Archive for March, 2010

Healthcare and Economic Realities

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

American people are now the unhappy recipients of Washington’s disastrous prescription for healthcare “reform”.

By Ron Paul
Campaign for Liberty

With passage of last week’s bill, the American people are now the unhappy recipients of Washington’s disastrous prescription for healthcare “reform.” Congressional leaders relied on highly dubious budget predictions, faulty market assumptions, and outright fantasy to convince a slim majority that this major expansion of government somehow will reduce federal spending. This legislation is just the next step towards universal, single payer healthcare, which many see as a human right. Of course, this “right” must be produced by the labor of other people, meaning theft and coercion by government is necessary to produce and distribute it.

Those who understand Austrian economic theory know that this new model of healthcare will cause major problems down the road, as it has in every nation that ignores economic realities. The more government involves itself in medicine, the worse healthcare will get: quality of care will diminish as the system struggles to contain rising costs, while shortages and long waiting times for treatment will become more and more commonplace.

Consider what would happen if car insurance worked the way health insurance does. What if it was determined that gasoline was a right, and should be covered by your car insurance policy? Perhaps every gas station would have to hire a small army of bureaucrats to file reimbursement claims to insurance companies for every tank of gas sold! What would that kind of system do to the costs of running a gas station? How would that affect the prices of both gasoline and car insurance? Yet this is exactly the type of system Congress is now expanding in health insurance. In a free market system, health insurance would serve as true insurance against serious injuries or illness, not as a convoluted system of third party payments for routine doctor visits and every minor illness.

While proponents of this reform continue to defy all logic and reason by claiming it will save money, I worry about cataclysmic economic events. Already investors are more reluctant to buy US Treasuries, fearing that the healthcare bill, along with other spending, will cause government debt to explode to default levels. I had the opportunity last week to address my concerns with both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, especially about the potential for the coming serious inflation. I am not optimistic that these important decision makers truly understand what is coming, why it is coming, and how best to deal with it.

The Federal Reserve finds itself in an unprecedented and unenviable position. To keep up with government spending and corporate irresponsibility, it has increased the monetary base by nearly $1.5 trillion since September of 2008. Excess bank reserves remain at historically high levels, and the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned to over $2 trillion. If the Fed pulls this excess liquidity out of the system, it risks collapsing banks that rely on the newly created money. However, if the Fed fails to pull this excess liquidity out of the system we risk tipping into hyperinflation. This is where central banking inevitably has led us.

The idea that a handful of brilliant minds can somehow steer an economy is fatal to economic growth and stability. The Soviet Union’s economy failed because of its central economic planning, and the U.S. economy will suffer the same fate if we continue down the path toward more centralized control. We need to bring back sound money and free markets- yes, even in healthcare- if we hope to soften the economic blows coming our way.

CNN Smears Completely Unconnected Group As Tea Party Terrorists

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Reporting on cop killing plans of Hutaree cult, CNN zoomed in on Michigan Militia website promoting family picnic.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Militia Field Day

During a report on the indictment against members of the Hutaree organization raided by federal authorities this past weekend, CNN displayed images from the Michigan Militia website, a completely unconnected group, and implied that they shared the cop-killing agenda of the Hutaree, in a clear attempt to smear the national Tea Party movement as a terrorist fringe.

Betraying their callous appetite for grist with which to silence their political opposition, establishment media talking heads and self-proclaimed progressives and liberals have zealously pounced upon the Hutaree raid to advance their anti-free speech agenda and smear opponents of Obamacare or big government as extremists and even terrorists who want to kill cops.

This despite the fact that the Hutaree were shunned by other militia and patriot groups precisely because of their advocacy for violence, beliefs that characterized the group as a “low hanging fruit” and easy targets for a federal raid and a subsequent organized media demonization campaign against anyone who dissents against the continued financial raping or any aspect of big government tyranny.

As we have documented, members of the Hutaree concerned themselves with macabre obsessions such as films about killing children and were clearly mentally ill. By tying this in with political paranoia about big government taking over, the group’s behavior lent itself perfectly to media demonization campaigns, an opportunity gleefully seized by the establishment back in October 2008 after one Hutaree member appeared in a You Tube video dressed in camouflage, waving around a machine gun and speaking with a sinister altered voice.

Despite the fact that other patriot groups went to great lengths to ostracize themselves from the Hutaree as a result of this behavior, the media has exploited the raids to imply that every militia and Tea Party group shares their violent agenda.

During a report on the raids and subsequent indictment of the group, CNN attempted to portray the Michigan Militia and the Hutaree as one and the same, despite the fact that the Michigan Militia posted a message on their official website immediately after the raids making it clear that they had no affiliation with the Hutaree, had not been raided, and in fact as subsequent reports revealed, had refused to help the Hutaree when asked because of their concerns over the Hutaree’s previous reckless behavior.

The CNN report featured a long lingering shot of a web page advertising an upcoming Tea Party event while the correspondent discussed charges of killing police officers using explosives.

“We’re looking at the website right now,” states the anchor, as the shot zooms in on the page of the Michigan Militia, which periodically changes to the official Hutaree website. The Michigan Militia website gets more screen time than the Hutaree website, despite the fact that the two groups are completely separate and even hostile to each other.

While the Hutaree allegedly planned to abduct and kill police officers as well as bombing their funerals, the Michigan Militia openly condemns “attacks or threats of any sort directed against our elected representatives or law enforcement officers.”

The Tea Party advertisement that CNN erroneously implied was on the Hutaree website, promotes a family picnic event at a lake recreation area as well as a shooting competition at a privately owned shooting range. The ad clearly states that open carry does not apply at the range and that “absolutely no alcohol, illegal drugs or illegal weapons” should be brought to the event.

Despite the obvious fact that the advertisement was for a completely lawful event organized by a group that has nothing to do with the Hutaree at all, CNN used the image to openly imply that the alleged cop-killing Hutaree members were part of the same organization, demonizing the second amendment and the Tea Party movement all in one fell swoop.

Watch the clip below courtesy of Raw Story.

Alex Jones Inside CNN Attack Piece

In this important interview attempting to link the Patriot movement and the Tea Parties with “violence”, Alex Jones shows us what goes on behind the scenes of the CNN attack piece apparently set on demonizing tea parties and pro-Constitutional movements as “violent”.

Alex instantly recognize the attempt to demonize him personally, as well as to discredit other grassroots political movements by the tone of the producers questions.

The interview, filmed on Friday, was set-up by Anderson Cooper’s producers, but so far hasn’t aired. Was Alex too controversial, or will excerpts of the footage be used in a future segment? We don’t know for sure, but all that Anderson Cooper’s program showed on Friday in connection with the alleged “violent” tendencies was Sarah Palin and John McCain.

Regardless of what CNN chooses to air in the future, or how they might distort Alex’s responses, here is a record of what really happened. It was filmed on a pocket camera, and no audio of CNN’s questions is available, but Alex Jones’ responses are all here, as he denies their attempt to frame his influence over talk radio and in documentary films as connected with “violence” “anarchy” or other such demonized terms.

Alex calls out CNN for their complicity in “violence” through the promotion of the Iraq War– which resulted in more than 1 million dead Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Alex dares CNN to mention over the airwaves the fact that Anderson Cooper was admittedly in the CIA and is part of the elite Astor family, or the fact that CNN reported the collapse of WTC Building 7 more than an hour ahead of attempt, likely in response to an early Reuters wire report. Yet, no retraction has been made.

Whether or not Alex’s strong response to the attempts at painting political dissent as “violent” terrorism will ever be aired or not remains to be seen.

Magnets ‘Can Modify Our Morality’

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Scientists have shown they can change people’s moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses.

BBC News

They identified a region of the brain just above and behind the right ear which appears to control morality.

And by using magnetic pulses to block cell activity they impaired volunteers’ notion of right and wrong.

The small Massachusetts Institute of Technology study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lead researcher Dr Liane Young said: “You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour.

“To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”

The key area of the brain is a knot of nerve cells known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ).

The researchers subjected 20 volunteers to a number of tests designed to assess their notions of right and wrong.

In one scenario participants were asked how acceptable it was for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knew to be unsafe.

After receiving a 500 millisecond magnetic pulse to the scalp, the volunteers delivered verdicts based on outcome rather than moral principle.

If the girlfriend made it across the bridge safely, her boyfriend was not seen as having done anything wrong.

In effect, they were unable to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions.

Previous work has shown the RTPJ to be highly active when people think about the thoughts and beliefs of others.

Continue reading…

Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

The decision, if upheld, could throw into doubt the patents covering thousands of human genes and reshape the law of intellectual property.

By John Schwartz and Andrew Pollack
The New York Times

A federal judge on Monday struck down patents on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The decision, if upheld, could throw into doubt the patents covering thousands of human genes and reshape the law of intellectual property.

Genae Girard, one plaintiff, applauded the decision as “a big turning point for all women in the country that may have breast cancer that runs in their family.”

United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet issued the 152-page decision, which invalidated seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, whose mutations have been associated with cancer.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York joined with individual patients and medical organizations to challenge the patents last May: they argued that genes, products of nature, fall outside of the realm of things that can be patented. The patents, they argued, stifle research and innovation and limit testing options.

Myriad Genetics, the company that holds the patents with the University of Utah Research Foundation, asked the court to dismiss the case, claiming that the work of isolating the DNA from the body transforms it and makes it patentable. Such patents, it said, have been granted for decades; the Supreme Court upheld patents on living organisms in 1980. In fact, many in the patent field had predicted the courts would throw out the suit.

Judge Sweet, however, ruled that the patents were “improperly granted” because they involved a “law of nature.” He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”

The case could have far-reaching implications. About 20 percent of human genes have been patented, and multibillion-dollar industries have been built atop the intellectual property rights that the patents grant.

Continue reading…

Health Care Reform Bill 101: Who Must Buy Insurance?

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

In an attempt to de-mystify the health care reform bill now before Congress, the Monitor takes a look at what is in it and how it might affect you. First, we look at the new requirement to buy health insurance.

By Peter Grier
Christian Science Monitor

Confused about the healthcare reform effort? Don’t worry – you’re not alone. By the time it comes up for a final vote this weekend, health legislation will be twice as long, and half as intelligible, as Tolstoy’s masterwork “War and Peace.” And news coverage of healthcare reform has focused as much, or more, on political wrangling than on substance.

So we’re going to try to describe what’s in the healthcare reform bill in plain English.

That’s not easy. For one thing, the bill is full of sentences that begin “For the purposes of subparagraph 6(b)….” For another, healthcare reform would be the most sweeping change in US domestic policy in a generation. It’s big, and it’s complicated.

Healthcare 101: What the bill means to you

But here’s a key thing to remember: There is a simple concept at the center of this rambling, Rube Goldbergian machine. Democratic healthcare reform would expand insurance coverage in America by requiring people to obtain it.

That’s right. The healthcare reform bill would mandate that most US citizens and legal residents purchase “minimal essential coverage” for themselves and their dependents. They can get this either through their employer, or, if their employer doesn’t offer health insurance, they can buy it through new marketplaces that will sell policies to individuals.

Those marketplaces would be called “exchanges.” We’ll talk more about them in a later story. (We’ll also cover subsidies for health insurance, when it all would take effect, how it would be paid for, and what it means for businesses.)
Are there penalties if you don’t buy insurance?

If you ignore this mandate and don’t get health insurance, you’ll have to pay a tax penalty to the federal government, beginning in 2014. This fine starts fairly small, but by the time it is fully phased in, in 2016, it is substantial.

An insurance-less person would have to pony up whichever is greater: $695 for each uninsured family member, up to a maximum of $2,085; or 2.5 percent of household income.

There are exceptions. Certain people with religious objections would not have to get health insurance. Nor would American Indians, illegal immigrants, or people in prison.
Why the requirement?

Why is Congress doing this? It’s a pretty obvious way to expand coverage, for one thing. Also, it will help bring in a flood of new customers for health insurance firms, including healthy young people who might not need much healthcare.

Continue reading…