Private insurance businesses are doing exactly what they have always done. When the sun shines they provide the best umbrella your money can buy and as soon as it rains they fold it up.

“Due to rising medical costs”

This is part of the famous line you get when the letter arrives from Anthem Blue Cross, or any insurance company, stating you will have to pay 39 per cent more on your monthly premiums. And if your outgoing is more then your incoming, it can ruin you.

Anthem Blue Cross has no qualms hiking rates for customers. Someone has to pay the highly compensated CEOs, such as Angela Braly, whose gets $10 million per year and off-the-books benefits with stock options.

There may be so-called regulators in the insurance industry but they have no power and insurance companies can decide how much more you must pay whenever they feel like it. They are not required to disclose the percentage of the premiums that goes to paying for patient care and how much goes to administrative costs. This is one of Obama’s many health care campaign promises “still in the works” he says. Some have been already broken and others will stand in line forever.

Most the changes Obama has promised are either stalled or pending since he doesn’t seem want to drop the bi-partisan baloney and follow George W’s lead.  George did whatever he wanted even with a minority republican congress using signing statements to modify whatever the democrats wrote into law.  As I said before, Obama is inept. As intelligent as he is, his style so far has not been practical when you need to get things done in the dog-eat-dog political arena. If he’d been a Roman Emperor, they might have murdered him within three months.

Even if the new “health reform” bill becomes law, it won’t go into force until 2014 and even if insurers will not be able to charge higher premiums for pre-existing conditions or gender, they will easily find other ways to increase premium rates, using the “due to rising medical costs” excuse.

Meanwhile, many more Americans will lose their homes, join the poverty statistics, lose their teeth, or die needlessly because Obama’s fight for health reform never had any heart to it. And because the brain-dead right and their brain-dead constituencies have been too busy fighting against their own interests, wetting their underwear over Obama’s birth certificate or tea-partying his “Socialist” – “Fascist” – “Communist” – “Islamic”  takeover of America -  whatever that means.

The predators who run the insurance companies is a huge issue that will be fatal to the citizens it affects and the overall health of the country. These middlemen must be eliminated.  Obama apparently has no power over the corporate world; it is the other way around.  But we all know that.

After 12 months of  a flaccid presidency and a democratic congress full of prostitutes, I would think President Obama would stop pretending and ask himself:  “what have I learned from this?”

The continuation of  torture and rendition programs, a renewed Patriot Act, a majority edge in Congress squandered, a State of the Union that will be forgotten in history, a totally screwed-up health reform plan engineered to fail that rewards insurance companies with bigger profits, an election in Massachusetts reflecting a national power loss to the Democrats which delivered on a silver platter power to a Republican bum to come up with even dumber solutions, an expanded military with a gargantuan budget which includes the global consolidation of military war garrisons, an expanded war with more to come, a crumbling national infrastructure with a reduction in social programs as a complement, along with lost jobs, lost homes and lost dignity.

The good old Bush Junior fun days of walking into doors and choking on pretzels are gone. The slapstick comedy up front and with Voldemort behind the scenes is over. Today’s ring master who delivers the Daily Theater platitudes in the White House is even more deceptive. He may talk the flowery rhetoric of change and hope to the populace with attention spans the length of a TV commercial to distract them for two minutes but there are people in America still living poor as dump dogs and relying on sewing up their own wounds with needle and thread bought or stolen from K-Mart. And the predatory 2% are still getting richer.

The American empire was carefully thought out by four men: Mahan, Brooks Adams,  Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt.  In the last 200 years or so we have had an oligarchic system in which men of property can do well and others are on their own. Or, as Book Adams put it, “ the sole problem of the ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority”.  Nothing has changed.

And it turns out the Democratic Progressive alternative is no alternative at all to the republican party of death and deceit.  Both sides are allowed to rule as long as they don’t mess with anything that matters.

A sharp ideological turn is coming. Although America bristles with sensible and logical options which our two major political parties can’t seem to grasp; like expanding the concept of Medicare into health reform or rebuilding infrastructure to provide jobs instead of useless wars and torture, there is not enough outrage in America of the kind that dragged the French aristocracy to the guillotine. And nor do most Americans grasp the reasons they keep electing the same bums over again. We elect presidents who work against our own interests and pack the Supreme Court with ideologues who now allow corporations to buy democracy.  Now no one can deny that corporations decide policy and that corporate control of the country seems inevitable.

And what has Obama even remotely tried to do to chip away at this monolith of  malefactors who are busy redistributing wealth from the bottom and the middle to the top?  Just talk is all.

And at the most token changes with little bite. I wasn’t expecting the changes Obama advertised but I was hoping he would have at least tried to fight against the status quo at the expense of losing a second term.  Now he has stupidly wrecked himself and may lose a second term anyway. He is like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who made it easier for the rich while the sham rituals of democracy continued as they employed the usual scapegoats;  gays, socialists, Arabs, immigrants and government, to take the blame. The crap covered the land, and still does today, disguised as fluff and patriotism to hide the huge illusion of the America Way.

People still seem to believe that problems can be solved if the parties sit down and rationally talk it over. This is no longer possible in an America where communication itself has become the problem, in an overcommunicated society where we “send” more and “receive” less.

But now the masquerade is over and the dumbed-down are waking up too late and all the defensives the plutocracy has tried to continue to dumb down the populace is wearing thin. If Americans have any backbone, that could only leave blood in the streets as the final solution.

I believe I am not alone in thinking that Barack Obama is not up to the challenges of the job and should be sent home as soon as possible.

Double-digit unemployment and Obama is proposing hundreds of billions of dollars for next year’s war which he and the pentagon imply will go on forever because the entire planet is a threat to the United States of America.

This so-called defense spending is made to look as though it’s not being taken out of our tax dollars using a lot of techno-speak and moral rationalization about the world’s oppressed peoples which the U.S. of A is going to thoroughly save by a good military thrashing with its hi-tech armies of anyone who opposes them.

I realize that things are much more complicated then they appear but the war spending which we are led to believe is necessary by this Orwellian administration, the costly consolidation of military bases that string the entire planet, fails to make a link with insurance and bank profiteering, lack of money for schools, layoffs, salary cuts,  and our infrastructure crumbling toward Third World status.  The state budget is artificially isolated from the national budget and sacrosanct “defense” spending. Somehow we are supposed to believe all this insanity will come together and save America.

What wisdom our leaders must have.

I suppose America has painted itself into a corner.  It cannot abandon its imperialistic brand of capitalism and must continue indefinitely with the business of war. To abandon imperialism would mean having to compete successfully with second and third world economies which uses its own cheap labor for its own brand of capitalism.

The evangelization of the planet by the Holy American Empire will eventually run into a little snag though. Borrowing money from the growing military and economic might of China who may one day decide to no longer prop up the US economy.  Yet China needs the U.S..  They are like two organisms dependent upon each other for life.

Gore Vidal: “Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.”

‘UN agency calls for global cyber warfare treaty, ‘driver’s license’ for Web users’

Nothing new.  The Internet overlords using the protecting-people-from-themselves ploy.  This benefits no one but “the people in charge”.   This     would work only in an ideal world.  Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer, was already ahead of this UN official.

The US government through an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act enacted on Sept. 3rd 2008 provides public access to motor vehicle driver’s information in an electronic format. Sadly, when this came out, many American citizens thought it was cool to be able to do a license search on anyone they felt like. With a perspective like that they deserve to be slaves of the state.  With this in mind, the next step towards licensing as well as taxing the use of the Internet seems logical as the tyranny of the state grows stronger.

The suggestion made by a UN official that we all need Internet driver’s licenses seems like another excuse to further intensify the invasion of the privacy of ordinary citizens.  Already the fear mongering has begun:

Susan Collins, a US Republican senator who sits on several Senate military and home affairs committees, said the prospect of a cyber attack sparking a war is now being considered in the United States.

“If that same country uses sophisticated computers to knock out our electricity grid, I definitely think we are getting closer to saying it is an act of war,” Collins said.

So far, there’s no explanation how a driver’s license for the Internet will prevent attacks by Internet criminals.  I’m sure one could eventually be created by the same sort of legal minds like John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee , who justified torture and now have been excused from any wrong-doing.

The major advantage to this not really new idea is that the police state, the FBI,NSA, CIA, and other branches of our surveillance government will be able to easier coordinate, identify and track its citizens as well as secretly isolate those who appear to be subversive.  In effect, the ordinary citizen will come under closer scrutiny, “under surveillance”, while the real criminals, which includes our private security corporations, will operate as freely, if not better, then before the license requirement.

More lists on who is a terrorist or a potential terrorist will have to be created. It would more efficiently allow them to track anyone down, even to the DNA level. The more regulation governments have the more they control the population.  Another arena in the global war on terrorism and another excuse to further eliminate civil liberties on a global  basis.