Obamacare Accounted For 58% Of US “Growth” In The First Quarter

Orwell would be so proud. Big Brother reports GDP “growth” of 1.1% in the first quarter an the vast majority of the “growth” is from the working stiffs in this debt ridden State of denial having to pay vastly more for their healthcare because Obama and his lying minions jammed Obamacare down our throats in 2009. What a fucking shitshow this country has become.

by Tyler Durden

Jun 28, 2016 9:19 AM

Remember when the Supreme Court decided that Obamcare is legal but it’s a tax? Well, the nuances were irrelevant, but when it comes to the Bureau of Economic Analysis they could not have been greater: by effectively counting a tax as part of US economic growth, Obama, the Supreme Court and the US government’s beancounters assured themselves of a steady stream of “economic growth” for quarters to come, and sure enough, Q1 was no different.

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As regular readers know, when it comes to the one constant source of US economic growth, nothing is more reliable than Healthcare, which is merely another name for how Obamacare figured in the bean-count reports. And, we are confident, it will come as no surprise that in Q1, when real GDP grew by $44 billion in real terms, or 1.1% annualized, from $16.471 trillion to $16.515 trillion, Healthcare was responsible for $26 billion (rising from $1,896 billion to $1,929 billion annualized) or a whopping 58.4% of the total.

This was revised strongly upward from the last number, which had Healthcare rising by $15 billion less, to “only” $1,907 billion.

Putting this number in context, the Q1 increase was the third biggest quarterly increase on record, the second largest in the past decade, and as the chart below shows the surge unexpectedly comes at a curious time, just as the quarterly increases in healthcare spending were supposedly trending lower.

How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother

SUBMITTED BY — THINKER

What occurs to me is that those of us who are Libertarians have so much in common with the “Left” when it comes to surveillance. But, where they don’t yet associate Big Government with loss of privacy and the kind of loss of freedom expressed in this article, I think our end goals — basic, human rights — are the same. Thinker.

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When money becomes information, it can inform on you.

In 2014, Cass Sunstein—one-time “regulatory czar” for the Obama administration—wrote an op-ed advocating for a cashless society, on the grounds that it would reduce street crime. His reasoning? A new study had found an apparent causal relationship between the implementation of the Electronic Benefit Transfer system for welfare benefits, and a drop in crime.

Under the new EBT system, welfare recipients could now use debit cards, rather than being forced to cash checks in their entirety—meaning there was less cash circulating in poor neighborhoods. And the less cash there was on the streets, the study’s authors concluded, the less crime there was.Perhaps burglaries, larcenies, and assaults had gone down because there was simply less to readily steal. Perhaps, also, the debit cards deterred people from spending money on drugs and other black market goods. While nothing was really stopping them from withdrawing cash and then spending it illegally, the famous Sunsteinian Nudge was in effect—the very slightest friction in the environment pushed people away from committing crime.

The year after Sunstein’s op-ed was published, in a seemingly unrelated incident, a student at Columbia University was arrested and charged with five drug-related offenses, including possession with the intent to sell. Supposedly, his fellow students and customers had paid him through the Paypal-owned smartphone app Venmo.Venmo makes every transaction public by default. The app features a social-network-like feed where you can see your friends sending each other varying sums of money, often accompanied with cute descriptions and emoji. The alleged dealer asked his customers to write a funny description for every transaction, and in doing so, turned his feed (and others’) into an open record of drug trafficking.

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Big Brother Shows Up In My Front Yard

Guest Post by Gayle

I moved to my community in Southern California in 1999. I wasn’t here very long before I recognized the high quality of life the citizens enjoyed; in fact, I was heard to murmur that I would be content here until I died. There is a lot of money (much of it medical) in our fair town, which is generously shared with the community in a number of ways, especially the arts, youth programs, and charities serving the poor. Generally speaking it is a peaceable and beautiful place despite the recent bomb factory that was uncovered here.

There have been a lot of changes in the past ten years. A chunk of land of several thousand acres next to our city but owned by the county was unavailable for development of any kind. That changed about ten years ago, and now the area is filled with unimaginative shopping centers, many large concrete warehouses (including Amazon’s two), large apartment complexes, and lots of traffic. This was preceded by the ripping out of productive orange groves. I am fortunate to live on the old side of town, so I can avoid this area unless I need my Target fix.

In the older neighborhoods, there are many mature and beautiful trees shading lovely lawns and flower beds. These make life much cooler and more pleasant in our very long and hot and dry summers. They also require a fair amount of water to maintain, and the drought has put pressure on our water supply. Last year most of us tried to reduce our water usage. I started doing laundry every other week and tried to significantly reduce my lawn and garden watering. Some people just let their lawns dry up and left them. Others paid landscapers to rip out lawns and put in desertscapes, some of which are quite attractive, especially if brown is your favorite color. Others tried the do-it-yourself route and they are not so attractive.

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MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT? (Oldie but Goodie)

Originally Published in June 2013

Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they’ll like this song?
Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
Ooh ah,
Mother, should I build the wall?

Mother, should I run for president?
Mother, should I trust the government?
Mother, will they put me in the firing line?
Ooh ah,
Is it just a waste of time?

Pink Floyd – Mother

The lyrics to Mother had both a literal and figurative meaning for Roger Waters. He was literally describing his overprotective single mother (his father was killed in World War II) building walls to protect him from the outside world. The figurative meaning is Big Mother sending its boys off to war and using fear to control and manipulate the masses. At the time he wrote this song in 1979, the Soviet Union was thought to be at its peak of power and the Berlin Wall represented a boundary between good and evil. Nuclear war was still a looming fear. Waters has always had a dim view of totalitarian states and institutions (English schools). Having seen his Wall Tour performance this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with a diverse crowd of 40,000, ranging in age from senior citizens to teenagers, it seems this song has gained new meaning. He sang a duet with himself from 1980 projected on the Wall and when he sang the lyric, “Mother, should I trust the government?” the entire stadium responded in unison – NO!!! This revealed a truth that is not permitted to be discussed by the corporate mainstream media acting as a mouthpiece for the ruling class. A growing legion of citizens in this country does not trust the government. This is very perceptive on their part.

In part one of this two part series – Hey You – I examined how an invisible government of wealthy, power hungry men have utilized the propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays and lured the American people into a narcissistic, techno-gadget, debt based servitude. Over the last one hundred years they have created a totalitarian state built upon egotism, material goods, and fulfilling our desires through Wall Street peddled debt and mass consumerism. It has been an incredibly effective form of control that has convinced the masses to love their servitude. The ruling oligarchs correctly chose the painless, amusement saturated, soft totalitarianism of Huxley’s Brave New World over the fearful, pain inflicting, surveillance state, house of horrors detailed in Orwell’s 1984.

Continue reading “MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT? (Oldie but Goodie)”

FACEBOOK ZOMBIES

Any Difference?

Big Brother Is in High Gear

FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

bigbro

Social media and smart phones don’t have to be evil – there’s nothing bad about talking to your friends, after all – but right now social media and “Big Brother in your pocket” phones are very clearly servicing evil. It wouldn’t be hard to build non-evil alternatives, but for the moment, the evil versions enjoy a monopoly. (At least with search engines, there are non-evil alternatives.)

However we choose to look at it, Big Brother is on the greatest roll in all of history. No Pharaoh, no Caesar, no commissar ever had anything approaching the surveillance and manipulation capacities of modern rulers. And in support of it all stand Jane and Joe Average, ever-compliant, who simply don’t want to know. Give them the slightest excuse to close their eyes, and they will.

This kind of thing doesn’t often end well.

Two Recent Outrages

Not that many people will actually be outraged, of course; there won’t be a great deal of that so long as ignorance remains possible. Joe and Jane have already forgotten about Snowden, after all. Still, I will continue to do my part.

One of the hundreds of US government offices, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently announced that they developed a system to predict the psychological status of smartphone users. They’re in the process of farming this out to businesses now.

This system tracks your location, tracks your psychological state, and when necessary, will “deliver an automated intervention.” In the NIH’s typical gov-speak, it sounds like this:

Continuously collected ambulatory psychological data are fused with data on location and responses to questions. The mobile data are combined with geospatial risk maps to quantify exposure to risk and predict a future psychological state. The future predictions are used to warn the user when he or she is at especially high risk of experiencing a negative event that might lead to an unwanted outcome…

This is all couched as “help for drug addicts,” of course. (Is “do it for the children” already out of the rotation?) No thinking person, of course, believes that this system will be used only “for good” and by beneficent angelic beings. And if not, then how shall it be used?

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The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government’s War on Cyberterrorism

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“The game is rigged, the network is bugged, the government talks double-speak, the courts are complicit and there’s nothing you can do about it.”—David Kravets, reporting for Wired

Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, “Big Brother is watching…. Big Brother may be watching you right now, and you may never know. Since 9/11, our national life has changed forever. Surveillance is the new normal.”

This is the reality of the internet-dependent, plugged-in life of most Americans today.

A process which started shortly after 9/11 with programs such as Total Information Awareness (the predecessor to the government’s present surveillance programs) has grown into a full-fledged campaign of warrantless surveillance, electronic tracking and data mining, thanks to federal agents who have been given carte blanche access to the vast majority of electronic communications in America. Their methods completely undermine constitution safeguards, and yet no federal agency, president, court or legislature has stepped up to halt this assault on our rights.

For the most part, surveillance, data mining, etc., is a technological, jargon-laden swamp through which the average American would prefer not to wander. Consequently, most Americans remain relatively oblivious to the government’s ever-expanding surveillance powers, appear unconcerned about the fact that the government is spying on them, and seem untroubled that there is no way of opting out of this system. This state of delirium lasts only until those same individuals find themselves arrested or detained for something they did, said or bought that runs afoul of the government’s lowering threshold for what constitutes criminal activity.

All the while, Congress, the courts, and the president (starting with George W. Bush and expanding exponentially under Barack Obama) continue to erect an electronic concentration camp the likes of which have never been seen before.

A good case in point is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), formerly known as CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act). Sold to the public as necessary for protecting us against cyber attacks or internet threats such as hacking, this Orwellian exercise in tyranny-masquerading-as-security actually makes it easier for the government to spy on Americans, while officially turning Big Business into a government snitch.

Be warned: this cybersecurity bill is little more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing or, as longtime critic Senator Ron Wyden labeled it, “a surveillance bill by another name.”

Continue reading “The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government’s War on Cyberterrorism”

Creepy, Calculating and Controlling: All the Ways Big Brother Is Watching You

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionally. Even before the age of overcriminalization, when the most upstanding citizen could be counted on to break at least three laws a day without knowing it, most of us have knowingly flouted the law from time to time.

Indeed, there was a time when most Americans thought nothing of driving a few miles over the speed limit, pausing (rather than coming to a full stop) at a red light when making a right-hand turn if no one was around, jaywalking across the street, and letting their kid play hookie from school once in a while. Of course, that was before the era of speed cameras that ticket you for going even a mile over the posted limit, red light cameras that fine you for making safe “rolling stop” right-hand turns on red, surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software mounted on street corners, and school truancy laws that fine parents for “unexcused” absences.

My, how times have changed.

Today, there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home. That’s because technology—specifically the technology employed by the government against the American citizenry—has upped the stakes dramatically so that there’s little we do that is not known by the government.

In such an environment, you’re either a paragon of virtue, or you’re a criminal.

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FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART TWO

In Part One of this article I laid the groundwork of the Fourth Turning generational theory. I refuted President Obama’s claim that the shadow of crisis has passed. The shadow grows ever larger and will engulf the world in darkness in the coming years. The Crisis will be fueled by the worsening debt, civic decay and global disorder. I will address these issues in this article.

Debt, Civic Decay & Global Disorder

The core elements propelling this Crisis – debt, civic decay, and global disorder – were obvious over a decade before the financial meltdown catalyst sparked this ongoing two decade long Crisis. With the following issues unresolved, the shadow of this crisis has only grown larger and more ominous:

Debt

The national debt has risen by $7 trillion (64%) to $18.1 trillion since 2009 and continues to accelerate by $2.3 billion per day, on track to surpass $20 trillion before Obama leaves office and $25 trillion by 2019.

The national debt as a percentage of GDP is currently 103% (it would be 106% if the BEA hadn’t decided to positively “adjust” GDP up by $500 billion last year). It is on course to reach 120% by 2019. Rogoff and Reinhart have documented the fact countries that surpass 90% experience economic turmoil, decline, and ultimately currency collapse and debt default.
Despite the housing collapse and hundreds of billions in mortgage, credit card, auto, and corporate debt being written off, dumped on the backs of taxpayers and hidden on the Federal Reserve balance sheet, total credit market debt has reached a new high of $58 trillion.

Harvard professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been a lone voice telling the truth about the true level of unfunded promises hidden in the CBO numbers. The unfunded social welfare liabilities in excess of $200 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are nothing but a massive future tax increase on younger and unborn generations. Kotlikoff explains what would be required to pay these obligations:

“To honor these obligations we could (a) raise all federal taxes, immediately and permanently, by 57%, (b) cut all federal spending, apart from interest on the debt, by 37%, immediately and permanently, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b).”

The level of taxation and/or Federal Reserve created inflation necessary to honor these politician promises is too large to be considered feasible. Therefore, these promises, made to get corrupt political hacks elected to public office, will be defaulted upon.

Continue reading “FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART TWO”

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

If you’re ever on the phone in the street in the United States, you might want to think twice about being too candid. It’s being reported that intelligence agencies are eavesdropping on thousands of people’s calls using fake cellphone towers installed on small planes – all without a search warrant.

It’s a strategy designed to pinpoint criminals, so police can then be dispatched to catch them – although there are serious concerns about how much is being listened in to.