The Ruthless Truth blog

Dylan Avery and Corey Rowe Confront Trash ABC News "Journalist" posted 03/08/2010, 9:15 PM (InformationLiberation)
[Category: Resistance]
ABC News "journalist" goes on a soundbite fishing expedition and gets exposed for the fraud that he is.
Note how he slithers away once he gets his pathetic little soundbites. These phony journalists are the scum of the earth.

Obama czar’s shocking communist connections posted 03/08/2010, 9:15 PM (WorldNetDaily)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
John Holdren, President Obama’s "science czar," served on the board of editors of a magazine whose personnel were accused of providing vital nuclear information that helped the Soviet Union build an atom bomb.
The magazine, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has a long history of employing socialist and communist sympathizers, including during the time of Holdren’s employment in 1984, reports the New Zeal blog.
Holdren is assistant to the president for science a… (more)

All in a days work!

Dissenters To Be Detained As “Enemy Belligerents”? posted 03/08/2010, 9:14 PM (Prison Planet)
[Category: Tyranny/Police State]
Since the establishment media is convinced that tea party members, 9/11 truthers, libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and basically anyone with a dissenting political opinion is a likely domestic terrorist, they should be celebrating the fact that a new bill would allow the government to detain such people as “enemy belligerents” indefinitely and without trial based on their “suspected activity”.
The “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” … (more)

A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully posted 03/08/2010, 9:14 PM (The Atlantic)
[Category: Tyranny/Police State]
Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration’s choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read t… (more)

Students Throw Cotton Balls, Are Arrested for Felony Hate Crime posted 03/08/2010, 9:12 PM (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
[Category: Tyranny/Police State]
Two students at the University of Missouri-Columbia were suspended Wednesday after their arrests in a case of cotton balls thrown across the lawn of the campus black-culture center.
Campus police on Tuesday evening arrested the students, one of whom is from the St. Louis area, on suspicion of a felony hate crime. The two were released on bond, and charges were pending.
The incident happened early Friday at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center, near the middle of c… (more)

Rep. Massa Blast Dems: He Was Set Up…Hoyer Lied…May Rescind Resignation posted 03/08/2010, 9:12 PM (Naked Emperor News)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
"When I voted against the cap and trade bill, the phone rang and it was the chief of staff to the president of the United States of America, Rahm Emanuel, and he started swearing at me in terms and words that I hadn’t heard since that crossing the line ceremony on the USS New Jersey in 1983," Massa said. "And I gave it … (more)

Update: Massa Will Resign Monday as Planned…

Massa: Rahm Emanuel "Would Sell His Own Mother" For Votes posted 03/08/2010, 9:12 PM (RealClearPolitics)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
"Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn, Rep. Eric Ma (0 Comments)

Eric Massa: Democrats ousted me over health care posted 03/08/2010, 9:12 PM (Politico)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) says the House ethics committee is investigating him for inappropriate comments he made to a male staffer on New Year’s Eve — and that he’s the victim of a power play by Democratic leaders who want him out of Congress because he’s a "no" vote on health care reform.
"Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill," Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ. "And this administration and … (more)

Detailing Harassment, Massa Claims Democratic Conspiracy Forced Exit posted 03/08/2010, 9:12 PM (City Hall News)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
In his final weekly radio show on Sunday morning, Rep. Eric Massa for the first time detailed the events he believes led to the sexual harassment complaint against him that prompted his resignation from Congress, announced on Friday, but effective Monday afternoon. Massa, a Democrat, also accused House Democratic leadership of conspiring to remove him from office ahead of the reconciliation votes on health care, given his vote against the legislation when it went before the House last November.<… (more)

Troopers raid popular bars for unlicensed beers posted 03/08/2010, 9:10 PM (Philadelphia Daily News)
[Category: Tyranny/Police State]
IT WAS ELIOT NESS and the Untouchables, as played by the Keystone Kops.
More than a dozen armed State Police officers conducted simultaneous raids last week on three popular Philadelphia bars known for their wide beer selections. The cops confiscated hundreds of bottles of expensive ales and lagers, now in State Police custody at an undisclosed location.
The alleged offense: Although the bar owners had bought the beer legally from licensed Pennsylvania distributors … (more)

God I feel safe.

Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED! Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab posted 03/08/2010, 9:10 PM (YouTube)
[Category: Cover-Up/Deceptions]
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fakealqaeda.html<>… (more)

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste posted 03/08/2010, 9:10 PM (TomDispatch)
[Category: Commentary]
Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s "triumph over race." Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.
Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally mad… (more)

Failed Banks May Get Pension-Fund Backing as FDIC Seeks Cash posted 03/08/2010, 9:08 PM (Bloomberg)
[Category: Economy]
March 8 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is trying to encourage public retirement funds that control more than $2 trillion to buy all or part of failed lenders, taking a more direct role in propping up the banking system, said people briefed on the matter.
Direct investments may allow funds such as those in Oregon, New Jersey and California to cut fees for private-equity managers, and the agency to get better prices for distressed assets, the people said. They d… (more)

IRS to Track Online Sellers’ Payment Transactions Beginning Next Year posted 03/08/2010, 9:08 PM (Auction Bytes)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
Internet sellers who don’t report their sales will no longer be under the radar. Starting next year, any bank or other payment settlement company that processes credit cards, debit cards, and electronic payments such as PayPal will have to issue information returns telling the IRS what merchants receive. The new returns are Form 1099-K, Merchant Card and Third-Party Payments.
Purpose of Reporting
The IRS believes that many online sellers fail to report thei… (more)

Obama administration plans to close International Labor Comparisons office posted 03/08/2010, 9:08 PM (Washington Post)
[Category: Politics/Corruption]
Like a scorekeeper for the world, a tiny unit within the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks globalization’s winners and losers, and the results are not always pretty for the United States. Manufacturing jobs here, for example, have fallen faster since 1979 than in Canada, Germany or Japan. Compensation for those jobs dropped here in 2008 but jumped in South Korea and Australia.
Soon, however, Americans may be spared the demoralization in these numbers: The White House wants to shut… (more)

5 ways your TV is slowly killing you posted 03/08/2010, 9:07 PM (MSNBC)
[Category: Big Brother/Orwellian]
You’ve accepted the idea that TV makes you dumber. You know there are lots of more edifying things you could be doing with your time than cheering on the contestants on "Survivor."
And unless you’re working out to an exercise video, you know those hours sprawled out in front of the screen are going to make you fatter — not to mention the impact of all that junk food you’ve been tempted to scarf down during the commercial breaks.
But you’ll be surprised to learn the … (more)

Court to decide if vaccine makers can be sued posted 03/08/2010, 9:06 PM (Reuters)
[Category: Brave New World]
(Reuters) – The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide whether a federal law protects vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits in state court seeking damages for alleged design defects.
The high court agreed to hear a Pennsylvania case involving a lawsuit by the parents of a child who suffered seizures after her third dose of a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine. They sued the vaccine manufacturer, Wyeth, which Pfizer Inc purchased last year.
Pfizer sh… (more)

IMF suggests how to raise climate change funds posted 03/08/2010, 9:06 PM (Associated Press)
[Category: Geopolitics]
NAIROBI, Kenya — The head of the International Monetary Fund on Monday proposed a plan for the world’s governments to pool together to raise money needed to adapt to climate change, a rare step for an organization that normally does not develop environmental policies.
IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the Fund is concerned about the huge amount of funding needed and the effect that will have on the global economy. He added that the proposal may help efforts to reac… (more)

informationliberation – The news you’re not supposed to know…

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By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Local Opinion Editor
03/05/10 1:20 PM EST

Congress hasn’t even passed Obamacare yet, but if and when it does, Virginia’s General Assembly has already fired the first round in what could be a major legal showdown with Washington over the limits of federal power.
On Thursday, the oldest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere became the first state to enact legislation that prohibits the federal government from forcing its citizens to purchase government-approved health insurance. The measure was sponsored by two Northern Virginians – State Senator Jill Vogel, R-Warrenton, and Del. Bob Marshall, R-Manassas – who also co-signed a Feb. 24 letter to President Obama protesting state legislators’ exclusion from his recent health care summit.
In an ominous sign for the president’s top domestic priority, five Democrats in the Virginia Senate joined 18 Republicans to vote for the Virginia Health Care Freedom Act in a state Obama won handily less than 18 months ago. They were, perhaps, influenced by the 2,400 grassroots activists who trekked to Richmond last month to oppose federally mandated insurance coverage.
A constitutional amendment passed earlier in Arizona, but has yet to be approved by voters. It will be on the ballot in November.
Legislators in more than 30 other states are also considering similar bills based on the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Freedom of Choice in Health Care model.
The Tenth Amendment Center has a map of pending health care nullification bills that challenge the federal government’s jurisdiction based on its reading of the Constitution.
So even if Obamacare passes, this brewing constitutional battle could delay enactment for quite some time.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Virginia-first-state-to-nullify-federal-health-insurance-mandate-86632032.html#ixzz0hKTUJqeN

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By Joanne Laurier
2 March 2010

The Obama White House and its media backers defend the administration’s cost-cutting health care overhaul, with all its dire implications for broad layers of the population, with the claim that the scheme is based on objective scientific research.

Leading the charge has been the New York Times, which has berated a skeptical US population for not accepting the supposedly incontrovertible scientific evidence that slashing Medicare, the government program for seniors, and reducing the availability of more expensive tests, drugs and procedures to ordinary people will improve the quality of their care while dramatically reducing costs.

In numerous editorials and articles, the newspaper has blamed runaway health care costs not on insurance companies making record profits and a for-profit system dominated by giant drug companies and hospital chains, but on doctors and hospitals that order “excessive” tests and treatments. It asserts that the Obama plan is based on scientific research, and suggests that people who oppose it are simply being irrational and backward.

Since the most expensive treatments are not always the best treatments, the liberal supporters of the Obama plan assert, high-cost hospitals and doctors should be penalized and the entire system should be loaded with financial incentives to ration care—except, of course, to the rich, who will continue to enjoy the best care money can buy.

Most prominent among the studies cited by such backers of Obama’s health care overhaul is the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which is published by Dartmouth Medical School’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. The Dartmouth Atlas website asserts that at a time “when there seem to be too many questions and too few answers about to how to repair a broken system, the [Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice] offers a science-based, methodological approach to analyzing and proposing solutions that can and will work.”

The Dartmouth Atlas research “has become phenomenally influential on Capitol Hill since it was popularized by Peter R. Orszag, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office and then as President Obama’s budget director,” the New York Times wrote last June.

In a September 2008 speech at Stanford University, Orszag stated that the government is “building off of much of the work the Dartmouth folks have done,” asserting there is “little evidence that extra spending gets us anything in terms of reduced mortality rates or higher quality.”

In fact, the underlying methodology of the Dartmouth studies is, at best, highly questionable from a scientific standpoint, and, as an examination of the Dartmouth Atlas shows, the conclusions the Dartmouth researchers draw from the data they collected are built into the premises they employ. There is a vocal and growing body of opinion within the health care and medical communities that insists the Dartmouth Atlas studies are examples of shoddy science driven by an underlying and reactionary political agenda.

While it has come to prominence of late, the Dartmouth group has long been an advocate of health care rationing. The Dartmouth Atlas April 2008 publication, “Tracking Patients with Severe Chronic Illness,” provides the key “scientific” rationale for Obama’s proposed health care cost reductions—in the range of 30 percent for both Medicare and other government health programs and for the private sector. The June 2009 Times article says that Orszag estimates that total US health care costs can be reduced by $700 billion a year without any decline in the quality of care for the American people.

The April 2008 study, headed up by Dr. John Wennberg, examined Medicare spending during the last two years of life for individuals who died between 2001 and 2005. It found that health care for these patients delivered in different regions and by different hospitals involved significantly differing amounts of treatment. From this, the Atlas concluded that those institutions with higher costs were guilty of providing unnecessary and excessive treatment.

The study argued that since there were no differences in patient outcome—all subjects died—variations in spending between high-cost and low-cost regions and hospitals could not be justified.

“By looking at care delivered during fixed intervals of time prior to death,” states the study’s Executive Summary, “we can say with assurance that the prognosis of all the patients is identical: all were dead after the interval of observation.”

This is a crude example of circular reasoning. According to the Dartmouth Atlas, all the patients in the study died. Ergo: those hospitals that spent more were wasting money.

To be blunt—that such arguments can be credited as “science” is an astounding testament to the degradation of official thought and intellectual life in contemporary America. Pardon us, if we point out—all of the patients died because only those patients who died over the two-year period were included in the study!

How does the banal and entirely predictable fact that some hospitals spent more on their patients than others hospitals warrant the conclusion that there was no difference in the quality of care? Or, for that matter, any conclusion other than the fact that some spent more than others. Because, the Dartmouth researchers claim, they all died.

One is almost embarrassed to point out the absurdity of this line of argument. Since there was no attempt to determine which hospitals had a better survival rate for the Medicare patients, or to measure any other indicator of the quality of life of the patients, the Dartmouth data can legitimately yield no conclusions about the relationship between cost and quality of care.

Moreover, and no less crucial, the Dartmouth study ignores real-life socio-economic and demographic factors among the different patient populations that obviously play a huge role in determining the cost of medical care. As many critics of the Dartmouth studies have correctly pointed out, poverty matters! Hospitals in large cities that treat many people from impoverished neighborhoods, as well as those in poor rural areas, are obviously going to face higher costs than hospitals in mainly upper-class areas, whose patient pools are wealthier and healthier.

Further, the study claims that a major portion of the “unwarranted” variation in spending is the result of what the researchers call “supply-sensitive” care—that is, the availability of health care resources, such as the number of specialists per capita. In other words, a major problem in the health care system that needs to be addressed is the general availability of more expensive and sophisticated forms of care, including new tests, devices, drugs and procedures arising from advances in medical technology.

The implications of this line of argument are as sweeping as they are reactionary: new technology and methods are “unnecessarily” increasing health care costs because they are available to ordinary people, and their widespread availability creates an incentive to use them on the general population. The truly Malthusian and misanthropic premises of this argument—and the entire line of the Dartmouth studies—emerge quite clearly.

Ordinary people are being given too high a level of care, they are living too long, and they are costing the ruling class to much! The Atlas study points to the “increasing recognition that some chronically ill and dying Americans are receiving too much care.”

This is clearly an argument for rationing health care and depriving masses of people of more sophisticated and expensive treatments, which should be reserved for the wealthy.

The principal conclusion drawn by the Dartmouth study is that lower-spending institutions should be the benchmark to be emulated, by financially incentivizing facilities and practitioners to provide a decreased amount of care. Toward this end, the study holds up as a model the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and denigrates as a prime example of “excessive” care the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

“Data from the Atlas can therefore be used,” says the study, “to estimate the savings that could be achieved if, for example, UCLA met the utilization provided by the Mayo Clinic.” The study ignores the fact that the Mayo Clinic is located in a suburban and upper-income area, while UCLA is an inner-city hospital in one of the largest metropolitan areas and services poor, working class and minority populations.

“One group of winners in this scenario would be payers,” such as insurance companies, says Dartmouth. The “winner” in this scenario would indeed be the for-profit health care industry, and the “loser” the American people.

There is, of course, waste and inefficiency in the US health care system. Waste is inherent in a corporate-dominated, for-profit system in which health care is subordinated in the accumulation of private wealth and subject to the anarchy of the capitalist market. It is one expression of the contradiction between the development of science and technology and the profit system.

Responding to the Dartmouth attack, the UCLA Health System, including six California teaching hospitals, produced a counter-study in which the dead were counted—but so were the living.

As a result, the California investigators found that the “hospitals that used more resources had lower mortality rates.” They went on to say that “our findings suggest that focusing only on expired patients may lead to different ranking of hospitals with regard to resource use…. Assessing hospital efficiency requires that we consider outputs as well as inputs, that is, health outcomes as well as resource use.” (See accompanying interview with Dr. Michael Ong, lead author of the California study.)

One critic of the Dartmouth Atlas, Dr. Peter B. Bach of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, published an analysis of the study in the February 18, 2010, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Entitled “A Map to Bad Policy—Hospital Efficiency Measures in the Dartmouth Atlas,” the article stated, “Because the Atlas is so influential, their rankings [of hospitals] could have broad effects on policy.… Given their potentially far-reaching implications, it is concerning that the rankings are unsound, both conceptually and methodologically.”

Bach asserts that the “Atlas efficiency rankings consider only costs (i.e., resources consumed),” rather than “weighing both resources consumed and [patient] outcome,” and might be used in the withholding of care from the seriously ill.

“We are about to embark on a huge transformation of our health care system,” Dr. Bach told the New York Times. “If we start with a bunch of flawed measures, it will be as devastating as putting in the wrong coordinates before a moon shot.”

Senior researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health concluded that at least half of the differences in end-of-life-care costs discovered by the Dartmouth group are the result of “socio-economic factors,” such as poverty.

Testifying before Congress on April 1, 2009, Dr. Robert Berenson of the Urban Institute in Washington DC, asserted, “Our preliminary findings cast doubt on both the magnitude of the geographic spending variations and the source of the variations that the Dartmouth researchers found. Analysis of spending for individual patients who live in different geographic areas suggests that variations in individual characteristics, especially patient’s underlying health status and a range of socio-economic factors, including income and the presence of supplemental insurance, account for almost all of the explainable variation. In our analysis, local provider supply—the number of hospital beds and physicians per capita—did not explain the Medicare or total health cost of individual patients.”

One of the most persistent critics of the Dartmouth group has been Dr. Richard Cooper, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and former dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin. He spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about the major fallacies of the Dartmouth study and their political implications. (See accompanying interview).

In a separate conversation, Dr. Cooper brought out what he termed a conflict of interest between Dr. Wennberg’s commercial affiliations and the research over which he presides.

“In Health Affairs in 2007,” Dr. Cooper said, “Dr. Wennberg cited a financial interest in Health Dialog, a commercial provider of care management services. Also in 2007, his son David Wennberg stated that he is the president and chief operating officer of Health Dialog Analytic Solutions, a subsidiary of Health Dialog. The pending Senate health care reform bill contains a section that calls for value-based purchasing, introduced by Senator Maria Cantwell, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Max Baucus, who both received campaign contributions from employees of Health Dialog, according to Watchdog.net.

“The privately-held corporation has a contract from the British National Health Service to develop risk-stratification tools for use by providers in England.”

Health Dialog describes itself as a firm that “helps physician groups, health plans and self-insured employers improve health care quality while reducing overall costs.”

A press release for the Dartmouth Atlas study acknowledges that it was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in partnership with a “funding consortium” that included the foundations of mega health insurance companies WellPoint, Aetna and UnitedHealth Group.

Dr. Wennberg’s office did not reply to questions on the study submitted by the World Socialist Web Site.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/dart-m02.shtml

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by Chuck Norris

Not surprisingly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released last Friday revealed that 56 percent of Americans think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to their rights and freedoms.

Particularly apropos here is the feds’ health care violation of the 10th Amendment, which is part of our Bill of Rights and was ratified Dec. 15, 1791. The amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Thomas Jefferson explained the pre-eminence of this amendment in 1791: "I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

The point is that based on the 10th Amendment, when it comes to legislating and controlling our health care, the federal government doesn’t have a constitutional leg to stand on. And even its past violations of the 10th Amendment by implementing government health care services have proved to break more national legs than they have to mend them. The proof is in the pudding. How many times does it have to be pointed out to Washington? Medicare is going bankrupt. Medicaid is going bankrupt. Case closed.

The government is inept to run America’s health care system. And now it wants to expand its programs (its health care business) to oversee what equates to one-sixth of the gross national product? What rational board anywhere in the world would rightly appoint a CEO who had a string of miserable business failures and major corporate bankruptcies in his dossier?

I agree with Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford University Medical Center, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who put it best in their article a few months back, titled "Alternatives to government health takeover." They said this: "We think it’s critical that power shifts to the American consumer and away from government, employers and insurers, as evidence shows medical care prices come down when patients pay directly. Government should offer tax relief, such as refundable tax credits, to encourage private health insurance purchasing — especially for low-income families. Similar ideas, like those in the Patients’ Choice Act … are important for Americans to consider. We would do well also to consider creative ideas such as changing federal payments to state-based medicaid plans to individual vouchers or expanding health savings accounts, as has been done in South Carolina."

Returning the onus of solving health care issues to families, local communities and states would not only return a balance of power to our federal government but also help with America’s economic recovery and build up communities at the same time.

The abuse of federal political power to intervene in areas such as Americans’ private health care could exist only in a nation that no longer holds its leaders accountable to its constitution and that has governmental leadership that regards itself as above its people and its constitution. Sadly, I was listening to an interview the other day in which President Barack Obama described the U.S. Constitution as "an imperfect document … a document that reflects some deep flaws … (and) an enormous blind spot." He also said, "The Framers had that same blind spot."

In so doing, the president established a rationale and justification for disregarding the Constitution. Even worse, he placed himself above the Constitution and those "blind Framers," who just couldn’t see the big picture as he does today. After all, he’s the constitutional scholar, and the Framers were just, well, the creators of the document!

Our 44th president would do well to learn from America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, himself a source greater than any living constitutional lawyer. Imagine Jefferson sitting there at the health care summit, a ripe sage at roughly 80 years of age. After listening to all the clamoring of both Republicans and Democrats, he politely but sternly utters these words, which he also wrote to Supreme Court Justice William Johnson in 1823: "The States supposed that by their tenth amendment, they had secured themselves against constructive powers. They (did not learn from the past), nor (were they) aware of the slipperiness of the eels of the law. I ask for no straining of words against the General Government, nor yet against the States. I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore, to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the constitution for the limitation of both; and never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market."

It couldn’t be any clearer or wiser than that.

I encourage you to go to TenthAmendmentCenter.com and learn more about your 10th Amendment rights, and then fight for those rights by holding all your representatives accountable to them.

Chuck Norris is a columnist and impossible to kill.
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http://townhall.com/columnists/ChuckNorris/2010/03/02/obama_vs_the_10th_amendment?page=1

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Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney were Right About Barack Obama

by Chris Hedges

Global Research, March 2, 2010

Truthdig – 2010-03-01

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives. 

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage.

“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?” Stack wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political ‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the ‘terrible health care problem’. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”

The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be. If we do not take a stand soon we must prepare for the rise of a frightening protofascist movement, one that is already gaining huge ground among the permanently unemployed, a frightened middle class and frustrated low-wage workers. We are, even more than Glenn Beck or tea-party protesters, responsible for the gusts fanning the flames of right-wing revolt because we have failed to articulate a credible alternative.

A shift to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader, along with genuine grass-roots movements, will not be a quick fix. It will require years in the wilderness. We will again be told by the Democrats that the least-worse candidate they select for office is better than the Republican troll trotted out as an alternative. We will be bombarded with slick commercials about hope and change and spoken to in a cloying feel-your-pain language. We will be made afraid. But if we again acquiesce we will be reduced to sad and pathetic footnotes in our accelerating transformation from a democracy to a totalitarian corporate state. Isolation and ridicule—ask Nader or McKinney—is the cost of defying power, speaking truth and building movements. Anger at injustice, as Martin Luther King wrote, is the political expression of love. And it is vital that this anger become our own. We have historical precedents to fall back upon. 

“Here in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name,” the late historian and activist Howard Zinn said in a lecture a year ago at Binghamton University. “Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.”

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism, organizing and mobilization that empower groups to confront the hegemony of the corporate state and the power elite. The longer socialism is identified with the corporatist policies of the Democratic Party, the longer we allow the right wing to tag Obama as a socialist, the more absurd and ineffectual we become. The right-wing mantra of “Obama the socialist,” repeated a few days ago to a room full of Georgia Republicans, by Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. speaker of the House, is discrediting socialism itself. Gingrich, who looks set to run for president, called Obama the “most radical president” the country had seen in decades. “By any standard of government control of the economy, he is a socialist,” Gingrich said. If only the critique were true.

The hypocrisy and ineptitude of the Democrats become, in the eyes of the wider public, the hypocrisy and ineptitude of the liberal class. We can continue to tie our own hands and bind our own feet or we can break free, endure the inevitable opprobrium, and fight back. This means refusing to support the Democrats. It means undertaking the laborious work of building a viable socialist movement. It is the only alternative left to save our embattled open society. We can begin by sending a message to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader. Let them know they are no longer alone.

Chris Hedges is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Chris Hedges

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17875

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