The Military's Death Panel

by

       Zeno Potas

      They said they would never happen, but my niece is dead. We were told they would never exist, yet one sentenced my niece to die. I am speaking of the "Death Panel", the group of people who decide who gets the health care and who does not. Who will live and who will die. This one made a call, a huge mistake, but then, it was too late.

      My nephew was in the military. It was the first area where the Affordable Care Act was introduced. His wife was pregnant and delivered a healthy baby. After she got home there were problems. She was not doing well. In the military you go with the government doctors. While under their care for a number of months, she slowly deteriorated. They didn't seem to be helping her so the couple went to get a second opinion outside of the military. Private care was very expensive, too much for a soldier to afford, so it was back to the military doctors.

      One day, six months after the birth of her child, she was found unconscious on the floor of her bedroom. She had internal bleeding and had slipped into a coma. After examination my the military doctors her case was referred to the panel for them to make a decision on her care. Their verdict - unlikely to recover, maintain for now, talk to the family about terminating her life support. Further surgery was ruled out as "low chance of recovery". She had been sentenced to death!

      The family struggled with the decision to terminate. At the very least it was incompetence on the part of the military doctors. In the private section it could be called malpractice. Then a call came in, she was waking up! The family rushed to the hospital. She lay there, semi-comatose and doctors were rushing to get the authorization to take her to surgery. She passed before it came.

      There is no doubt in the family's mind that her death was unnecessary. The fact is that the panel decided not to help her, to withhold and ration treatment for another, was the cause of her death. In doing this they also were able to cover up the incompetence of the doctors that treated her. They are the"Death Panel", the ones who decide who lives and who dies. My niece was one of the first casualties of the ACA. One of the first deaths caused by, what is called, Obamacare. She was one of the first to die, but I guarantee she was not going to be the last.

Socialism: No Longer a Dirty Word

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The election of people who declare that they are Socialists to public office is starting to snowball. The recent election of Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, Bill DeBlasio as Mayor of New York City, and

Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who says he may run for president, is representative of the direction the United States is going.

      Ms Sawant recent rally to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour drew many new converts to the cause. Their victories not only establishes a model for others to follow, it flies in the face of American wisdom which holds that no Communist candidate can win an election in the United States. Not only can these Progressives win, but they can win in the largest city in the country. This is a substantive change in U.S. politics. Is anyone paying attention or is this the nation's future?

      In Florida  Rep. Joe Garcia (D., Fla.) of Florida stated that “communism works"  "We’ve proved that communism works. If you give everybody a good government job, there is no crime,” Rep. Garcia said. This is the mindset of the Progressives, the Socialists, the Democrats. As much as they dance around any suggestion of this truth, it is a slip of the lip that occasionally shows their true colors, their anti-Constitutional, anti traditional American agenda. They wave the flag to hide behind, but the truth is nothing of the kind.

      There are a lot of arguments about whether communism, socialism, and liberalism are the same thing.

What shouldn't be arguable is that they're all closely related branches of the same tree. We have seen this progression before with failed policies around the world. Winston Churchill described described what the Socialists in Britain had brought to that once-proud island. He stated that “Capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

      Today, the government  -- the welfare and warfare states in which we Americans now live -- is comfortably in the hands of Progressives. With the exception of the Goldwater and early Reagan years, the leadership of both major political parties has been dominated by Progressives since WWII -- heavy progressives in the Democratic Party, now almost completely infected, and light progressives in the Republican Party, the "mainstream Republicans."  The Democrats in the Senate are loading up the federal courts with Socialist judges, who will be dismantling the rule of law and destroy the rights of the people, for decades after they are long gone from the Congress. The Senate's power to confirm or not confirm presidential nominees to the federal courts is the only thing that can prevent the Progressives from leaving that kind of toxic legacy in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

       We are at a crucial point in the history of America, and perhaps approaching a point of no return.  This year's elections and the 2016 presidential election may be among the most important elections in the history of this country, and can determine what kind of country this will be for years -- and even generations -- to come. We will choose whether to continue down the course of Democratic Socialism or try to reverse this back towards what the USA was once was.

     

What's Really Going on in Europe?

by

       Phillip Todd

       Addressing the Russian Federal Assembly Putin, as usual, had some choice words for the United States. "In the case of Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line," he told lawmakers. "Western partners, led by the United States, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. ... They have come to believe in their exceptionalism and their sense of being the chosen ones. That they can decide the destiny of the world, that it is only them who can be right. It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation," Putin stated. "There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too," he wrote. "We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal."

       Those are the words and thoughts of the Russian leader. Instead of finding common ground with Russia, the US continues to escalate tensions with inefficient sanctions and rhetoric while provocatively supporting the illegitimate CIA led Kiev government. This didn't have to happen if they had realized back in 1990 that they should create a new security organization, with no Warsaw pact and no NATO. Not without Russia, nor against Russia, but with Russia – a common security alliance.

      Let us look back at what has transpired. From 1989 to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to let Eastern Europe go free and withdraw his troops and tank armies back to the Urals. The Soviet Union was allowed to dissolve into 15 nations. In three years, the USSR gave up an empire, a third of its territory, and half its people. It extended to us a hand of friendship. How did we respond? We pushed NATO right up to Russia's borders, bringing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, even former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. European objections alone prevented us from handing out NATO war guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia.

       To cut Moscow out of the Caspian Sea oil, we helped build a pipeline through two former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and, thence, under the Black Sea to our NATO ally Turkey.In the Boris Yeltsin decade, the 1990s, George W. Bush sought to put an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Neither country had requested it. We said it was aimed at Iran.  U.S. hustlers are colluding with local oligarchs in looting Russia of her natural resources. You can't take riches from a nuclear power, but you can have them surrender them. The goal has always been to encircle Russia and bring it's to it's knees for the profit of the Democratic Socialist billionaires of the world.

      So how did we think he would react to U.S. encirclement of his country by NATO and U.S. meddling in his internal affairs? What did everyone expect when the US broke promises and expanded NATO to the East? Did they expect Russia would sit back and do nothing? Are the US and it's allies trying to start WW III? No, they want to pry their riches out of them. Why cannot we Americans see ourselves as others see us?

      The answer to that is very easy - American media propaganda. As it was in the old Soviet Union, so it now how it is in the West. The US public is bombarded with non-news and government propaganda. Half truths and outright lies furnished by rich Leftist Socialists, many of whom are not US citizens but control the media almost completely. Looking at the US today, Joseph Stalin would have been proud.

Todays Democratic Socialism

by

       George Sontag

         
     "Democratic control is therefore also essential to the meaning of socialism," - World Socialist Movement. Democratic socialism is a political ideology advocating a democratic political system alongside a socialist economic system. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand. All over the world, wherever the idea of democracy has taken root, the vision of socialism has taken root as well. The Founding Fathers knew this. That is why they set up the country as a Republic. They did all they could to avoid creating a democracy. For them, democracy meant mob rule and depotism. It is also, the first step towards Socialism.


      To get to Socialism you first have to go through another stage - Fascism. It doesn't have to be exactly as the definition suggests. You would have a leader who, in the eyes of the media, can do no wrong. Constitutional violations would be marginalized and spun to be inconsequential and the ruling elite would arbitrarily pick and choose which of the country's laws to enforce and by how much. The judicial systems judges would be appointed according to their political views especially their willingness to "change" the laws "to fit" a "modern world".

       What Socialism, Fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people -- like themselves -- need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat. The left's vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, "We the People..." That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution's limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges' new interpretations, based on notions of "a living Constitution" that will take decisions out of the hands of "We the People," and transfer those decisions to our betters.

      To keep the average citizen confused and complacent they go by different names such as Progressives, Liberals, Socialists, or today, Democrats. They are the ones changing the country. These are "mainstream" liberals, who control the Democratic Party, the old media, the executive branch of the federal government, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court half the time, the mammoth federal bureaucracy, many state governments, our universities, our national educational establishment and other cultural institutions. Their Socialist mindset oozes intolerance for opposing viewpoints, and with their cultural bullying, they've effectively scared many non-liberals into silence using such tactics as "political correctness".

      This is the stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the ruling class has not yet been successfully achieved. We are, however, going down that road.  Unless the American people come to their senses and stop the "something for nothing" mindset and demand that the Constitution, as it is written, be respected, the end of this great Republic will come sooner than later.