The US Is Now Really Just One Gigantic Ponzi Scheme

99% of the population are just marks getting bilked by Bushco.

A Serious Drug Problem
By PAUL KRUGMAN

There was a brief flurry of outrage when Congress passed the 2003 Medicare bill. The news media reported on the scandalous vote in the House of Representatives: Republican leaders violated parliamentary procedure, twisted arms and perhaps engaged in bribery to persuade skeptical lawmakers to change their votes in a session literally held in the dead of night.

Later, the media reported on another scandal: it turned out that the administration had deceived Congress about the bill's likely cost.

But the real scandal is what's in the legislation. It's an object lesson in how special interests hold America's health care system hostage.

The new Medicare law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings. It creates an unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that the drug benefit be administered by private insurers. The biggest giveaway is to Big Pharma: the law specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.

--snip--

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/opinion/06krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

This scandal has not received nearly enough attention.

The real scandal is this is just business as usual.

"The business of America is business" - Calvin Coolidge

For the most part, legislation has always been written by special interests. But the Bush Crime Family has taken this practice to new levels of corruption, sacrificing public health and safety to the altar of the golden corporate calf.

As long as the marketing mantras are bought by a gullible public, far more interested in celebrity sex lives than their own diminishing futures, the slow degeneration will continue.

This is the golden age of the giant con...It's no accident that all of a sudden there are also all these bullshit, phony products hitting the market big time that are reveling in false advertising, like penis extension pills, miracle weight loss stuff...They've always been around but were kept in check, but now they are allowed to run rampant and advertise like crazy on tv and radio w/ essentially no repercussions....

The corporate takeover has been enabled by decades of public appeasement. Consumers have happily sucked up the benefits of empire. There will be no backlash until the grim reality of living far beyond both our means and our entitlement rears its ugly head in sliding standards of living and all the social ills it will bring.

For the most part, the public has played Neville Chamberlain to the corporate fascists. The Post WWII US stood like a bloody Colossus over the harbor of libertine Sirens, terrible swift sword at the ready, conveniently opposed by its ready made Antichrist du jour, the former Soviet Union.

We bought it all. Like a Viagra-fueled erection searching for nubile new fields to plow, we stand erect in our delusional righteousness. Our chemically induced fetid spew leaves us with the present polarized barren political wasteland yielding the sour fruits of our folly.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Well said...

It was simply another vehicle to funnel public wealth into the hands of a few while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt another humane program for Americans.

The neoCON agenda: funnel wealth to the corporacrats while simultaneously destroying humane programs for American citizens. This agenda is common in pretty much everything they push through.