Holy Guacamole, that’s a lot of effort to promote a non-issue. From the NYT to BuzzFeed and from President Obama to some Bush or the other, we have this issue being paraded right in front of our eyes. Slow news day? Hardly, when the mainstream tries so hard to dangle a carrot of bullshit right in front of us, we KNOW there’s a more important issue that is being covered up. And even if there’s no cover up, there’s plenty of news that is worth our attention. Here are just some of the issues that the average American knows less about than Guacamole-pea.
The TPA
If you’re a regular reader of this website, the you probably know a fair bit more about the TPP, or trans-pacific partnership, than the average Joe out there. You know that it is a secret agreement, with scant details made available by just a handful of leaks. What we do know of it is that it would create an international arbitration court, leading to governemts of the world being subject to the whims and fancies of the corporations. Suppose a country imposes a tax on cigarettes, to reduce smoking which is proven to nagatively impact health. The cigarette company can take the government to court and sue them for the theoretical loss of profits.
Then there’s the issue of generic drugs; a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter recently revealed provisions that could make it extremely tough for generics to challenge brand-name pharmaceuticals abroad. Those provisions could also help block copycats from selling cheaper versions of the expensive cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics” inside the U.S., restricting treatment for American patients while jacking up Medicare and Medicaid costs for American taxpayers. I can’t believe people actually thought Obamacare was meant to help them out… Obama cares right?!
But… have you heard of the TPA though? From Bloomberg:
TPA, also known as “fast-track,” doesn’t prevent lawmakers from voting on a final deal, but it does prevent amendments. Obama administration officials say explicitly they need TPA to reach a final agreement on TPP. Other nations, as Obama’s team explains it, simply don’t trust that the U.S. can get a deal through Congress untouched without it. (This is a serious point of disagreement between Obama and Democrats opposed to the trade deal.)
Did you know that Obama got Bipartisan support from the REPUBLICANS on this issue? That’s right, he had to fight Democrats to pass it. We know why the TPP is bad, but the TPA is how they will get the secret TPP passed without amendments. That means, even if our politicians can be bothered to read the thing, they can’t be held accountable to us to figure out which parts of it are particularly horrendous, or be bothered to change them. It passed last week, without any resistance. Without protest.
Obamacare Fuels Healthcare Mergers
If the TPP/TPA wasn’t enough to convince you that this man’s preference for guacamole has nothing to do with his hypocrisy regarding the standards of healthcare, Obamacare is in fact fueling a boom in healthcare…. mergers.
“The Affordable Care Act is really driving this merger mania,” said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “There are billions of dollars pouring into the system, and it’s money to buy insurance.”
Yup, healthcare mergers lead to fewer competing healthcare providers. This leads to oligopolies of a few vastly wealthy firms. Big Pharma? Meet Big Healthcare. These firms will lobby the government, and manipulate prices upwards.
“We cannot afford what we are paying now,” said Glenn Melnick, a healthcare economist and professor at USC. “Healthcare could eat up the federal budget.”
Workers’ share of employer health premiums soared 93% in the last decade at a time of relatively little wage growth, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a New York think tank.
US Employment Participation Is Lowest Since 1977
They LOVE to cheer for jobs growth when it happens to be up. But when it’s down, you barely hear a whisper of it. U.S. job growth slowed in June and Americans left the labor force in droves. This apparently tempers expectations for a September interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve, a hike that they simply could not afford to pay for regardless of the employment rate.
The unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 5.3 per cent, the lowest since April 2008, but that was a sign of weakness not strength (the mainstream loves to just look at a lower unemployment rate and say that it’s awesome) as it reflected about 432,000 people leaving the labor force.
The shrinking work force drove the labor force participation rate, or the share of working-age Americans who are employed or at least looking for a job, down to 62.6 per cent, the lowest reading since October 1977. Even in 1977, a single-income household was by and far the norm. Now that it takes two incomes to sustain a household, this rise in people who had given up on finding work is a concern because the cost of living has not gone back down to 1977 levels, and real median wages have not gone up at all.
That’s right, a full THIRD of working-age Americans are not working. This of course does not even count dependents like children or the elderly. Let’s see: the total population in the US stands at 318.9 million. Working-age is from 15 to 64, or about 204 million; 34% are not looking, this leaves 66% of 204, or 134.6 million looking for or working. 5.3% of these are unemployed; this leaves 127.5 million. 127.5 million people support themselves and 191.4 million people, by taxes or familial ties.
The Elephant in the room: Greece
Greece has ALREADY defaulted, by the way, but on Sunday it will vote in a referendum which will decide whether to formalize this by exiting the EU altogether. The mainstream is underplaying the importance of this, and when they do report it, they do so with a YES-vote bias. A Grexit would give OTHER much larger debt-ridden EU nations like Italy or Spain the precedence to also default, should Greece prove that it is able to improve its economy by cutting off austerity and debt. This might cause financial institutions that have invested too heavily in the debt of these countries to themselves fall apart, reigniting the financial crisis of 2008- a bad outcome, but better than letting this mess get even larger by letting the EU continue to pump unpayable debt into the country.
And the most chilling thing they forgot about Greece? They forgot to film just how large the NO and YES protests were, trying oh-so hard to convince you that the YES camp has a shot at winning. Thankfully, we have RT footage of the NO protest:
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