Civilianism News for July 16th

News for July 16th:

• “They Dump the Sick to Satisfy Investors”: Insurance Exec Turned Whistleblower Wendell Potter – Whistleblower: (For-profit Insurance Companies are moving away from managed health care to what they refer to as consumer-driven or consumer-directed care, and it really is just a euphemism for shifting the financial burden from insurers and employers onto the shoulders of working men and women. These insurance companies are the very definition of evil. They make monumental health care decisions for people every day, coming between people and their doctors, deciding who lives and who dies. Their decisions are based only on how much profit they decide they “need”. If that isn’t evil, what is? No one else in the US has that kind of power over people’s lives except perhaps Dick Cheney’s assassination squads.
• Taking Shorter Showers Doesn’t Cut It: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change – “Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance.” Ain’t that the truth. I’m currently reading Jensen’s “End Game Volume 1″ and it’s good stuff. Unfortunately, I had to engage in an act of personal consumption to obtain it.
• Michael Jackson’s Death Was Sensationalized by the Same Corporate Media That Drove Him Insane – Dear Chris Hedges, Michael Jackson was not insane. Insane is: Glenn Beck, Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin, etc., the hysterical people who believe their own lies. Michael Jackson was just a drug addict. This is the most obvious/useless article I have read by Hedges so far, and they don’t seem to be improving. Let’s just say,  “bandwagon”.
• Pentagon weighs adding 30,000 to Army – “Military leaders say war wounds, stress among factors depleting force” Hmmm.  They forgot to include “death via war” as a depletion factor.  How about just ending these stupid wars we’re in.
• Report: CIA Assassin Program Could Operate Anywhere — Even Inside U.S. – The Washington Post reports today on how the program had been revived and then put on hold several times since 2001. But it also says, referring to the “presidential finding” with which President Bush authorized the program in 2001…” Paul Wellstone? I don’t know how they did it, but that smelled like murder to me when it happened right before the election in 2002.

  “The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.”

• Matt Taibbi – - The real price of Goldman’s giganto-profits – We constructed this massive bailout infrastructure, and instead of pumping that free money back into the economy, the banks instead simply hoarded it and ate it on the spot, converting it into bonuses. So what does this Goldman profit number mean? This is the final evidence that the bailouts were a political decision to use the power of the state to redirect society’s resources upward, on a grand scale. It was a selective rescue of a small group of chortling jerks who must be laughing all the way to the Hamptons every weekend about how they fleeced all of us at the very moment the game should have been up for all of them.
• Obama goes to bat for Bush wiretap program – President Obama is adamant about maintaining the secrecy of a wiretapping program authorized by George W. Bush, an administration lawyer told a federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday.” Where’s the change, President Obama? I expected more from you. I still do.