Bernanke is Man of the Hour: Inflation and the IMF Threats

At 2:15 p.m. ET, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, will make waves in the world of economists and Wall Streeters. For the first time in the 98-year history of the nation’s central bank, the chairman will talk to the press after an interest rate decision, fulfilling a promise he made at his first confirmation hearing back in 2005. (Source: ABC News)

Federal Reserve Shrugging Off IMF Insinuation

Sovereignty is the quality or authority of being independent and in charge of the conditions you live under.

Tea Partyiers are calling for the dissolution of the Fed — that is nothing new. Let me repeat: that is nothing new. John Birchers, Goldwater Republicans and Libertarians have been calling to end the Federal Reserve for decades. It is part of their return-to-the-gold-standard platform.

While many mainstream media reporters are stating Bernanke is speaking to everyday Americans about inflation here in the U.S., I believe he will be sending a strong message to the IMF — we control our monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve strengthens U.S. sovereignty and U.S. authority as it enables the United States to operate independently of global monetary policy makers. There is a fight going on right now between the IMF and the United States. The IMF wants to reduce the U.S. sovereignty by replacing the dollar as the world currency with SDRs, Special Drawing Rights. (see June 2010 Bloomberg excerpt below). Reducing U.S. sovereignty would undermine our authority around the world. For that reason, and that reason alone, I believe Bernanke will, through his well thought out comments, re-establish the authority of the United States today in his unprecedented press conference. He will through his comments assert the United States controls its monetary policy through the Federal Reserve. We will assert our authority and power through our currency and there is no way we are giving that authority up.

The U.S. is seen as weak right now and it’s enemies are looking at this as a prime opportunity to press agendas to further weaken the U.S. The IMF attack on the dollar is but one challenge we face. The other is the incessant call to return to the gold standard. Another is even coming from the left-wing as the Second Bretton Woods Summit was held earlier this month to discuss global governance of financial capitalism. No consensus came out of that summit.

In an article from Forbes we get a clearer view of where Soros stands: he wants more regulation of central banks as does Obama, and many Democrats to avoid another economic meltdown in the future.

Critics mistakenly argues “that Soros and well known economists like Joseph Stiglitz are calling for the dollar to be replaced as a world currency. That is false. They are saying that a weak dollar is forcing Central Banks around the world to turn to other currencies and hard assets because they are losing value on their dollar based assets. They are turning to the euro and to gold to build up reserves. But they are not doing this at a rate that puts the dollar under serious threat of being debased as the global reserve and trade currency of choice.”

In Kenneth Rapoza’s article he states” SDRs are light years away from ever becoming a tradable currency. Yes, they could become part of a Central Bank’s foreign reserves, but if they account for 10% of them in some countries, I’d be shocked. SDRs are used by IMF member nations to pay each other their IMF loans. Americans will not be going to ATM machines to withdraw SDRs with Soros and Obama’s pictures on them to buy bread in the socialist bread lines within –let’s put money on it — the life cycle of planet Earth.

I’ll be doing a followup after Bernanke speaks today.

Related:

I listened to a comprehensive report on inflation yesterday on Los Angeles 1070 radio Business Hour. Food – up; Gas – up; Retail goods – up; Gold continues to climb and now silver is surging; John Harris’s Summer of Rage is developing as predicted.

Business Times reported today:

(SINGAPORE) Silver rallied to an all-time high as investors sought to protect their wealth against accelerating inflation and a weaker dollar with holdings in a metal that also benefits from economic growth. Spot gold also reached a record.

Immediate-delivery silver climbed as much as 5.4 per cent to US$49.79 per ounce, beating the previous peak, which according to research company GFMS Ltd was US$49.45 in 1980.

1980 was a particularly nasty year; Inflation in 1980 hovered between 13 and 14%. Credit card rates were very high; The Prime lending rate hit 21.50% in December 1980. These were very tough years for most Americans including myself as I was in my prime earning years and just could not get ahead. My best years, were the Clinton years, otherwise, it has been a battle to make a decent living. Now, we are in a similar situation, if not worse. Bernanke is really driving the bus now and I have every confidence in him that he will make astute decisions that will help the recovery long term, preserve our monetary authority, and strengthen our sovereignty.

Sources:

Bloomberg June 6, 2010 -(Bloomberg) — The International Monetary Fund said it’s possible to take the “revolutionary” step of creating a new global reserve currency to replace the dollar over time.

The IMF’s so-called special drawing rights could be used as the basis for a new currency, First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky told a panel discussing reserve currencies at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum today.

“There are many, many attractions in the long run to such an outcome,” Lipsky told a panel discussing reserve currencies at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum today. “But this is not a quick, short or easy decision,” he said, adding that it would be “quite revolutionary.”

The SDRs would have to be delinked from other currencies and issued by an international organization with equivalent authority to a central bank in order to become liquid enough to be used as a reserve, he said.

As much as 70 percent of the world’s currency reserves are held in dollars, according to the IMF, leading to calls for nations to diversify their cash piles to avoid excessive exposure to the U.S. economy as it quadruples its budget deficit in a bid to counter the worst recession since the Great Depression.

IMF Special Drawing Rights, click here

Forbes: Soros Bretton Woods Meeting Not So Scary, click here

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Rewind: Democracy Now Interview with Stiglitz on 1% Dilemma

PART ONE

PART TWO

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Wealth Inequality in America Solution is Either Localization or Revolution

ASHEHAM PRESS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.

– Noam Chomsky

There are several very good resources on the status of wealth in America in this post. They are listed further below. My own views on how to change this dynamic are several. Here they are and they are all doable and must be done to save ourselves from plutocracy – corporatism, oligarchy, and privatization. The only other way is to have upheaval and possible revolution like the French revolution when the French people rose up and killed the oligarchs and outlawed corporations; and with good reason – they were predators feeding off the masses. I am afraid we have arrived at such a point.

STOP FEEDING THE PYRAMID!

– Skip over buying at companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Verizon, etc. Stop buying from large corporations as many are involved in tax dodging, overseas hiding of assets, investing in overseas labor, labor lawsuits, and lobbying efforts against the betterment of the everyday American in their quality of life. They are anti-tax, anti-union, anti-environment, anti-regulation, anti-public healthcare, and anti-civil-rights. Verizon is on the list as they helped the Bush administration spy on Americans post-911 and they are against net neutrality.

– Refrain from investing in the stock market where large corporations and banks benefit the greatest from small investors and 401k contributions, thus empowering them even more.

– BUY LOCAL FROM LOCAL COMPANIES TO KEEP THE MAJORITY OF WEALTH IN THE LOCAL ECONOMY. The goal is to strengthen LOCALIZATION currently running in parallel to Globalization; LOCALIZATION must become the locus of our labor efforts AND spending habits. It is the key to shifting wealth back to the majority of everyday Americans because we all live locally.

These three things could turn the tide in wealth distribution. When we spend money locally at locally owned small businesses (a small business in America is deemed by the SBA as making $25 million a year or less), that money will stay largely in the local economy. We are shifting where we spend our money and that will make all the difference in the world – literally.

Related:

– 15 Mindblowing Facts About Wealth and Inequality in America — see these charts

Here is one chart from the Nation as shown in the article:

– The Richest 1% Have Captured America’s Wealth — What’s It Going to Take to Get It Back? click here to read

Excerpt: just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving them to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people.

– Why Obama’s Economic Plan Will Not Work—And a Better Plan – click here

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Fox Hunting: Goldman Traders Guilty of Manipulating Sub-prime Derivatives

This is finally coming to light in a more significant way. I have repeatedly reported on the corruption and manipulation as revealed in the Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job, plus special reports from Frontline, 60 Minutes, and the New York Times.

Bloomberg reports: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) mortgage traders tried to manipulate prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in May 2007 for their own benefit, according to a U.S. Senate report.

Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.

“We began to encourage this squeeze, with plans of getting very short again,” Deeb Salem, a trader in the structured product group, said in a 2007 self-evaluation excerpted in the report. Swenson, Salem’s supervisor, sent e-mails in May 2007 urging traders to offer prices that will “cause maximum pain” and “have people totally demoralized.” In interviews with the committee, Salem and Swenson denied attempting a short squeeze, the report said.

The subcommittee cited the episode as an example of how Goldman Sachs traders placed the firm’s interests ahead of its clients’ as the value of mortgage-linked investments tumbled in 2007. The subcommittee, led by Senator Carl M. Levin, a Michigan Democrat and Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, has called on regulators to craft strict bans on proprietary trading and conflicts of interest to keep the problems from recurring.

‘Poor Quality Investments’

“Conflicts of interests related to proprietary investments led Goldman to conceal its adverse financial interests from potential investors, sell investors poor quality investments, and place its financial interests before those of its clients,” according to the subcommittee.

Read entire Bloomberg story, click here

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Tax Dodging Corporations Need to Pay More Taxes

Let’s not mince words: the wealthy and corporations are scamming America and Americans. Will our country be a nation for and by the people, or for and buy the wealthy and corporations? That’s the fight we are fighting.

I have no problem with people making money and keeping their earnings, BUT I am also in favor of EVERYONE PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE of taxes. But the subject does not stop there. The money retained by certain corporations goes to lobbying efforts — influence peddling — towards our publicly elected representatives.

ThinkProgress just posted an excellent article:

A new report by Public Campaign examines how these major corporations have influenced Congress to craft a tax code that lets them get away with making so much money and paying so little taxes in return. In its report, “The Artful Dodgers,” Public Campaign juxtaposes the limited tax liability of dozen major corporations with the companies’ campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, which amount to more than a billion dollars over the last decade:

EXXON MOBIL: The oil giant that was the world’s most profitable corporation in 2008 has spent $5.7 million in campaign contributions over the last ten years and $138 million in lobbying expenditures. Its federal corporate income tax liabilities for 2009? Absolutely nothing. Not only did it pay nothing, but it also received a tax rebate the same year of $156 million.

CHEVRON: Chevron spent $4.4 million in campaign contributions and $91 million in lobbying expenditures over the last decade. It received a tax refund of $19 million in 2009 while making $10 billion in profits and $324 million in government contracts in 2008.

CONOCOPHILLIPS: The Texas-based gasoline giant spent $2.5 million in campaign contributions and $63 million in lobbying expenditures over the last decade. It received “$451 million through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction,” a special tax break, between 2007 and 2009, despite $16 billion in profits over the same period of time.

VALERO ENERGY: Valero spent $4.1 million in campaign contributions and $4.8 million in lobbying expenditures from 2001 to 2010. It received a $157 million tax rebate in 2009 despite $68 billion in sales during the same year. It received “$134 million through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction” over the last three years.

BANK OF AMERICA: Bank of America employees contributed $11 million to federal political campaigns from 2001 to 2010 and spent $24 million lobbying over the same period of time. It made $4.4 billion in profits in 2010 while receiving a tax refund of $1.9 billion.

CITIGROUP: Citigroup employees contributed $15 million to federal political campaigns from 2001 to 2010 and spent $62 million lobbying over the same period of time. It made $4 billion in profits in 2010 while paying absolutely nothing in federal corporate income taxes. It also received a $1.9 billion tax refund.

GOLDMAN SACHS: The mega-bank Goldman Sachs, which is often called “Government Sachs” in insider circles because of its clout over Washington, spent $22 million in campaign contributions and $21 million in lobbying over the last decade. It paid an ultra-low tax rate of 1.1 percent in 2008, while also receiving $800 billion in governmentloans to help weather the financial crisis.

BOEING: The aviation and defense contractor giant gave $10 million in contributions and $115 million in lobbying expenditures over the last decade. It paid a grand total of nothing in federal corporate income taxes in 2010 and received a $124 million tax refund.

FEDEX: FedEx spent $8.7 million in campaign contributions and $71 million in lobbying expenditures from 2001 to 2010. It paid a .0005 percent effective tax rate recently, actually spending 42 times as much on lobbying Congress as it did paying taxes. To do this it utilizes 21 tax havens.

CARNIVAL: The cruise line paid $1.7 million in campaign contributions and $1.6 million in lobbying over the past ten years. Despite the relatively low amount of money it spent influencing Washington, it has gotten away with a super-low tax rate. Over the past five years, its federal corporate income tax rate has been an effective 1.1 percent.

VERIZON: Verizon spent $12 million in campaign contributions and $131 million in lobbying expenditures over the past decade. It paid absolutely nothing in federal corporate income taxes over the past two years and $488 million in government contracts in 2008; in 2010, it made $12 billion in profits.

GENERAL ELECTRIC: General Electric spent $13 million in campaign contributions and $205 million in lobbying expenditures over the last decade while netting a tax refund of $4.1 billion over the past five years. It made $26 billion in profits over the same time period.

The amount of money that taxpayers are losing from the tax dodging by these major corporations is enormous. For example, if five of the nation’s biggest banks paid their taxes at the full rate, we could re-hire every single one of the 132,000 teachers laid off during the recession — twice.

To shed light on this story, Public Campaign analyzed the lobbying expenses and political contributions of 12 large, well-known corporations, their political action committees (PACs), and their executives. These 12 corporations were chosen because they have been identified by news reports, nonprofits, and elected officials as egregious corporate tax dodgers. It should be noted that what these large corporations are doing to avoid tax payments is perfectly legal. But as we have often noted about our campaign finance laws, the scandal is what is legal, not illegal.

It won’t come as any surprise that we found that the dozen tax dodging corporations invested heavily in Washington politics. While the extent to which these corporations and their executives spent is not knowable – corporations and wealthy executives regularly give to trade associations and political organizations without disclosing the donations – Public Campaign’s analysis found that the dozen corporations, their PACs, and executives spent more than $1 billion over the last ten years to influence Washington.

READ THIS IMPORTANT REPORT FROM PUBLIC CAMPAIGN CLICK HERE

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Rewind: Alzheimer’s Disease Will Claim One in Eight Baby Boomers

My regular readers know my mom is in the early stages of Alzheimers and my grandmother, her mother, also had the disease. It is critical that we continue private and government funded research to help develop therapies. It is also one more reason Medicare and Medicaid should be strengthened and not privatized. I would be more that willing to pay a few dollars more per month to support these programs.

March 18 (Bloomberg) — Alzheimer’s disease will claim about one in eight baby boomers in their lifetime, or about 10 million Americans, a new report suggests.

Medicare spending for Alzheimer’s will jump to $38 billion in 2025, when those born between 1946 and 1964 start to reach the median age for nursing home admission, according to the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association, which releases its yearly report today. That compares with a Medicare outlay of about $21 billion in 2005, the group said.

Unless new treatments are developed, the time and out-of- pocket costs for family caregivers will increase as well, the group said. Karen Holland, whose husband Edward doesn’t always remember who she is, said she knows how confusing it’s been for him, and difficult for her. Holland, born in 1947, says her fellow baby boomers aren’t ready for what’s coming.

“I think that in baby boomers, there’s a lot of denial,” said Holland, who works at the association’s New York City chapter. “It’s the same problem with people not wanting to do wills because you don’t want to think about that.”

Holland and others say more research is needed on the condition, and that families should prepare themselves better as her generation gets older. The report said 7.7 million people will have Alzheimer’s by 2030, a 48 percent rise from 2008, and lists the prevalence of the disease by state, the number of caregivers, the hours of unpaid work watching patients and the costs of health care for Alzheimer’s patients.

By 2010, Alaska and Colorado will record a 47 percent rise in cases from 2000, the biggest jump among states, the report said. Wyoming is next with a 43 percent rise.

Read entire Bloomberg article, click here

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Vouchers: Good for Health Insurers – Bad for Insurees

The Ryan plan, he said, would “end the current health care guarantees for seniors on Medicare, and deny health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans. That’s not courageous, it’s wrong.”

– Budget Committee, ranking member Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

The Republican party is very busy these days lobbying for the largest and wealthiest corporations rather than doing their job which is to represent the public interest. The Health Insurance industry is a favorite one. The proposal by Paul Ryan (R) from Wisconsin to offer vouchers for Medicaid and Medicare and otherwise privatize these programs It would eliminate both programs as we know them today.

I am very familiar with both programs as my mom uses both. And just for the record: we were middle class folks who worked and saved and paid our taxes. She simply outlived her savings and my small business went under all at the same time. She was placed in a nursing home in late 2009 due to congestive heart failure and diabetes. Without Medicare and in particular, Medicaid, she would be living with me, with no skilled nursing care because neither of us could afford her daily medical care.

Today I will explain what vouchers are and how that would work. But first let me say this. If the largest corporations would get off their hoarding of nearly $3 trillion and invest in America and American jobs, tax revenues would increase dramatically very quickly and the two programs would be well on their way to being solvent. Our whole system is set up on taxes to fund government and related programs. Our government is owned by its citizens; whereas, corporations sell things and make a profit, and customers have little or no input as to how these businesses operate. Health Insurance sells insurance and coverage always has limitations. Insurees are not patients or citizens, they are customers first and foremost.

That is a very important distinction and should be remembered anytime we are considering privatizing public programs or services.

What Are Vouchers
According to Merrill Goozner, “the House Budget Committee chairman’s alternative budget would turn Medicare over to private insurers for anyone who retired after 2021. Future retirees would receive a capped payment to buy insurance (he called it “premium support,” not a voucher). Medicaid would be turned into a capped block grant – which translates as a fixed sum awarded to states.”

Economist Paul Reich wrote, “Paul Ryan’s plan – to give seniors vouchers they can cash in with private for-profit insurers — would be even worse. It would funnel money into the hands of for-profit insurers, whose administrative costs are far higher than Medicare.”

What this means is a voucher is more like a coupon worth a stated amount of money. You use it PLUS YOUR OWN MONEY to buy healthcare. Nothing is guaranteed. You will be subject to the rules of health insurance corporations decided by a very small group of people. They are not your government representatives. EVEN if you were a stockholder in one of those companies, you would not have a say so over how the programs would run.

As I wrote recently here, the aging of the Baby Boomers is a goldmine that private corporations want to cash in on. They see 70 MILLION NEW CUSTOMERS — NOT PATIENTS WHO NEED COMPASSIONATE CARE AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT, OR CITIZENS WHO HAVE RIGHTS AND INPUT.

If you want to protect Medicare and Medicaid, get involved, Contact your representatives on both sides of the aisle and let your views be known.

Related:
Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt, who sits on the boards of device-maker Boston Scientific and Amerigroup, a managed care provider, argued in his February critique of the Ryan-Rivlin plan that the most likely outcome of turning Medicare into a defined contribution plan from its current defined benefits would be an ever-widening gap between the level of government support and what constitutes good health care in our society. That would lead to “a multi-tiered health system with a highly financially constrained, bare-bones system for tax-financed health insurance, a broad but varied set of tiers for privately insured patients and a boutique tier for Americans able to afford that style of care.”

Source: Medicare, Medicaid Gets Squeezed in Ryan Program, click here

Also read: Medicare for All Is the Solution by Robert Reich, click here

Excerpt: The real problem is the soaring costs of health care that lie beneath Medicare. They’re costs all of us are bearing in the form of soaring premiums, co-payments, and deductibles.

Americans spend more on health care per person than any other advanced nation and get less for our money. Yearly public and private healthcare spending is $7,538 per person. That’s almost two and a half times the average of other advanced nations.

Yet the typical American lives 77.9 years – less than the average 79.4 years in other advanced nations. And we have the highest rate of infant mortality of all advanced nations.

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Fox Hunting: Investigators Look to Banks on Possible Multi-Trillion Libor Collusion

I learned many years ago that if you want to know what goes on in our world – FOLLOW THE MONEY. Nothing surprises me after learning about the massive fraud that went on with the largest investment banks that preceded the 2008 global collapse. Now we are seeing more of the same. This breaking story tonight might roil the markets. I am putting together a couple quick sources to get a full picture of what is going on.

Note: The Libor Rate is the London Interbank Loan Rate. Countries that rely on the LIBOR for a reference rate include the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the U.K.

WSJ Breaking News tonite: U.S. investigators are examining whether some of the world’s biggest banks colluded to manipulate a key interest rate before and during the financial crisis, affecting trillions of dollars in loans and derivatives, say people familiar with the situation.

For the past year, law-enforcement officials have been investigating whether the U.S. and European banks understated their own borrowing costs, which are used to calculate the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. The investigators are now looking into whether the banks effectively formed a global cartel and coordinated how to report borrowing costs between 2006 and 2008.

The inquiry, led by the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, is analyzing whether banks were understating their borrowing costs. At the time, banks were struggling with souring assets on balance sheets and questions about liquidity. A bank that borrowed at higher rates than peers would likely have signaled that its troubles could be worse than it had publicly admitted.

Roughly $10 trillion in loans and $350 trillion in derivatives are tied to Libor, which affects costs for everything from corporate bonds to car loans. If the rate was kept artificially low, borrowers likely weren’t harmed, though lenders could complain that the rates they charged for loans were too low. Derivatives contracts could be mispriced because of any manipulation of Libor.

According to people familiar with the yearlong probe, U.S. regulators are focusing on Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and UBS, among others, and have sent subpoenas to those banks. The three banks declined to comment.

Inside the Justice Department, the case is being pursued by antitrust and antifraud prosecutors, said people familiar with the situation. Criminal antitrust investigations typically focus on collusive behavior such as price-fixing and bid-rigging. A number of the banks involved in the probe have hired high-profile corporate-defense law firms.

Read entire article, click here

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — U.S. law-enforcement officials have launched an investigation into possible collusion among U.S. and European banks to fix the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The report said the probe, conducted over the past year, is looking at whether the banks acted in concert to understate their borrowing costs, used to calculate Libor, during 2006-2008. The report said officials had sent subpoenas to Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG, among others.

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Medicare Battle Set: Obama To Announce Entitlement Reform

ASHEHAM PRESS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The President wants to get out ahead of the debate over healthcare, i.e. MEDICARE. I heard on CBS news this morning the President will be announcing his own plan for entitlement reform. It will be everyday American who will have to come out in force and en masse to protect Medicare from privatization.

Here are the buzz words for entitlement “reform”:

– Reform is a Republican code word for cuts to favored Democrat programs

– Title shift is shifting the cost from the Federal government – public sector – to the private insurance sector in a significant way.

– Premium support – the Federal government would provide premium support in the form of vouchers to help seniors purchase private insurance.

– Block granting would shift responsibility for overseeing the “public portion” of the reformed medical coverage to the States. The states would determine the eligibility, or rationing of health coverage.

I just wrote on this last week and I have been writing on PRIVATIZATION for months. I hope people are taking heed to this potential fundamental shift in our country. Let me review what PRIVATIZATION means again. Let’s start with who is who, and what is what.

First off, as a United States citizen you own your government. Essentially you have an undivided interest in the structure we call a Constitutional Republic. You are a stakeholder with tremendous rights as embodied by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your rights are inherent in your birthright. They are not granted, nor are they privileges. Every United States citizen except some criminals, have the right to vote. This is a fundamental right tied to the principle of self-determination for our citizenry who choose our leaders and determine the course of action for our country.

As Alexander Hamilton and James Madison summed it up, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

In a corporation you do not own it unless you are a shareholder. As a shareholder, you have a small interest unless you are what is called a major stockholder with 30, 40, 50% or more interest. You have proxy voting privileges and very limited influence. You have virtually no rights in the decisions on how the corporation is run. An elected small group of people, called the board of directors, make all the major decisions along with the executive management, which is another small group of people. There are bylaws and articles of incorporation which layout the basic structure of the company. There is no function of self-determination in a corporation. The motive of all corporations is to make a profit through the selling of goods and services.

Public versus Private
Health insurance corporations make money by selling goods and services at a PROFIT. The government when providing Medicare for its citizens does not extract a profit. Tax revenues are used to subsidize these government programs. Elected public servants, i.e. legislators and the Health and Human services department decide how Medicare is run. Corporate boards and analysts decide how to run their health insurance program.

Medicare was voted into law by an act of Congress.
Health insurance is decided by a small group of corporate heads and boards of directors.

Medicare is designed to serve the mass majority of American citizens; its benefits are available to everyone over sixty-five, regardless of need, and by linking payments to the existing private insurance system.

Health insurance is designed to make a profit and limits coverage so as to limit its liability and outlay of funds. Note: 44 million Americans cannot afford private health insurance.

Medicare was implemented as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society domestic program agenda meeting one of the two main goals of social reform: the elimination of poverty and racial injustice.

Today in America, the number one reason for personal bankruptcy is medical debt obligation. That obligation is due to the high cost inflicted upon our citizenry by a predatory health system which at its center is the private health insurance industry.

From March 2010 Report on Health Insurance Profits:
The top five earning insurance companies averaged profits of $12.2 billion, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, from 2008. And in 2008 (the last year for which data was available), CEO compensation for these companies ranged from $3 million to $24 million.” See table of a partial list of insurer/CEO profits, click here.

Insurer profits increased even in the midst of the current recession. Last week, during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, WellPoint admitted that it increased premiums to keep up with medical costs and maintain a 2% profit. The company’s 2009 fourth quarter net income “was more than $2.7 billion, a 727 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year” — even as membership declined by some 4 percent.

Read: Think Progress – Health Insurance Industry Defends Massive Profits

See related post: Forget Medicare! 70 Million Boomers Healthcare is a Goldmine for Corporations – click here

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Soros: Shadow Banking “Out of Control”

This past week while listening to various Bloomberg TV shows I heard again and again from analysts who favor the free trade-multinational-globalization paradigm, that China is our friend, our ally, our partner. More like a partner in crime. George Soros a billionaire capitalist ironically is not a free trade proponent. This statement he made at Bretton Woods has me very concerned for if we start to see inflation worldwide, we will see widespread destabilization as food prices will soar and upheaval will ensue. Remember what John Harris said: 2011 will be the summer of rage. I am thinking he was right.

Dow Jones reports: At a conference in Bretton Woods, N.H., billionaire financier George Soros said he believes Thursday’s interest-rate hike by the European Central Bank was done at a “quite inappropriate” time, and that China’s reluctance to allow currency appreciation was a “mistake.”

Economies across the globe are facing mounting inflationary pressures with rising food and commodity prices, and that fear “induced the ECB to raise interest rates at a time that in my opinion is quite inappropriate,” Soros said.

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