Death Wraiths
They’re still around, and growing.
Read this:
Blackwater’s Private Spies: A Bush-era CIA Who’s Who
Now, turn off the “news” and read books.
This Two-tiered Healthcare System Blows
My spouse and I are now jobless.
Neither of us have health care.
A cut-rate dentist told me that after replacing a crown in my mouth three times and even though food continues to be trapped in it, I may still have to pay if I want it replaced a fourth time. Thousands of dollars for one damn crown even though I floss and brush religiously.
Yet wealthy people have no such troubles. CNN reports how easy it was for Steve Jobs to get a liver transplant as he moved to the top of a list of 16,000 people who were also waiting for livers.
This week it was reported that Steve Jobs, the CEO and cofounder of Apple, underwent a liver transplant two months ago. One detail concerning Jobs’s transplant seemed odd: The surgery took place at a hospital in Tennessee, some 2,000 miles from Jobs’ home in northern California. Why Tennessee?
The answer sheds light on the intricacies of the organ transplant system, as well as why it’s sometimes easier for people with significant financial resources to get an organ transplant. (Jobs’ estimated net worth: $5.7 billion.)
Livers are a scarce resource. In any given year, only about one-third of the people on the national transplant waiting list receive one, and as of late June, more than 16,000 people were on the list.
Yet it sometimes seems that celebrities in need end up at the front of the line when they need a transplant, and people often assume they get preferential treatment.
The chance for a public option in the “revamped” health care legislation looks pretty dismal as long as insurance lobbyists control legislation. Unless and until money’s grip on America is pried loose, we will continue to see despicable injustice perpetrated against those without the means to their right to health care, in other words, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Extremely Disturbing Violation of Constitution
While all the apoplectic media uproar over the economy, the baggers and the birthers, the supposed upcoming “swine flu pandemic,” Obama’s health care plan (actually an opportunity to scream and froth over the fact that we have a Negro president –see Costco Pulls “Lil Monkey” Doll off Shelves) distracts us from truly alarming news, the army is quietly moving forward to recruit “Internment/Resettlement Specialists.”
People have poo-poo’d the building of concentration camps on American soil as tin-foil hat conspiracy for years, which is precisely what we are meant to believe.
Then how do you explain the recruitment notice on the Army’s website?
In addition, I found the following on the National Guard website
31E – INTERNMENT / RESETTLEMENT SPECIALIST
(Internment/ Resettlement Specialist – Armed Forces prepare for Dissent)
Armed Forces Prepare for Dissent
Description
http://www.nationalguard.com – /careers/mos/ – –>Internment / Resettlement Specialists in the Army are primarily responsible for day-to-day operations in a military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility. Internment / Resettlement Specialists provide rehabilitative, health, welfare, and security to US military prisoners within a confinement or correctional facility; provide custody, control, supervision and security to internees within a detention/internment facility; conduct inspections; prepare written reports; coordinate activities of prisoners/internees and staff personnel.
Responsible for all personnel working in the confinement/correctional facility, including security, logistical, and administrative management of the prisoner/internee population Supervising and establishing all administrative, logistical and food support operations, confinement/correctional, custodial, treatment, and rehabilitative activities
These recruitments create a promise that successful applicants would be trained in “search and restrain procedures,” which is code for violation of the 14th Amendment.
Read FEMA Concentration Camp Watch for details.
It seems critical to me that word gets around about this to the extent that it actually sees the light of mainstream news. Spread the word or remain silent and face a halocaust of unprecedented horror–unprecedented because of deadly and enormous advancement of ignorance, fear, nationalism, technology, and corporate/media weatlh and power since the 1940s.
Honeybee Collapse Part 4
The truly frightening state of world honebees continues to be monitored here. Watch The Silence of the Bees, a video on the PBS Nature series. My take on the whole situation is that humanity has ignored, and continues to ignore at its own peril, the interconnected webwork of humans and nature in preference of money, speed, and power.
The link has a huge amount of updates and other information to explore. Keep in mind that the disappearance of the honeybee (estimated to be by 2035 in America) will be the end of our eating flowering fruits and vegetables.
Psychopathic Designer: “Medicare Freaks”
Get a load of a woman who called the Randi Rhodes Show on Thursday. What a psychopath – or is she a narcissist? I’m not a psychiatrist, so you decide. Oh my freaking god!!
Extracting Wealth from Health
Get yourself informed! Read the health care reform myths that are being perpetrated on the American people by insurance company shills in Washington and in the corporate media.
It doesn’t look good for a public option right now, and forget single payer health. For-profit health insurance companies are poster children for the unregulated free market and they ain’t goin’ away soon.
I finally gave up going to the dentist. Sure, I could cough up enough dough for a checkup, but what was the point? I can’t afford health insurance premiums or deductibles, and I found national dental “plans” to be basically worthless, so I couldn’t pay for the fillings and whatnot that I’d need for my rotten teeth. I gave up on dental care along with vision care (my prescription lenses are getting worn and weaker) and forget medical coverage.
All this time I thought it was just me.
I guess this NPR story, Rural Medical Camp Tackles Healthcare Gap finally reveals what most of us suspected, that America is a war-torn, third world country. People flocked in droves to these camps from sixteen states, desperate for health care.
And speaking of health care, here are the rules insurance companies follow: High costs, empty choices, no guarantees. Only a fraction of revenue from health insurance premiums goes to pay for medical services. This fraction is called “medical loss ratio.” And those who bought the policies are the losers.
While we’re fed bogus information including that that there are hundreds of insurance companies to pick from so we can keep our great insurance instead of running for the public option (good lord, forget about single payer), the truth is there are only five major insurance companies with smaller companies that they bought out. Those five are Cigna, Aetna, UnitedHealth, Humana, and Wellpoint. How long before there are only two or three or (shudder) one? They make money not by providing health care, but by denying it.
Health-related bankruptcies are up 50 percent. People have no recourse, no protection from unregulated health insurance industry.
CNN posted the Fortune 500 obscene profits of the major health care companies here.
Read about the revolving door between the health care industry and Washington.
Read about the nefarious Lewin Group, which skews numbers to make insurance companies look good here.
the Washington Post reported Wednesday, few who have cited recent Lewin data, which suggests nearly 100 million Americans may quit their private insurance plans if offered a government-run alternative, mention that the company belongs to a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary.
Read how hypocrite Blue Dog Rep. Mike Ross made millions selling prescription drugs, threatening to kill health care reform here and here.
Karl Rove has penned an editorial in the Wall Street Journal attacking the public health care option. Rove’s ‘myths’ echo the poll-tested talking points of Frank Luntz and other conservatives determined to protect the private insurer’s monopoly over coverage and deny Americans choice. Below is a fact-check of Rove’s assertions. >>Download a PDF version of this fraudulent information.
Where Will The Grilling Lead?
I hardly dare breathe. Will this grilling lead to anything or will Democratic Congress members be bought off and/or threatened and their spines turn to jelly, as usual? The excuse is always, “Let’s not focus on the past; let’s move forward.” Oh my freaking god.
Guess I’ve grown increasingly weary, wary, and cynical since Reagan. If they do manage to sit up without hands up their backs, it could set a precedent. But I don’t expect much. Will money be the grand arbiter and law of the land forever? At this point, it still seems likely.
Bush’s key men face grilling on torture and death squads
Former vice-president Dick Cheney could be forced to testify to Congress over allegations that a secret hit squad was set up on his orders, as Democrats press for inquiries into the conduct of the ‘war on terror’. Read the whole damn thing>>>
End of the Illusion
Although the metaphor “The Matrix” is growing a little stale and timeworn, the Wachowski brothers’ were, if nothing else, prophetic for those still living in The Matrix.
This morning I scribbled notes on an interview with Chris Hedges , a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, who talked about his new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. The only bit I added was the quote from Margaret Thatcher. The rest is from the interview and not from me. Note that since I scribbled the notes in long-hand and may have not copied everything exactly, then edited my notes for continuity and clarity, I could hardly place what Hedges said in quotes, but this is the jist of what I heard him say.
Michael Jackson was the poster boy of the dissolution of self when you become a commodity. He illustrates the disease of commercial culture that is managed by corporate forces and advertising. These forces deliberately replaced values like thrift, integrity, and self-sufficiency, which once directed Americans, with branding and consumption. This manipulation had the effect of destroying American culture and replacing it with consumer culture.
But this consumer culture is now collapsing. Now that the middle class finds mass-produced goods of consumer culture less and less affordable, what we now experience is an existential crisis which goes far beyond economic or political management.
Seymour Melman has written about the permanent war economy that sustains empire. This war economy has expanded beyond its capacity to sustain itself. As it diverted resources to itself, it has eroded and destroyed America, hollowed it from the inside out by hollowing out social services, state economies, infrastructure, public education, healthcare, and jobs. This is how empire destroys itself–by neglecting its domestic economy.
Why do we keep funding the war machine? Because people have become irrelevant. [Recall during the Reagan era Margaret Thatcher's infamous saying, "there is no such thing as 'society'" - my comment, not Hedges's]. Corporate interests have a stranglehold on the legislative branch. The result is that what once was illegal is now legal, such as spying on citizens and creeping fascism. There is no popular support anywhere for this corporate ramrodding.
For example, because health care lobbyists pay the most to political campaigns, America spends three times more than any other nation on health care, yet it has the worst health care of any developed nation on earth. It’s all about profit, not people. This is why politicians, including President Obama, are unresponsive to the needs and rights of citizens, and refuse to create a public program.
There is a direct correlation between war and blight on working class neighborhoods, i.e., a Weimar effect . Under Clinton, for example, the draconian NAFTA and welfare reform were the two single greatest betrayals of the working class. Once a welfare recipient could live on $500 a month; nowadays that same person is expected to survive on a little more than $100 a month.
Consumerism, image, spectacle, entertainment, cheap mass goods are all part of the illusion. But with the decline of the American dollar, cheap mass-produced goods are becoming more and more expensive. This amounts to a coup d’etat in slow motion. Sheldon Wolin in his Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy & the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism writes that the corporate forces have retained a facade of democracy while perverting it so it no longer functions. As the situation disintegrates and the middle and working classes are pushed to extremes, they have begun to wake up and see beyond the illusion that we are the best country in the world. Increasingly they can no longer be pushed to buy mass-produced goods (the hollow spectacle of illusion–advertising, television, Hollywood, fashion, anti-depressants, cosmetic surgery, etc.), and they feel more and more hollowed out because as criminal wars of aggression and massive penal institutions continue to detain and torture. The illusion that America is a champion of democracy has kept them in a state of perpetual childhood.
The hollow spectacle of illusion, pedaled by corporatism, can never define America and instead has rendered citizens ineffectual in a time of momentous change. This hollow spectacle of illusion was carefully designed to keep citizens from growing up. It seduced citizens into investing in the illusion that poisons them against doing anything to change anything. Investing emotional lives in the spectacle of illusion has kept Americans from seeing the coming economic, environmental and political crises.
Is there a way out of all of this? No. We’re a dying nation. And we see that President Obama is utterly ineffectual in determining the direction of the nation. We’ve been manipulated (as opposed to governed) by an utterly self-centered and corrupt oligarchy for decades. Under corporate management there has been a virtual inverse of the New Deal, an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth without the resources to respond to the collapse. The nation is sustaining a criminal structure that’s bringing untold misery in its wake. These criminals, i.e., the CEOs that enjoyed immense bonuses at the expense of taxpayers, should be in jail, but they likely won’t see a day behind bars. The only reason America is still afloat is because China is still buying its debt, but China has begun to back out by unloading dollars for physical assets. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the reserve currency, it will become junk.
Restive right wing elements in America are growing violent. Although their analysis of the situation may be correct, violence is what fascists want to happen so that they can deepen social repression. The corporate/fascist state is responsible for destroying the two-party system.
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi outlines the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act which kept commercial and investment banks from getting in bed with each other. Now, years after the repeal combined with deregulation, this sociopathic oligarchy (bought by corporate interest and comprised entirely of both Republicans and Democrats) lacks the capacity to understand that people and things have intrinsic value besides as means for profit, intrinsic value beyond commodification.
Under these toxic conditions, self-destruction of America and the eco-system (ecological and economic) that sustained it was and is inevitable.
How do we as individuals act to break this machine with its stranglehold around our necks? First, get out of debt and second, don’t buy anything else except absolute necessities, locally.
Unrelated to the above notes or any reference to “The Matrix,” how about On the Coming Crisis written on November 9, 2000? Talk about prophetic.
Have We Begun the Real Work Yet?
The Real Work
by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
