Oligarchy

9 New York Doctors Arrested for Using Homeless People to Defraud Millions from Medicaid

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Mr. Rorie was recruiting homeless people, prosecutors said, and whoever had a valid Medicaid card would be packed into a van and sent to medical clinics around New York City. There, after hours of unnecessary tests and fake diagnoses, the homeless people would be sent off with sneakers — selected from stacks of shoeboxes in the clinics’ basements. The doctors, staff members and billing specialists, meanwhile, would rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars per recruit in false Medicaid claims, prosecutors said.

From a warehouse in Sunset Park, Eric Vainer, 43, oversaw the operation with the help of his mother, Polina, 66, prosecutors said. “We can use the same patients like guinea pigs for anything we want,” Mr. Vainer was recorded saying in a government wiretap.

– From the New York Times article: 9 New York Doctors Are Accused of Defrauding Medicaid Using Homeless People

In America’s fraudulent oligarch economy in which corruption and theft have become the preferred means to earn money, it’s no surprise doctors feel a need to participate. Do no harm indeed.

From the New York Times:

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Peter Thiel on the American Political System – “Not a Democracy or Constitutional Republic”

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The obvious conclusion that the U.S. is neither a democracy nor a constitutional republic has been a key topic of conversation here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the past several years. One of the most powerful representations of this unfortunate fact came from an academic study highlighted last year: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy.

A couple of days ago, Peter Thiel sat down with Tyler Cower at George Mason University’s Mercatus center for a chat about all sorts of interesting things. The Washington Post picked up on some of his thoughts regarding the American political system, which I think deserve some additional commentary.

On the one hand, he accurately identifies the U.S. as nothing resembling either a democracy or a constitutional republic. He then goes on to point out that the system we have is one in which the power is increasingly concentrated in undemocratic, “technocratic” agencies. Where I think he falls way short is with a failure to ask what interests are driving the decisions of these undemocratic entities. Any unbiased observer can clearly see that it is oligarchs driving the oligarchy, as opposed to independent thinking bureaucratic technocrats driving a technocracy. I have published countless articles proving this to be the case. Naturally, a billionaire might have a harder time recognizing this.

Fortunately, the writer of the Washington Post article picked up on his oversight. Here are some excerpts:

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The Dissident Dad – Free Your Mind

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I was wiping off the dust from an old book that I read when I was just 15 years old. I thought I had lost it, but while cleaning out my garage, I discovered it at the bottom of a box, like buried treasure. This specific book changed my life. It was the key to everything my brain had told me was right, but I had never seen it in written words. The book was “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” by Robert Kiyosaki. First self-published in 1997, somehow I got lucky and a friend who was in his 30s gave it to me as a gift.

Upon opening up this book that I hadn’t touched in 18 years, written in my handwriting was “free your mind.” It was a statement of faith I had declared to myself as a young man.

Since last fall, I’ve been writing Dissident Dad posts weekly, focusing on my personal struggle to raise 3 children in an environment where the America we were all told about and learned to love is completely in the past. It’s a totally foreign nation to anyone residing in the current police state run by an insane group of oligarchs, multinational corporations and lunatics in D.C.

Today, I want to change it up a bit and reach out to any young adults reading this post, or perhaps parents who are raising teenagers. With daily stories about college-aged kids being overwhelmed with debt and irrelevant degrees for today’s economy, I wanted to put together a list of 50 alternatives to going to college.

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Jeb Bush Doubles Down on His Love Affair with the NSA in Recent Interview

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Last month, I highlighted Jeb Bush’s passionate and relentless support for the fascist, authoritarian and unconstitutional activities of the NSA in the post, Jeb Bush Exposed Part 2 – He Thinks Unconstitutional NSA Spying is “Hugely Important.” Here’s an excerpt:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016, said Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program that collects bulk telephone records was “hugely important,” throwing his support behind the practice as Congress debates whether to reauthorize or limit it.

At an event on foreign policy hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mr. Bush, a Republican, said, “For the life of me, I don’t understand the debate” over the metadata program.

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Meet the Overseas Contingency Operations Account – Washington D.C.’s Crony Capitalist War Slush Fund

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Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain has called it a “gimmick,” and Democrats complain that larding up the separate war funding bill with extra spending amounts to an “abusive loophole.” Yet so far, the massive increase is likely to remain in this year’s budget.

Another major criticism of the process has been its common use to fund favored projects and other items not directly tied to the war — a trend that has steadily grown over the years as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on and the Pentagon loosened the definition of war-related spending.

From 2001 to 2014, nearly $71 billion of nonwar funding was provided through war appropriations, according to the Pentagon’s own definition, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reported in December.

– From the Politico article: War Budget Might be Permanent ‘Slush Fund’

Many people will read this post, and posts like it, and shrug their shoulders saying that there’s always going to be corruption. True; however, there are degrees of corruption. When empires such as the U.S. attain a certain level of corruption that reaches the point where it becomes engrained within the fabric of society, and you couple that with zero accountability for the super rich and powerful, you have the ingredients for societal collapse. We are rapidly approaching this point, and I personally don’t think there’s any way to stop it.

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Another Oligarch Preaches to the Peasants – Charlie Munger Says “Prepare for Harder World”

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While several exceptionally wealthy and successful people have admirably come out and spoken passionately of the broken nature of financial markets and the political system, as well as the threat this poses to society in general (think Paul Tudor Jones and Nick Hanauer), there have been several examples of oligarchs coming out and conversely demonstrating their complete disconnect from reality, as well as a disdain for the masses within a framework of incredible arrogance.

I’ve commented on such figures in the past, with the two most popular posts on the subject being:

A Billionaire Lectures Serfs in Davos – Claims “America’s Lifestyle Expectations are Far Too High”

An Open Letter to Sam Zell: Why Your Statements are Delusional and Dangerous

The latest example comes from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand man, who tends to demonstrate an incredible capacity for verbal diarrhea. Recall his commentary on gold: “gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939.”  

Moving along, Mr. Munger provided some typically insensitive commentary at an event yesterday in Los Angeles. Bloomberg reports that:

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Just Another Tale from the Oligarch Recovery – $100 Million Homes Being Built on Spec

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Neoclassical economics and the trickle down policy framework that we have derived from it argues that there is a trade-off between fairness and growth. The general idea of trickle down economics is that the richer the rich get and the less constrained they are, less burdened in regulations, the more jobs they create, the better off everyone will be. It’s the concentrated accumulation of capital which is the principal driver of market capitalism.. So, rising economic inequality isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the trickle down economics. It’s how you know things are getting better, right? Because the richer the rich get, the more jobs they create. This is a general principle of the thing.

– From Salon’s recent interview of Nick Hanauer: The 1 Percent Rigged Everything: Why No One Can End Ronald Reagan’s “Dead Wrong” Voodoo Economics

Just to give you a little sense of how all this wealth has been “trickling down” see…

More developers and investors are racing to build increasingly lavish homes on spec. Built on prime lots with master suites larger than most homes and spas and entertainment spaces comparable with those in hotels, many of these homes are also attempting to break new price records.

Real-estate agents say the surge reflects an ultraluxury housing market that is at an all-time high, fed in part by overseas buyers and house hunters looking to invest in trophy properties. 

“These are people who are going to buy these homes to park money,” says Jeff Hyland, of Beverly Hills-based Hilton & Hyland. 

Mr. Hadid declines to say what he’s spending on the home, but says the listing price will likely be in the $200 million range when the house is completed next year.

– From the Wall Street Journal article: The Race to the $100 Million Spec House

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to highlight a recent insightful interview Nick Hanauer gave to Salon. In case you forgot, Mr. Hanauer is the billionaire who came out and publicly warned of pitchforks unless our corrupt economic system is reformed. I highlighted his article and provided my own thoughts in the piece: The Pitchforks are Coming…– A Dire Warning from a Member of the 0.01%. If you never read that, I suggest taking a look now.

A very poignant point made by Hanauer in his latest interview, concerns how fake liberals like Barack Obama will pay lip service to income inequality as if it is simply some unexpected moral tragedy which happened accidentally within a well functioning economic system. Hanauer correctly points out that the economic system itself is corrupted. That all wealth is being funneled to a tiny oligarchy isn’t a a flaw within this system, it’s a deliberate part of the design itself replete with its own elitist hedging mechanism.

For example, whenever oligarch wealth is threatened, such as in the 2008/09 time period, all resources are immediately mobilized to bail them out. The interests of all other segments of society are consistently thrown to the wayside, with the exception of welfare merely meant to just lessen the probability of civil unrest, as opposed to actually lifting people into the middle or upper classes.

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Clinton Foundation’s Deep Financial Ties to Ukrainian Oligarch Who Pushed for Closer Ties to EU Revealed

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Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.

In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

The Pinchuk foundation said its donations were intended to help to make Ukraine “a successful, free, modern country based on European values.” It said that if Mr. Pinchuk was lobbying the State Department about Ukraine, “this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing.”

– From the Wall Street Journal article: Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends

When I first came across the title to this article, I didn’t think much of it. In fact, I almost didn’t even click the link thinking it was just a repeat of a prior expose I highlighted in the post: Hillary Clinton Exposed Part 2 – Clinton Foundation Took Millions From Countries That Also Fund ISIS.

Fortunately, I did decide to take a look and pretty soon my jaw absolutely hit the floor. Although the Wall Street Journal didn’t play up the connection, I was stunned to see that of all the oligarchs connected to foreign governments who donated to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State, Ukraine was at the very top. I thought this to be strange, but as I read on I just couldn’t believe how connected the main donor was to the current regime in power. Considering this is the main geopolitical hotspot on earth right now, many, many questions need to be asked.

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Baby Oligarch Gets a Wrist Slap – Conrad Hilton Cops Plea Deal for Smoking Pot in Plane Restroom and Threatening to Kill Flight Attendants

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Screen Shot 2015-01-22 at 4.42.04 PMLast month, I wrote about the fact that Paris Hilton’s brother had engaged in extraordinarily disruptive and illegal behavior on an international flight. I didn’t cover this story because it was a matter of national importance, but because I knew that he wouldn’t be punished for what he did. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans are imprisoned every day for far less (see: Land of the Free: American Police Make an Arrest Every 2 Seconds in 2012).

I’m not saying that average Americans should be imprisoned for such offenses, rather, I’m pointing out the egregious injustice within the U.S. legal system, and the the fact that when you have as much money as Conrad Hilton, laws simply do not apply to you. Here’s an excerpt from that post, Little Oligarch Gone Wild – Paris Hilton’s Brother Yells: “I Will F*cking Own Anyone on This Flight; They Are F*cking Peasants”:

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Neither Republicans nor Democrats Top 40% Favorability in Latest Gallup Poll for First Time Ever

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Over the past couple of months, I’ve launched a series of posts titled either “Hilary Clinton Exposed” or “Jeb Bush Exposed,” in order to call attention to the deplorable and embarrassing fact that the American citizenry is being set up to choose between two awful candidates, both from dynastic and corrupt political families.

One thing I’ve realized over the past half-decade or so, is how incredibly slow genuine political change can be. Societies can be well aware of how despicable, useless and criminal their so-called political “leaders” are, yet it still can take decades or more to usher in real, sustainable paradigm level change. This is sort of the curse of being aware and awake, but it’s a burden I and all of you reading this share together.

While I spend a lot of time on this site talking about concerning things happening around us, there’s certainly reason for optimism. Indeed, if I didn’t think that positive systemic change was not just possible, but probable, I wouldn’t bother doing this at all. Many people will read the news from Gallup about how neither the Republican nor Democrat party have greater than 40% favorability and say “who cares,” but I’ll tell you why I think it matters.

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