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I remember going through a phase where I wanted to learn how to do card tricks to impress my friends and members of the fairer sex. I read several books on the subject and the number one thing to learn is to get the observer’s eyes off the deck of cards. Create a distraction. In fact, it’s in all good illusion handbooks. Misdirection, getting the audience to look in one place so they don’t notice what is going on in another is the key to being a good magician.
As the Obama administration announces its turn to its key campaign issue of healthcare, I cannot help but think back to those books and the key tenent of illusion – creating a distraction so that no one notices what’s really going on. Now, granted, pulling it on a national level in front of an unwitting audience of hundreds of millions is far more difficult than getting your three snot-nosed friends off the scent; but the fact remains that this public move to healthcare by Obama seems nothing less than a ruse to get us off the scent of the bailout. To get us to stop scrutinizing the complete lack of enforcement, investigation, reform or action (other than handing them hundreds of billions of dollars) against the malfeasance, greed, ineptness of those that engineered this meltdown.
As bills like HR 1728 wind through Congress shifting ever-more power in the real estate market to the remaining big banks, and accounts of the Fed buying more mortgage backed securities and running secret repo accounts to keep the markets moving, and the dog-and-pony Congressional hearing of Ken Lewis and the complete lack of enforcement activity by the Federal government and…no wonder the administration is playing slight of hand.
Hopefully you’re as pissed as I am. Your pissed that the government decides that 3-card monte is the way to reduce the public ire and let the status quo remain. That the same folks who caused the mess and are now benefiting from it are also being given the wink-wink, nudge-nudge from the government. An unspoken offer of amenesty to anyone who goes along with their ill-advised plans.
There is a great piece in the Huffington Post about the same thing, and is well worth the read.
This makes me nervous for two reasons. First, it portends a long drawn out legislative battle on health care reform with more time for industry lobbyists and the Congresspersons and Senate persons on their payrolls to compromise away or wreck the change we so deeply need.
Second, it confirms that the lobbyists for financial institutions — the people responsible for the collapse of our economy—have been scheming and wrangling to gut the reforms that could stop anther economic breakdown. Reviving this industry without restructuring and re-regulating it just guarantees another disaster down the line.
…
Shamus Cooke writes on Global Research: “History will likely show that these bailouts involved the largest transfer of wealth ever – from the working class to that small group of billionaires who own the corporations. This fact is recognized by most people now and is such common knowledge that even the mainstream media feels comfortable discussing it . . . matter-of-factly.
These corporations have also exerted tremendous influence in other realms of politics, working towards destroying Obama’s campaign promises of health care, job creation, civil liberties, the Employee Free Choice Act, peace, etc.
In each case, the promised reform was gutted of its essence, and ‘compromise’ versions of the bills are now being discussed: instead of universal health care, we will likely be universally mandated to purchase health insurance; instead of ‘job creation’ we are told that the stimulus has ’saved jobs’ (contrary to the evidence); while troops are ‘drawing down’ from Iraq, the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan is being escalated; instead of allowing workers to organize unions easier, a compromise version — Employee Free Choice Act, minus card check – seems more politically ‘pragmatic,’ etc.”
What do you think? How angry are you that while employment tanks we’re being fed a line of crap about healthcare to take our minds off the fact that nothing, NOTHING, has changed.
Hocus Pocus.
Last 3 posts by Morgan
- Subprime Bananas - June 28th, 2009
- Roubini: No confidence in government exit strategy - June 24th, 2009
- Goldman bonuses largest in firm's 140-year history - June 21st, 2009
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