Levana – Health Care for America Now wrote:
Stunning deception
From: Levana – Health Care for America Now [hcan@healthcareforamericanow.org]
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 10:17 AM
To: Tom
Subject: Stunning deceptionDear Tom:
Did you see the stunning story about the insurance industry last week?
The industry used senior citizens as props in their fake “grassroots” campaign, sending letters to the editor without their knowledge to protect industry profits. As the Eagle-Tribune in Massachusetts reported:1
Some of those seniors are unaware that they have sent any such letters to newspapers. Some of them hadn’t even heard of Medicare Advantage.
“I did not write a letter to the editor. It’s not from me,” said Gloria Gosselin, 75, of Lawrence.
Can you email your Members of Congress and tell them about the insurance industry’s deception?
The insurance industry keeps saying it’s for reform. They keep saying they want a seat at the table. And they keep saying they will be productive negotiating partners, working in good faith towards a solution.
They’re lying.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry lobbyist group, was caught red-handed using deceptive tactics to oppose President Obama’s initiative that would end giveaways to private insurance in the Medicare Advantage program.
They were faking letters to the editor and even impersonating a senior citizen’s relative!
Though you and I know these deceptive tactics are business as usual for the insurance industry, we have to make sure Congress gets the message that they are negotiating in bad faith.
Can you share this story with your Members of Congress? Click here to send them an email.
With your help, we can prove to Congress that the insurance industry can’t be trusted.
To your health,
Levana Layendecker
Health Care for America Now
Awareness is key to stopping deception and fraud. Remembering the tobacco industry’s grand deception that lasted two or more generations we must take anything said by big health and big pharma with a grain of salt. They will say or do anything to preserve their profits at the expense of you and I. This is why we have a strong central government. These industries have been poorly supervised for the last twenty-five years and now this is what befalls us – corporations that have merged and grown large, rich, and powerful. The corporations have been allowed “citizenship” and given much the same rights under law as persons. But when it is found out that these “persons” or their agents commit fraud, they should be prosecuted in the same manner as you and I. Read more about corporations from Wikipedia.
Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state,[1] and they may be responsible for human rights violations.[2] Just as they are “born” into existence through its members obtaining a certificate of incorporation, they can “die” when they lose money into insolvency. Corporations can even be convicted of criminal offences, such as fraud and manslaughter.
Libertarians and other right-wing provocateurs such as the “Tea Baggers” protest government power. (They wish to eliminate taxes but ironically protest on park grounds paid for and maintained by taxes.) They believe that government should stay out of corporations’ way and allow them to operate as the market would see fit. This is what happens when the Laissèz-Faire type of government/economy is allowed to operate. We are seeing the results of it today. De-regulation has nearly sent the entire world’s economy into such a tailspin we may yet have another Great Depression. A truly free market economy cannot exist inside a settled, well governed democratic republic such as ours because government in this society is expected by the majority to do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves such as regulate and set boundaries so corporations will reign in their greed and behave as good citizens. Yet there are factions in this country, such as the Libertarians, that would have this protection torn apart simply to satisfy a pie-in-the-sky ideological desire and unwittingly harming our citizenry.
Powerful corporate lobbies have made inroads to doing just that. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, stripped away some of those very important safeguards that were enacted shortly after the Great Depression. That vital legislation was called the Glass-Stegall Act and it separated banks from investment houses, controlled speculation, and established the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation to protect individual depositors. But the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed during the Clinton administration as a gift to the corporations and their lobbies from a center-right leaning president. It should be repealed – at least amended – to return those protections guaranteed by Glass-Stegall and but the brakes on corporate interests gone wild.
Democracies are strengthened by legislation like Glass-Stegall. It further enables government to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves more efficiently. The letter-writing fraud perpetrated by the lobbies for big insurance and big pharma should not go unpunished. You and I cannot achieve that. We have no power to mount such an endeavor. Our government has the money and power and now it must act. Let’s make them act.
Contact your Members of Congress. Click here to send them an email.
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More Translation of Republicanese “small government values”
Re: Anti-War Activist Mounts GOP Campaign for Congress « The Washington Independent
The article is about a McCain heckler and an anti-war protester turned Libertarian candidate stating that, “He’s a candidate for Congress in
New Mexico’s 3rd district, looking like the Republican front-runner just one short year after he crashed the convention”.
Whenever I read words like “small government values” and “guarantees of national and state sovereignty” – words written to propel truisms – my very acute sense of hearing kicks in and I hear the very distinct sound of dog whistles.
Let me enlighten you with the English translation of this Republicanese statement. “Small government values” is Repblicanese for “less is the new more”. What do they want less of? Well, if you can think of a government program that gives money to the underprivileged, then you are on the right track.
Take public welfare for example. The right wing wants it stamped out entirely. The biggest hit on welfare, specifically the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program which had been in effect since 1935, came with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 signed into law by President Bill Clinton, after the Democrats became the minority in Congress. This law destroyed one of the vital safety nets set up during the Great Depression that could help millions of people stay in their homes today. By killing welfare, the Republicans made government smaller.
The Republicans/Libertarians believe in a small government that stays out of the way of business. If they had their way, there would be no Department of Labor. They would instead call it the Department of Business. If the Libertarians had their way, there would be mass privatization of public schools, no college Pell grants, no Social Security that you would recognize, no national forests that you would recognize, no regulatory agencies in the government to protect consumers, no minimum wages, no Medicare, and no social safety nets of any kind. This is the smaller government you would have under unrestricted right-wing rule.
The translation of “guarantees of national and state sovereignty” is a dog whistle for “the Bush doctrine” and “the South shall rise again” and all that connotes. This means that Idaho could make it real easy for separatists to thrive in the backwoods. States could eliminate the minimum wage completely and deny state aid to single pregnant women. We could declare war on whoever we want for whatever reason. It would be a apocalyptic horror you only see in the movies.
Libertarians vehemently believe that there shall be no government whatsoever except to enforce business contract law and to provide a robust/dominating military. They read “Atlas Shrugged” and strictly adhere to Friedman economics which advocates the free market to the extent of violent overthrow of government. See The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
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