up until the ’80’s, we had laws against usury, (usury means setting people up to fail) and now, without these protections the credit card companies have been setting people up to fail for decades.

Nancy Trejos journalist for the Washington Post said “…in the 1980s when the usury laws were relaxed, when credit scores were created, and suddenly card companies that used to have this one-size-fits-all approach were able to tailor terms and conditions, you know, according to the person's risk. Credit card companies were raising interest rates on existing balances for any time, for any reason. They were also charging excessive fees, not giving consumers enough time to make their payments, and they were doing some aggressive marketing of credit cards to college students, to people under 21.”

The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act just singed by the president brings some measure of regulation to an industry which had been allowed to run rampant and make billions gouging Americans in excessive late fees and penalties.

With these new rules the credit card companies are threatening to raise interest rates on everyone, including all those who pay their bills on time! And they will be ‘forced’ to with hold credit because it’s too risky. Ha that’s a laugh, who owns these credit card companies? Banks, the same banks the taxpayer has bailed out for taking too much risk. Banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to name two.

Interest rates on credit cards may go to eighteen percent yet we the tax payers lent JPMorgan Chase 40 billion to buy Bear Stearns at three and a half percent interest. How does that work?

Just like we’re told the financial collapse was due to people who couldn’t pay their mortgages, banks issuing credit cards say credit will be tighter with higher rates due to the new laws.

This new legislation is only on the surface, because it doesn’t return us to the protections against usury, credit card companies will find other ways to bilk us out of billions. Subsequently, the capitalist crooks ruling this nation will continue to set us up then pull the rug out from underneath our feet, while our paid off politicians look the other way.

The Real Social Security Crisis

Social Security will be bankrupt in 2037.
FDR signed Social Security into law to protect anyone who earned a living against the poverty of old age and the loss of a job. Ever since, the Republicans have wanted to dismantle Social Security. Witness the failed Republican attempt under President George Bush to privatize Social Security (imagine if they had, all that money would be gone, stolen by the corporate crooks on Wall Street).

The whole idea behind the Republican façade of “less government“, is to bankrupt the federal government so that social programs like Social Security and Medicare become insolvent.

In 1981 President Reagan increased the Social Security tax to 12.4 percent split between employers and employees while decreasing taxes on the wealthy, the Republican idea of good governance. We were told the increased taxes were to create a nest egg for when the baby boomers retired. Now we’re being told as the boomers retire, it’ll create a financial tsunami.

The “crisis” facing Social Security is that presidents and Congress have “borrowed” from the trust fund leaving an IOU with a promise to pay back the money when Social Security benefits come due. Now that pay back time is arriving, the funds are not there for the ‘government’ to pay back its obligation to the tax payers.

All of this leaves the president in a difficult position. If he doesn’t gut benefits, he’ll be labeled a tax and spend liberal. If he does gut benefits, then he’s not standing up for the American citizen to whom that money rightly belongs.

The worrisome part is that we’re now hearing this administration talk of reforming “entitlement programs”. Will the president stand up for the American people or will he back down as he did on cutting farm subsidies to agri-business and eliminating off shore tax havens. As soon as the howls of opposition went up in DC and in the corporate world, the president backed down.

The corporate crooks on Wall Street stole peoples’ pensions and the government stole everyone’s’ Social Security money that we‘ve paid for with every single paycheck we‘ve ever earned. Why do you think the Founders of our country had a strong distrust of banks and governments? So much so that they revolted and it’s high time we do the same.

Wealth Transference

Last week the Senate defeated a mortgage measure to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages for thousands of Americans in foreclosure. The vote was 45-51 and according to an AP article the Democrats “lamented they were powerless, with the 45 votes falling short of the 60 to overcome procedural hurdles.”

No kidding they’re powerless, they’re powerless against taking our millions away from the lobbyists who pay them to vote their way; in favor of the capitalist crooks.

In years past a bankruptcy judge had the ability to modify a mortgage until the Republican controlled Congress under President Bush changed the bankruptcy rules (at the request of the credit card companies, and the banks who own them) to eliminate this rule.

Now with the Democrats in control they had the opportunity to change the rules back, and they refused. Not only do they refuse, they whine about being helpless because of the “procedural rules“. Well they’re not as helpless as those Americans facing foreclosure or the loss of a job. Just think, these whining Democrats have all that lobbying money to back them up while the rest of us are lucky enough to still be able to pay the mortgage. Just goes to show no matter which party is in control of Congress, the real control lies with whoever supplies the payoff to campaign funds in the millions. It’s all influence peddling dollars.

These banking lobbyists work for the same banks who for decades have made billions from us. The Washington Spectator’s editor Lou Dubose reflects on liberal House Democrat Henry B. Gonzalez who chaired the House Banking Committee from 1989 to 1995 who reminded Lou that “In 1988 a thirty-year fixed rate mortgage required the average family to pay for its house twice-once in principal and once in interest. He described mortgage lending as a vast transfer of wealth from the working class to the stocks-and-bonds class.”

It is this transference of wealth which has created the situation we’re in today, with the power and wealth in the hands of the few.

The president supported this bill but backed off when he faced stiff opposition from the banking lobby, which is further evidence that no matter the party in the White House, or Congress, Republican, or Democrat, they are all complicit in this transference of wealth to the capitalist crooks.