Trickle Up Poverty (21 page)
Are you beginning to get the picture? You’re losing your freedoms. You’re losing your choice.
You’re losing your access to the best healthcare system in the world.
Of course, the ever-arrogant Barack Obama dismisses all such talk. One week after ObamaCare passed, Obama publicly chided journalists for citing polls demonstrating that America is bitterly divided over what just went down. Obama wagged his finger in the face of his critics, saying:
Every single day since I signed the reform law, there’s been another poll or headline that said, ‘Nation still divided on health care reform.’ It just happened last week! It’s only been a week! Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm and you planted some seeds and they came out next day and they looked—‘Nothing’s happened! There’s no crop! We’re going to starve! Oh no! It’s a disaster!’ It’s been a week, folks.67
In one respect, Obama is right. The economic damage and the trickle up poverty that will come once his wrecking ball hits the healthcare industry will take some time to bear its ugly fruit. The full force won’t be felt overnight. Why? Many of the draconian measures don’t kick in until 2014 and beyond. Even so, plenty of weeds are sprouting in Obama’s garden of healthcare paradise. Within a week of its passage, three hundred companies screamed bloody murder. Among them, 3M Corporation, AK Steel, AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Company, Valero Energy, and Verizon said the new law “will make it far more expensive to provide prescription drug coverage to their retired employees.”68
AT&T screamed the loudest. The company announced its plan to take a $1 billion charge against their earnings due to the new tax provisions in ObamaCare. Likewise, the executives at “Deere & Company announced a $150 million charge, Caterpillar a $100 million charge, and 3M a $90 million charge.”69 The result for these and numerous other companies is to stop providing prescription drug coverage altogether.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
ObamaCare was going to improve medical benefits not harm business.
Which is why Linda Douglass, Communications Director for the White House Health Reform Office, remains in denial. She said of these cuts, “We’re confident that the benefits are going to accrue and strengthen business’s bottom line.”70 What does she or Obama or Pelosi or Reid or any of the Obamocrats on the hill know about running an international corporation? Nothing.
They don’t live in the real world. They never even ran a hotdog stand.
Of course, the rapid negative response by corporate America to Obama-Care makes Henry Waxman angry. As Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Waxman issued a decree from this Lilliputian throne summoning executives from these evil, money-hungry corporations to appear before him in Washington, D.C. Why? Waxman refuses to believe these companies are just doing their best to survive after being sucker-punched by their own government. Waxman wrote:
The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern … To assist the Committee with its preparation for the hearing, we request that you provide the following documents from January 1, 2009, through the present.71
Waxman went on to demand a far-reaching list of confidential, internal documents, e-mails, accounting methods, and other company correspondence in what is clearly a heavy-handed act of government intimidation. Representative Michael Burgess, of the Energy and Commerce Committee, questions Waxman’s tactics:
The timing of the letters and the hearing and the scope of information requested looks an awful lot like an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents of the Democrats’ flawed health care reform legislation.72
And so the battle over health care heats up.
Barack Obama and Nancy “The Hammer” Pelosi may be gloating today, but the passage of socialized medicine in America is a blunder of major proportions. Businesses will have to reduce or cut benefits to remain solvent—or move jobs abroad. Period. We’re already seeing businesses making changes in order to survive the spike in additional health care costs. In fact, three short months after ObamaCare passed, the White House “outlined broad new rules designed to prevent employers from dropping health insurance benefits for their workers or shifting huge new costs onto them.”73 Yes, ObamaCare is a blunder—and the worst is yet to come. All that Pelosi and Obama have accomplished is artificially to increase the “demand” for health insurance by forcing everyone to be covered or suffer financial penalties. What they fail to see is this simple equation: High demand + limited supply = higher prices.
That’s Economics 101, which Obama must have missed while studying Marxism 401. The consequences of ObamaCare might not hit middle-class earners overnight, but very soon there will be little relief from the rate hikes we’re all about to receive.
Obama has won. Your pain has just begun.
Seizing Control
Rather than be a pragmatic centrist, as the compliant media insists on portraying him, Obama is an ideologue. His actions during his first year and a half in office demonstrate that he is hell-bent on turning America into a socialist land with an impoverished citizenry dependent on the government. Regarding the passage of ObamaCare, he pursued his agenda with an almost maniacal flare—even at the risk of badly damaging the Democratic Party. And, while Obama was the front man, Nancy “Mussolini in a Skirt” Pelosi was the fixer. The most hated woman in America has pushed this country to the brink of communism.
It wasn’t easy. It was an impressive act of chicanery.
First, she had to design a bewildering, convoluted bill spanning 2,074 pages because she wanted to make sure even a speed-reader wouldn’t have time to go through all of it—nor fully understand it if they did. Second, she chose the end of the week to release the details of the bill because she knew that this would prevent the handful of media members who weren’t already on the side of socialized medicine the barest minimum of time to find out what was in it or, in turn, have time to tell the public about it.
What’s more, Pelosi scheduled the vote for a Sunday. Why?
So that the real America that she scorns, the loyal patriots who hate this bill and don’t want the government shackling them with mandatory insurance, would be in church, praising God while Congress desecrated God by voting for ObamaCare on a Sunday. What’s more, Pelosi suddenly got that good time religion when she said on the Sunday morning of the vote, “Today is the feast of St. Joseph the worker, particularly significant to Italian-Americans. It’s a day when we remember and pray to St. Joseph to benefit the workers of America.”74
Let’s set aside the fact that Saint Pelosi was factually wrong. The feast of Saint Joseph the Worker is May 1 while the date she referred to was really the Solemnity of Saint Joseph. So she flubbed her religious history. Fine. I’m not one to take issue with someone’s personal beliefs. But this smacks of religious pandering of the worst order. Imagine the outcry if a Republican Speaker of the House were to have said they were praying to a saint to help get a highly controversial, much-hated bill passed.
Not a word from the government media complex taking her to task for integrating church and state.
Beyond pandering to the Catholic voters, Madam Pelosi had to threaten and whip Congress into going along with Obama’s American-style socialism. She whipped the right so the Blue Dogs would go along. She whipped the left so the Kuciniches would go along. And now America is about to be whipped by Pelosi’s lash. Indeed, Pelosi had to take out her opponents one by one, dangling sweetheart deals to secure key votes with payoffs, paybacks, and plenty of pork.
After the bill passed, House Minority Leader John Boehner said, “Look at how this bill was written. Can you say it was done openly? With transparency and accountability? Without back room deals that were struck behind closed doors? Hell no you can’t!”75 With regard to Pelosi’s Pork, it’s a well-known fact that, for example, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson was promised millions in additional Medicaid cash for his state, a controversy known as the “Cornhusker Kickback.” Only after the terms of that deal saw the light of day and after the ensuing public outcry was that provision later extended to all fifty states.76
For her part, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu got $300 million in pork funding and became the sixtieth vote to bring the bill to the Senate floor. As a pundit on Good Morning America whom I’ve never heard of said, “The people of Louisiana sent her to Washington to get as much sausage as they could, you know, she could.” On the same show, George Stephanopoulos called the kickback a bargain for the Demoncats: “But I think Democrats are saying it’s a pretty cheap vote. $300 million. Without Senator Landrieu’s vote yesterday, this bill would have died, would have been very difficult to put it back together.”77
I guess we have Senator Landrieu to thank for this nightmare.
Pelosi wasn’t the only member of the administration strong-arming the rank and file into compliance. Rahm Emanuel accosted one uncooperative representative, Eric Massa, in the shower. Remember that one? Afterward, Massa described the White House Chief of Staff as “an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.” Regarding Emanuel’s confrontation, Massa said, “I am showering, naked as a jay bird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me.”78 Let’s set aside the question whether or not the guy was engaged in extra-marital relations. The fact of the matter is that, in the end, the administration destroyed Massa’s reputation with crypto-gay smears, forcing him to resign.
That’s just what has been made public. Who knows how many threats Rahm Emanuel made that we’ll never hear about. Who knows how many backroom meetings were held by this pit bull, or the number of other naked encounters he made in the showers. In 1965, Malcolm X declared that civil rights must be achieved by “any means necessary.”79 In 2010, that’s clearly the Obama view.
And then there’s Ohio’s Representative Dennis Kucinich, the Whore who sold out to Obama after getting a ride on Air Force One. This communist congressman from Cleveland betrayed his own far-left principles in order to appease Chairman Obama. At first, Kucinich wasn’t going to vote to pass ObamaCare—because he didn’t think it went far enough! After his joyride with the president, Kucinich the Whore acknowledged that the vote would be “quite close” and decided to vote “not on the bill as I would like to see it, but as it is.”80
What was his original problem with Obama’s bill?
Kucinich opposed it because it didn’t “protect states that want to create a single-payer system” and was miffed because he saw it, wrongly, as a “step toward privatization.”81 As communistic as his position might be, I would have had a modicum of respect for him if he had stuck to his guns, been true to what he really believed, and voted against the bill. Instead, he fell in lockstep with his power-hungry comrades whose main concern is not principle but power.
If he and Obama would have come out and said, “We want to take over the health care industry and turn America into a socialist nation,” then at least we could admire them for their honesty. At that point, Americans could have had an open and honest debate about whether democracy or communism was the better way to go. But these backstabbers know that America is a fundamentally center-right nation.
They knew they’d lose if they were upfront about their goals.
Instead, they minced words and danced around the edges, essentially saying, “ObamaCare isn’t socialist. We’re just nice guys trying to make sure everyone has access to health care.” But when you examine the fundamentals of this bill—the mandatory nature of the insurance, the extreme government regulation of the private sector, the layer after layer of bureaucracy—you find that it is, in fact, socialist pure and simple.
In an attempt to sell his healthcare bill to the half-asleep American public, the president told an audience in Glenside, Pennsylvania:
On one side of the spectrum, there were those at the beginning of this process who wanted to scrap our system of private insurance and replace it with a government-run health-care system like they have in some other countries. Look, it works. It works in places like Canada, but I didn’t think it was going to be practical and realistic to do it here.82
You have to read between the lines to understand what Obama is really saying. Since I’m the best analyst in the business, let me unlock what he’s trying to hide. When this usurper says, “there were those … who wanted to scrap our system … and replace it with a government-run” program, Obama is one of “those” of whom he speaks. He wants a government-run system. He wants total control. That’s what dictators like this Socialist-in-Chief ultimately hope to accomplish.
Furthermore, when Obama says, “I didn’t think it was going to be practical and realistic to do it here,” he left off the most important word in the sentence: “yet.” It’s all about taking baby steps to hoodwink the American public into accepting a single-payer, socialist-style, government system, which is precisely why he’s been vilifying private insurance sector. As one Canadian paper put it:
U.S. President Barack Obama cast America’s private health insurance companies Monday as the premium-hiking villains in the nation’s health-care crisis and hailed Canada’s publicly funded Medicare as a system that “works”83 [emphasis added].
If Obama thinks the Canadian healthcare system is so good, why did the Premier of Newfoundland, Danny Williams, travel to America for heart surgery? Williams was unapologetic about his decision to fly to Miami for treatment. He said, “This was my heart, my choice and my health. I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics.”84 Likewise, former prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, flew on Canadian government jets—at Canadian taxpayer expense—to the United States to go to the Mayo Clinic.85 So, if America offers the best treatment, why would we want to have socialized medicine as they have in Canada?