American Meltdown: 3AM or 8PM—Emergency vs Urgency

Posted on May 5, 2008 by Neil Garfield

Thomas Friedman, in Michael Moore -like frankness, doesn’t make a case, create a sound bite, or try to get elected. Here he simply tells the facts. 

If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. 

MOST OF ALL WE NEED TO STOP VOTING BECAUSE SOMEONE SCARED THE CRAP OUT OF US OR APPEALS TO BASE PREJUDICE. WHEN WE DO THAT WE ARE VOTING AGAINST OURSELVES, OUR CHILDREN AND OUR GRANDCHILDREN.

The emergency is that the fiscal fiasco of the last 7 years is frightening larger than any public figure has stated. Who will tell the people? The reason why you hear scattered comments about this period being comparable to the great depression is that we have dug a real hole for ourselves, so big, so deep, that we can’t see the bottom anymore.

  • Buffett and others are admitting it — economists are slyly predicting it without being accused of starting riots and panic. There is general agreement that the housing market could have another 20% correction from current levels.
  • 20-30 million American homes will have greater mortgage indebtedness than they are worth within 12-14 months.  The same people are mired in credit card debt carrying interest and fees that assures( or at least threatens) the virtual permanent enslavement of a significant portion the American people. Americans spend more money on debt service (interest payments and principal) than many countries do on EVERYTHING. 
  • We have locked ourselves into an energy policy that allows both domestic and foreign enemies of freedom almost unfettered control over our property, our food, our lives and our civil liberties. We have done this while having the technology and knowledge to reduce our oil and gas consumption to a negligible amount, forever abandoning foreign policy based upon foreign fuel supplies. 
  • Inflation is already five times higher than the manipulative government statistics reported and it is increasing. 
  • Joblessness is five time higher as well. 
  • The Iraq war will take at least 7 years — our longest war.
  • Our healthcare system is in the death grip of a few people who have turned our vulnerability into an excuse to rob the public treasury and the private finance of every individual.
  • 1929? — we already there and headed downward, burdened in more debt than any country or its people have acquired in the world history.
  • And in world opinion our stock of confidence has never been lower and is clearly declining every other day, as the dollar goes lower and lower and the world’s central bankers look for alternatives for their currency reserves — anything other than the plummeting dollar. They know we caused, allowed and promoted the worst outbreak of financial fraud in history and that the measurement of the scope of the fraud keeps growing every day by trillions of dollars.

So there is the emergency. The urgency is that there is hope.

The Mortgage Meltdown was the trigger, the wake-up call that the fundamentals of our policy, our society and our economy were all wrong. The people know it, with 4 out of people asserting we are headed in the wrong direction.

We emerged from the Great Depression and we can emerge from this too, perhaps a little battered and wiser but still standing tall. The way we can do that is through ruthless truth, a tolerance for ambiguity, transcending our fears, acceptance of failure, determination to succeed, and persistent pursuit of the core values expressed, although unevenly lived, in our Declaration of Independence and our U.S. Constitution. 

MOST OF ALL WE NEED TO STOP VOTING BECAUSE SOMEONE SCARED THE CRAP OUT OF US OR APPEALS TO BASE PREJUDICE. WHEN WE DO THAT WE ARE VOTING AGAINST OURSELVES, OUR CHILDREN AND OUR GRANDCHILDREN.

May 4, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Who Will Tell the People?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore … have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

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Reverse the Federal Deficit without Taxation— PRIVATE TAXATION MUST GO !!!

Posted on April 27, 2008 by Neil Garfield

Every one of the facts stated here are verifiable from multiple sources and are NOT disputed. The only policy question that is relevant is WHETHER WE PUT PEOPLE OR BIG BUSINESS FIRST in our priorities. The rest is obvious. HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES:

1. HEALTHCARE: (AT LEAST $1 TRILLION IN DIRECT AND HIDDEN FAT IN THE SYSTEM). The U.S. health care system is a wealth transfer scheme, which takes money from the pockets of ordinary citizens and puts it in the hands of a few people who do nothing to earn it. This is a PRIVATE TAX that only exists because the government has interfered on behalf of big business starting with Keiser Permanente.

          a. We spend, on average anywhere from 5 to 40 times what other countries spend on drugs for two reasons (1) we are prescribed too many drugs and (2) we pay much higher prices from the same companies that sell the same drugs in other countries.

Instead of the money going through the government to the insurers, pharmaceutical companies and medical service providers, the government mandates the money go directly to these cartels.

These companies have applied a substantial portion of their excess profits towards placement of “news stories”, advertisements and other propaganda that have convinced most Americans that the U.S. health care system, while faulty, is still better than other countries. THIS IS A LIE. Check it out using any statistic you like.

  • THE U.S. SPENDS 15.4% OF ITS GDP on heath care plus capital expenditures for equipment and buildings which brings it to around 18.5%. The amount of money spent is therefore $2,400,000,000 ($2.4 trillion dollars).
  • U.S. patients take 65% more medication than any other country on earth because only our system allows access and payment for INTERVENTION and allows nothing for for PREVENTION and MAINTENANCE. Most of these medications eventually increase the risk of death and/or other diseases. The Food and Drug Administration is staffed by and funded by Pharmaceutical company employees (either past, present or future). Access to PREVENTATIVE protocols is denied by the FDA, insurance company and the propaganda disseminated by the medical industrial cartel.
  • Not only is there sufficient funding already in the system to provide health care to every man, woman and child, along with social services that would reduce living stress and increase productivity, hope and innovation in the U.S. economy, there is actually about $400 billion dollars left over to contribute to other social programs (education, police, fire) that would make it possible for every man, woman and child at any age to be educated and trained to be competitive in the global economy. 
  • NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD SPENDS MORE THAN 11% OF ITS GDP ON HEALTHCARE. 
  • ALMOST EVERY OTHER WESTERN COUNTRY (INCLUDING THOSE WITH NATIONAL UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE) HAS MORE PHYSICIANS AND MORE HOSPITAL BEDS PER PATIENT THAN THE U.S.
  • THE DEATH RATE, INFANT MORTALITY RATE, “UNNECESSARY” DEATH RATE, AND EVEN HEIGHT IS WORSE IN THE U.S. THAN, ON AVERAGE, 40 OTHER MODERN WESTERN COUNTRIES. (we have lost three years of longevity in the last 50 years and we have lost one inch of height).
  • NO OTHER COUNTRY ALLOWS PRIVATE INSURANCE AS THE MIDDLE MAN BECAUSE INSURANCE AND MANAGED HEALTHCARE PLANS ADD NO VALUE.
  • EVERY OTHER COUNTRY EMPHASIZES PREVENTATIVE HEALTHCARE AND GIVES BONUSES TO HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS WHO IMPROVE THE HEALTH OF THEIR PATIENTS.
  • The only rational conclusion is that by deleting private insurance as the middle man in providing access to a public need (like education, police, public libraries and fire) and enabling a single payer to negotiate reasonable prices, the problem, and the deficit caused by healthcare spending would be eliminated. 

2. CREDIT AND DEBT: The U.S. credit and monetary system is a wealth transfer scheme, which takes money from the pockets of ordinary citizens and puts it in the hands of a few people who do nothing to earn it. This is a PRIVATE TAX that only exists because the government has interfered on behalf of big business starting with the credit card associations and companies that provide network access to credit imposing interest rates that have been known and understood for centuries to result in permanent debt.

It was once called USURY. Now it is called liquidity. The laws that made it illegal to charge rates of 35% on credit cards and 400% on payday advances were changed. So now it is still a crime under natural law but not under our legislative system. It’s government backed and therefore it is a PRIVATE TAX.

  • Government spending, government subsidies to big business, and government laws allowing big business, large unregulated, to charge exorbitant interest rates has resulted in unprecedented consumer and government debt — Federal, State, local and individual — requiring SOMEBODY (either us or our children, grandchildren and great children) to pay interest amounting currently to more than $3 trillion dollars per year plus the loss of social services and safety nets that have existed for more than 50 years. 
  • All of this debt has been funded by issuing U.S. currency equivalents that are now held in foreign investment vehicles, foreign exchange reserve accounts in central banks concentrated in the hands of China, South Korea and other countries whose commitment to the sovereignty and nationals security of the United States is best questionable.
  • At least $1 trillion of interest, fees and costs associated with excess interest and/or excess debt could be eliminated from the expenditures of U.S. spenders, producing substantial capital for improvements to infrastructure, jobs, increased revenues from income taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes,etc., without raising the rate of taxation on any of these sources of revenue.
  • The Mortgage Meltdown could be stopped by a commitment to keep people in their homes, preventing abandonment of homes that are not maintained. This would stop an ever-decreasing spiral of housing prices caused by REO homes coming onto the market at rates that demand could not possibly meet, reinstate the balance sheet of lenders and thus improve their capital position, and reinstate the balance sheet of investors who were tricked into buying junk securities which, with a little help and cooperation from business, government and people could be converted into ratable securities. 
  • Devaluation of the dollar and inflation caused by devaluation would be slowed, stopped or even reversed if the U..> showed its resolve to responsible economic policies and responsible monetary management and responsible regulation of “securitization” which is merely a unregulated method of increasing monetary supply despite declining demand for the U.S. dollar.
  • Reducing the debt service BY LAW to sustainable levels that would enable debtors to eliminate their debt. Banning advertisements that encourage consumers to buy goods and services they don’t need, or could wait to buy through savings, would convert a debt economy to a solid foundation of  savings economy. like many other countries in the world.
3. OIL, COAL and GAS: The average American family spends more than $800 per month in direct costs on fuel related services and probably another $600 per month in indirect costs associated with delivery and production. This is apart from Federal, State and local spending related to various social services and maintaining government facilities. In other words, we can safely say that at $15,000 per year comes out of the pocket of each taxpayer. This means we are spending $1.5 trillion in fuel costs plus the cost of vacation and business travel and sundry other matters.   OF THIS AMOUNT,WINDFALL PROFITS TO OIL COMPANIES AND OTHER MIDDLE MEN AMOUNTED LAST YEAR TO APPROXIMATELY $700 BILLION.
  • THAT OF COURSE IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD THE TECHNOLOGY FOR 40 YEARS TO CONVERT TO ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF ENERGY THAT ARE RENEWABLE AND LESS EXPENSIVE, AND WOULD NOT REQUIRE US TO MAINTAIN A FOREIGN MOLICY THAT MEDDLES IN THE AFFAIRS OF OTEHR COUNTRIES AND THUS LEADS TO PERIODIC WARS.
  • THE REAL SHAME ON US IS THAT MORE THAN 2 MILLION JOBS COULD HAVE BEEN CREATED IN PRODUCING AN MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE POWER GRID AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS. TESE HIGH PAYING JOBS WOULD AND COULD INCREASE THE WEALTH OF THE MIDDLE CALSS, INCREASE TAX REVENUES WITHOUT RAISING RATES, AND RESTORE U.S. LEADERSHIP IN INNOVATION AND RESEARCH. 
  1. If the Clinton years showed us anything, it was that by encouraging entrepreneurship, which produces 80% of our jobs the entire country is lifted. 
  2. Another thing Clinton proved is that by increasing the number of people in social services (police, fire etc) we increase employment, tax revenues and economic activity.
  3. The other thing Clinton proved unwittingly is that treaties like NAFTA are inherently unworkable because they are used by big business to side-step the advances in product safety, worker safety and benefits that America spent the better part of 100 years inventing and maintaining. 
  4. Thus we end up subsidizing slavery in other countries, and reducing the quality of products and services to American citizens. 
The money is already there in the “budget” when you include the PRIVATE TAXATION items. There are many more examples. If we can stop tripping over our ideological divides, the graft paid by big business and elect people who start with the premise “first do no harm”, the country could be thriving again. 

 

 

The New York Times

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April 27, 2008

3 Candidates With 3 Financial Plans, but One Deficit

By LARRY ROHTER and MICHAEL COOPER

The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates differ strikingly in their approaches to taxes and spending, but their fiscal plans have at least one thing in common: each could significantly swell the budget deficit and increase the national debt by trillions of dollars, according to tax and budget experts.

The reasons reflect the ideological leanings of the candidates, with Senator John McCain proposing tax cuts that go beyond President Bush’s and the Democrats advocating programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But for fiscal experts concerned with the deficit, both approaches are worrisome.

With the national debt soaring to $9.1 trillion from $5.6 trillion at the start of 2001, in part because of the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, a crucial question about the candidates to succeed him is “whether they are helping to fill the hole or make it deeper,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates deficit reduction. “With the proposals they have on the table, it looks to me like all three would make it deeper.”

Representatives of all three campaigns disputed such assessments, questioning the accounting methods analysts used to calculate the growing debt and saying they could enact their plans without making matters worse.

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

The centerpiece of Mr. McCain’s economic plan is a series of tax cuts that would largely benefit corporations and the wealthy. He is calling for cutting corporate taxes by $100 billion a year. Eliminating the alternative minimum tax, which was created to apply to wealthy taxpayers but now also affects some in the middle class, would reduce revenues by $60 billion annually. He also would double the exemption that can be claimed for dependents, which would cost the government $65 billion.

“High tax rates are driving many businesses and jobs overseas — and, of course, our foreign competitors wouldn’t mind if we kept it that way,” Mr. McCain said, laying out his economic plan this month in Pittsburgh. “We’re going to get rid of that drag on growth and job creation.”

On the expenditure side, Mr. McCain has called not only for continuing an open-ended deployment of troops in Iraq, but also for spending $15 billion annually to expand the Army and the Marine Corps and to improve health care for veterans, among other programs.

Mr. McCain’s advisers have said the new tax cuts would be paid for by eliminating earmarks and making large spending cuts, but they have not identified specifics. And they have spoken vaguely about making entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare less costly for the government. Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said the campaign had simply presented its vision of what the tax code should look like and noted that some of the proposals would be phased in.

“I think what they ought to do is remember that the proposals are going to engender economic growth, which is the best thing you can do for near-term budget improvement,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said, adding that Mr. McCain believed spending restraint was possible.

That vision for the tax code includes making permanent the Bush tax cuts, set to expire in 2010, which Mr. McCain once opposed in part because they were not accompanied by sufficient spending cuts.

“I voted against the tax cuts because of the disproportionate amount that went to the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. McCain said in 2004. “I would clearly support not extending these tax cuts in order to help address the deficit.”

In 2001 and 2003, Mr. Bush pushed through Congress tax cuts totaling nearly $2 trillion. The first set lowered income and estate taxes, and the second focused mostly on capital gains and dividends.

The McCain campaign does not figure the costs of extending the tax cuts into its deficit projections, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost an extra $2.2 trillion over the next decade.

When Mr. McCain outlined his tax cut plan, he backed away from his pledge to balance the budget during his first term, but said that he would do so by the end of his second term. And in an interview last Sunday on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Mr. McCain said he would push ahead with his tax cuts even if Congress did not approve his spending cuts.

Some conservative economists say that increased deficits in the short run are an acceptable tradeoff for tax cuts that they say will promote economic growth in the long run. And many liberal economists say that some of the Democratic spending proposals, like addressing the affordability of health care or improving education, are long-overdue investments that pay off handsomely even if they entail more red ink.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have acknowledged that their various new programs would be costly but have outlined how to pay for them. But some fiscal monitors say they may be relying on overly rosy projections of how much savings their proposals would actually yield.

Mrs. Clinton has calculated that her universal health care plan would cost about $110 billion a year, while Mr. Obama’s somewhat more modest proposal would cost up to $65 billion annually, his advisers say. Both candidates have also talked of new government incentives and investment to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy, which would cost about $15 billion a year.

The Democratic candidates have suggested that they could finance these and other programs by allowing parts of the Bush tax cuts to expire. That, however, ignores projections of the Congressional Budget Office, which has already assigned those savings to deficit reduction.

In other words, unlike Mr. McCain, both Democrats say they would revoke the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. “At a time of war and economic hardship, the last thing we need is a permanent tax cut for Americans who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them,” Mr. Obama said.

But they would retain those reductions meant to benefit poor and “middle-class” families, which they defined as the 97 percent or so of the population that lives on less than $250,000 a year, and they would count the estimated $50 billion generated by higher taxes on the wealthy as new revenue.

“Remember, you can only use this money once,” said Mr. Bixby of the Concord Coalition, “and with all the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire, that money is already scheduled to come into the Treasury. But on the campaign trail, this has become a source of new spending.”

Mrs. Clinton’s aides have been perhaps the most specific in explaining how they would offset the costs of their proposals, and her campaign speaks of moving toward balanced budgets. “We’re not going into debt for the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans,” Mrs. Clinton has said, “but instead we are taking care of the needs of our people at home.”

Regarding gas taxes, Mr. McCain has proposed a one-time “tax holiday” for the summer. Mrs. Clinton also calls for suspending it in a new advertisement in Indiana, while Mr. Obama says that is a “bad idea” but opposes any increase in the tax.

On the spending side, Mr. Obama has argued that ending the Iraq war is one way to pay for some of the new programs, including creating a national infrastructure investment bank and increasing the foreign aid budget. But such savings, which Mrs. Clinton does not count on, would not immediately make their way into the Treasury, and some experts say it is not clear whether they would be sufficient to finance all the programs Mr. Obama has enumerated.

Mr. Obama has talked of spending that money on a variety of initiatives whose costs amount to about one-third of the war’s estimated annual cost of $150 billion. “It is clear that there ought to be some distinction between a candidate who says a withdrawal should start immediately and a candidate who says let’s maintain the war at the highest level,” said Austan Goolsbee, Mr. Obama’s senior economic adviser.

The fiscal outlook has been made even murkier by the explicit “no new taxes for the middle class” pledge that both Democratic candidates made at their debate in Philadelphia this month, exempting taxpayers making $250,000 a year or less from new levies.

Hearing such a promise “makes you very sad,” said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center. “First of all, we don’t have enough revenue coming in to pay our bills.” In addition, he said, the notion that all the revenue that would be lost in a middle-class tax freeze can be made up by higher taxes on the wealthy “is not tenable.”

Filed under: alternative medicine, bubble, CDO, Chelation, CORRUPTION, credit unions, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, healthcare, inflation, interest rates, Investor, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, Mortgage, Obama, politics, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

Economic Meltdown and Moral Constipation = POLITICS and MSM

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Neil Garfield

I would give credit for the term “moral constipation” but I can’t remember where I heard it. I invite all who read this to give me the creator’s name so I can correct this blog and give him the attribution he deserves. 

It appears that we can all agree on one thing regardless of which candidate, party or ideology we subscribe to — The United States of America is on a path of moral bankruptcy, where ethical concerns and choices between right and wrong have been shoved off the table and instead convenience and self-aggrandizement is accepted by “we the people” with far more tolerance than is acceptable to me.

There is practically nothing so dear to me as my own opinion of my own intelligence. And yet I am dumfounded by the lack of outrage as corporate America and Government join hands in our pockets, in our lives, in our families, and in our minds. Protests erupt about the Olympic flame — but where is the outrage, the “I’m mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore” about the following:

  1. Diesel fuel is $4 per gallon here but across the border in Mexico it is $2. Anyone care?
  2. Real inflation for the Average American is in excess of 15% and climbing. Anyone interested?
  3. Exxon made $11 billion last quarter. The rest of us made less at the end of the month because the money went to Exxon. Is there any connection between that fact and the Presence of an Oil man in the White House/ How about a vice President that headed up the very company that profited the most from the Iraq war? Is this so boring that MSM should be ignoring it just because nobody seems to want to anything about it?
  4. By 2009, 1 person in 10 will be on food stamps in the United States. Shouldn’t that be interesting to both sides of the “Aisle?”
  5. The average person in the United States is in debt on credit cards and other consumer and real estate loans in an amount that they can never repay, whereas no other modern country has that problem. Why?
  6. Interest on debt accounts for more expenditure by government and individuals than anything else in the United States. Trillions of dollars of transfered wealth from those who now can’t eat to those who don’t know what to do with the money. What is being done about interests rates that guarantee non-payment and assure financial enslavement? (By the way medical care is second is now touted to be the “employer of last resort”).
  7. Houses were appraised at $500,000 and within days were revealed to have values of less than 70% of that. People were prompted, tricked and coerced into signing mortgage documents they didn’t understand, in violation of law (not that anyone has been prosecuted), and now the borrowers are blamed for a scheme they still don’t understand. Now millions of American citizens are or will be broke, homeless and jobless. We know who did it and how it happened but MSM doesn’t care about that.
  8. All of MSM (Main Street Media) is now controlled by a handful of people who let us hear only the things they want us to hear and only in the ways they want us to hear it. If you want news, go to the Internet, if you want infotainment watch TV or listen to radio. 
  9. How many flag draped coffins can be hidden from view to keep the Iraq war “sanitary” and keep the public distanced from the gruesome reality of war, death, disfigurement, famine, disease and moral decrepitude? And why is MSM going along with  the ban on pictures of coffins? Isn’t the death of young loved members of families who made the ultimate sacrifice worth reporting?
  10. How many veterans need to be homeless and wandering through the streets with head injuries before we think to ourselves “you know, there is something not quite right about this.”
  11. We have outsourced the most sensitive manufacturing of top secret defense components to China which just happens to be the only real military threat to our national security. And we have financed their military expansion by encouraging their economic growth to the point where they now have a  stranglehold on our country — they own most of our debt, they manufacture most of our goods, they process most of our food, and they are the most prolific source of spying in the United States. Thus whatever they don’t get legally, they get illegally. 
  12. MSM (main Street Media) has virtually eliminated their staff of reporters, because they get everything off the newswires and they make up the rest. Most of the time spent on “news” channels consists of opinions about gossip. Interesting, perhaps, but useless for those of us who would like to evaluate our options on voting on issues and candidates.
  13. It is illegal to counterfeit money unless you are a foreign country (North Korea for example) or you are a Wall Street investment banking firm that creates money supply by calling them “derivatives, collateralized debt obligations” and such. Between North Korea’s supernote and and the $500 trillion (yes with a “T”) in derivatives, credit swaps etc. out there it can be no surprise that no government can control the effects on world monetary supply —- that has been outsourced to the private sector as well. 
  14. MSM (Main Street Media) now presents us with pretty faces, some nice looking legs, a tempting bust line, and a teleprompter written by people who have not researched the validity of the reports in 10 years.
  15. Prescription medications are “so dangerous” that you can’t get them without seeing a doctor, but they are advertised directly to consumers. Is this what we want our children to hear and see? You can get a Bud Lite or a Absolute martini without a doctor’s prescription and drink all you want. It’s only when you kill or main people with your driving or other physical abuse that you are held accountable. 
  16. MSM (Main Stream Media) provides us with pundits and moderators who are undereducated, and inculcated with the sole core value of saying something that will increase the ratings and thus revenues of the media in which their comments appear. 
  17. Prescription medications cost $20 per pill here and as little as $0.50 in other countries easily accessible from the U.S.
  18. The total expenditures for medical care, drugs, products and associated services is around 2-3 times the amount spent by any other country or group of countries. The average U.S. Citizen is in constant danger of dying for lack of medical care because he/she is probably not covered entirely for the medical event, because he/she was never given a preventative regimen that is regularly followed in other countries, or because they are simply barred from access to medical system. 
  19. Despite the amount we spend per person, we get less care, and suffer from shorter longevity, higher infant mortality, shorter height, than at least a dozen other countries and sometimes as high as 40 other countries depending upon which metric you are interested in. To say we lost our “lead” is not the point. 
  20. The average person educated in the U.S. has slipped from 1st in world ranking to around 20th. Does that bother anyone?
  21. Bullying has spread through every school, public and private and is spreading into the marketplace. Hello? Anyone there?
  22. We have lost our way. We worship money in all its forms more than we worship God. Every day we perform acts that involve our worship, use and belief in money. Most of us spend at best one day per week for a couple hours worshipping God.
  23. MSM (Main Street Media) thrives on conflict over minutia (bullets in Bosnia, a flag pin probably made with lead in China, and statements of “associates” that are made into controversial “positions”) rather than actual issues and characteristics about the candidates themselves. We allow this by talking about that the pundits tell us to talk about. And what we talk about causes us to vote against our own interests.  
  24. When we tried importing from China and India the prescription drugs at a fraction of the cost that the drug companies were charging us, the government stepped in and said it was unsafe and  could result in tainted drugs. Now the drug companies have eliminated American jobs and outsourced the manufacture of the drugs to where? — India and China — and we have what — tainted, deadly drugs of dubious value to begin with and with side effects that include anal leakage and death. 
  25. How many times do we need to hear that pharmaceutical companies spend $5,000 on every man or woman doctor in the U.S. to push their stuff before we make THAT an issue?
  26. The war on drugs is making a fortune for people on both sides of the law, including the privatization of prisons and huge profits from private ownership of prisons, 75% of the inmates of which are there because of minor drug charges. There is no war on drug use and there is no war on drug supply. That is why we have drugs in America.
  27. How many times do we need to be disappointed in a politician, whom we knew was taking money from the medical- pharma complex, insurance companies, oil companies and credit card companies? What makes us vote for these people?
  28. Where is MSM “keeping them honest” by reporting discrepancies between promises and action?
  29. How many dogs need to die before we accept that they are the canary in the mine shaft and that the rest of us are just as much at risk because the tainted, poisoned food is all coming from the same place now?

I could go on, but I invite you to add your own comments to the list. And while you are at it, why not answer this question: What specifically are you going to say to your friends and family about these issues and how will you vote?

Filed under: alternative medicine, bubble, Bush, CDO, Chelation, community banks, CORRUPTION, credit unions, currency, education, Eviction, foreclosure, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, healthcare, inflation, interest rates, Investor, marketing, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, Mortgage, Obama, politics, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Mortgage Meltdown + Inflation + Dollar Devaluation

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Neil Garfield

Trouble for American Consumer is building and the perfect storm threatens our tenuous economy. 

DEEP RECESSION LOOMS WITHOUT FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN OUR POLITICS AND ECONOMIC POLICIES

 

The inevitable outcome was always the same: eventually we would hit the the top, like in any Ponzi scheme. 

Consumers, who maxed out their credit cards, and maxed out their borrowing on their homes, and maxed out on their purchasing power which has declined significantly over the same 25 year period, and who are vastly unemployed or underemployed (further decreasing their wages and purchasing power), and maxed out their borrowing from consumer finance, and even maxed out their short-term borrowing through pay day lending and overdraft privileges and eliminated their savings plans, have reached the point where (1) they can’t buy anymore “stuff” and (2) they don’t want to. 

 

The end result is that we have spent ourselves and our country into a hole, diminished our standing in the world, and we continue to insult the world by asserting a dominance that was once real, but isn’t anymore. And the world is telling us as politely as possible to shove it. 

The strength of the Euro, the movement amongst the oil producing countries to create a unitary currency for the Gulf countries and other trends around the globe all spell the same thing: everyone is looking for an alternative to the U.S. dollar and an alternative to the U.S. altogether. We have brought ourselves and the world to neither peace nor prosperity, and neither security nor safety. 

 

Asian inflation which is gearing up to be as bad as we have seen in any emerging economy is starting to hit wholesale prices. Rising costs due to rampant and growing inflation in countries that had before been “cheap” producers is hitting hard on products purchased here in the U.S. 

 

Add to that the more or less daily devaluation of the dollar and the effect is multiplied. Add to that mixture the further devaluation of the dollar caused by the mortgage meltdown where central bankers are converting their dollar reserves to Euros and the effect is further increased.

 

The headlines in most papers is the end of the free ride we had for a long time where the dollar was king and we could purchase imports more cheaply because dollars were in great demand. 

Our headline here is that we are headed for the deepest recession since the greatest depression. 

 

The reasons are many but all fairly simple. The United States converted from being a nation of production to a nation of consumption. The final nail in the coffin of this unfortunate conversion was the advent of credit cards — not at their inception — and the high interest rates that were institutionalized during the double digit prime rate days 25 years ago. The theory was that the credit card companies were under hardship because it cost them more to get capital to lend than they could get under usury laws, once you factored in defaults and the extremely high interest rates that the issuers had to pay. But when rates went back down to modest figures of around 7% prime rate from highs of 22% credit card companies were allowed to keep their rates at 21-22% and eventually raised those rates to as high as 35%. Adding insult, the issuers now have fee schedules that add to the absurd payments. 

 

This “free money” craze coupled with stupendous profits earned by credit card issuers caused a huge but temporary surge in consumer sending encouraged by government, business and lenders. Everyone liked it because for consumers they were getting more “stuff”, for government they could claim better economic performance, and for credit card companies, they had a stranglehold on an economy that was now addicted to credit card and home equity loan consumer spending. As with the mortgage meltdown, nobody thought it through. 

 

Our economy became addicted to, dependent on and under the control of consumer spending, which up till now has accounted for around 70% of our entire economy.

 

The inevitable outcome was always the same: eventually we would hit the the top, like in any Ponzi scheme. Consumers, who maxed out their credit cards, and maxed out their borrowing on their homes, and maxed out on their purchasing power which has declined significantly over the same 25 year period, and who are vastly unemployed or underemployed further decreasing their wages and purchasing power, and maxed out their borrowing from consumer finance, and even maxed out their short-term borrowing through pay day lending and overdraft privileges and eliminated their savings plans, have reached the point where (1) they can’t buy anymore “stuff” and (2) they don’t want to.

 

Alan Greenspan is now defending his record of relying on the marketplace to work things out. Free market ideologies, like the one Greenspan relied on, are like all other theories in economics. They seem to work for a while and then they don’t. Ideology does not govern how people act. People act as they choose to and the way they choose is based upon mostly subjective factors at the time of their decision. That is a lot messier than the neat and clean theories and policies, indexes and measurements that have been used in determining economic policy, foreign policy, and domestic agendas for decades. 

The underlying flaw in all currently used economic theory is that people are not theoretical. They are real and they are complex. 

This is not a new observation. Plenty of brilliant analysts and thinkers have known this for thousands of years. Just look at some of the most recent contributions from Rothbard and von Mises and you’ll see that the idea that human motivation and human thought process as the real issue has been around for a very long time, well understood, and pointing toward policy mechanisms that were based in reality rather than the mythical world where everyone behaves according to the “plan.” 

 

The problem is that economics and politics are inseparable — like time and space. You cannot define one without reference to the other. And in politics, the goal is to get elected and stay in power. You are playing to an audience with precious little time to get the finer points of economics, personal finance and monetary policy. 

 

People are too busy trying to make ends meet, getting the kids off to school and after-school activities, and working a two-income family schedule with increasingly longer working hours. Up until now, buying “stuff” has been a recreational outlet and they had the “free money” to do it. Now they can’t even pay the “minimum payment” without borrowing more and they can’t borrow more.

 

You don’t get elected giving people bad news — especially the news that things will get worse before they get better. So politicians create agencies to give them reports, indexes, median incomes, and unemployment data that provides them a reference point from which to pontificate about things these “leaders” actually know nothing about. They create slogans and “programs” that will never happen to give the potential voter a reason for putting them or keeping them in office. 

 

The end result is that we have spent ourselves and our country into a hole, diminished our standing in the world, and we continue to insult the world by asserting a dominance that was once real, but isn’t anymore. And the world is telling us as politely as possible to shove it. The strength of the Euro, the movement amongst the oil producing countries to create a unitary currency for the Gulf countries and other trends around the globe all spell the same thing: everyone is looking for an alternative to the U.S. dollar and an alternative to the U.S. altogether. We have brought ourselves and the world to neither peace nor prosperity, and neither security nor safety. 

WHAT DO WE DO? BITE THE BULLET, GIVE UP IDEOLOGY AND GET REAL

If you want to stop the mortgage and credit crisis, go with Barney Frank’s plan which takes blame out of the equation and simply stops the worst from happening. It gives everyone an opportunity to recover and it is the only way to do it — taking everyone’s interest into account rather than one group over another. 

 

If you want to stop foreclosures and evictions, change the rules of civil procedure in each state and in federal bankruptcy court that enables cram-down procedures and mediated results that allow for the same outcome as Barney Frank’s plan. Home values were inflated far beyond fair market value. Everyone should share in the loss and everyone should share in the potential recovery. 

 

If you want to stop the health care crisis and the economic nightmare created for our citizens, take insurance out of the equation, wind down the current system and move relentlessly toward a single payer system that pays medical service providers well, does not subject them to liability for bad results, and gives them incentives to get their patients healthier. That is what other countries do and what we should do here. 

 

Eliminate the restrictions on so-called “alternative care.” Those protocols have been around a lot longer than allopathic medicine. End the hegemony of allopathic medicine, provide incentives for preventative lifestyles and care, and the costs of health care will drop like a stone while the prospects for a longer, productive, happier life will rise. Reinstate the basic pledge “First do no harm.”

 

If you want to create a country with solid economic foundation, we need savings. To create savings, people must have the financial resources to cover their expenses and set aside money for the future. Take credit card debt and other forms of predatory lending off the table. Change the “no end in sight” vision to a light at the end of the tunnel. Stop telling people to spend money when you know they don’t have it. All you are doing is making things worse when you could be leading them out of the darkness.

 

If you want an economy that has solid prospects and good earnings potential for its citizens and the country as a whole, change the direction of innovation from getting our own people to part with their money to buy “Stuff” and make innovation work to produce things the rest of the world values. In other words shift back from the consumer driven economy to production. The products might be the same, similar or entirely different as before. 

 

BRING BACK UNIONS: Stop trying to minimize costs and start working to maximize revenues. Anyone can eliminate their costs by simply going out of business. A business is worthless without growth and strength in the marketplace. By eliminating our production capacity, we have effectively relinquished our sovereignty. Have government intervene wherever necessary to prevent dominance that results in imbalance — encourage the start-up of new small businesses and create a level playing field for them to compete. 

 

If you want to reassert America’s place in the world give the world a reason to respect and honor us besides our military power. Raw power is a transient commodity. Eventually it ends. If you want to retain sovereignty over our economic affairs and avoid becoming a satellite of China or a junior member of the European Union then demonstrate the power of the American worker and the attractiveness of living and working here. 

 

If you want communities to prosper allow community banks and credit unions the same access to providing financial services as the megabanks, where centralization has shifted local deposits into faraway investments of dubious value to anyone. State and Federal programs should be deposited into local banks rather than national or international combines. The infrastructure already exists without any changes required to enable this to happen. What is necessary is for State regulatory authority to become more active and more focussed on their own State’s economy.

 

As the song goes, these are a few of my favorite things. What are yours?

Filed under: alternative medicine, bubble, CDO, Chelation, community banks, CORRUPTION, credit unions, currency, education, Eviction, foreclosure, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, healthcare, inflation, interest rates, Investor, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, Mortgage, Obama, politics, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Healthcare Madness and Private Taxation

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Neil Garfield

Healthcare Madness: Stem Cell Furor

You must remember the simple American health care formula: if insurance covers it, it gets done. Insurance only covers it if the overall revenue and profit picture for big Pharma and insurance is maintained or enhanced.

The big LIE in the United States that we have all subscribed to until recently is that single payer systems would vastly increase our costs and decrease the quality and availability of health care producing long waits for appointments and treatments. 

The TRUTH is that of all the countries in the world, the United States pays more per citizen for health care and many, if not most, of its population is ineligible to receive it. Long waits for appointments and treatments under most HMOs exceed any waiting period in England, France and Canada. Check it out. 

In short, we are already paying for socialized medicine but we are not getting it — just like the education we pay for that is not delivered to our children and requires us to seek private school alternatives. 

And under Medicare Part D, the public has been frightened into taking a plan that drains more money from them than before — AND they can’t shop around for better prices. Worse yet, most people after going to the doctor under Medicare get billed for the part that Medicare didn’t pay. One can only wonder why AARP endorsed Part D. 

AND that secondary insurance they pay for every month somehow never seems to cover the shortfall, which is MORE expense (private tax) to the citizen providing a benefit that is 90% oriented to the sellers of insurance, the providers of drugs, and medical service providers. There again we are paying for socialized medicine, and not getting it. It is capitalist medicine disguised as socialized medicine. How about the real thing, since we are already paying for it?

The problem with ANY proposal that keeps the insurance companies in the mix is that while it makes it look like we are not going to a political extreme” (socialized medicine), we are going to pay for it anyway, and guarantee that prices will remain high, costs of providing healthy care will remain out of reach and will burden taxpayers with far more than they are paying right now. 

We are already paying double what we should be paying. All of the difference is going into the pockets of large corporations controlling our government policies. It is not politically feasible for any candidate to come right out and say we should convert to a National Healthcare System because too many people have blindly accepted the disinformation disseminated by drug companies, insurance companies and medical associations. So until we educate ourselves we are stuck with this ridiculous system.

EDITOR’S COMMENT: STEM CELL IS A HOT TOPIC. I knew that when I wrote the piece.

The comment from “watchdogonscience” contains inaccurate facts resulting from disinformation from the pharmaceutical companies and from lobbyists working for medical service providers. Cell treatment isn’t the end of disease or dying, but it is the largest advance in medical care we have achieved in human history. 

Only some of the bone marrow transplant has worked and none of it has worked for lung disorders. It also is quite troublesome on the issue of rejection when the marrow comes from another human being. It is not yet “quite successful” because of a variety of absurd and sometimes dangerous side effects (cancer etc). 

Embryonic stem cell research, still in its infancy is far more promising under the latest advances. It avoids the pitfalls and pain and risks of bone marrow extraction, and allows true differentiation into specific organs which in many countries has resulted in the regeneration of organ function and sometimes the organ itself. 

The comment about the drug companies wanting stem cell therapy is wrong. Drug companies want any therapy that requires purchases from them on a regular basis at prices controlled by the seller in protocols that are written by the sellers themselves and which medical providers blindly follow. 

This is why almost every recent medication requires a constant regimen for life rather than a defined course of treatment over a specified period of time. The oath to “first do no harm” is completely ignored by the drug companies because it doesn’t apply to them. And doctors, afraid of liability, must stay with “conventional protocols, which as it turns out were written by the drug companies. It is a perverse cycle. Thus they want gene therapy but not stem cells. 

Stem cell therapy and other forms of cell therapy from animals threatens drug revenue far more than any regulation or other external event. By getting Bush to veto stem cells in this country the drug companies shot themselves in the foot. The protocol is now developed in the UK, China, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico and several other countries. 

The price structure has been developed without any input from the major drug companies. Hence a person receiving a successful stem cell treatment and eliminating, for example, diabetes from their current health condition is likely to avoid more than $200,000 in health care costs mostly including medications from pharmaceutical companies. The cost of stem cell therapy varies from $15,000 to about $45,000 and the cells themselves cost only around $7,000. 

It is not hard to see why the pharmaceutical companies are putting out disinformation about stem cells and stoking the religious fires to maintain opposition. 

Stem cell therapy, far from “making the pharmaceutical companies richer” threatens their legislative and market dominance. And insurance companies and government health care programs, faced with decreasing health care costs, will be under pressure to reduce premiums. Thus revenues of insurance companies are threatened as well. And fewer visits to doctors’ offices, urgent care and hospitals does the same.  

You must remember the simple American health care formula: if insurance covers it, it gets done. Insurance only covers it if the overall revenue and profit picture for big Pharma and insurance is maintained or enhanced. 

The TRUTH is that the United States pays more per citizen for health care and many, if not most, of the population is ineligible to receive it. Long waits for appointments and treatments under most HMOs exceed any waiting period in England, France and Canada. Check it out. In short, we are already paying for socialized medicine but we are not getting it — just like the education we pay for that is done delivered to our children and requires us to seek private school alternatives.

Filed under: bubble, Chelation, CORRUPTION, education, foreign relations, GTC | Honor, healthcare, inflation, Investor, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, Obama, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Private Taxation — American Healthcare

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Neil Garfield

The answer to our unique American set of issues is not a single issue proposed solution, but a sea change in our premise: either we are a nation of people and laws to protect, defend and promote the health, safety and welfare of all our citizens or we are a vehicle for corporate interests that will do anything to maintain their positions of power and profit. Getting rid of the influence of lobbyists and the effect of campaign contributions on candidates is not some lofty ambition or ideal; it is an imperative that is the ONLY answer to having food on the table, gas in the tank and a roof over our heads.

A candidate for public office must (a) spend the time to learn about economics (b)  demonstrate their independence from special interests, (c) demonstrate their proficiency in understanding how economic trends impact the average voter and (d) educate the voter as to how economic policies are being used against them and what they can do about it. 

BEWARE OF PLATITUDES AND QUICK FIX PROPOSALS THAT WILL NOT WORK AND CANNOT DELIVER RELIEF TO THE HOME OR DINNER TABLE. 

Prospective voters who are considering support for candidates for public office or propositions and petitions having economic consequences are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The growing realization is that, in particularly in a global economy, some complex events are somehow having an effect on their daily lives. 

In the absence of any real information for each voter to make their own decision they are forced to rely on “mainstream” news, which is more fact based entertainment than informative, candidates who will say anything to get elected, and special interest advertising that mischaracterizes the choices.

Voters understand that food, fuel and medical costs are taking away more and more of their income with the same effect as if a new tax was enacted requiring them to fund the largest corporations in the world, whose losses are covered by taxpayers and whose windfall profits are closely guarded from consumers who don’t get the benefit of cost reductions, stockholders who don’t get the benefit of dividends, and merchants who don’t get the benefit of sales revenue from people who don’t have anymore money to spend. 

These “ private taxes” are reflective of the growing pattern of privatizing public finance. In short they are private taxes sanctioned by federal, state and local governments who themselves are victims of the pattern. In my opinion this represents “PRIVATE TAXATION” sanctioned by government.

Let’s look at some of the “proposals” for healthcare that are offered and watch how they work.

 

  1. American citizens spend more (35%-250%) on drugs, medical protocols,, tests and treatment than any other country in the world. The same drugs that cost $20 per pill in the U.S. can be purchased for $2.00 elsewhere. Protocols that would prevent disease or would cure them are virtually banned or are allowed to be “not covered” by insurance — resulting in the average person my age (61) taking thousands of pills per year that people in other countries are not taking because they don’t need them and because the pills themselves present risks of side effects that include everything up to and including death. 
  2. The financial excesses of the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industry is supported by “laws” that protect the industry and which little or nothing to do with the health of any person. These excesses are present ONLY in the United States. 
  3. At the same time that we are spending more, we are suffering more medical disasters in more families every day. Longevity (life-span) in the United States is declining. Infant mortality is rising. Even average adult height has decreased in the Untied States and is now lower than many other countries.
  4. Protocols like chelation IV therapy, food supplements and vitamins, gene therapy, human stem cell therapy, and primitive cell therapy are being used all over the world, growing back diseased or missing organs, improving overall health, and improving vitality while at the same time vastly reducing the demands for medical treatment. Those other countries are spending less and delivering more. Several third world countries have now become centers for medical care of those Americans who have the money, time and physical ability to reach them. 
  5. National programs for health and fitness are not only improving physical health, but the all important index of happiness and contentment.
  6. Ideological arguments against these other systems are bogus arguments designed to distract American voters from the truth: the system is working here for those looking to earn a profit, whereas the system is working elsewhere in the world for those seeking to maintain a healthy population.
  7. The ideological argument against a single payer that negotiates prices, seeks preventative national programs and pursues the best possible treatments and cures is merely a hammer to threaten and frighten people with the prospect of “socialism” which most people translate as a loss of freedom, constant fear of government, loss of privacy, and a lack of disposable income at the end of the month.
  8. The truth is that all societies practice socialism as to those services that the government elects to provide. In the United States, taxes are used to pay for military, police, fire, education etc. In an ultimate irony, the heavy reliance on ideological argument over common sense has resulted in the the outcome most feared by those who are cajoled into voting against their interests: loss of freedom, constant fear of government, loss of privacy, and a lack of disposable income at the end of the month.
  9. The surrender of our healthcare to profit motivated private interests, like the surrender of prison management to private interests, like the surrender of regulation of sales of securities, creation of credit, expansion of monetary supply to private interests has led to a corporatocracy that threatens to consume the last dollar of every “average” American leaving them not only with no disposable income at the end of the month, but rather in debt up to their ears.
  10. Meanwhile the countries with “high” tax rates (which can simply be translated as honest transparency, as opposed to hiding the taxes in your utility bills, and covering up the private power of taxation given to corporate America) have satisfied, happy, free, contented populations who get along just fine and their citizens are not in debt and who are able to save up money and pay for things in cash.

American citizens have the exclusive right to vote in what should be a free society, but instead they are confronted with a corporate-government set of rules where the opportunities and choices are closing in on the the average guy or girl who is just trying to get through the month. 

Our incomes are being used to fund corporate losses, corporate abandonment of our own population for employment and training, military adventures that are funded by borrowing (which is future taxation), and huge windfall profits of oil companies, agricultural companies receiving “subsidies”, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies.

The answer to our problems is not a single issue proposed solution, but a sea change in our premise: either we are a nation of people and laws to protect, defend and promote the health, safety and welfare of our citizens or we are a vehicle for corporate interests that will do anything to maintain their positions of power and profit. Getting rid of the influence of lobbyists and the effect of campaign contributions on candidates is not some lofty ambition or ideal; it is an imperative that is the ONLY answer to having food on the table, gas in the tank and a roof over our heads. 

Filed under: alternative medicine, bubble, Chelation, currency, healthcare, inflation, Investor, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, Obama, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

A Jail called Mandatory Health Insurance

Posted on December 7, 2007 by Neil Garfield

A Jail called Mandatory Health Insurance

 

This is arithmetic not ideology. We make it ideology when we defy the numbers. We are already paying for full and complete coverage for all American citizens. In fact, we are paying 40% more than is required to give everyone complete health services. That we are paying for it and not getting what we are paying for (including a rebate or dividend on the many billions we are overspending) is testament to our ideology getting in the way of good judgment and concern for American citizens. It also gives you an idea on how and why the Pharmaceutical companies alone spend more than $5,000 on each and every one of the more than 500,000 doctors licensed in the United States, rewarding them with free samples, free trips, free seminars, free equipment, free supplies, and a host of other things that would make anyone other than a saint turn their heads.

 

In fact, it isn’t even ideology, it is myth. The myth is that American medicine is better than anywhere eels in the world. This is one of those myths that come from facts once holding morsals of truth. It is no longer truth. Our rate of medical advances is dwarfed by work done in dozens of other countries, our education is in a nose-dive, people are dropping out of the system, retiring early and otherwise getting out of the cancerous system we call our medical establishment.

 

We are already paying far more than we need to and far more than any other country in the world for the exact same medical facilities, medical care, medical treatment and medical prescriptions — AND we don’t have access without digging into the bottom of our pockets to treatments that are available, more effective and far less expensive than medical protocols in the U.S. because Big Pharma dictates those protocols through its absolute control of the FDA. And Big Pharma has a blank check from Big Insurance, because Big Insurance wants everyone to perceive the need to pay premiums for medial insurance. It’s like the credit card industry — they want to convert your assets into their fees without giving you anything of value in return.

 

Insurance is not the solution. It is the problem. Mandatory insurance locks us into the problem instead of heading for a solution. Wind down the need for medical insurance and the hold that Big Pharma has would likewise wind down. Putting people on the front line of what is available and how much it costs would put them “in the know” — instead of removing them from their sight the obvious tyrannies of the medical-insurance complex. This will create outrage. And outrage is what we need here — before we pass outrage and go straight to social unrest, riots, and other troubles that shake even the foundations of our form of government. We are corrupted and we the voters must make the changes that elected officials are unwilling to do. The only thing left that is made in America and for sale are our politicians.

 

Our insurance driven system causes us to spend about 40% more money than it would take to give full, total and robust health care to every man, woman and child in the United States. Instead, our citizens get partial coverage, no coverage and limitations on what therapies “qualify” for coverage — not on the basis of safety but on the basis of revenue production for Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big medical. We need e little trust busting here like a hundred years ago. The corporate trusts, creating anti-competitive barriers to both older and newer treatments that are readily available, preventative care that would reduce the need for medical services and products, are literally ruining our lives.

 

Krugman, Clinton and the rest of those who subscribe to mandatory health insurance have it flat wrong on the numbers, the policy, and the purpose. Obama is a lot closer to the truth when he says we should NOT tie ourselves to the insurance model. Insurance is the problem, not the solution.

 

Under the Clinton plan we would be locked into the current cycle for the foreseeable future. Insurance companies would control how well we are cared for, what procedures are available (i.e., “covered), and perpetuate the medical fraud perpetrated on the public whereby spiraling higher medical costs for services, procedures and treatments are completely controlled in the lockbox created by the mighty triumvirate of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine.

 

Under mandatory insurance the jail cell we are in would become a life sentence and the key thrown away. Transfer of wealth on the backs of those need help would continue on its merry way — a perfect Republican solution conceived in fear and deceit, servile to their own greedy agendas and creating cruel results but never brave solutions, to paraphrase Thomas Paine in “the Crisis.”

Filed under: alternative medicine, Chelation, CORRUPTION, healthcare, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Mystery Diagnosis and Medical Predators

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Neil Garfield

Looking at the medical establishment, it is apparent that we are  under the worst form of tyranny and we have been forced to surrender our rights, coerced by an economic strategy that says literally says “pay or die.” On the issue of chelation all of the chelating agents are nutrients. So called “alternative therapies” are actually mainstream starting with the hypocratic oath of “first do no harm.” This is important because of the effectiveness of rejected therapies and why the insurance industry and medical establishment is against it on economic grounds — reduced drug therapies, reduced revenue, reduced premiums, reduced perception for need for medical coverage other than catastrophic, you know the way it used to be.

In Arizona my wife and I get Chelation and IV therapy all the time, that it is sometimes covered by insurance, and it is relatively inexpensive compared even to just paying the co-pay on prescription drugs. In Florida and other states, the medical establishment has been successful, just like big tobacco, at stonewalling for the benefit of their business survival and enormous profits. There is now a movement in several states mandating insurance coverage which the medical establishment is fighting tooth and nail because of reduced doctor visits, reduced, surgeries, reduced hospital stays, reduced RX drug consumption, reduced expenses generally, reduced premiums, reduced revenue for everyone who has a stake in keeping the system the way it is. 

The average person my age is prescribed anywhere from 6-9 medications per day for heart (Aspirin, Plavix, Altace, Lipitor, Toprol, lungs (breathing) (steroids, inhalers) , diabetes (Medforman, glucose support insulin) , pain (anti-inflammatory, oxycontin, Vicidin), circulation, anxiety Prozac, Zanax), up from half that just 15 years ago, which was double the number from 15 years before that. 

Using fear and intimidation, together with controlling the information that escapes into the public domain, we are now subject to the ultimate life and death authority of nameless people who are the source of a constant flow of marketing information, samples and suggested drug protocols to physicians and hospitals who want their insurance payments, who are afraid of liability, and who are just plain too lazy to do their own thinking. 

The side effects including interaction of the smorgasbord of drugs keeps lengthening the tiny print which no senior can read, include destruction of muscle tissue, including the heart and lungs, kidney and liver damage, anal leakage, stroke, seizure and death. Those of us who use IV vitamins and nutrients for chelation and supplement have reduced and eliminated most of those drugs, our blood tests and other lab results or better than those people who have not been diagnosed with disease, and are far more active in our daily lives.

The point is that this issue is laden with political intrigue, back-room strategies, and economic perversity at the expense of the health of the consumers/patients in Florida and the rest of the nation. 

Benjamin Rush, one of the founders of this country campaigned tirelessly nearly 200 years ago for an amendment to our constitution that would include the right to health care. It was his belief and the many who agreed with him, that the medical establishment would establish itself as a source of tyranny worse than the British Crown from which they fought to break loose, some losing their own lives and the lives of their sons, fathers, brothers and other family members. 

So let us keep in mind that this is not just another issue, and the absurdity of the situation in these cases is that they result in administrative complaints against good, conscientious practicing physicians even though in like circumstances they would not have been filed against physician, who was not outspoken about the limits placed upon the scope of by the agencies in the pocket of Big Pharma, Medical and Insurance despite clear legislative and popular intent to the contrary. 

Filed under: alternative medicine, Chelation, medical insurance, Medical Treatment, Rush | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

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