Friday, December 26, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
Fresh Doubt Over the Bailout of A.I.G.
GRETCHEN MORGENSON wrote in the DEC. 20, 2014 New York Times
“The government is on
thin ice and they know it,” a lawyer representing the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York wrote in a private email on Sept. 17, 2008, as the federal bailout of
the American International Group was being negotiated. “But who’s going to
challenge them on this ground?”
Well, as it turned out, Maurice R. Greenberg would.
Mr. Greenberg, the former chief executive of A.I.G. — the
insurance company whose failure threatened to bring down much of the global
financial system with it — is not the most sympathetic figure. But the lawsuit
he has brought on behalf of Starr International, a large stockholder in A.I.G.,
seeking compensation for shareholder losses during those crucial days of the financial
crisis, raises troubling issues.
In a 37-day trial that ended in late November, Starr
contended that the government’s actions in the bailout, including its refusal
to put some terms of the rescue to a shareholder vote, were an improper taking
of private property under the Fifth Amendment. It is seeking at least $25
billion in damages on behalf of A.I.G. shareholders. The judge is expected to
rule on the case next year.
Henry M. Paulson Jr., secretary of the Treasury at the time
and a former Goldman chief, was instrumental in hiring Mr. Liddy, with help
from other current and former Goldman executives.
The government rejected Starr’s accusations, contending that
its rescue of A.I.G. kept the company from disaster and that A.I.G.’s board
agreed to the bailout terms.
Those backing the government are indignant over the case.
A.I.G. shareholders did well in the bailout and should be grateful for it, they
say. And all’s well that ends well, right? A.I.G. repaid its $182 billion
rescue loan in 2012; the government generated a profit of $22.7 billion on the
deal.
To me, however, the case’s significance lies in the
information it unearthed about what the government did in the bailout — details
it worked hard to keep secret.
And new documents produced after the trial seem to bolster
Starr’s case, casting doubt on central testimony by some of the government’s
witnesses.
The new elements include emails written by the New York
Fed’s lawyers during 2008 and 2009 that had been subject to attorney-client
privilege and were not produced during the trial.
Starr’s lawyers argued that the government’s legal team had
knowingly waived that privilege when they put the Fed’s lawyers on the stand at
trial; the judge agreed and ordered the government to produce 30,000 new
documents.
A Dec. 8 court filing made by Starr included emails from
this trove.
Some relate to the actions taken by the government to gain
control of A.I.G. without receiving approval in a shareholder vote. The vehicle
set up by the government to complete the bailout received preferred stock in
A.I.G.
The problem the government faced was that Mr. Greenberg,
voting his sizable stake, could have thwarted the deal.
At trial, the government argued that it had not tried to
circumvent the A.I.G. shareholder vote. But documents from early on in the
rescue show the government’s lawyers discussing how to do just that.
“Ideally we should have the pref issued before they realize
that we are going to do it w/out a SH vote,” a government lawyer wrote on Sept.
19, 2008. Three days later, a lawyer for the New York Fed wrote, “I would give
a lot to find a way to take the stock before the shareholder war machine
moves.”
There’s also the matter of whether the New York Fed had
legal authority to receive the 80 percent equity stake in A.I.G. in exchange
for an initial $85 billion loan. A.I.G. was the only financial company rescued
in the 2008 crisis that surrendered equity to the government.
Edward Liddy was named A.I.G.’s chief executive on Sept. 18,
2008, but he remained a Goldman Sachs director until Sept. 23. Credit Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images
During the trial, Fed officials contended that they had no
doubts about their authority to take shares. But according to the email written
by Randall Guynn of Davis Polk & Wardwell, the lawyer who worried about
being on thin ice, the Fed knew that it had no “express authority” to acquire
an equity interest in A.I.G.
Finally, testimony during the trial shed new light on how
Edward Liddy became A.I.G.’s chief executive under the bailout.
Mr. Liddy, a former C.E.O. of Allstate, had been a member of
the board of Goldman Sachs since 2003 and head of its audit committee since
2007. He held “a considerable amount of Goldman stock” when the bailout took
place, testimony shows.
It was well known before the trial that Henry M. Paulson
Jr., a former chief executive at Goldman who was the Treasury secretary at the
time, was instrumental in hiring Mr. Liddy for the A.I.G. post. But the
extensive involvement by other current and former Goldman executives in his
selection was not.
This involvement was remarkable: Goldman, after all, was one
of A.I.G.’s largest trading partners and one of the biggest beneficiaries of
the insurer’s bailout. Goldman received $13 billion when the New York Fed,
under Timothy F. Geithner, paid A.I.G.’s trading partners in full on credit
insurance they had bought from it.
According to Mr. Liddy’s testimony, Chris Cole, co-chairman
of Goldman’s investment banking unit, was the first to contact him about the A.I.G.
job. Mr. Cole was working on a private-sector rescue of A.I.G. and called Mr.
Liddy the morning of Sept. 16, 2008.
Later that day, testimony shows, Ken Wilson, Goldman’s
former vice chairman and an adviser to Mr. Paulson at the Treasury, repeated
the offer to Mr. Liddy. He accepted it. Mr. Paulson then telephoned Mr. Liddy
around 3 p.m. to discuss the matter.
That evening, the bailout was completed at the New York Fed.
Early on Sept. 17, Mr. Liddy met with Dan Jester, another
former Goldman executive advising Mr. Paulson at the Treasury. A Sept. 17 email
from Mr. Cole to a Goldman colleague indicates that he had met with Mr. Liddy
for four hours.“Getting him prepped for his first day on the job,” Mr. Cole
wrote. “His chin strap is fastened.”
At the trial, Mr. Liddy testified that he didn’t recall
meeting with Mr. Cole. A spokesman for Mr. Cole said last week that he declined
to comment.
Mr. Liddy was appointed A.I.G.’s chief executive on Sept.
18. But he remained a Goldman director until Sept. 23, and he testified that he
attended a Goldman board meeting by telephone on Sept. 21. At that meeting, the
company’s directors voted to become a bank holding company to receive
additional government support.
Later that evening, Mr. Liddy led an A.I.G. board meeting,
notes produced at trial show. He urged the insurer’s directors to accept the
government’s costly bailout because it “was not going to come to the aid of
other troubled issuers and turmoil was expected,” the notes state.
Last week, Edward Kane, a finance professor at Boston
College and an expert on financial regulatory failures, said, “We’ve learned so
much from this case that everyone wanted to cover up.” Mr. Kane said that while
he is not on Starr’s side in the litigation, the facts that it has surfaced are
important for citizens to understand.
“These are the equivalent of storm troopers marching in and
throwing their weight around and telling lies about it afterward,” he said.
“The lawsuit is an effort to make these people accountable that has not been
available through the political system.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 21,
2014, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fresh Doubt in the
Bailout of A.I.G.. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Friday, December 12, 2014
Government for the strongest
George F. Will
By George F. Will Opinion writer December 5 Washington Post
Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the
likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the
Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government,
which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the
strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to
understand and manipulate its complexity.
Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive
more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives,
refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as
systemic, want to make government an ever more muscular engine of regulation
and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy
America’s left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to
upward mobility — they would study “The New Class Conflict,” by Joel Kotkin, a
lifelong Democrat.
The American majority that believes life will be worse for
the next few decades — more than double the number who believe things will be
better — senses that 95 percent of income gains from 2009-2012 went to the
wealthiest 1 percent. This, Kotkin believes, reflects the “growing alliance
between the ultra-wealthy and the instruments of state power.” In 2012, Barack
Obama carried eight of America’s 10 wealthiest counties.
In the 1880s, Kotkin says, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad
revenues were larger than the federal government’s revenues. That was the old
economy. This is the new: In 2013, the combined ad revenue of all American
newspapers was smaller than Google’s; so was magazine revenue. In 2013,
Google’s market capitalization was six times that of GM, but Google had
one-fifth as many employees. The fortunes of those Kotkin calls “the new
Oligarchs” are based “primarily on the sale of essentially ephemeral goods:
media, advertising and entertainment.”
He calls another ascendant group the Clerisy, which is based
in academia (where there are many more administrators and staffers than
full-time instructors), media, the nonprofit sector and, especially,
government: Since 1945, government employment has grown more than twice as fast
as America’s population. The Founders worried about government being captured
by factions; they did not foresee government becoming society’s most rapacious
and overbearing faction.
The Clerisy is, Kotkin says, increasingly uniform in its
views, and its power stems from “persuading, instructing and regulating the
rest of society.” The Clerisy supplies the administrators of progressivism’s
administrative state, the regulators of the majority that needs to be
benevolently regulated toward progress.
The Clerisy’s policies include dense urban living as a
“sustainable” alternative to suburbia, and serving environmentalism by
consuming less. Hence the sluggish growth and job creation since the recession
ended in June 2009 — a.k.a. the “new normal” — do not seriously disturb the
Clerisy. It preaches what others — including the 43 percent of
non-college-educated whites who consider themselves downwardly mobile — are
supposed to practice. The result, Kotkin says, is a “more stratified, less
permeable social order.” And today’s “plutonomy,” an economy fueled by the
spending of the relatively few people who guaranteed that luxury brands did
best during the recession.
Michael Bloomberg, an archetypical progressive, enunciated a
“ ‘Downton Abbey’ vision of the American future” (Walter Russell Mead’s phrase)
for New York. As New York City’s mayor, Bloomberg said: “If we can find a bunch
of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because
that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.” Progressive
government, not rapid, broad-based economic growth, will “take care of” the
dependent majority.
In New York, an incubator of progressivism, Kotkin reports,
the “wealthiest 1 percent earn a third of the entire city’s personal income —
almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.” California, a
one-party laboratory for progressivism, is home to 111 billionaires and the
nation’s highest poverty rate (adjusted for the cost of living). One study
shows that young Californians are less likely to become college graduates than
their parents were. “The state’s ‘green energy’ initiatives,” Kotkin observes,
“supported by most tech and many financial Oligarchs, have raised electricity
rates well above the national average, making it difficult for firms in
traditional fields like manufacturing, fossil fuels, agriculture or logistics.”
California is no longer a destination for what Kotkin calls “aspirational
families”: In 2013, he says, Houston had more housing starts than all of
California.
In 2010, there were 27 million more Americans than in 2000 —
but fewer births, a reflection, surely, of what Kotkin calls “the end of
intergenerational optimism.” The political future belongs to those who will
displace the progressive Clerisy’s objectives with an agenda of economic
growth.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on
Facebook.
Friday, October 24, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Money Is Not Wealth -- But It Helps Create Wealth
This story appears in the October 20, 2014 issue of Forbes.http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2014/09/30/money-is-not-wealth-but-it-helps-create-wealth/
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY is a mess today because most economists,
bankers and political leaders don’t understand that most basic of subjects:
money. When it comes to monetary policy, they have it backwards, thanks to the
misbegotten ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Before Keynes and like-minded peers,
economists understood that the real economy was the creation of products and
services. Money was the symbol economy. It represented what people had produced.
It was a facilitator of commerce.
The ability of people to trade with one another is how we
achieve a higher standard of living. Money measures wealth; it is not wealth
itself. It is a claim on products and services that people have created. That’s
why counterfeiting is illegal; it’s thievery. But when government does this,
it’s called quantitative easing, or stimulus.
Money reflects what we do in the marketplace. But instead of
recognizing that basic truth, Keynes posited the exact opposite. To his way of
thinking, money controls the economy. Change the supply and you can change
economic output, just as a thermostat controls a room’s temperature.
Government, not the marketplace, is the real driver of commerce. Other
“economic actors,” such as investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and
business executives, are secondary; they merely respond to the prompts of
government officials and central bankers. (While monetarists focus exclusively
on the money supply, Keynes thought it useful to employ fiscal tools, such as
spending and taxes, to help steer the economy. He and his acolytes, however,
had virtually no concept of taxes being a barrier or hindrance to commercial
activity; they simply saw them as a way of controlling an economy’s total
purchasing power, or “aggregate demand.”)
Keynes did share one crucial view with the classical
economists: They both saw the economy as a machine that should run smoothly.
So-called business cycles–booms and busts–were phenomena to be studied with an
eye toward eliminating them. Classicists thought more “perfect competition”
among businesses, minimal government regulation, prudent levels of government
spending, a gold standard and low taxes, along with combating unsound banking
practices, would do the trick. The cult of Keynes thought that free markets
were inherently unstable, capitalists were their own worst enemies, and wise
government officials, like Keynes, were necessary to save businesspeople from
themselves. Get the government controls right–primarily monetary–and the
economy would purr smoothly forever after.
Joseph Schumpeter thought both the classicists and the
Keynesians were utterly wrong in looking at the economy as if it were a clock.
To him “equilibrium” didn’t exist. The marketplace was always changing; the
pace would vary, but things never stayed still. New methods, inventions and the
constant rate of improvement of existing things meant that government officials
could never run an economy the way one drives a car.
The only single economy is the global economy. Yet Keynes
assumed the British economy could be treated as if it were an isolated entity.
Too many countries today formulate policies under a similar assumption.
The Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans and our list of
global billionaires demonstrate that Schumpeter had it right. “Economic actors”
are the drivers. Government can either impede their activities or create an
environment in which they can rise and flourish.
This would seem self-evident. Yet economies all over the
world are in trouble. Government leaders and economists galore talk about
monetary policy as if it could rev up economies that are staggering under
excessive taxation, suffocating regulation and massive government spending.
(Remember, government doesn’t create resources. It gets them through taxation,
borrowing or inflation, which is–Keynes got this right–another form of
taxation.)
Most governments loathe the truth that the people on our
lists are essential to prosperity and a higher standard of living. Government
wants the benefits of what such people create, but it doesn’t want anyone to
get rich from the creating.
(See Steve Forbes’ new book, Money: How the Destruction of
the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy—And What We Can Do About It.)
A Nobel Economist’s Caution About Government
Friedrich Hayek warned that intervening can make things
worse. ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, anyone?
By
Donald J. Boudreaux And
Todd J. Zywicki
WSJ Oct. 12, 2014
Forty years ago the Nobel Prize in Economic Science was
awarded to a scholar who believed the prize perhaps should not exist. As he
graciously accepted the distinction in 1974, Austrian-British economist
Friedrich A. Hayek worried aloud that thinking of economics as a science might
fuel what he called “the pretense of knowledge”—the idea that anyone could know
enough to engineer society successfully. He was right to fret.
Hayek’s greatest contribution to economics was to show that
society is far more complex than we realize, with little pieces of knowledge
dispersed among millions of individuals. “The curious task of economics,” he
famously wrote in “The Fatal Conceit,” which he published in 1988, “is to
demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can
design.”
Recent government interventions suggest that politicians and
bureaucrats today think they can design just about anything. This ignorance has
backfired, as it always does, bringing with it what economists call “unintended
consequences.”
Consider the Affordable Care Act. The law’s mandates,
restrictions, prohibitions, taxes and subsidies are meant to make health
insurance universally available. Yet since its passage in 2010, the proportion
of Americans lacking health insurance has fallen only to 13% from 16%,
according to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Millions of Americans have faced higher premiums, often losing their preferred
doctors, contrary to what President Obama predicted and promised.
Thanks to the hastily written law’s incentives, ObamaCare
also has been a drag on employment. About 18% of employers surveyed by the
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in August said that the ACA caused them to
reduce the number of workers they employ. Only 3% of employers credit the ACA
with enabling them to hire more workers. Those who are being hired often find
their workweek capped at 29 hours, not coincidentally just one hour less than
the definition of “full time” under the ACA.
Or take the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, the financial reform
legislation enacted after the 2008 meltdown. The law empowers the federal
government to centrally manage the risks of the American financial system, as
it seeks to prevent another crisis and eliminate the problem of too-big-to-fail
banks. Yet large banks still reap a $70 billion annual subsidy from the
continued market perception that they will be rescued if trouble arises,
according to a March report from the International Monetary Fund.
Enter the unintended consequences. Dodd-Frank has created
nearly 400 new regulations, slapping the industry with more than $20 billion in
new compliance costs, according to research from the American Action Forum.
Even worse, these regulations tend to fall more heavily on small banks that
cannot absorb the new costs as easily as their giant rivals that were the supposed
risks to the economy should they flounder.
In addition, many of Dodd-Frank’s costs are passed on to
consumers in the form of higher bank fees and reduced bank services. Expensive
bank fees then drive many consumers out of the mainstream financial system and
into the arms of payday lenders. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. estimates
that the number of “unbanked” consumers in America rose by one million from
2009 to 2011, while payday lending has boomed during the same period. That was
not the plan.
Such hubris and its inevitable results would not have
surprised Hayek. In the 1970s, he saw government policies create the inflation
they were designed to avoid. Government has shown again and again the folly of
efforts to centrally direct complex systems.
What does Hayek recommend? A little humility. “We shall not
grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish,” he
wrote in his 1944 masterpiece, “The Road to Serfdom.” It was the book’s central
lesson that hubris makes us not only poorer but also less free. Today’s leaders
would be wise to become better students of the late Nobel laureate.
Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason
University, where Mr. Zywicki is a professor of law. Both are senior fellows at
the Mercatus Center’s Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics
and Economics.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
George Will on Trickle Down Economics
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/10/02/George%20Will-Obama-Is-Practicing-Trickle-Down-Economics
Friday, September 12, 2014
Israeli doctors say Obama has a mental disorder
Subject: Israeli doctors say Obama has a mental disorder
>>> Date: August 26, 2014 3:40:25 PM EDT
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This is rather frightening!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Subject: Israeli doctors say Obama has a
mental disorder
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> A
very interesting story. Well worth
reading. Takes about 5 minutes.
>>>
>>> This
article tries to explain why Obama acts as he does.
>>>
>>> Haberman and Vaknin are legitimate. Check
them out on Google if you
wish.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Written by Dr. Michael A. Haberman, M.D.
>>> This Israeli doctor says Obama has a mental
disorder. Labels him a
pathological narcissist and there is no greater insanity
than electing one as President said Dr. Sam Vaknin who is an Israeli
psychologist.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Dr. Vaknin States, "I must confess I
was impressed by Obama from the
first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a
black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident, a
wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his
shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor
that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty
words. Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in
American history.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Never a politician in this land had such
quasi "religious" impact on
>>> so
many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito
with Zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama
is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on
most important subjects.
>>>
>>>
Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the "Malignant Self Love"
>>> believes
Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Vaknin is a
world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the
inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism
everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and
the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest that the man is either
a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Narcissists project a grandiose but false
image of themselves. Jim
Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man
who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even
murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson,
Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler
are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous
influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around
themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled
their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life.
They gave them hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they
brought them to their doom.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> When you are a victim of a cult of
personality, you don't know it
>>> until
it is too late. One determining factor in the development
of NPD is childhood abuse "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and
replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations, "says Vaknin.
"Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through
a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw his father only once
again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama
had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign land with a radically foreign culture,
to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live
with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently
in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979.
"She died of cancer in 1995."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> One must never underestimate the
manipulative genius of pathological
narcissists. They project such an imposing personality
that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the
narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his
bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world
around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image.
>>> He creates a cult of personality. His
admirers become his codependents.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Narcissists have no interest in things that
do not help them to
>>> reach
their personal objective. They are focused on one thing
alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do
not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not
help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention. If an issue
raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no
interest in it. The "present" vote is a safe vote. No one can
criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature
because they are not about him.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Obama's election as the first black
president of the Harvard Law
>>> Review
led to a contract and advance to write a book about race
relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than
expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography!
Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he
had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He
entitled the book Dreams from My Father.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote
his own autobiography
>>> when he
was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no
subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time
and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an
august being as himself? Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As
the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest
in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in
luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who raised nearly
half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history)
has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother
cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but
himself.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This election was like no other in the
history of America . The
>>> issues
were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can
be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and
one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free
world? I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed. Many
politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply
self-serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of pathological narcissism,
which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a
Bill Clinton for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This is a mental health issue, not just a
character flaw.
>>> Pathological
narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and
even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous. Today the Democrats
have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their
party. The great majority of blacks voted for Obama. Only a fool does not know
that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The downside of this is that if Obama turns
out to be the disaster I
predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the
whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic
mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads deeper in
the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash
among the whites. The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent
and they will receive widespread support.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I predict that in less than four years,
racial tensions will
>>> increase to
levels never seen since the turbulent 1960's. Obama will
set the clock back decades. America is the bastion of freedom. The peace of the
world depends on the strength of America , and its weakness translates into the
triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that
Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers
of the Guantanamo terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so
thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House. America is on the
verge of destruction.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> There is no insanity greater than electing a
pathological narcissist
>>> as
president.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Michael A. Haberman, M.D.
> =============
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Thursday, May 29, 2014
Doctors' War Stories From VA Hospitals
Hal Scherz wrote this opinion in the May 27 edition of WSJ:
Administrators limited operating time so that work stopped by 3 p.m.
May 27, 2014 7:26 p.m. ET
With the recent revelations about the
disgraceful treatment of patients by the Veterans Affairs hospitals, the
public is discovering what the majority of doctors in this country have
long known: The VA health-care system is a disaster. Throwing more
money at the system, or demanding the scalps of top
bureaucrats—Washington's reflexive response to any problem of this
sort—won't repair the mess. What's needed is a fundamental rethinking of
how to provide medical care for America's veterans.
The
federal government runs two giant health-care programs—Medicare and the
VA system. Medicare is provided by private physicians and other
providers. Its finances are a mess, but the care that seniors receive is
by and large outstanding. The VA health-care system is run by a
centrally controlled federal bureaucracy. Ultimately, that is the source
of the poor care veterans receive.
The Phoenix VA Health Care Center.
Associated Press
U.S. doctors are well aware of the
problems with VA hospitals because many of us trained at them. There are
153 VA hospitals. Most of them are affiliated with the country's 155
medical schools, and they play an integral role in the education of
young physicians. These physicians have borne witness to the abuses and
mismanagement, and when they attempt to fight against the entrenched
bureaucracy on behalf of their patients, they meet fierce resistance.
Most
doctors have their personal VA stories. In my experience at VA
hospitals in San Antonio and San Diego, patients were seen in clinics
that were understaffed and overscheduled. Appointments for X-rays and
other tests had to be scheduled months in advance, and longer for
surgery. Hospital administrators limited operating time, making sure
that work stopped by 3 p.m. Consequently, the physician in charge kept a
list of patients who needed surgery and rationed the available slots to
those with the most urgent problems.
Scott Barbour,
an orthopedic surgeon and a friend, trained at the Miami VA
hospital. In an attempt to get more patients onto the operating-room
schedule, he enlisted fellow residents to clean the operating rooms
between cases and transport patients from their rooms into the surgical
suites. Instead of offering praise for their industriousness, the chief
of surgery reprimanded the doctors and put a stop to their actions. From
his perspective, they were not solving a problem but were making
federal workers look bad, and creating more work for others, like
nurses, who had to take care of more post-op patients.
At
the VA hospital in St. Louis, urologist
Michael Packer,
a former partner of mine, had difficulty getting charts from the
medical records department. He and another resident hunted them down
themselves. It was easier for department workers to say that they
couldn't find a chart than to go through the trouble of looking. Without
these records, patients could not receive care, which was an
unacceptable situation to these doctors. Not long after they began doing
this, they were warned to stand down.
There are thousands of other stories just like these.
Opinion Video
Dr. Ben Carson discusses how private hospitals work, in
contract to the government-run Veterans Administration. Photo credit:
Getty Images.
In my experience, the best thing that
a patient in the VA system could hope for was that the services he
needed were unavailable. When that is the case, the VA outsources their
care to doctors in the community, where their problems are promptly
addressed. But these patients still need to return to the VA system for
other services and get back on a long waiting list.
Proponents of the Affordable Care Act
have long used the VA to showcase the benefits of federally planned and
run health care. Doctors know otherwise—and it is no surprise that a
majority of them have opposed a mammoth federal regulatory apparatus to
control health care in this country. The systemic problems with the VA
bureaucracy are a harbinger of things to come.
The
best solution for veterans would be to wind down the VA hospitals. The
men and women who have served in our armed forces should be supplied
with a federally issued insurance card allowing them to receive their
care in the community where it can be delivered better and more
efficiently.
The veterans who receive
their care at VA hospitals are the kindest and most grateful patients
that I have had the privilege to care for in my career. Unfortunately,
they are getting shortchanged. The time to repair this national
embarrassment is long past.
Dr.
Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and
Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and serves on the faculty of Emory
University Medical School.
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