The Truth About the Health Care Bill

by Michael Connelly,
Ret. Constitutional Attorney

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009.

I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected. To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying.

The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for undocumented immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession. The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business, and put everyone into a government run system..

All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats, and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled by the government.

However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portionsof the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people, and the businesses they own.

The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with! I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal healthcare direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4thAmendment to the Constitution information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendm e n t s m a y p r o v i d e .

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment.

However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the d u e p r o c e s s o f l a w. So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much, out the original ten in the Bill of Rights, that are effectively nullified by this law It doesn’t stop there though.

The 9th Amendment that provides: The enumeration in the Constitution, ­of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people; The 10th Amendment states: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control. I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea.

This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution.” If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me accountable. For those who might doubt the nature of this threat, I suggest they consult the source, the U.S. Con

por Nick Timiraos

JJoselin Reyes and other supporters listened while citizens affected by the foreclosure crisis gave testimonials at the Wells Fargo demonstration yesterday.  (PHOTO FROM RICHMOND CONFIDENTIAL)

Banks trying to foreclose on homeowners are hitting another roadblock, as some delinquent borrowers are successfully arguing that their mortgage companies can’t prove they own the loans and therefore don’t have the right to foreclose.

These “show me the paper” cases have been winding through the courts for several years. But in recent months, some judges have been siding with borrowers and stopping foreclosures after concluding that banks’ paperwork problems are more serious than previously thought and raise broader ethical questions.

This year, cases in California, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Massachusetts and others have raised questions about whether banks properly demonstrated ownership.

During the fall, banks temporarily suspended foreclosures to address so-called robo-signing problems, where employees were approving legal documents without properly reviewing them. They said that in weeks they could fix what they considered to be simple clerical errors. But borrowers are uncovering new types of document problems, further delaying banks’ efforts to get foreclosures back on track.

In some cases, borrowers are showing courts that banks failed to properly assign ownership of mortgages after they were pooled into mortgage-backed securities. In other cases, borrowers say that lenders backdated or fabricated documents to fix those errors.

“Flawed mortgagebanking processes have potentially infected millions of foreclosures, and the damages against these operations could be significant and take years to materialize,” said Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in testimony to a Senate committee last month .

Last month, the Maine Supreme Court reversed the foreclosure of Dana and Robin Murphy of Auburn, Me., after concluding that the mortgage company, a unit of HSBC Holdings PLC, filed “inherently untrustworthy” documents. An HSBC spokesman declined to comment.

The case began in 2008 when HSBC filed to foreclose on the Murphys, who hadn’t made a mortgage payment in two years. A trial judge initially rejected HSBC’s foreclosure because the bank couldn’t show it owned the promissory note—in effect, the borrower’s IOU.

The court later granted the foreclosure after HSBC submitted new ­paperwork. However, the Murphys found discrepancies and alleged that the documents were backdated. The court voided the foreclosure and sent the case back to the lower court to determine potential penalties.

Attorneys for borrowers reject the view that they are using arcane legal rules to secure free houses for clients who aren’t paying their bills. Efforts to gloss over incomplete or falsified evidence “can’t be tolerated by a free society,” says Thomas Ice, an attorney in Royal Palm Beach, Fla., who has a similar case before the Florida Supreme Court. “This is a huge assault on our legal system” that risks “turning us into a banana republic.”

by Ethan A. Huff,

Natural News

A landmark new study out of Canada exposes yet another lie propagated by the biotechnology industry, this time blowing a hole in the false claim that a certain genetic pesticide used in the cultivation of genetically-modified (GM) crops does not end up in the human body upon consumption. Researchers from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre in Quebec, Can., have proven that Bt toxin, which is used in GM corn and other crops, definitively  makes its way intothe blood supply, contrary to what Big Bio claims — and this toxin was found in the bloodstreams of 93 percent of pregnant women tested. Published in the journal Reproductive Toxicology, the study explains that Bt toxin enters the body not only through direct consumption of GMOs, but also from consumption of meat, milk and eggs from animals whose feed contains GMOs. Among all women tested, 80 percent of the pregnant group tested positive for Bt toxin in their babies’ umbilical cords, and 69 percent of non-pregnant women tested positive for Bt toxin.

The only reason many countries even approved GM crops in the fi rst place was because they were told that GM crops were no different than conventional crops. The biotechnology industry has purported for years that the alterations and chemicals used in GM crop cultivation pose no risk whatsoever to human health, and that any GM substances that remain in food are broken down in the digestive system. Now that it has been revealed that such claims are complete fabrications, many groups are urging governments to pull GMOs from their food supplies.

“This research is a major surprise as it shows that the Bt proteins have survived ­the human digestive system and passed into the blood supply — something that regulators said could not happen,” said Pete Riley from GM Freeze, an alliance of organizations united against GMOs. “Regulators need to urgently reassess their opinions, and the EU should use the safeguard clauses in the regulations to prevent any further GM Bt crops being cultivated or imported for animal feed or food until the potential health implications have been fully evaluated.”

Most of the studies that have been used to validate the safety of GMOs have been conducted by the companies that created them in the fi rst place, so they are hardly a credible source for reliable safety data. Governments in North and South America, as well as throughout Europe, have essentially welcomed GMOs into the food supply based on fl imsy reassurances rather than sound science.

by the El Reportero’s news services

Porfirio Lovo

Two developments, in two small neighbours in Central America, in the space of a week will cause serious domestic and international repercussions. Honduras is poised to shake off its pariah status and rejoin the Organization of American States (OAS) after President Porfirio Lobo finally managed to strike a deal with Manuel Zelaya nearly two years after he was ousted in a coup.

Meanwhile El Salvador, one of the top allies of the US in Latin America even after the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) came to power in 2009, has been rocked by startling revelations about an entrenched organised crime network implicating business leaders, politicians, judges and the security forces.

Mexico considers cancelling state election

On 25 May the national leaders of the country’s three main parties announced that instead of allowing the electors of Michoacán to pick the next governor they may agree on a joint candidate. The proposal is a demonstration of how weak President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa now is and how vulnerable his key policy of using the army to combat drug trafficking gangs has become.

Michoacán has been the scene of a major upswing in gang violence in the past 10 days and the politicians now fear that elections, due this November, would be impossible. This admission raises questions for other state elections this year, especially in Nayarit, where 28 people were killed by gangsters on 25 May and which goes to the polls on 3 July, and also for the congressional and presidential elections due in July 2012. The US government has a clear understanding of what is happening in Mexico: on 24 May the US President nominated Earl Anthony Wayne, currently deputy ambassador to Afghanistan, ­to be the next ambassador to Mexico. Wayne, a career diplomat, was ambassador to Argentina from 2006 to 2009.

Paraguay, closer to becoming the region’s energy hub

Recent efforts by Brazil and Argentina to promote greater energy integration within the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) by providing concessions to their smaller partners, Paraguay and Uruguay, have finally made an integrated regional energy market a distinct possibility. In particular, both countries appear more inclined to accede to Paraguay’s longstanding demand to regain sovereignty over its hydroelectric output.

However, a fi nal decision, which rests in the hands of Argentina, has been stalled for political reasons, as the two Mercosur powerhouses assess the implications.

Cuba’s (r)evolution

On 19 April President Raúl Castro closed the ruling Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC)’s sixth party congress with a defi ant vow “to defend, preserve and continue perfecting socialism, and never permit the return of capitalism”. It’s unclear what the 79-year old Castro meant by “capitalism”, but it’s certainly the case that the ruling gerontocracy that was (re-) confi rmed in the leadership may well struggle with the planned transition to a mixed system, whereby a centrally planned economy run by a one party state is expected to co-exist in harmony with a limited private entrepreneurial sector for the fi rst time in fi ve decades. (Latin News contributed with this report.)