ObamaCare: What You're Not Being Told

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Obamneycare Converts Health Care Into Profits

Paul Craig Roberts

In the guest section there is a new contribution by Dr. Robert S. Dotson. He points out that Obamneycare is two versions of the same thing. A person has to be gullible and uninformed to believe the claims of Obama and Romney that their replacements for Medicare will save money and improve care. What the schemes do is convert public monies into private profits.

The exploding costs described by Dr. Dotson and the rising profits for private corporations are paid for by reducing health care. For example, Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York, writing in Investors Business Daily ( http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/101212-629190-obamacare-medicarecuts-danger-to-senior-citizens.htm?p=full ) reports that “On Oct. 1, the Obama administration started awarding bonus points to hospitals that spend the least on elderly patients.” The result will be fewer knee and hip replacements, angioplasty, bypass surgery, and cataract operations. These procedures transformed aging by allowing the elderly, who formerly languished in wheelchairs and nursing homes, to lead active lives.

The Queen of Corporate-Fascist Faux "Democracy"

Aung San Suu Kyi Goes to Washington - exposes US "democracy promotion" as corporate-fascist racket. 

Tony Cartalucci, Contributor

Key Points

• Aung San Suu Kyi and her movement are creations of Western corporate-financier interests.
• Suu Kyi has recently received a series of suspect "awards" from corporate-financier sponsored institutions.
• Awarding institutions represent the antithesis of Suu Kyi's alleged ideals of "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights."
• Suu Kyi's movement has been recently exposed as genocidal bigots, which is perhaps the reason the US has staged this latest PR "awards" blitz.

Nothing could say "democracy" and "humanitarianism" less than big-oil's Chevron, Exxon, BP, ConocoPhillips, or international financier criminals like Deutsche Bank, Blackstone, Barclays, Citigroup, or perhaps defense contractors and war profiteers EADS, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Nazi collaborators IBM. Professional propagandists like News Corporations (Fox News), Bloomberg, and Reuters, as well as public relations firms like Edelman, who make the vast criminal conspiracies of the above mentioned possible, also constitute the antithesis of "democracy promotion." 

Photo Above: Not the first shower of accolades - earlier this year Hague handed Suu Kyi the "Chatham House Prize." Nothing quite says "democracy promotion" like a prize from an organization consisting of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, Exxon, Chevron, BAE, Boeing, Lockheed, and many more. This, along with Suu Kyi's more recent trip to the US equates to self-aggrandizing stunts the global elite pull to lend themselves otherwise non-existent legitimacy.

Laws Courtesy of Your Corporate Government (Video)

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The Very Existence of the Queen Is Against Any Notion of Democracy

This is just one of a number of compelling charges set down by Morrissey in an article written for Hot Press, to coincide with the Queen's visit to Ireland

Morrissey compares Queen to brutal
 dictators, says she's Fascist.

Morrissey
Hot Press

The Queen's visit to Ireland is part of a new Palace PR campaign to re-invent the Windsors. The message from the Queen will be the same as ever: who we are born to is more important than what we achieve in life.

It should be remembered by the Irish people that as recently as the turn of the 1980s the Queen supported Margaret Thatcher by not dismissing Thatcher as she allowed hunger strikers to die at the Maze Prison, most famously Bobby Sands, who was 27 years old. As Sands starved to death in protest at being tagged a 'criminal' and not a 'political prisoner' by the Thatcher government, the Queen sat in her Palace and said nothing. If the Queen had any human feelings for the Sands family or other hunger strikers then she did not express them.

The full meaning of the Monarchy is, like the Queen herself, a complete mystery to most people. It is protected from any investigations by ridiculous stories of trivia and wedding dresses and on-again-off-again soap-drama romances. The most revealing statement came from Commander Christine Jones of the Metropolitan Police last month, when she warned that any British people carrying anti-royal placards who are "seen in the vicinity of the royal wedding would be removed under the Public Order Act." This means that any political dissent in England is silenced in order to protect the royals, which in itself goes against every principle of democracy.

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The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Project Syndicate

NEW YORK – The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the problems are probably greatest in rich countries – those with supposedly “good governance.” Poor-country governments probably accept more bribes and commit more offenses, but it is rich countries that host the global companies that carry out the largest offenses. Money talks, and it is corrupting politics and markets all over the world.

Hardly a day passes without a new story of malfeasance. Every Wall Street firm has paid significant fines during the past decade for phony accounting, insider trading, securities fraud, Ponzi schemes, or outright embezzlement by CEOs. A massive insider-trading ring is currently on trial in New York, and has implicated some leading financial-industry figures. And it follows a series of fines paid by America’s biggest investment banks to settle charges of various securities violations.

A Government by The Fascists for The Fascists

"Fascism Grows in Black Rain" - Adam Gillespie

S. Paul Forrest
Activist Post

A fascist state exists where a nation begins to allow the control of its government by corporatism, single party political interests, and law enforcement that reaches beyond the normal necessity of such.  There are many other defining characteristics of a fascist condition, but in the United States of America these basic ingredients have come to define a developing system that is leading the American people into a cage of control.

Most recently in this country, fascism has taken the form of overzealous faux-patriotism, and its accompanying legislation, in order to garner control of our nationalistic interests, domestic and abroad.  It has condemned the speakers, the activists, the natural food producers, the non-Christians, immigrants and the poor.  In fact, it has attacked everything that is America.

9/11 started the landslide toward our national village.  Like an echo in the mountains unleashing an otherwise peaceful pack, this shot heard round the world shook the very base of our “Democracy” to the point where people without even the slightest idea of what Al-Qaeda was, started toting signs and waving flags when called upon by the Bush Regime to denounce and condemn the alleged actions of a terrorist organization from the remote country of Iraq.

It didn’t matter that the attack was a direct result of this Nation’s previous actions in a land we had no right to be in, or that the attack had not been proved to be carried out by these profiled “terrorists;" all that mattered was the American Government needed justification to invade and control an oil rich land.  When the towers fell, the race was on for total governmental control over “We The People” and, by extension, the Middle East.


In reaction to this “attack” by those in charge, came the enacting of one of the most destructive pieces of Executive and Legislative acts in the history of this Country:The Patriot Act.  This Wag the Dog“Patriotism” initiative set into play a series of national protectionist acts the like of which hadn’t been seen since the McCarthy Era.  Not only did this legislation throw up a cloak of denial to the reasons behind 9/11 and use it as a reason to propel us into an immoral war, it enabled the government to intrude into our lives and deny the Constitutional Rights of We, the American people.

It isn’t even the fact that the destruction of the Twin Towers has not been proven to have been linked to these terrorists, or that Iraq didn’t actually have Weapons of Mass Destruction as vehemently insisted upon by Bush and his minions; it is that they used the occasion to call upon those with heads deeply planted in the sand to begin waving flags in support of government-driven xenophobic initiatives.  It all served to introduce the next phase of Fascist Evolution.

Fascism is not new to this country, nor is it a conspiracy theory by half-baked paranoids.  It is alive and growing in this, our Republic, and has been for quite a long time.  Any developed country has, as part of its governing system, a certain level of fascism.  There needs to be a police element, otherwise there is anarchy.  A certain level of governmental control of information is necessary to secure military counter actions in national defense interests.  Prisons are established to correct criminal behavior. These defining principles of fascism are present intrinsically in any government.  The issue that needs to be watched and contained by the people, is to what level of existence the fascist element is present within said government.

America was supposed to be the land of the free.  The Statue of Liberty was meant as a beacon; calling to those across the globe to come to our door for refuge.  It is a place where religion was to be practiced freely, speech guaranteed, and a citizen had a right to vote for real representation.  Why then, are so many of our politicians uniting to close our borders, religion closed to anyone not Christian, and our electoral college a scene out of Himmler’s own daydream?

The gathering secrecy and purposeful placement of representatives of the fascist interests into the political arena is eerily consistent with the rise of the Third Reich in Germany.  Milton Mayer wrote on this in his book, They Thought They Were Free:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it. 

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

The Historical Parallels are frightening if one looks at it in context with the present initiatives of our American Paranoia in the wake of 9/11:

1.  Hitler, or rather the Third Reich, propagated that economic conditions of Germany in 1932 were the fault of the Jewish population. They introduced anti-Jewish decrees, which gradually eliminated the rights of Jewish citizens.  People listened attentively, believing every word.

• In 2007, Oklahoma State Representative, Randy Terrill, a Republican, pushed through a series of measures to try to drive out illegal immigrants, whom he blamed for economic hardship and lawlessness in his state. Many followed the call for reform of our immigration laws across the nation based upon this same belief.

2.  In 1933, the Reich initiated internment camps for Habitual and Dangerous Criminals, which included beggars, the homeless, alcoholics, and the unemployed.

• The current push by the Right to cease current unemployment compensation payments, tougher sentencing for “habitual” criminals, which directly affected immigrants and the attempt by Marge Baker, a candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, told The Associated Press in 2010, that we needed to have camps because there are a lot of these people (illegal immigrants) roaming among us. 
• The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus" of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

3.  In 1937, Jews are banned from many professional occupations including teaching Germans, and from being accountants or dentists. They are also denied tax reductions and child allowances.

• In 2010, the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.

One can easily see other founding principles of Fascism in our system:

• Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
• Supremacy of the Military 
• Controlled Mass Media 
• Obsession with National Security
• Religion and Government are Intertwined 
• Corporate Power is Protected 
• Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts 
• Obsession with Crime and Punishment 
• Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
• Fraudulent Elections

These are just a few of the similarities between the rise of the Third Reich's call to Patriots to protect the German Nation, and the current call for blind Patriotic support of our Government today.  Yes, they are more subtle, more disguised, more executive, but to those who are aware they are signs of things to come.  All one has to do to see the future is to compare the Nazi timeline with our own emerging one.

These sentiments are not just isolated in the words of these few people, they are the same beliefs that have been emerging in the Republican Party, the Freedom Party and the Tea Party Patriots.  These words may have been meant as protectionist statements, but so were the words of Hitler as felt by the Nazi Party and swallowed by a desperate people as a reaction to desperate times.

When a government set up as a beacon to those who have been downtrodden begins to extinguish not only the flame of Liberty but the very freedoms that this country was founded upon, it is time for a second look at reforming the very structure of that government.  The people that back these initiatives speak of Patriotism, but they act with very different character of a real Patriot.

Milton Mayer finishes his book with the poignant words of his colleague:

Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution' of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it.  The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong.  And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.

As Erich Pratt stated so well: “If our government chooses to violate our unalienable rights; if our government chooses to pass unjust laws, contrary to the consent of the governed; if our government chooses to take despotic actions that reduce us to servitude of the government, or some political agenda – then we have a right and a duty according to the Declaration of Independence to throw off such Government."

What will you do to avoid history’s repetition and the continuation of the American Dream?  For those of you who have been sleeping for the past several years, I can only say this: Welcome to the slow creep of American Fascism.

Related Articles by S. Paul Forrest
Beware The Rising Ire of a Forgotten Generation 

Death of The American Dream

America's Misconception of Freedom

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Big Sis Invades Wal-Mart: 'If You See Something, Say Something'

TV monitors at checkout with government message 

Homeland Security Press Office -- Drudge Report

WASHINGTON -- Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced the expansion of the Department’s national “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign to hundreds of Walmart stores across the country—launching a new partnership between DHS and Walmart to help the American public play an active role in ensuring the safety and security of our nation.

“Homeland security starts with hometown security, and each of us plays a critical role in keeping our country and communities safe,” said Secretary Napolitano. “I applaud Walmart for joining the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign. This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.”

The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—originally implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS’ Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities. 

More than 230 Walmart stores nationwide launched the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign today, with a total of 588 Walmart stores in 27 states joining in the coming weeks. A short video message, available here, will play at select checkout locations to remind shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity.

Over the past five months, DHS has worked with its federal, state, local and private sector partners, as well as the Department of Justice, to expand the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign and Nationwide SAR Initiative to communities throughout the country—including the recent state-wide expansions of the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign across Minnesota and New Jersey. Partners include the Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries, and state and local fusion centers across the country.

In the coming months, the Department will continue to expand the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign nationally with public education materials and outreach tools designed to help America’s businesses, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe.

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What is Freedom?

Energy Grid Magazine

FREEDOM is self-determinacy; it is the condition of minimal constraint. Naturally, in a society or community, there has to be some constraints — the burglar cannot have the freedom to steal, the thug cannot have the freedom to mug, and the businessman cannot have the freedom to excessively pollute and pay no taxes. But get the balance between personal freedom, social order and ecological integrity right, and the vast majority of citizens can live happily with moderate personal freedom and minimal constraints.


Our freedom and constraints are formalized by a very long written agreement between individuals (or legal entities such as companies) and between individuals and the society of which he, she or it is a part. This formal agreement, called the law or legal system, is a constantly evolving and changing as new situations and circumstances arise. (Parts of this legal system, usually those dealing with human rights, are deliberately less changeable and are sometimes called constitutions.) So our freedom (and lack of) is defined by the legal systems, and different legal systems give us different levels of freedom depending upon which one we stand under.

A common fallacy regarding freedom is to automatically assume that it is a byproduct of modern democracy. In fact, the "only" freedom that a democracy bestows practically on its members is that they have the right, every few years, to vote for one of a set group of representatives who will run the country on their behalf.  Whilst modern democracy is an indispensable foundation for free societies, it does not guarantee freedom. That job falls to the legal system, which is not so readily influenced by our periodic voting. (Which is why freedom campaigns often involve legal challenges.)

Democracy can only be an agent of freedom if it gives people meaningful voting choices (not just a choice of 2 or 3 parties with only cosmetic differences), and if it ensures that the people have the unbiased and undistorted information necessary to make a choice that is in their interest (which can only happen with a mass media and educational system free from undue governmentand corporate influence). Of course, sometimes the majority may want to use their democratic rights to restrict freedom (for example in the areas of gun ownership, stem cell research, GM foods, pedophilia, the "war against terror" or fox hunting). This is because different freedoms often conflict with each other.

For example, the freedom to have clean air requires restriction of the freedom for factory owners to produce cheap goods by not having to clean up the pollution generated as a by-product. So the freedom for us all to have clean air conflicts with both the freedom of the factory owner to make larger profits (by having to clean up) and the freedom we all have to buy cheap goods. So freedoms do not necessarily conflict between different groups of people, but often with the same group of people. So the support for freedom is always a balancing act, usually between our collective long-term interests and the short-term interests of not only society, as a whole, but also of particular groups of people (which includes corporations and political groups).

Another example of this conflict might be in raising a green tax on large 4x4 vehicles to off-set their greater ecological impact. Many of us, especially 4x4 drivers, consider this an affront to our personal freedom to drive our own choice of car, and yet such a tax is likely to be in the interest of future generations, including the very children of those 4x4 drivers. Which freedom is more important? That should be obvious to anybody, but because so many decision makers are taking short-term and selfish perspectives, long-term public interests are not being respected and freedoms are not being chosen wisely.

We live today in democracies that are increasingly hostile to long-term interests and collective freedom. Our choice of political party at election time is quite restrictive (and becoming increasingly cosmetic), with politicians focused almost exclusively on their own political and financial interests rather than the long-term interests of the country as a whole. Better to promise tax-breaks today to get into power, then austerity to try to lessen the burden on our children. And when politicians are done in public office, they almost invariably move to the boards of the large corporations whose agendas they promoted when they had political power. (Politics and big business have a symbiotic relationship with each other, a symbiosis that is most certainly not in our collective interest.)

And because the mass media is entirely corporately-owned and largely dependent upon corporate advertising, it has become the propaganda machine for corporate interests, significantly under-reporting stories that might wake the people up into realizing that their freedom to have happy, healthy and fulfilling lives, not only for themselves but also for their children, seriously conflicts with the freedom of the corporate world to maximize profits by enslaving us financially (by careful control of the money supply) and selling us goods and services which we largely do not need.

As a consequence, we have become slaves to the corporate interest, where the freedom to make high profits has come to dominate all other freedoms. And this collective enslavement is dressed up by the mass media as freedom, so that anyone who criticises, for example, the Federal Reserve for enslaving America soon finds themselves accused of being "Anti-American" or a "Communist". After all, how can the people be slaves when they live in the "Land of the Free". It is all media propaganda.

This corporate control of the mass media means that the mind of the people is being strongly manipulated to make voting choices that are not actually in their best interest, but in the short-term interest of corporations and politicians.

The two main legal systems in most Western democracies are: Common or Civil Law (also called Law of the Land); and Commercial Law (Maritime Admiralty, Banking Law, or the Law of the Sea).

Common or Civil Law is what normal people think of as law — an accumulating body of formalized rules made by judges in court mostly regarding our behaviour towards others in the interest of keeping society civil. The judges use common sense and previous court decisions (legal precedence) to reach their decisions. This law tends to be country-specific, and all people in that country are automatically obliged, whether they consent or not, to follow those laws, or pay a penalty such as a jail term or fine if they choose not to.

Commercial Law, on the other hand, deals with commercial agreements between two consenting parties; it is the law of business transactions. If you do not consent to standing under this legal system in any situation, then it has no legal hold over you and you cannot be legally penalized for non-conformity. That said, our birth certificates automatically bind us into a commercial agreement with the State and the banks that control the State; so our parents basically signed us away at birth into bondage to Commercial Law.

Whereas Civil Law is largely concerned with the issue of fairness in society, Commercial Law is used to bind (enslave) people into legal contracts with organisations that have their own interests at heart (invariably profit and control). It is under Commercial Law that the banks have ended up controlling almost every aspect of society, and it is under Commercial Law that we slave away in order to pay the rent or mortgage.

Commercial Law also drives the international political agendas that are rapidly eroding individual freedoms, and what is most concerning is that these agendas are immune to the people's choice of political party. Organisations (actually corporations) taking control of the world using Commercial Law include the United Nations, Food and Agricultural Organisation, World Health Organisation, World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the European Parliament… all of which "the people" have little influence over.

The only way to counter these agendas is either through the courts (by appealing to Common or Civil Law), by knowing enough about Commercial Law so that we do not consent to it in the first place, through mass consumer choice, and through public protest and disobedience (although any form of violence is strongly discouraged as it is counterproductive).

What is concerning, however, is that with their massive lobbying power and money, corporations are now able to disproportionately influence legislative procedure, which results in a society increasingly bound by Commercial Law and the freedoms of corporations to pursue their business (world-domination) agendas with minimal government and legal interference. This destroys the very fabric of human society. And people are so hoodwinked by the propaganda flowing from the mainstream media, that they honestly believe that supporting corporate freedom has something to do with their own freedom, democracy and interests! That is the consequence of very successful propaganda!

In light of these threats, it is important that we unite to defend encroaches on collective freedom by the "pseudo-freedoms" of special interest groups such as corporations. We need to have public debate about which freedoms are in the collective long-term interest and which are not, and which individual freedoms we are not prepared to surrender. After 9-11, for example, is it really in the collective interest to introduce the Patriot act? Short-term, that is debatable; but long-term, definitely not. After 9/11 we saw shameful intolerance within the US to anybody who opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq, even though Iraq had ostensibly played no part in 9/11, posed no threat to any of the invaders, and had no weapons of mass destruction. In the "land of the free", you would think that people would respect each other's right, indeed duty, to voice disapproval of misguided government policy, but that is not what happened… patriotism reared its ugly head and sheep-mentality prevailed.

Public freedom and civil rights are seriously compromised by fervent patriotism. In the words of Leo Tolstoy, "The subjection of men to government will always continue as long as patriotism exists, for every ruling power rests on patriotism — on the readiness of men to submit to power." Judging by the staggering number of "freedom" organisations and sites that are plastered with national flags and emblems, there is widespread confusion between patriotism and freedom. Patriotism serves only to pervert government accountability, allowing reprehensible behaviour to go unchallenged, even where that behaviour is directed at the people themselves. This is why governments waste no opportunity to stir up patriotism… it gets them off the hook and back in control.

Finally, it is important to remember that the freedom that so many of us now take for granted didn't just come about because everybody agreed that it was a "good idea". Previous generations literally risked their lives for freedom — that is how much they valued it. Those in authority generally don't give up that authority willingly; freedom needs to be taken from them (preferably, as Gandhi did, by peaceful means).

We are now the generation that has become the custodians of freedom. Will we allow it to languish because we have more important things to do like watching TV and shopping, or will we take up the responsibility, as our forebears did, and fight for freedom and civil liberties so that the world is a better place for ourselves and our children?

But to do that effectively we have to make choices between conflicting freedoms. We will need to favour certain freedoms over others, so the fight for freedom includes the restriction of freedom as well. This is the paradox and there is no simple formula or easy solution to this balancing act. But be warned: if you do not consciously make that choice yourself, it is unconsciously being made for you as you sit each evening in front of your propaganda screen (TV). Remember that there are many different organisations out there spending large amounts of money influencing that decision because the freedom balance has huge financial consequences.

We are either awake, making choices that are in the collective long-term interest and that of our children, or we are asleep, drifting with the rest of the sheeple towards enslavement — in the name of freedom of course!

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$335,906 Is The Price Of The Constitution

Daniel Greenfield
Eurasia Review

When Senators give speeches, they will say that you can't put a price on freedom. But as it turns out you can. You can actually put an exact dollar amount on the Constitution. And that amount is $335,906.

That's the amount that Hollywood gave Senator Patrick Leahy. And in return, Leahy gave them COICA. That's not the same of some new disease, it's the abbreviation for Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, the biggest and more comprehensive internet censorship proposal in the history of this country. It would give Attorney General Eric Holder the power to create a blacklist of websites and force all companies that do business in the United States to comply with that blacklist.

Ever since the Clinton Administration's Communications Decency Act, Democrats have been obsessed with censoring the internet. And that drive has kicked into high gear again. COICA is the most ambitious plan to enact government control over freedom of expression on the internet since the days of the CDA.


While this bill was crafted on behalf of the entertainment industry, the applications go far beyond that. Websites that feature collections of articles, such as FreeRepublic or DemocraticUnderground could easily be targeted under the terms of COICA. And so could many blogs, which list entire articles or cite extensively from them. Any site or blog that embeds videos or images which are not authorized by the copyright holder could be similarly targeted. And with the Attorney General of a highly politicized administration wielding the power to preemptively shutter and blacklist entire websites, it would be all too easy for COICA to be used as a club for suppressing dissent.

While on paper COICA is only supposed to apply to 0.01 percent of the internet, in its broadest interpretation it could apply to anywhere between 30/40 percent of the internet. And the damage can go even beyond that. COICA gives the AG's office a billy club that can destroy any company's business overnight. And will that billy club be used strictly for copyright oversight alone? When the Attorney General's office has the power to shut down any webhost, costing its owners millions in revenues, what will the owners do when they're asked to shut down a site that does not actually fall under COICA? Will they call the AG's bluff and prepare for a legal battle to restore the site and hope their business survives, or will they do the practical thing and comply?

We already know the answer to that. Some larger companies with deep pockets will put up a fight. Maybe. Smaller companies will just go along. And this is not what free speech was supposed to look like in America.

COICA is just the beginning. It's the first step in transforming the internet into an environment completely controlled by the government. If the Senate can move along a law that creates a copyright blacklist, the next step is to create a blacklist for political extremism. Once we've established the principle that you can just pull a switch and blacklist sites that the government doesn't like, where does it end?

Liberals screeched for years about the Patriot Act, but very little attention is being paid to COICA, which is primarily co-sponsored by Democratic senators. The endless Hollywood movies bemoaning the oppression of the Patriot Act, won't give way to movies bemoaning COICA. But that's because COICA was written for Hollywood's benefit. And the forms of oppression that are practiced by the people who make movies about oppression, naturally don't make it into movies.

Some conservatives are defending COICA as a means of protecting private property, but it's not. It creates a privileged status for specific industries through government action, which those specific industries paid for. This is classic 'Rent Seeking Behavior' which uses government force to protect a bad business model. Hollywood is suffering from the plague of piracy because of its own convoluted structure and its need to negotiate every iota of every action with its own unions. Rather than adapt and evolve, it uses lawyers and lobbyists to protect its defective business practices. And having a 'red phone' to the AG's office in order to protect defective business practices does the entertainment industry no favors in the long term.

COICA is a unconstitutional bailout of our freedoms and internet civil rights for a specific industry that has troubling implications for everyone. And it's a demonstration of just how dangerous the intersection of corporate lobbyists and politicians can be. Some conservatives believe that supporting capitalism means blindly endorsing any corporate action. It does not. When corporations subvert public representation and harness government force for their own benefit, then they act like a part of the government.

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RELATED ARTICLE:
Endgame Legislation: Lame Duck Session Ushers in Tyranny
End of Free Internet: US Senate Committee Approves Internet "Blacklist" Bill

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Health Insurance Profits Soar, Dem Calls For Rebates

Ryan Grim
Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- Health insurance profits are skyrocketing in 2010 compared to last year's returns and the outgoing chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the companies is calling on them to return the profits to consumers in the form of premium reductions.

"Your ten firms alone have reported over $9.3 billion in profits for the first three quarters of 2010," writes Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), chairman of the Ways and Means health subcommittee -- and, for a day, chairman of the full committee. "On average, your profits have gone up 41 percent from last year."

Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the leading health insurance trade lobby, America's Health Insurance Plans, said that Democrats shouldn't focus on the companies' profits, but rather the overall cost of health care.

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