Obamacare Explained in One Sentence

DeadlySleep wrote:Let me ponder this...Obama on Leno makes a bunch of gaffes about the Winter Olympics...snip ...
... Oh well...

"We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an e-mail address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat. And that information is useful." -- Obama

DreamStalker wrote:

DeadlySleep wrote:Let me ponder this...Obama on Leno makes a bunch of gaffes about the Winter Olympics...snip ...
... Oh well...

Gaffes?

He LIED to the public on national television ...

"We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an e-mail address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat. And that information is useful." -- Obama

... Calling it mechanisms instead of spying does not make it a gaffe. HE LIES!!

Wulfman... wrote:

DreamStalker wrote:

DeadlySleep wrote:Let me ponder this...Obama on Leno makes a bunch of gaffes about the Winter Olympics...snip ...
... Oh well...

Gaffes?

He LIED to the public on national television ...

"We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an e-mail address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat. And that information is useful." -- Obama

... Calling it mechanisms instead of spying does not make it a gaffe. HE LIES!!

And, they believe that if they repeat the lies enough times, they can turn them into "reality" (or at least believable by the "sheeple").
This is a problem on both sides of the aisle.......Rs & Ds. I'm not letting any of them off the hook.
Whether anybody wants to admit it, Snowden did everybody a big favor. Now Pandora's box is open for all to see and question.

Did anybody see the movie "Sneakers" (1992)? "Too many secrets......" Ironically, it starred a bunch of liberals and made during a Republican administration.
And, "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) starring one of those same liberals had somewhat of a similar subversive government theme.
Now, the shoe is on the other foot (same people but with the other party is in office). One has to wonder how they can defend this destruction of privacy and liberty. After all, they made money from the movies which depicted a ruthless federal government.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759


Den

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DreamStalker wrote:What'cha gonn'a do when they come for you?

123.Shawn T.W. wrote: From http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-0 ... -part-time

Obamacare Full Frontal: Of 953,000 Jobs Created In 2013, 77%, Or 731,000 Are Part-Time
When the payroll report was released last month, the world finally noticed what we had been saying for nearly three years: that the US was slowly being converted to a part-time worker society ...

by PST

Those organizations have always had a reason to hire part-time employees that they do not have to provide full benefits to.

DeadlySleep wrote:

by PST

Those organizations have always had a reason to hire part-time employees that they do not have to provide full benefits to.

To make this statement in reference to a growing trend in part time workers is flat wrong.

If you look at demographics you will see that workers are demanding more part time employment. The demographics show a huge increase in the number of women attending college; a smaller, but still large, increase in the number of men attending college; and an increase in the number of retirees and the number of years retirees live.

These groups are demanding more part time work and many do not need and/or do not value benefits.

Companies are merely using what the available workforce is supplying.

DeadlySleep wrote:

by PST

Those organizations have always had a reason to hire part-time employees that they do not have to provide full benefits to.

To make this statement in reference to a growing trend in part time workers is flat wrong.

If you look at demographics you will see that workers are demanding more part time employment. The demographics show a huge increase in the number of women attending college; a smaller, but still large, increase in the number of men attending college; and an increase in the number of retirees and the number of years retirees live.

These groups are demanding more part time work and many do not need and/or do not value benefits.

Companies are merely using what the available workforce is supplying.

Wulfman... wrote:

DreamStalker wrote:What'cha gonn'a do when they come for you?

All you have to do is look at history and see how that worked out for the "Native Americans" (Indians), and other aboriginal peoples in other countries/continents. "Might makes right".


Den

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Time to Get Crazy

Posted on Jul 2, 2012
Illustration by Mr. Fish


By Chris Hedges

Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.

Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism “a machine for demolishing limits.” This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.

ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are “plunder,” “fraud,” “criminality,” “deceit,” “murder” and “repression.”

Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.

“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” wrote the philosopher John Locke, “they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”

The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.

The white men “made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Chief Red Cloud said in old age, “but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”

Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book “League of the Iroquois,” written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois’ “whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. …” This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.

Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.

There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little BigHorn. “Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was,” Ian Frazier writes in his book “Great Plains,” “because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.” His “dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic,” Frazier writes. “He never met the President” and “never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table.” And “unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.”

Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man’s cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief’s body and said, “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tim ... _20120702/

PST wrote: It is silly to look at a 50-year trend and claim that the reason it has persisted into the last two or three years is some new legislation. It is just as silly as claiming that the increasing cost of health care and health insurance, which similarly represents a 50-year trend, is due to Obamacare this year.

Cutnstuf wrote:An article from Hubpages:

The American Caste System - How America Mistreats Its Citizens
...
How America Refuses to Help Its Citizens
...
Capitalism, it is said, rewards those who work hard - a statement that is not necessarily so. Many who work hard never make a lot of money, and many who don't work hard can use and cheat others to make it to the top of the ladder. Professional athletes, actors, singers, don't work any harder than others, but get ridiculous amounts of money because the American people are willing to pay them ridiculous amounts of money.

Cutnstuf wrote: ...
Just since 2001 the United States has spent over $1.2 trillion dollars on wars!

Cutnstuf wrote: NASA's budget for the space program since 1958 has averaged $9 billion a year.
How much good could have been done with that kind of money? Think of the jobs that could have been created.

Cutnstuf wrote: Health Care
...
Social Security
...

Calvin Coolidge, Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C. January 17, 1925 wrote: After all, the chief business of the American people is business.
...
Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth can not be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it.

Cutnstuf wrote:NASA's budget for the space program since 1958 has averaged $9 billion a year.

How much good could have been done with that kind of money? Think of the jobs that could have been created.