Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Under ObamaCare, Prepare to Wait 18 Months to See a Doctor


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, December 22, 2009


Eye surgeon and senatorial candidate Rand Paul warns that under ObamaCare, Americans could be forced to wait a year and a half merely to see a doctor due to Canadian-style rationing of health care being imposed.
As an eye surgeon with his own private practice, Paul warned that senior citizens could be forced to endure debilitating conditions as a result of health care rationing under the system being readied for passage, and be forced to wait as long as 18 months just to see a doctor as happens in Canada and Britain.
“There are 1 million people waiting for any kind of elective surgery in Canada at any one time,” he told Newsmax.TV’s Ashley Martella.
“Canada’s so bad that they have a lottery, there are some little towns that have one family doctor, they do a lottery and you can sometimes wait a year and a half to see the doctor,” said Paul. “I have friends who are eye surgeons in Canada, they’ve finished their surgery by September, they’re allotment, they’re given a number of surgeries they can do, when they’re finished in September some of them come to the U.S. and do elective cosmetic eye surgery in the U.S. because they’re not allowed to operate any more in Canada.”
In his article, There’s No Such Thing as Free Health Care, Journalist John Stossel highlights how even people with life-threatening conditions are told to wait. A woman with a blocked artery that prevented her from digesting food was told by doctors in British Columbia that she had only weeks to live, but that the surgery was still “elective.”
“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” said the woman, who traveled to the United States to receive treatment.
It’s true that America’s partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.
“[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment,” Dr. Gratzer says.
“Literally we’re surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You’ve got to pay a price for that type of advancement.”
Canada and England don’t pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we’d get 2009-level care—forever. Government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do.
On this note, Paul stressed that problems in health care were created by too much government interference, and that the only way to fix the system was to increase competition, not restrict it.
The Republican candidate for Senate highlighted FEMA’s botched efforts to distribute water bottles at the superdome after Hurricane Katrina as an example of the failings of government-run health care.
“They can’t even distribute water, there’s no way they can distribute health care,” said Paul.
The Senatorial candidate also said that with 46 million new people on government assistance, the new system could bankrupt medicare and lead to rationing for everyone. Doctors who have already tolerated shrinking wages for the last fifteen years would also leave the U.S. warned Paul, creating a vacuum.
“It’s intellectually dishonest for Democrats to say it’s going to cost $874 billion, but it’s really not going to add anything to the deficit. I don’t think the American public believes that,” added Paul.
Paul pointed out that the longer the debate raged about health care, the more people opposed the government’s proposals, emphasizing why the Obama administration is hell-bent on ramming through the legislation later this week on Christmas Eve.
Watch the video below:

Two Years of Failure in Directing The Economy


Bob Chapman
Infowars.com
December 22, 2009
As we look back and this year comes to an end we find two plus years of failure. Even government admits to 1-1/2 years of negative growth – a sorry record after having poured trillions of dollars into the economy. The recent 3rd quarter results supposedly broke that record. If it did it was the result of government stimulus and Fed monetization. If you look back further you will find a stock market that rallied 54% just to reflect the highs of 1999. House prices have decline to 1990s levels as well. Both markets, which were bubbles, next year will fall again. Americans opened their markets to products of Communist China’s slave labor and China became the world’s biggest exporter. Via free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing, transnational conglomerates have stolen America’s destiny and handed it to China. This is what corporatist fascism is all about.
featured stories   Two Years Of Failure In Directing The Economy
featured stories   Two Years Of Failure In Directing The Economy
featured stories   Two Years Of Failure In Directing The Economy
Bernanke has created the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, so he is to be rewarded. This is a world gone mad.
The dollar will soon end its mini-rally and the USDX will test 71.18 in the first quarter as the euro tests $1.62. Interest rates will stay at zero for at least two years, and mega monetization will continue. As you have just seen the Treasury wants TARP funds for Treasury debt and the administration wants the TARP funds to further stimulate the economy. Either way it is very inflationary.
We are told the credit crisis is over and that recovery is underway. We do not believe that. It is projected that as many as 300 more companies will default on debt in 2011. A default rate of 12 to 14 percent. That is up from 1% in 2007 and a long-term average of 4.5%. These are not just small firms, but companies with more than $100 million in assets as well. That doesn’t sound like recovery to us. What is very significant is that the 300-figure is based on recovery. Only 116 companies defaulted between 2004 and 2007. One of the groups hit hard will be commercial real estate. The figures are already bad, but companies and lenders have been buying time by using two sets of books, marking to model and refinancing. All that doesn’t change the big picture and that is with a recovery the situation will be bad, without recovery it will be dreadful.
Corporate America has lots of problems, but the federal government has many more. It has to finance more than $1 trillion a year in borrowings. Interest rates are the lowest ever, but rates will begin to climb next year; 5% real interest rates would add some $600 billion to the debt service. That is more than the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, energy, education and Homeland Security.
The Fed has been backstopping short-term interest rates and holding down long-term rates. They say they will end their $300 billion program to buy up Treasury bonds and will stop buying mortgage securities by the end of next March.
The administration believes it will have to borrow $3.5 trillion over the next three years, plus rolling over short-term debt, or another $1.6 trillion. That is a total of $5.1 trillion. Knowing politicians you can increase that number by at least 50%. The wages of sin have caught up with the government as it attempts to replace short-term bills with 5, 7, 10 and 30-year paper. We do not believe the debt is payable and the consequences are not going to be pretty. All the velocity of monetary circulation is not going to change the final outcome.
At the same time the Fed and Wall Street are trying to cover-up, as they did 2-1/2 years ago what became a credit crisis. Last time they ramped up the stock market and they are attempting to do the same thing again. It is a masking of two underlying problems. They are doing what they did before, pushing up the value of shares, of companies that are on the edge of serious problems. In this process they have virtually nationalized banks and given them the funds to re-leverage in the market and take it again to today’s heights. The market has again become divorced from economic reality. They are again about to find out printing money and taxing is not going to solve the problem. On the way to the printing press and along the path of monetization the government has forgotten that they are in serious financial conditions and in the coming year will not be able to fund their deficit. The revenues are not to be had and foreigners are more and more reluctant to shoulder America’s debt. That means another credit crisis and further monetization of debt. Very simply, the US government is bankrupt. They can either default or lay the burden on future generations. The immediate answer is for government to cut spending on such trivialities, such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Allow the citizens to live in penury and poverty. These are the people who helped build America into what it is and they are to be cast aside as the Fed rescues its owners, the bankers, who deliberately caused the problem in the first place.
The deficit for fiscal 2010 should be close to $2 trillion, up from $1.4 trillion in 2009. The projection for the next ten years is at least $10 trillion. That means an increase of 150% to be serviced by 60% increase in tax revenue in a world where current receipts are off 30%. Even in better times recently tax revenues only increased by 12% during the biggest real estate and stock booms ever. We are about to find out that the muddle through theory does not work. Just for good measure we will add that unfunded liabilities increased by $9 trillion last year alone. That is ten years of deficits in just one year. Who in their right mine is going to fund and support such profligacy?
Just to give you an idea of how much debt has been created, the average G-20 budget deficits are 10.2% of GDP, when 3% is normal. Greece, which is on the edge of bankruptcy, will be 12.5% in 2010. Yet, the US is already at 13.5%. Close behind are the UK and Japan at 11.6% and 10.3%. The erosion of confidence and trust will soon manifest itself as lenders stop lending to these nations. This has already happened to the US with the Fed monetizing more than half of Treasury issuance. This is proof the dollar will crash and be devalued, as debt goes into default. Foreign nations are understandably concerned, as the dollar now only makes up 37% of new foreign reserve holdings. That is about a 50% reduction in holdings. As we reported before it is no wonder oil producers have held secret meetings to dump the petro dollar. Wall Street, Washington and central banks worldwide refuse to heed the lessons of the centuries and so have been damned to oblivion.
In more slight of hand the BLS has let us know that their birth/death model has overestimated the unemployment by some 824,000. These errors will be included in their statistics in February, and may be revised. The private sector number is 855,000. Some would like to call the error incompetence, we call it strategic planning by government to mislead the American people. For months the number of employed had been expanding via these phantom figures when they should have been contracting. We cannot access their data so the incorrect figure could be even higher.
What government has been doing is guessing for the past six years how many jobs had been created or lost by small businesses. In reality it was a totally unsound method of creating jobs that didn’t exist.
This miscounting by other methods also distorts the CPI, PPI retail sales, durable goods and, of course, GDP. That means you cannot believe a thing the government says. We have contended this for more than ten years. As an example, how can employment in small businesses be growing when more than 43,000 went under last year? Even if the figures come in late there obviously is never any adjustment. The difference in this case is jobs lost were not 7.2 million, but 8 million. In the second quarter some 16,000 businesses failed, up from about 14,000 quarter-to-quarter, the highest in 16 years. In addition the BLS only looks at unemployment insurance tax records once a year – how convenient. The birth/death model is nothing more than a ruse to present unemployment in a better light. This has been done for the past six years not just over the past two years. Our research shows a bogus set of additions yoy of about 1.7 million.

Small business cannot borrow and they created 64% of new jobs in the past 15 years says the SBA. We see that figure at 75%.The fund-less FDIC reports US banks may be making money gambling with leverage using TARP funds, but bank loans fell by $210.4 billion, or 2.8% in the third quarter, the biggest drop since the FDIC started keeping records in 1984. Those same banks booked profits of $2.8 billion reversing a $4.3 billion third quarter loss. Loans to businesses fell 6.5% and those to real estate 8.1%.
Non-current loans rose 10% to 5% of all loans to $366.6 billion, the highest rate on record. In the 3rd quarter banks charged off $51 billion in bad loans, the 11th straight quarterly increase, up more than 80% yoy. 66-2/3% of banks set aside $62.5 billion in loss reserves, 22% higher yoy.
124 banks have failed thus far this year, up from 25 in 2008 and we could see more than 2,000 fail in 2010 and 2011.
It looks like the stock market is finally ready to rollover. It is in a well-defined head and shoulders pattern that began in September. This is what happens when trillions are given to the financial sector and a pittance to the public. This is a control planner’s formula for disaster. The present dollar rally could end at 78 or 80 and then the test of 71.18. Our government rigged this rally using the currency swaps they created out of thin air in March.
If banks do not increase lending by 20% in 2010, a second credit crisis will beset markets. Stocks are way over valued having baked in a strong recovery with the help of TARP funds. This market reminds us of the alcoholic who has to have a drink upon rising and says he is not an alcoholic. All Wall Street knows is profits and they could care less about unemployment. The debasement of our currency means nothing. Speculation wages again with no thought of lower financial profits in the first quarter and a distinct chance of a second credit crisis. Ignored is the government’s manipulative presence in the market, or market fundamentals. Today’s speculation reflects the lack of trust, confidence and lack of fiscal and monetary discipline. The theme is we had better make it while we can, because there may be no tomorrow. As a result the probability of a steep market correction is strong. What we are involved in economically and financially is not a common correction, it is a correction in a bear market and few, even professionals, see this. This happened in the early 1930s and by the end of 1940 we still had not exited depression. We had to arrange a war to extricate ourselves.
Just look around you and you will see contraction as well as higher inflation. New home purchases fell to a 12-year low in November, off 22%, as government expanded the assistance program to include higher-income trade up buyers. Auto sales are fading again as well. Why? Because the markets for big-ticket items are saturated. We still have to face de-leveraging by domestic financial institutions, which few talk about. March values at Dow 6,600 were fair for that time frame. 10,500 is madness even after allowing for a bottom bounce to 8,500. We can assure you 6,600 will be tested again. We see the Dow sweeping into the 6,300 to 6,600 area for a first real test. We cannot tell at this juncture whether it will hold or not.
Few, except for Ron Paul and his fellow sound money adherents, are asking where the trillions of dollars of Fed and government money has been spent, or who got it, and what was the collateral on the loans and how was it priced? The recipients for the most part were the same culprits who caused all the problems in the first place.
In case you have not realized it the US government has to replace $2.5 trillion in debt in 2010, or 35% of their outstanding marketable obligations.
The Chicago Climate Exchange is 10% owned by Goldman’s Hank Paulson and former Treasury Secretary, 10% by Generation Investment Management, owned by Al Gore and 10% by Goldman Sachs. The exchange has been operating for several years.
If the US cannot craft a plan in 2010 to get its ballooning debt under control, it will face panic in financial markets. That is why you must be out of US dollar denominated assets. That is all forms of US government, state government debt (municipals), cash value life insurance policies, and annuities and out of the stock market except for gold and silver shares.
The national debt has more than doubled since 2001 due to wild government spending and gross incompetence of those in government. There were political tax cuts and a trillion dollar war to assist in the carnage. This has put national debt at 53% of GDP, up from 41% just a year ago. Some believe that figure could be as high as 85% in 2018 and 200% by 2038.
The government now admits to inflation of 2.4%. We see 7.7%.
The MBA mortgage purchase Application Index fell 0.1% in the week of December 11 for a total market index of 0.3%. This compares to 4% and 8.5%, respectively in the prior week. The refi index was 0.9% versus 11.1% in the prior week. The 30-year fixed rate mortgage rose 3 bps to 4.92% and the 15s were flat at 4.33%.
We are getting change you can believe in. The IRS granted another sweetheart deal to Citigroup – a $38 billion tax break. As George Orwell said in Animal Farm, “Some became more equal than others.” This is nothing more than a gift from taxpayers to bail out a bankrupt bank.
Making the President win a Peace Prize for widening a war was an insult to all Americans and citizens of the world.
Now we are again insulted by the elitist-owned media as Time Magazine crowned Ben Bernanke as person of the year, after he deliberately destroyed the American economy. This is akin to naming cheetah Woods as husband and father of the year.
Bernanke has created the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, so he is to be rewarded. This is a world gone mad.
Nomi Prins, former managing director of Goldman Sachs and head of International Analytics Group at Bear Stearns in London, is saying what we have been saying “The giant banks are manipulating their books to make themselves look profitable.” Prins says, this might be worse than the fraud, which occurred at Enron.
David Rosenberg says: “The government has to roll $2.5 trillion of debt in 2010, or 35% of its outstanding obligations.” That means no interest rate hikes, officially anyway. For 2010 he has Japan’s debt to GDP at 227%, Italy 120%, the US and UK at 94%, Germany and France at 83% and Canada at 79%. This also means all currencies will continue to fall versus gold.
The Fed has unnerved liquidity bulls by stating that they would accelerate the termination of credit facilities and remove most of the facilities by February 1, just as we reported earlier. We said they wanted to remove $1.5 trillion from the system, privately as we reported. They will monetize $1.425 trillion of Agencies by 3/31/10. Supposedly no more asset-backed commercial paper, Money Market Fund liquidity facility; the commercial paper facility; the primary dealer credit facility and the term securities lending facilities. It will close swap arrangements by February 1, 2010. That means no further major dollar support and explains why the dollar is manipulated upward prior to the end of support. The term auction facility will be scaled back. By June 30, 2010 the term asset-backed securities loan facility for toxic waste will end. Later in 2010 everything will become unglued again and the second credit crisis should begin.
PIMCO’s Total Return fund went to cash holdings of plus 7 from minus 7, as Treasury holdings fell to 51% from 63%. They cut holdings of mortgage securities to 12%, the lowest since PIMCO started in 2000, from 16%.
The Treasury says the Fed was responsible for Citigroup’s botched attempt to raise funds to pay back its (TARP) federal bailout. Wall Street banks, despite planning to pay sky-high bonuses this year, have yet to turn things around.
Congress voted a $290 billion increase in the debt ceiling, which will last only six weeks.
A $2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling will last 15 months. Next comes the unlimited ceiling. Pretensions will eventually be cast aside. The country is bankrupt.
Then the Senate finance committee voted to reappoint the Chief counterfeiter Ben Bernanke. Wonders never cease. What they should have hired was the monkey from the organ grinder; he couldn’t have done any worse. Shame on the committee.
What has occurred in the US could not have happened by ineptness or chance. It has been done by design. There is no such thing as coincidence.

Spy Drones To Enforce CO2 Regulations


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 21, 2009
Spy Drones To Enforce CO2 Regulations 211209top
President Barack Obama has said that spy drones will be used to enforce CO2 emission regulations, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has outlined plans for the European Union to police compliance with carbon-cutting targets.
The final Copenhagen Accord included the provision that a global “governance structure” would be set up to control taxes on CO2 emissions and this is already starting to take shape after Gordon Brown announced that he is drawing up plans with French President Sarkozy for the EU to become a global warming policeman.
“Mr Brown and French President Nicholas Sarkozy now are working proposals for a “European monitoring organisation” that will oversee every country’s actions on emissions,” reports the Telegraph.
“I will work with President Sarkozy for a European organisation that will monitor the transparency that is being achieved not just in Europe and our own countries, but in every country around the world,” said Brown, adding, “I think people deserve for there to be international reporting at the highest standards of what is being done.”


In addition, President Barack Obama said that satellite technology would be used to check if countries like China are living up to their promises to cut CO2, a move that has been termed “eco-spying”. New advancements allow drones to monitor greenhouse gas emissions over a certain geographical area.

“We can actually monitor what takes place through satellite imagery and so forth, so I think we are going to have a pretty good idea of what people are doing,” said Obama.
“It is hoped that the use of satellite imagery will increase pressure on every country to do their part once targets are eventually in place,” according to the Telegraph.
While this will inevitably pose highly problematic geopolitical flash points in the short term, specifically with regard to U.S. satellites snooping on China, one can only imagine the long term implications of such measures on an individual level.
Governments are already announcing laws to track and trace every mile we travel via black boxes in our cars.
In future, is every business going to be assigned its own individual spy drone to monitor and report on its CO2 emissions?
In a wider sense, this is all geared towards further crushing any notion of border integrity or national sovereignty in pursuit of a global government authority to rule over all countries, zealously enforcing draconian CO2 reduction targets that will bankrupt richer countries while completely devastating the third world, leading to untold poverty and millions more deaths as a result of skyrocketing food prices.

Greek PM, Bilderberger at Copenhagen: "We are Observing the Birth of Global Governace


Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars.com
December 20, 2009
Addressing the COP 15 summit last Thursday, 5 time- Bilderberg attendee, president of the Socialist International, and current prime minister of Greece, George Papandreou, stated that “at this time, we are observing the birth of global governance.”
featured stories   Greek PM, Bilderberger at Copenhagen: We are Observing the Birth of Global Governance
featured stories   Greek PM, Bilderberger at Copenhagen: We are Observing the Birth of Global Governancefeatured stories   Greek PM, Bilderberger at Copenhagen: We are Observing the Birth of Global Governance
Greek PM and Bilderberg attendee George Papandreou: Copenhagen “is global governance in the making.”
After this statement we continuously hear parroted by members of the Bilderberg Group, he added: “We must, however, agree to an obligation and be committed to carrying this out.”
The interesting thing is that Papandreou published a version of the same speech onhis own website, but with an altered- but certainly more revealing- text:
“This is global governance in the making. But we must agree, and agree to a binding commitment.”
He also admitted he was not there only as Prime Minister of Greece:
“The Socialist International, which I also represent here, has proposed, among other measures, funding through an international carbon tax, green bonds or transaction taxes, transforming foreign debt into equal funds to be used by poor countries for climate change adaptation.”


Papandreou attended the Bilderberg conferences of 1995, 1998, 2000, 2004 and 2005. So it may not come as any surprise that the Papandreou calls for global governance to “stop climate change”- which is of course as absurd as calling for the planet to stop turning. It’s interesting to note here that earlier this year Papandreou authored an article for TheNation titled ‘
The Challenge of Global Governance” in which he openly stated: “While I am pleasantly surprised that socialism is back in vogue, I am also mindful that it must be reinvented, too.”

“(…) we are calling for greater financial transparency, more robust regulation, the closing of tax havens, and the creation of a World Finance Organization to enforce global standards.”
In between Bilderberg meetings, on May 8, 2003, the Prime Minister showed us a glimpse of the master plan, namely:
“Creating a new Europe, means creating a new concept of identity for Europe itself, for all the countries in it and to a certain extent for the world too. Europe has a unique dimension here. What is happening in this globalizing world. We are seeing the difficulties of integration into the world system, into a global village. We are seeing a difficulty in creating global governance.”
The plan of the Socialist International as well as their sugar-daddies, the Bilderbergers, is to remove any difficulties they may encounter while setting up their world government.


Alex Jones: Copenhagen Births World Government Framework Despite Fallout Over Science Fraud



Aaron Dykes
Infowars
December 19, 2009
IN HIS THIRD EXCLUSIVE EXPOSÉ OF THE CLIMATEGATE FALLOUT, Alex Jones breaks down the conclusion of the Copenhagen United Nations Conference on Climate Change (UNFCC), including the foundations of a new era of Global Governance– as evidenced by quotes directly from the mouths of Al Gore, UN Head Ban Ki-Moon and bankster heir David de Rothschild.
Though new taxes have been levied and mechanisms for world regulation have been laid down, the Climate Change agenda has taken a lot of political damage. The beginnings of Climategate with the East Anglia CRU email leaks were just the beginning of a chain reaction of revelations that has fueled anger, doubt, denial and speculation worldwide. Compromised calculations or deliberately-fudged data have been exposed worldwide from research centers in Russia, New Zealand, Australia and beyond– casting serious doubt by even mainline commentators upon the so-called “settled-science” and ‘peer-reviewed’ scientific “consensus” of man-made global warming.

Further, many leaders from Third World nations became angered at the ‘Danish text leak’ revealing plans to burden lesser-developed nations with greater emissions cuts and plans to levy a proposed $100 Billion in ‘green’ debt upon poorer nations, to be paid back at interest, of course. George Soros has proved to be at the center of what has been critiqued as ‘Climate Colonialism’ and would prove deadly to populations at-risk for starvation in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, etc. Already, taking over farmlands for ethanol production in the place of food has been blamed for millions of deaths in the LDCs.
Alex also breaks down revelations about the carbon trading and other green schemes. It’s not only players like Al Gore, the Rothschilds and George Soros who stand to make a killing. President Barack Obama– with a great conflict of interest– was a founding investment partner in theChicago Climate Exchange alongside Maurice Strong, a top Rockefeller agent and leading climate change schemer.Chicago Climate Exchange is written into the architecture of many of the proposals for alternative energy credits, carbon derivatives and other green financial products and stands to provide a worthwhile return on investment.
In the end, the forced-incrementalism towards total world government, with complete dominance over money, debt, food, energy and resources, paid a price in exposure at COP15. Many politicians, journalists and people in general are now well aware that a scam has been forced down upon them– and both their freedom and sovereignty are certainly at stake.



There'll be Nowhere to Run From The New World Government


Janet Daley
The Daily Telegraph
December 21, 2009
featured stories   Therell be nowhere to run from the new world government
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Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown and other leaders at the Copenhagen climate talks.
There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which “global” swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were “global crises” and “global challenges”, the only possible resolution to which lay in “global solutions” necessitating “global agreements”. Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a “global alliance” in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)
Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word “global”, as in “global economic crisis”, meant: “It’s not my fault”. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.