SEPP Organization Blog

Can Canada afford to be healthy? Karen Howlett Globe and Mail Friday, Feb. 26, 2010

Dr. Paul Dobrovolskis had just come back from vacation to his job in the emergency room when an official at the Greater Niagara General Hospital called with an ultimatum: Either go along with a new work schedule or leave. “That was the final straw,” Dr. Dobrovolskis recalls. He decided he would go, he declared that, because of constant cuts to its budget, the hospital where he had spent 14 years was “dying a slow death.” Three of his colleagues followed suit, leaving just two-full-time doctors on the emergency ward’s staff. Doctors voted non-confidence in its leadership, residents protested in front of the Ontario Legislature.

…Hospitals are cutting services and undermining their role as providers. “Our population here is older and sicker, and we have a national shortage of doctors and nurses.”

…Overall spending last year amounts to $5,452 for every Canadian, and roughly 12 per cent of the gross domestic product – an all-time high and almost twice the 7 per cent seen in the 1970s.

….governments at all levels seem determined to avoid a public debate on how to sustain a system many Canadians appear to take for granted.

…Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page warns that the country must cut spending or raise taxes.

…Alberta retreated on plans to close acute-care and rehabilitation beds at an Edmonton hospital.

…British Columbia is trying to cut $160-million from budgets for its 12 hospitals, close a six-bed psychiatry unit, 10 beds for addiction-treatment.

…In Ontario, the government has quietly topped up funding for several cash-strapped hospitals.

…Niagara Health received another $14-million, all but erasing its deficit. With a shortfall expected to reach $24.7-billion this year, Ontario has launched the biggest restructuring of hospitals since the mid-1990s cuts.

…The gap between “what the public wants and what governments feel they’re in a position to give” is widening.

…Bureaucrats insist that changes they are making are all about improving the care the public receives as medicine becomes more sophisticated and highly specialized. But that’s a tough sell when cutting costs is the real goal.

…Niagara Health’s experience shows how trying to save by streamlining services can have unexpected consequences, leading to a disgruntled work force and, in some cases, even greater expense.

….In late 2008, converting emergency rooms into around-the-clock urgent-care centres, closing beds for patients with chronic illnesses saved $28milion.

…In the 1990s, Harris government’s Health Services Restructuring Commission oversaw the biggest shutdown of hospitals in Canadian history. It closed or merged 35 facilities.

…Converting the emergency rooms has failed. Niagara Health will save more than $1-million, but area municipalities and the province will spend an additional $3.1-million on ambulance service.

…Niagara Health announced that the medical staff faced a risk of “burnout” because they were seeing too many patients.

…“It is impossible for physicians to deliver appropriate care with time constraints.”

…Ontario Medical Association’s emergency medicine section said a shortage of beds was the real issue.

American Capitalism Gone With a Whimper April 04, 2009       Pravda Russia

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe. These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars.

These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them? Join Pravda.ru forum. Registration is free and simple

Bosses at scandal-hit Stafford Hospital escape scot-free.  Instead they receive huge money awards.The senior managers who presided over one of Britain’s worst hospital scandals, in which up to 1,200 patients died, have all escaped discipline. By Rebecca Smith Medical Editor Published: 9:59PM GMT 24 Feb 2010 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7310629/Bosses-at-scandal-hit-Stafford-Hospital-escape-scot-free.htm

Patients, most of whom were treated at the trust?s main hospital in Stafford, were ‘robbed of their dignity’ Photo: PA No one on the board at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust has faced censure and all of them were either paid off, walked into another job or allowed to remain in post. The man who ran the hospital trust received a large pay-off despite his part in the scandal. Martin Yeates, the former chief executive, left the trust “by mutual agreement” with a pay-off of £400,000 and a pension worth £1.27 million, it has been alleged.  Related Articles

• Patients abused by hostile staff, inquiry finds
• The catalogue of failures at Mid-Staffs trust
• Patients ‘routinely neglected’ at Stafford Hospital
• NHS puts targets ahead of patients reports warned
• Stafford scandal boss walks off with £400,000
• No one is more damaged by Damian McBride than Gordon Brown himself

The lack of disciplinary action emerged after the publication of a damning report into the treatment of patients between 2005 and 2008. An independent report commissioned by the Government found that patients were abused and neglected by hostile staff and were left in humiliating and undignified conditions. The impact on them was “unimaginable”, the report said. Patients, most of whom were treated at the trust’s main hospital in Stafford, were “robbed of their dignity”, left in soiled bedclothes, unwashed and in states of undress in full view of others, it found.

Families of patients had to clean lavatories and public areas themselves, while food and drinks were left out of reach and, it was alleged, patients drank out of vases. Attitudes of staff were at times “uncaring”. Managers were “in denial” about the problems and were concentrating on cutting costs and hitting targets to achieve foundation trust status, the report said. There was said to be a culture of fear and bullying with staff concerned they would lose their jobs if targets were not hit. The report followed an independent inquiry chaired by Robert Francis QC, a specialist in clinical negligence, who has acted in previous high-profile inquiries. It found that 18 of the 22 board members who ran the trust over the period under investigation had now left their roles, with none facing disciplinary action. Many went on to senior, well-paid lucrative positions elsewhere in the NHS.

Mr Yeates, 51, did not give evidence in person to the inquiry due to ill health and is not thought to be working. The trust’s most recent accounts show that he had built a pension pot worth more than £1.27 million by the time he stepped down, entitling him to annual payments of more than £65,000. The Government has previously stepped in to stop a payout to a chief executive of a failing trust. Rose Gibb, who left her post at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells in 2007 days before a critical report into the spread of Clostridium difficile on overcrowded wards, was in line for a £250,000 payment. Speaking about the Staffordshire report last night, Katherine Murphy, the director of the Patients Association, said: “It is absolutely disgusting and a total scandal that no senior managers have been disciplined over the appalling standards of care patients suffered at this trust.”

Ken Lowndes, a spokesman for the campaign group Cure the NHS, said: “No one has been disciplined either internally by the hospital, under the old regime or the current one, no one has been disciplined by the Nursing and Midwifery Council and no one has been disciplined by the GMC (General Medical Council). “The Government has tried to make out that this was just a few rotten apples in the barrel but it was not. The whole culture at the hospital was like this.” Toni Brisby, the chairman of the trust at the time, was allowed to step down without payment when a report by the Healthcare Commission last year disclosed the extent of the problems at the trust and the high mortality rates. Jan Harry, the director of clinical standards and chief nurse who pushed through damaging job cuts, has since been employed as interim director of operations at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust. Helen Moss, the director of nursing and governance from December 2006, took a senior training role at East Midlands Strategic Health Authority last year. John Newsham, who was the finance director for more than a decade, took early retirement in 2008. Karen Morrey, the chief operating officer, founded her own company after quitting last year. Dr Val Suarez resigned as medical director in March last year but is still employed at the trust in her previous role as a pathologist.

The GMC said several doctors involved in Mid Staffordshire had been referred to the council for investigation but it would not disclose how many, and hearings have not yet been held. The Nursing and Midwifery Council has opened a case file and is investigating at least one nurse. It is also considering whether other nurses should be investigated. Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary said: “It is a scandal that a chief executive can walk away from these appalling events, with his financial rewards intact and not even give any account to the inquiry undertaken by Robert Francis.” Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said it was unacceptable for NHS mangers to be responsible for major failings at one organisation and then to get another job elsewhere in the service. The trust admitted Mr Yeates left with six months’ notice pay and his salary at the time was around £160,000. But officials said they were trying to discover if he had received any other payments on departing.

A spokesman for the trust said: “Former chief executive Martin Yeates did not receive a £400,000 pay off from the trust. “He was a member of the NHS Pension Scheme, which is a final salary scheme. He has received no pension enhancements from the Trust. “We will forensically examine the Robert Francis report to identify individuals criticised and take all necessary steps to ensure that the trust’s disciplinary procedures are robustly enforced.”

Now three MORE female patients ‘kept in hospital store cupboard’ surrounded by blood-stained binsBy Jenny Hope
Last updated at 10:58 PM on 12th February 2010

• Comments (52)

A flagship hospital is facing an investigation as patients told of their nightmare stays in tiny windowless ‘broom cupboard’ treatment rooms.Elderly women described being transferred to 12ft by 16ft store rooms in the middle of the night – where they were surrounded by blood-stained bins, bandages and shelves of medical supplies.Some missed meals because they were not on proper wards while others described sleepless nights as nurses continually entered to collect stores.

Vulnerable: Rhoda Talbot, 85, was put into a store room at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital after surgery for a spine fractureIt has emerged that Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital has 27 cupboards – labelled ‘treatment rooms’ and regularly used to house patients – attached to wards.NHS watchdog the Care Quality Commission has launched an investigation into the £229million hospital, built less than a decade ago with private funding, after a flood of complaints. More…

• Shocking picture shows how elderly patient was abandoned for two days in hospital store cupboard with little food or medication

The scandal came to light when 80-year-old Doris McKeown this week told the Daily Mail how she spent two days in one of the rooms as she awaited surgery for compressed nerves in her spine.Now 85-year-old Rhoda Talbot has told how she was admitted to the hospital last month with a hair line fracture to her spine and was moved into the ‘stock cupboard’ the night before her discharge.Her son Rod said: ‘It was literally a store room. There was shelf racking filled with stuff used to run the ward, green buckets with dirty, bloody needles in them and oxygen  cylinders.’ 

Cramped: The space where Doris McKeown was left overnight and kept awake by nurses who accessed the place to collect suppliesWhen Mrs Talbot, from Wroxham near Norwich, was collected by her family, she said: ‘I’m absolutely shattered. They [nurses] were in and out all night. Every time they came in they turned the light on.’Mr Talbot is planning a formal complaint and wants an apology to his mother over her ordeal.Another woman, Helen Howes, 35, complained to the ward sister after spending the night in a similar windowless room before urgent surgery on an abscess. She was hemmed in by dressing packs, catheter bags and other medical supplies and her handbag was put on a medical waste bin.

‘Even in the night I was having my bed moved across because the nurses needed to get to something on the left-hand side and my bed was too close for them to open the drawers,’ she said.The mother of one, who lives near Norwich, doesn’t blame nursing staff.Under fire: Norfolk and Norwich Hospital said the room Mrs McKeown (below) was kept in was a treatment room, not a cupboard‘They are powerless,’ she added. ‘They knew it was common practice. I wanted to highlight the completely unacceptable manner in which vulnerable patients, who perhaps feel too ill at the time to complain or feel they don’t have a voice to raise these issues, are treated.’Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, condemned the cupboards. She said: ‘It’s so undignified. Families shouldn’t put up with it.’ Mrs McKeown, of Bungay, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, was moved to a ‘treatment room’ at 2am on October 22 and spent 48 hours there before surgery.

The 80-year-old missed out on meals and medication because she wasn’t on a proper ward and described the room as ‘like a broom cupboard’.Her daughter Dr Helen McKeown, a GP, added: ‘My mother needed emergency surgery and she ended up in a cupboard. Where’s the dignity in care?’’Regular problem’: Doris McKeown lies in the windowless store cupboard where she spent two days before surgeryLiberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb branded the rooms unacceptable. Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital responded that all its treatment rooms were used strictly on a short-term basis.Director of nursing Christine Baker said: ‘Our interest is in making sure all our patients get the best possible care and that their dignity and privacy is protected. ‘We carefully assess any patient’s needs before they are placed in a ward clinical treatment room.’ Hospital spokesman Andrew Stronach claimed many hospitals followed the same procedure.

#1 Comment Welcome to the NHS. Britain has the WORST public health service in Europe accordingly to several researchers. Usurprisingly we also have the worst quality of life as well.- Mark, London, UK, 12/2/2010 17:18

#2Comment Appalling treatment of anyone but particularly our elderly. I notice the patients are all elderly…is that because we who are stronger in mind and body would not stand for it?? It is a sad state of affairs and the stress brought on by this experience for the patient and their families is unmeasureable and can only hinder the road to recovery and will have a lasting effect at a time when our elderly require sensitivity and respect.- Rosie, United Kingdom, 12/2/2010 17:14

#3 Comment It is not Free Health Care, but affordable health care for everyone. It is horrible to be without healthcare. I know, because I have been there. I also have many sick friends and co-workers who need to have surgeries and are not able to because they cannot afford to see a doctor.
Now I have health care, but my family cannot spend over $3600 a year in doctor and hospital visits. We also have to pay for our medicines which come out to $200 a month (my son has asthma). thank goodness we are healthy
Not every system is perfect and it sounds like the lady had a horrible recovery. maybe this story will make them make some changes.- jennifer, ky, U.S, 12/2/2010 17:12

#4 Comment Appalling, unforgivable, this will leave a lasting impression of these fragile elderly lives and those members of their families in the most trying of times. I time when you would expect more from this country. Our elderly do not have a voice and liberties are constantly taken with their good natured, take in your stride approach whereby they say nothing and pay the price…often with their life.- Rosie, United Kingdom, 12/2/2010 17:08

#5 Comment You have to admit that being in the broom cupboard is better than lying on a trolley in the corridor? I mean, you wouldn’t expect the hospital to sack all those “managers” and “diversity experts” that NuLiebr are so fond of, just so they can afford to care for those irritations… what d’you callem? Oh yes, the nursing and medical staff and the patients!
Take out medical insurance, people.- Dominic Fahr, Oxford, England, 12/2/2010 17:01

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250502/Now-MORE-female-patients-kept-hospital-store-cupboard-surrounded-blood-stained-bins.html#comments#ixzz0fQl55niU

Canadian Premier shuns Canada and goes to U.S. for heart surgeryKenyon Wallace, National Post  Published: Tuesday, February 02, 2010
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States.Deputy premier Kathy Dunderdale confirmed the treatment at a news conference Tuesday, but would not reveal the location of the operation or how it would be paid for.”He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done,” said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks. “In consultation with his own doctors, he’s decided to go that route.”Mr. Williams’ decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada’s health-care system.”It was never an option offered to him to have this procedure done in this province,” said Ms. Dunderdale, refusing to answer whether the procedure could be done elsewhere in Canada.Mr. Williams, 59, has said nothing of his health in the media. “The premier has made a commitment that once he’s through this procedure and he’s well enough, he’s going to talk about the whole process and share as much detail with you as he’s comfortable to do at that time,” she said.Ms. Dunderdale wouldn’t say where in the U.S. Mr. Williams is seeking treatment.A popular Progressive Conservative premier, Mr. Williams has also seen his share of controversy. During the 2008 federal election, Mr. Williams vehemently opposed the Conservative government, launching his “Anything But Conservative” — which has been credited with keeping the Tories from winning any seats in the province.

Response #1 corx_g  7:54 AM on February 2, 2010Hide Details

I thought Canada had one of the best healthcare systems in the world while the US system sucked? Now I’m confused. Of course this guy is sacrificing his health by coming to the US while all those Canadians are living under that wonderful system they have up there. Idiots, stop being sheep lead to slaughter. If your system isn’t good enough for him why would you for an instance think it is good enough for you. If he won’t live under the system he supports why should you? If he says “You must live under the rules I deem apply to you but I don’t have to do so!” Then you are fools 

Canadian Response #2 Bay Bulls 7:55 AM on February 2, 2010If going to the USA for surgery is good enough for the likes of Danny Williams, it should be good enough for the rest of us lowly Canadians as well. 

Canadian Response #3 Jocko2 8:59 AM on February 2, 2010Hide DetailsHypocritical little weasel! It’s get in line and wait for us, but go to the head of the line in the U.S.for wealthy Danny Boy! Nothing but the best in medical care for his Highness. All animals are equal, but some, apparently, are more equal than others.

Canadian Reponse #4 spiffy26 4:14 PM on February 2, 2010

Paging Mr.Moore, Mr. Michael Moore !!! He couldn’t find anyone (in his movie) from Canada that had a problem with the “health care system” …

By David Olmos http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHoYSI84VdL0Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) — The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

Medicare Loss

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said. Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said. “We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”

Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

National Participation

Medicare covered an estimated 45 million Americans at the end of 2008, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency in charge of the programs. While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the program, said Heim of the national physicians’ group, citing surveys by the Leawood, Kansas-based organization.

Greater access to primary care is a goal of the broad overhaul supported by Obama that would provide health insurance to about 31 million more Americans. More family doctors are needed to help reduce medical costs by encouraging prevention and early treatment, Obama said in a June 15 speech to the American Medical Association meeting in Chicago.  

Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on Mayo’s decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale clinic.

Medicare Costs

Mayo’s Medicare losses in Arizona may be worse than typical for doctors across the U.S., Heim said. Physician costs vary depending on business expenses such as office rent and payroll. “It is very common that we hear that Medicare is below costs or barely covering costs,” Heim said.

Mayo will continue to accept Medicare as payment for laboratory services and specialist care such as cardiology and neurology, Yardley said.

Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.

“Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said.

Annual Costs

A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo’s Glendale clinic will pay about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits, according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare patients at the Glendale clinic won’t be allowed to switch to a primary care doctor at another Mayo facility.

A few hundred of the clinic’s Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.

“We’ve had many patients call us and express their unhappiness,” he said. “It’s not been a pleasant experience.”

Mayo’s decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix- area doctors who cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.

“We’ve got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare patients in the hospital” because they consider the fees too low, Rivers said. “Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our practice.”

To contact the reporter on this story: David Olmos in San Francisco at dolmos@bloomberg.net

Guilt by association? 1 in 3 fear punishmentAmericans say they see ‘chilling’ loss of rights

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December 26, 2009 By Bob Unruh © 2009 WorldNetDaily http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=119894 Editor’s note: This is another in a series of monthly Freedom Index” polls conducted exclusively for WND by the public opinion research and media consulting company Wenzel Strategies.

There’s a new “chill” that has nothing to do with claims of global warming or climate change and everything to do with the failing confidence Americans feel in their own freedoms, according to a new poll.

“More Americans this month felt that there was more of a climate of fear over their freedom of association – with more than one in three – 36 percent – saying that they believed Americans had reason to fear punishment or retribution based on who their friends were or who they met with. This is chilling stuff!” said Fritz Wenzel of Wenzel Strategies.

The WND/Wenzel telephone survey was conducted Dec. 18-21 using an automated telephone technology calling a random sampling of listed telephone numbers. The survey included 26 questions and carries a 95 percent confidence interval. It included 823 likely voters. It carries a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

His survey revealed that the WorldNetDaily Freedom Index took a huge plunge in December, dropping to its lowest ever mark of 46.4 on a 100-point scale. The assessment is based on respondents’ answers to a series of monthly questions about how they feel about a basketful of liberties they enjoy as Americans.

The survey’s initial result in June was 57.6, which fell to 53.2 in July. There followed a slight uptick with 54.2 in August and 56.4 in September, but October fell again, to 52.2 followed by a weak rally at 53.6 in November.

Wenzel described the issues undermining Americans’ confidence in their liberties as linked to Washington’s moves toward President Obama’s agenda.

“When it comes to health care reform, December has turned out to be a very good month for President Barack Obama,” he said. “But when it comes to public approval of his work, it has been a very bad month.”

“There has been a dramatic negative move in the WorldNetDaily.com Freedom Index this month, dropping for othe first time below the dead-level-even mark of 50 on its 100-point scale. It now stands at 46.4, down from 53.6 just a month ago

“This coincides with the commencement of the serious votes on the health care bill, which apparently imposes some harsh restrictions on virtually every aspect of the American health care system,” he said.

“Clearly, people are spooked.”

Nearly half of all respondents – 47 percent, confirmed there has been a decrease in freedoms under Obama’s reign. That was up from 40 percent a month earlier.

“That’s a big move,” Wenzel said.

“And, in this and other polls, Obama has seen his job approval rating plummet,” he continued. “In this survey, his approval is just 41 percent positive, down from 44 percent last month. He is slipping dangerously close to a point from which it will be very hard to recover.”

Wenzel reported among Republicans, 73 percent confirmed “a decrease in freedoms under Obama, up from 61 percent just one month ago.”

“And among political independents, the percentage who said the same thing increased by 7 percent this month over last,” he said.

Along with increased worries about the loss of American freedoms, “more Americans this month felt that there was more of a climate of fear over their freedom of association,” he said.

Thirty-six percent said they thought Americans has reason to be concerned about punishment based on their friends and acquaintances, he said.

“An increase in the fear that Republicans said they personally feel when expressing their thoughts using a bumper sticker or campaign button was offset by a growing sense of freedoms felt by Democrats to do the same thing. This is a continuing trend of political polarization that we have seen in the WND Freedom Index over the past few months which has coincided with the increasing bitterness over sweeping Capitol Hill legislation,” he said.

The result may not be good news for the president.

“This is the bottom line – coming on the heels of the Democratic Party election losses last month, this polling data paints a drab picture for the Democrats heading into what is shaping up to be a critical congressional election year,” Wenzel suggested.

“The Democrats have so far pinned their legislative hopes on landmark victories on two key issues – health care reform and the so-called Cap and Trade environmental bill that passed the House last summer, but public sentiment on both of those issues has tilted strongly against the Democratic Party.

“Politics is a lot like the weather – just wait a little while and it will change. But right now, it is hard to imagine a scenario – or an issue – where they [Democrats] could regain enough political momentum to hold their majorities in both houses less than 11 months from now,” Wenzel said.

Nearly one voter in five said Americans are “not at all free” to speak their minds without fear of punishment and another one in six said the country is “not very free.” One in seven even have “great fear” that punishment or investigation could result from their choice of worship.

The means for the government to obtain such information also is an issue. More than three in 10 believe the government is using “scanners” and electronic records to create “great intrusion” into American lives. Nearly 10 percent express “great fear” at even expressing their own opinions.

About one in six said they were not very free or not at all free to even put a bumper sticker expressing their political or religious beliefs on their vehicles. One in five expressed the same reservations about discussing their beliefs if the conversation was in a public area. And more than one in four said they were not very or not at all free to express their opinions without fear of government penalty.

The result was that more than 25 percent of Americans censor their own expressions because of the perceived threat.

If you are a member of the media and would like to interview Fritz Wenzel about this story, please e-mail.

See detailed results of survey questions:

Do you believe that, under the Obama administration, America has seen an increase or a decrease in freedom?

Do you believe that today Americans can speak their minds freely without fear of punishment, penalty or retribution?

Do you believe that today Americans can associate with anyone they want, no matter who they are, without fear of penalty, government investigation or retribution?

Do you believe that today Americans can worship in any manner they choose without fear they will be punished, ostracized, investigated or face some other penalty?

Do you believe that the government today is using technology, such as cameras, scanners, and electronic health records, to become too intrusive into the lives of citizens?

If there were a controversial cause about which you felt strongly, would you be afraid to attend a local rally to voice your opinion because of fear of retribution, penalty, or government investigation?

How free do you feel to put a bumper sticker on your car or to wear a button expressing your political or religious beliefs?

How free do you feel to discuss political or religious beliefs in a public place, such as in a restaurant or on a bus or train?

Do you feel you are free to express what you truly think about any subject without fear of harm, punishment, government investigation, or some other penalty?

Do you find that you self-censor thoughts before speaking on certain issues in public because you fear harm, punishment, social rejection, or some other penalty?

America is transforming itself, without forethought, debate, or pause, into a command economy. A command economy is a top-down, state-controlled economy directed by planners and bureaucrats, boards and bodies, administrators and authorities. A command economy is not characterized by mutuality of interest and agreement between parties. It relies on edict. A command economy, as the name implies, orders the affairs of a nation by coercion. In a free economy goods and services are bought and sold by consent; business transactions are based on agreement; contracts depend upon a meeting of the minds of the parties involved. In a command economy government sets prices, controls and directs resources, and oversees production and consumption. Free economies produce prosperity; command economies produce poverty. The transformation o America is already taking place at breakneck speed, even before the current economic crisis is full blown. Historical precedents insist that as conditions worsen, the transformation into a command economy will accelerate.

It is astonishing that this should be taking place, especially at a time in which three billion people around the globe have rejected the poverty, want and shortages of their command economies to begin the experience and blessings of abundance. It is not as though object lessons are wanting. China’s stunning economic growth, its modernization and rising living standards are the result of nothing more complicated than freeing the command economy. Although lessons abound, Americans are choosing — or perhaps failing to choose and therefore letting the choice be made for them — to go in much the same direction as the command economy of postwar Great Britain. That period saw the nationalization of entire sectors of the British economy, a currency crisis and prolonged economic decline including crippling unemployment and choking inflation. The reasons that the United States would choose to follow a pattern that hollows out economies the way it did the British are many. But as a symptom, although not a cause of this self-inflicted harm, look to the modern American politician. For today’s breed of politician, power is their very passion. Their every concern and the entire public debate about politicians centers around the use of power. How may power best be exploited and aggrandized? Who is to be bailed out, who is to be plundered to pay for it? Who is to be subsidized, who penalized? Who shall be taxed and who shall be paid? In contrast, the founders looked upon power very differently: How can it be kept in check? In yielding to the former and to their command economy, the current generation of Americans, blessed with so much, will be the shame of the ages.

Anyone believing the evidence for the looming command economy is being overstated need look no further than the speed at which American finance has been nationalized in the current crisis. Legislators voted an initial $700 billion bailout package, but in no time the taxpayers ended up with more than eighteen times that, $12.8 trillion in loans, spending, and guarantees. And to make clear who is really in charge, the giveaways are accompanies by a refusal of the authorities to disclose who is getting what and what kind of collateral, if any, is being given. The trend was dramatically illustrated in October 2008. In a development that played out like a scene from The Godfather, the CEOs of the nine largest banks in America, dealmakers and negotiators in their right, were ushered into a room at the Treasury Department in Washington and handed a one-page document agreeing to sell preferred shares to the government. They were told by Henry Paulson, according to the New York Times account, that they must sign it before leaving. The chairman of Wells Fargo protested that his institution didn’t have problems with toxic mortgages and didn’t need a bailout. Too bad. “It was a take it or take it offer,” said one insider. An online writer for The Wall Street Journal favorably likened Paulson’s commandeering of the banks to Reagan at the Berlin Wall. “History often carries an air of inevitability,” he gushed.

If there is inevitability to America’s becoming a command economy, it is a sorrowful day for human freedom. The Central Plan of the command economy is incompatible with dissent, disagreement, individual preferences, and your own plan, whatever it may be. If the Central Plan is to prevent foreclosures on homeowners who can’t pay, then the plans of individuals whose resources will be used to prevent those foreclosures must give way. If your individual plan and the Central Plan are in conflict, you will have to give up your plan. As we have noted, a free economy rests on agreement, but a command economy is constructed of coercion. One of the reasons (among many to which I refer in my book The Dollar Meltdown) that a command economy produces poverty has to do with the diversion of productive human effort. In a free economy people provide services that are sought by others and they are rewarded for doing so. Each individual’s own wants and needs are met to the extent he finds ways to serve others. But in a command economy enormous amounts of human effort are expended in attempts to influence or control the Central Plan. This activity produces no new wealth. It only seeks to divide what wealth already exists.

The command economy is not the exclusive province of either the left or the right, Republican or Democrat, Communist or Fascist, Stalinist or Nazi, Pol Pot, Mao, Chávez, or Ahmadinejad. It is what they all have in common. Just as war is the health of the state, economic turbulence is the state’s opportunity for self-advancement. As the unseen and destructive consequences of each new command and initiative unfold, new plans are created and commands issued to undo the latest harm. In the current sequence, the Fed used its monetary monopoly to create artificial credit conditions; the cheap money fueled a housing boom, which, like all bubbles, popped; the monetary and fiscal authorities rushed in to bail out the banks; the only means they have of bailing out the banks is to borrow or print more money. And that’s only going to make matters a lot worse.

Regards,
Charles Goyette December 23. 2009

Remember those heady days of 2008 when Barack Obama successfully painted himself as a moderate?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-socialist-revolution-has-come-to-america/December 21, 2009 - by Matt Patterson   The socialist revolution has come to America. It has been a long time coming.

On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin came down — the Cold War was over. In the United States, the political left, dismayed from the collapse of its great patron, retrenched and transmogrified with the times, choosing for their president a free-trading, welfare-reforming moderate.

But this was but a feint; the era of big government was not over. The left had not learned its lesson, had not abandoned its dreams of absolute control. It seethed and stewed … and waited.

The new century dawned in fire when the twin towers came down. America lashed out, sending large armies into Asia and Arabia. Like all wars, fortunes waxed and waned. But the iPod generation has not the capacity to endure the waning. By the time Mesopotamia was stabilizing, it was too late; the American public had abandoned the war it had once supported. The commander-in-chief who took America into battle with Congress and the people behind him left office ridiculed and reviled.

Many will tell you that it was the financial crisis that led to the election of Obama in 2008. It is certainly true that John McCain’s erratic response to that meltdown did nothing to enhance his chances. But the Republican goose was cooked long before Lehman by years of war, seemingly endless reports of our soldiers struggling valiantly to hold back chaos in faraway lands for reasons that were growing less clear by the day, and a Republican president who seemed frighteningly inarticulate and uncomprehending throughout. The public had simply had enough.

Into this breech stepped a charming, charismatic, seemingly moderate Democrat (he even promised tax cuts!). Barack Obama made everyone feel good — about him, about themselves, about themselves for supporting him. And America wanted, needed to feel good again; they had spilled too much blood, had too much of their own blood spilled, in the preceding eight years.

A Republican Party in tatters, a nation exhausted and desperate. Are there any other conditions under which the American people could have turned to a man like Barack Obama? For just under the smooth, smiling facade lurked a man of deep allegiance to the radical left, counting among his associates both an avowed terrorist and a raving, racialist preacher.

But Americans didn’t want to hear it and the media obliged them. The ideologue was soon ensconced in the White House, where he acted swiftly to upend the entirety of American society through a comprehensive, two-pronged assault:

1. The government moved to take greater control of medical care and thus one-sixth of our entire economy. The excuse? Some people don’t have insurance, don’t you know? What are the details? Good question: specifics hatched in back rooms behind closed doors, utterly incomprehensible bills that may as well be carved in hieroglyphics. What will it mean for you? Why, whatever they want it to mean, of course.

2.  Efforts to criminalize a particular naturally occurring compound, CO2, picked up pace. Why have they so singled out this substance? Because it is a byproduct of work and, indeed, life itself — every time you turn on your heater, every time you drive to work, every time you sit down to eat: don’t you know these sinful behaviors must be curbed, because you are “poisoning the planet” with your every move?

Success in this double strategy would amount to nothing less than a socialist revolution. A revolution of legislative opacity and bureaucratic fiat, to be sure, but a revolution just the same, for there is literally no part of your existence they couldn’t justify controlling under the cover of “health care” and “emissions” reform. Resistance would be met at first with peaceable punishments, fines and such. But the history of such revolutions shows that, sooner or later, they enforce their dictates with bars and boots.

Think it can’t happen here? History is littered with the wreckage of free states that gave way, sometimes with a scream, often with a whimper, to autocracy and absolutism. The city that gave birth to the world’s first and greatest republic was also home to Caesar and Mussolini.

America is not immune to these forces. The tides of history are inexorable and sooner or later pull every edifice into the sea.

Matt Patterson is a National Review Institute Washington fellow and the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story”. His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

By Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson
December 17, 2009

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy hosted a dinner for 49 Nobel laureates. The occasion provided the opportunity for JFK to display his keen wit in the memorable quote, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

I wonder how many of today’s high school and college students appreciate Jefferson’s genius. Our third president, author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia, was a masterful scholar of history, a political philosopher for the ages, a noted horticulturist, an archaeologist, architect, and inventor. He also knew a thing or two about money and banking. Let’s take a moment here to review the wise insights on money and banking left to us by this consummate Renaissance man.

Regarding money, Jefferson commented, “Paper is poverty … it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” We should remember this when we contemplate the loss of 95 percent of the purchasing power of the paper currency called “Federal Reserve notes” in less than a century. As Ben Bernanke and the Fed create trillions of new paper “dollars,” we, the richest country in history, face the possibility of a hyperinflationary collapse and accompanying impoverishment.

Jefferson, like other Founding Fathers, understood vividly the vulnerability of paper currencies, because of the devastating hyperinflation of the paper Continental dollar during the War for Independence. That is why the Coinage Act of 1792 stipulates gold and silver, NOT paper, as money. Jefferson and the Founders knew that for money to be sound, it needed to be something objective, tangible, unvarying, as well as something that people valued independent of its use as money—something like a fixed weight of gold or silver—rather than something as transitory and insubstantial as “the full faith and credit” of a government of unreliable human beings.

Jefferson intuitively grasped one of the basic principles of free-market economics: In a free, open competitive market, people choose good stuff (food, machines, tools, etc.) over bad stuff, and so goods of superior quality and value push inferior products into oblivion. The only reason Americans today have such an inferior currency is political. Government legislation denies us the freedom to choose what to accept as money. Jefferson wrote, “I now deny [the federal government’s] power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender.” What a terrible price we have paid and will pay for legal-tender laws forcing us to accept mere paper as money.

Anticipating the Federal Reserve System, Jefferson believed that, “The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed [by legislation doing so] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated.” In Jefferson’s eyes, a central bank is unconstitutional.

Jefferson warned, “If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied … I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.”

Today, Uncle Sam is woefully dependent on the Fed and a few “too-big-to-fail” banks. That is because Uncle Sam is the world’s largest debtor, and without these giant banks to maintain a market for its oceans of debt, the federal government would have to shut down.

I once spoke with a congressman after hearing him complain about Federal Reserve policy. When I reminded him that the Fed had been created by an act of Congress, and that the creator controls the creation, he turned ashen, speechless. Is Congress a bunch of cowards or do the banks have a choke-hold on our government?

Are the Fed and the giant money-center banks as “dangerous” as Jefferson believed? Certainly, their power is undeniable.

The wealth of the American people is jeopardized by paper money and big banks. We should have heeded Jefferson’s warnings.V & VIf you are interested in learning about supporting the efforts of The Center for Vision & Values, please click here. Thank you.

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Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.