The Health Insurance Scam – “Coverage” Doesn’t Mean Affordability or Access

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An architect of the federal healthcare law said last year that a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” helped Congress approve ObamaCare.

He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn’t know what was in the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval. 

– From the post: Video of the Day – Obamacare Architect Credits “Lack of Transparency” and “Stupidity of the American People” for Passage of Healthcare Law

Politicians, particularly those of the Democratic persuasion, love to throw around statistics about how many additional people have healthcare coverage without ever talking about the cost of such coverage, or whether it actually translates into actual access in the real world.

While a greater number of Americans having health insurance is a good thing when it comes to protecting against unexpected catastrophic events or extended hospital stays, it doesn’t tell you anything about two very important variables: 1) How much does it cost? 2) What kind of access does it provide? As usual, the devil is in the details.

We’ve all seen headlines about higher monthly premiums, but that’s just the tip of iceberg. Once you’ve paid your premium, you’re far from off the hook. Another one-two punch of deductibles, copays and out of pocket maximums appear which can collectively run into the thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for families.

Meanwhile, it appears insurance companies may have recognized the politically toxic nature of higher premiums, so their focus has turned to deductibles as the most efficient way to suck more money from the public for no comparable increase in service.

As the Daily Caller reported earlier this month:

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The New “Middle Class” – Making $250,000 a Year in Palo Alto Qualifies for Housing Subsidies

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Luke Iseman has figured out how to afford the San Francisco Bay area. He lives in a shipping container.

The Wharton School graduate’s 160-square-foot box has a camp stove and a shower made of old boat hulls. It’s one of 11 miniature residences inside a warehouse he leases across the Bay Bridge from the city, where his tenants share communal toilets and a sense of adventure. Legal? No, but he’s eluded code enforcers who rousted what he calls cargotopia from two other sites. If all goes according to plan, he’ll get a startup out of his response to the most expensive U.S. housing market.

Iseman collects $1,000 a month for each of the 11 structures parked in the 17,000-square-foot warehouse he rents for $9,100. Tenants include a Facebook Inc. engineer, a SolarCity Corp. programmer and a bicycle messenger.

– From last year’s post: The Rent is Too Damn High – San Fran Residents Pay $1,000 a Month to Live in Shipping Containers

Welcome to the new normal, where in bubble communities, $250,000 per year is now a middle class income.

Nothing to see here.

From CBS News:

PALO ALTO (CBS SF) — Palo Alto is seeking housing solutions for residents who are not among the region’s super-rich, but who also earn more than the threshhold to qualify for affordable housing programs.

The city council has unanimously passed a housing plan that would essentially subsidize new housing for what qualifies as middle-class nowadays, families making from $150,000 to $250,000 a year.

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Liberty Links 3/22/16

8 links today. Enjoy! Donald Rumsfeld Confronted Over WTC7 (What a weasel, YouTube) Goldman Sachs Probed in Alleged Treasury rigging (New York Post) Billionaires Helped Anti-Trump Super PAC Raise $4.7 Million in February (Wall Street Journal) General Mills to Label GMOs on Products Across the Country (USA Today) UK Teachers Report 4 Year Old Boy To The … Read more

Donald Trump’s Speech at AIPAC Demonstrates Why He Will Be America’s Next President

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In addition to the 21% of responses in the “dishonest/don’t trust her” category, another 7% of Americans use even stronger words in a similar negative vein, including “criminal,” “crooked” and “thief.” Nine percent say they dislike her. Smaller percentages (shown at the end of this article) associate her with Bill Clinton, with the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server while secretary of state and with the Benghazi terrorist attack.

The perceptions of Hillary Clinton as dishonest are not new. When Gallup asked the same question in 2008, “dishonest” was Americans’ most frequent response. 

– Results of a recent Gallup poll

Before I get into this post, I want to make one thing clear — I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m neither a Hillary Clinton nor a Donald Trump supporter; in fact, I’ve spent quite a bit of time sharply criticizing both of them here on these pages.

Donald Trump checks none of my important boxes when it comes to policy. He’s horrible on civil liberties, shows no real interest in reining in Wall Street criminals, and is unlikely to view the Constitution any more respectfully than Barrack Obama or George W. Bush before him. I simply cannot support such a man. With Trump, one has to hope he’s the anti-Obama, i.e., says all the wrong things but then does the right thing. In this sense it is possible that Trump could be a decent president, but he could also be an unmitigated nightmare. He’s the ultimate wildcard, potentially far worse than even Hillary, but also conceivably far better. There’s simply no way to know for sure.

Hillary Clinton on the other hand is a guaranteed disaster. She will take the oligarch-controlled U.S. Banana Republic institutionalized by Obama and embrace it like no one else could or would. She won’t begrudgingly acquiesce to plutocrat demands, she will enthusiastically and shamelessly push forward their agenda without the slightest hesitation or passing thought regarding the wellbeing of the peasantry. Every single negative trend in American society we’ve seen develop over the past several decades will be thrust into overdrive, from neocon militarism to Wall Street criminality. I’ll put the odds at her being a decent president in terms her donors can understand, 0.0001%.

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The Dangers of New York City’s Public Wi-Fi

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If you’re a NYC resident and find yourself excited about the city’s public Wi-Fi network known as LinkNYC, you may want to think again.

As the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) notes:

March 16, 2016 —  The city’s new public Wi-Fi network LinkNYC raises several privacy concerns for users, the New York Civil Liberties Union announced today after sending a letter to the Office of the Mayor on Tuesday. CityBridge, the company behind the LinkNYC kiosks that have begun replacing phone booths in Manhattan, retains a vast amount of information about users – often indefinitely – building a massive database that carries a risk of security breaches and unwarranted NYPD surveillance. 

“New Yorkers’ private online activities shouldn’t be used to create a massive database that’s within the ready grasp of the NYPD,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “Free public Wi-Fi can be an invaluable resource for this city, but New Yorkers need to know there are too many strings attached.”

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Clinton Emails Reveal Google’s Role in Attempting to Oust Syria’s Assad

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Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, will head a new Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday.

Carter unveiled the new Defense Innovation Advisory Board with Schmidt during the annual RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco, saying it would give the Pentagon access to “the brightest technical minds focused on innovation.”

– From the Reuters article: Former Google CEO Schmidt to Head New Pentagon Innovation Board

It’s been observed for quite some time that Google isn’t just a private corporate behemoth, but that its executives are often times more intricately involved in U.S. foreign policy than most people would find appropriate.

It’d be one thing if this support was for a sane and humanitarian foreign policy, but we all know it’s precisely the opposite. In fact, certain Google executives have demonstrated a particular interest in overthrowing governments throughout the Middle East, which has achieved nothing but sow chaos and result in the creation of powerful new terrorists groups such as ISIS.

Two days ago, Wikileaks announced the following to the world via Twitter:

This sounds like a pretty huge deal, so you’d think the American media would be all over it. Not quite. In fact, the only story I’ve seen emanating from the U.S. press was published by the Washington Examiner.

Here are a few excerpts from the story titled, Clinton Email Reveals: Google Sought Overthrow of Syria’s Assad:

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Must Watch Video – “The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime”

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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him…The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

– H.L. Mencken

It does not take a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

– Samuel Adams

Fiat justitia ruat caelum
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

I believe it is the duty of every single American citizen to sit down and watch the following mini-documentary. In just 45 minutes, you will learn more about the state of the union and the the world around you than decades of schooling and mainstream media could ever provide. Ignorance is not bliss, and if it weren’t for the blinding levels of ignorance pervasive in modern society, we wouldn’t find ourselves in this current deplorable state — on a knife’s edge between manageable serfdom and intolerable tyranny.

No one in American society is supposed to be immune from criminal prosecution, yet the Justice Department within the Obama administration took it upon themselves to grant such immunity to the mega banks and their employees. This is a tale of the traitors operating within the highest levels of U.S. government, and it is a saga of how the rule of law was openly torched in front of our very eyes.

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Obama Administration Denied or Censored Information in 77% of FOIA Requests During 2015

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Least transparent ever.

The Associated Press reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration set a record for the number of times its federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn’t find a single page requested under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a new Associated Press analysis of government data.

In more than one in six cases, or 129,825 times, government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year.Such cases contributed to an alarming measurement: People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record. In the first full year after President Barack Obama’s election, that figure was only 65 percent of cases.

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Liberty Links 3/18/16

14 links today. Enjoy! The Clintons’ $93 Million Romance with Wall Street: a Catastrophe for Working Families, African-Americans, and Latinos (Must read, CounterPunch) How the Democrats Have Helped Wall Street, Not the Middle Class (Interview with Thomas Frank) Ted Cruz, A Bush By Another Name (Cruz is not what he pretends to be, Daily Caller) Former Citi Vice … Read more

Leaked Documents Expose the TTIP Trade Deal as a Subversive Imperial Scam

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At least 150,000 people marched in Berlin on Saturday in protest against a planned free trade deal between Europe and the United States that they say is anti-democratic and will lower food safety, labor and environmental standards.

Organizers – an alliance of environmental groups, charities and opposition parties – said 250,000 people had taken part in the rally against free trade deals with both the United States and Canada, far more than they had anticipated.

Opposition to the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has risen over the past year in Germany, with critics fearing the pact will hand too much power to big multinationals at the expense of consumers and workers.

– From the post: Merkel “Surprised” as Hundreds of Thousands March in Berlin Against TTIP “Corporate Dictatorship”

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is under total assault here in these United States, as the general public has become aware that these fake trade deals are merely oppressive power grabs written by lobbyists to benefit multinational corporations at the expense of the general public.

Less well known to the American public is a similar scam targeting Europe, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Recently leaked documents have highlighted its profound dangers.

The Independent reports:

The European Commission will be obliged to consult with US authorities before adopting new legislative proposals following passage of a controversial series of trade negotiations being carried out mostly in secret.

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