Obamacare is only a few weeks old, but the evidence against it is mounting with every passing day. A small portion of that evidence is described in the open letter to Congress provided below.
Please take immediate action to repeal the recently passed healthcare bill. To understand just a few of the reasons why repeal is needed please read this column by Cato Institute scholar Michael Tanner: http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/health-246711-care-insurance.html
Here’s a partial summary . . .
A study by the RAND Corporation has now confirmed the warning Congress was given by the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) prior to passing the healthcare bill. Obamacare will do NOTHING to curb increases in insurance premiums. For example, RAND predicts that premiums will rise by 17% for young people.
A recent CBO report also predicts that up to 10 million workers will lose their current insurance under Obamacare, and will either have to buy new insurance through the government-run exchanges, or be forced into Medicaid.
Remember, President Obama and Congressional leaders promised us that none of us would lose our current coverage.
by John Browne – Senior Market Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital
As the health of much of the global economy weakens on a daily basis, political leadership increasingly ignores the source of the malady and instead focuses on short term “band-aid” remedies. These measures which may buy a few months, or years, of relative well being, will convince the public that problems have been solved and will thereby take pressure off governments to make the needed structural changes.
The recently announced $1 trillion EU bailout is a perfect example of this “band-aid” approach. The just concluded general election in the United Kingdom is another. The inconclusive UK result, which creates a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, will be an unhappy, unquestionably temporary arrangement. Similarly, the EU bailout will continue to infuriate Northern Europeans, who may ultimately push for a breakup of the Union.
NuLabour (what the center-drifting Labour Party of Tony Blair has been branded) took a spectacular beating as a result of the clumsy stewardship of now former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Mr. Brown, whom I knew as a political bruiser in his early days in the House of Commons, had led Britain far down the road to economic ruin. As a very powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair, he introduced many stealth taxes to finance a wave of high government spending. Seemingly operating as an unelected Prime Minister, he unleashed massive spending programs and interfered with UK banks in ways that worsened the effects of the financial crisis.
Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has the story in an update to an article discussing how Ron Paul is now backing Bernie Sanders’ watered down Fed Audit amendment as well as David Vitter’s full Fed Audit amendment.
Sanders will get a vote on his amendment Tuesday at 11:30 a.m., followed by a vote on Vitter’s more comprehensive amendment. Paul is urging a yes vote on both. Splitting the action into two votes could give Fed defenders an opportunity to split the bipartisan coalition, with Republicans generally voting for the Vitter amendment and Democrats generally voting for Sanders — leaving neither with enough to get over the top.
Looks like Paul’s Fed Audit effort is going to get a straight up or down vote in the Senate todayin the form of Vitter’s amendment. It can’t hurt to contact your Senator’s and urge them to vote yes on both amendments, but as it stands now the prospects for passage of either amendment appears bleak.
Do you ever wonder what’s going on behind closed doors on Capital Hill? We’re about to give you a behind the scenes view . . .
Last week we told you, based on our best available information, that a Senate vote on the Audit the Fed amendment could come on May 4. It didn’t happen.
Here’s the background . . .
* An amendment requiring an audit of the Federal Reserve, co-sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul and Rep. Alan Grayson, was added to the House financial reform bill that passed late last year
* Sen. Bernie Sanders then introduced this amendment to the Senate’s version of the financial reform bill
But Sanders recently came to believe that this amendment couldn’t win the 60 votes needed to beat a filibuster, so he cut a deal for a new amendment with Banking Chairman Chris Dodd and the Obama Administration, both of whom want to protect the big banks and the Fed.
Under the Sanders compromise (unlike the original Paul-Grayson version), there will be . . .
* no audit of Fed activities prior to December 1, 2007, nor after the date the bill becomes law
* no audit of how the Fed sets interest rates
But there was something gained in the compromise. Under the Paul-Grayson version of the amendment the GAO (General Accounting Office) was prohibited from publishing the results of the audit, while the Federal Reserve was merely “permitted” to share the results. In other words . . .
Ron Paul delivered a speech on the House floor earlier this week illustrating the potential for inflation due to our 40 year adherence to a fiat monetary system.
He names gold as “the one true money” and delivers a warning to everyone that our ability to cover up the fundamental flaws in our economy may be coming to an end.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken
Yesterday Congressman Charles Dent, the incumbent in my congressional race, offered a comment to the Associated Press: “I suspect it’d be easier to launch a Hellfire missile at a non-citizen than a citizen.”
Charlie Dent, a sitting member of the Department of Homeland Security, was referring to his newest bill that would strip an American citizen of citizenship by an act of Congress instead of a trial by jury. He wants to use the classified CIA Predator drone assassination program that Bush started – and Obama has continued – to carry out state-sponsored killings of suspected terrorists. However sensational and however strong the appeal to those who wish to be protected from the hobgoblin of terrorism, Dent neglects the rule of law and his oath to the Constitution. Specifically:
“The Trial of all Crimes… shall be by Jury.” – Article III, Section 2
“The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” – Article IV, Section 2
Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed by nearly 1,000 points over several minutes before recovering. About 800 points of the drop occurred in about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, gold spiked over $1,200, closing at a near all-time high in United States dollars after setting all-time highs in Euros, Swiss franks, and British pounds. And just last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article about how market traders are now using video game processors to beat out their competition in a game of milliseconds.
The below is a June 2009 interview with Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading. Pay close attention to the entire video
“The volume you see during the day right now.. is FICTITIOUS… It’s NOT REAL.. It’s done by what they call high-frequency traders. These are machines. The biggest machine out there wins the game nowadays. And these people deal in subseconds. 50 milliseconds is a huge amount of time. Any over that and you are a dinosaur… What they do all day long is basically buy and sell and they try and collect liquidity rebates from the exchanges who are basically in partnership with them. They trade for no apparent fundamental reason…
As Americans observe the chaos in Greece, most assume that the strength of our currency, the credit worthiness of our government, and the vast expanse of two oceans, will prevent a similar scene from playing out in our streets. I believe these protections to be illusory.
Once again the vast majority fails to see a crisis in the making, even as it stares at them from close range. Just as market observers in 2007 told us that the credit crisis would be confined to the subprime mortgage market, current analysts tell us that sovereign debt problems are confined to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and perhaps Italy. They were wrong then, and I believe that they’re wrong now.
During the housing boom, subprime and prime borrowers made many of the same mistakes. Both groups overpaid for their homes, bought with low or no down payments, financed using ARMs instead of fixed rate mortgages, and repeatedly cashed out appreciated home equity through re-financings. The market largely overlooked the glaring similarities, and instead merely focused on FICO scores. Yes, prime borrowers had better credit, but their losses on underwater properties were no less devastating. As the magnitude of home price declines intensified, prime borrowers defaulted in levels that were almost as high as the subprime crowd.
So when mortgage backed securities started to go bad, it wasn’t as if the problems emanated in subprime and subsequently “contaminated” the rest of the market. All borrowers were infected with the same disease, but the symptoms merely expressed themselves sooner in subprime. The same is true on a national level, whereby Greece plays the part of the subprime borrower. Though the U.S. is considered to be the highest order of “prime” borrower, based on historic precedent, our debt to GDP levels are at crisis levels, and are not that much lower than Portugal or Spain. When off-budget and contingency liabilities are properly accounted for, one could argue that we are already in worse financial shape than Greece.
Quote of the Day: “No Bill or Joint Resolution shall embrace more than one subject at a time, and that shall be clearly and descriptively expressed in the Title.” – One Subject At A Time Act, Section 3(a)
There are provisions in the bill that will give the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) broad, almost dictatorial powers over the American economy. Wait until you see the list in our sample letter to Congress below.
Your company or job could come under the sway of the FTC’s vast new powers. This could place your economic future in the hands of faceless, unelected bureaucrats in far-off Washington, DC.
Is this the future you want?
DownsizeDC.org’s One Subject At a Time Act (OSTA) was written to prevent outrages like this, because . . .
Empowering the FTC’s authority over most industries has NOTHING to do with Wall Street finance. It’s an UNRELATED subject.
by John Browne – Senior Market Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital
GOLD HEATS UP AS ATHENS BURNS
In the decades that preceded Greece’s adoption of the euro in 2001 the country papered over its chronic inefficiency and lack of competitiveness with its northern neighbors through regular devaluations of its currency, the drachma. But as a prerequisite to join the Euro Zone, the dominant powers of the Continent, most notably Germany, required financial housecleaning and promises of fiscal discipline. When these goals were apparently met, the Greeks came aboard.
With the benefit of hindsight it is now widely understood that Greece, in common with some other ‘Club Med’ countries, ‘distorted’ its financials (largely through accounting gimmickry dreamed up on Wall Street) in order to qualify for entry. No doubt the influx of more than 100 million citizens from these countries swelled the economic heft of the Euro Zone. But these benefits came with a price.
At its core, the euro is a Germanic currency. Similarly the European Central Bank (ECB) has an institutionally Teutonic preference for sound money. Once within the euro, countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, were bestowed a monetary respectability that was previously unavailable to them. But they were no longer able to print their own money, and were therefore unable to camouflage their economic deficiencies with currency devaluation.
Liberty Maven
by John Browne – Senior Market Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital
Today the 
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