From Volume 38, Issue 31 of EIR Online, Published August 12, 2011

United States News Digest

Did Geithner and Obama Collude With S&P To Downgrade the U.S.?

Aug. 6 (EIRNS)—There is every indication that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, acting on behalf of President Obama, actively colluded with David Beers, head of S&P's sovereign ratings division, in the criminal downgrading of the U.S. government which S&P announced Aug. 5.

The two reasons S&P gave for the downgrade, were, 1) the alleged need for $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years, and 2) the need for an overhaul of the current Constitutional "American policymaking and political institutions"—in the direction of unconstitutional dictatorship. One S&P representative summarized this, when he told a television audience that America is now a "dysfunctional democracy."

But both the $4 trillion over ten years, and the scrapping of the Constitutional authority of the Congress, have long been avowed objectives of Barack Obama. The Simpson-Bowles Commission, appointed by Obama in 2010, was tasked with $4 trillion in so-called deficit reduction over ten years. And when Obama first took over the so-called debt ceiling negotiations after July 4, 2011, his goal for his "big deal" was the same $4 trillion in cuts over ten years.

The same is true for the so-called "super Congress" which will usurp the Constitutional authority of the actual Congress under the "Budget Control Act" Obama signed on Aug. 2. Earlier, Obama had rigidly insisted on an unconstitutional "Independent Payment Advisory Board," IPAB, which is to usurp Congress's Constitutional authority over Medicare under his so-called health reform law passed in 2010. Jane Hamsher, founder of the blog firedoglake.com, correctly calls the new "Super Congress," "IPAB on steroids."

Obama only appointed the Simpson-Bowles "catfood" commission in 2010, with no power over the Congress, after Congress had earlier rejected his plan for a commission which, as a much milder version of the current "super congress," would usurp the real Congress's Constitutional authority.

Seeing that S&P's objectives were so closely aligned with Obama's throughout, it should be no surprise that a July 27 hearing of the House Financial Services Committee found that Geithner and S&P's Beers had been exchanging large numbers of secret e-mails about the U.S. credit rating since March 2011, and had been in "very regular, frequent contact, many times," ever since Beers put U.S. debt on a "negative watch" in April.

Beers went public, probably by prearrangement with Geithner, on July 4, telling the London Financial Times and Bloomberg News that Congressional action to increase the U.S. debt ceiling would not suffice to save its AAA rating, but that that would require cuts and tax increases to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over a decade.

Obama immediately used Beers' statements to preempt the ongoing negotiations to increase the debt ceiling, rejecting a "clean" debt-ceiling increase and starting secret talks with House Majority Leader John Boehner for what Obama called the "big deal." By this he meant $4 trillion of tax increases and cutbacks in maintaining the population, including "putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the table" for the first time. Now we see where this has gone to: a coup in the United States equivalent to Hitler's Enabling Act of 1933.

A knowledgeable source has testified that Geithner hosted a party for the ratings agencies on Monday, Aug. 1, and broke out the champagne when a treasonous majority of the House of Representatives voted up the "Enabling Act."

Californians Protest 'Bodies in the Street' Medicaid Policy

Aug. 6 (EIRNS)—On Aug. 4, a delegation of 20 California medical treatment representatives met personally with Sir Donald Berwick, head of the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), telling him to reject Gov. Jerry Brown's request for a waiver to cut $1.4 billion from California Medicaid spending. Brown seeks permission for a 10% across-the-board cut to Medicaid payments to doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes; and to impose other measures, including limiting a Medicaid enrollee's doctor visits to seven times a year, and such.

This will be "tearing down the infrastructure" on which health care is dependent, said Dustin Corcoran, the CEO of the California Medical System, in demanding Berwick reject Brown's waiver request.

Under Obama's Hitler health policy, such waivers have been granted as a matter of course, with HHS Secretary Sebelius even sending out letters to the states encouraging their action. Until Obama is out, such a murderous policy won't be stopped.

LaRouche Was Right: Americans Repudiating Both Parties

Aug. 5 (EIRNS)—In the wake of the debt-ceiling debacle, Americans' disapproval of Congress is at its highest level on record, according to a new New York Times/CBS News poll. Eighty-two percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job, which is even more than after the 1995 Federal government shutdown.

But it's not just Congress. Writing in the National Journal, Ron Brownstein cites the "astronomical levels of discontent with President Obama, Congress, and the Washington system itself"; he says that while never in the past has there been an election in which voters turned out large numbers of incumbents from both parties, this could now happen. There is "an unmistakable opening for a Ross Perot-style outsider candidate who mobilizes voters unhappy with both major parties," Brownstein writes, adding that the debt-limit agreement didn't alleviate public disillusionment with Washington, but deepened it. He quotes one political consultant saying that there could be a massive backlash against all incumbents, "a broad-scale tsunami that will wipe out everybody regardless of which party it is."

Harry Belafonte on Obama's Failed Mission

Aug. 3 (EIRNS)—Singer Harry Belafonte, now in his 80s, who helped fund the campaigns of his good friend Martin Luther King, Jr., and helped organize the March on Washington in 1963, recently gave an interview in which he said that the mission of President Barack Obama has failed, because the American President lacks courage and a certain vision.

"The President is not an independent person," Belafonte said on July 28. Referring to the huge debt crisis facing the United States, Belafonte said he wanted to ask the politicians in Congress, the U.S. President, and the representatives of other institutions, what happened to truth and courage in this country. Belafonte made the remarks at the Television Critics Association, while interviewing for "Sing Your Song," a documentary that is dedicated to him and will premiere this Fall on HBO.

"There has never been such a void in moral truth as it now exists," Belafonte said. "And what the expectation has been for many of us was that Barack Obama would bring to the table a great sense of moral fortitude...." But, he added, "He [Obama] has only listened to the voices that shout the loudest, and it's all those reckless right-wing forces. It's almost criminal."

According to a transcript of the session, Belafonte said: "My question would be to the Congress and to the President and to a lot of institutions in the United States of power, 'What happened to moral truth? What happened to moral courage? Why has it been so eliminated from our DNA?'"

Belafonte then continued in respect to Obama: "Barack Obama and his mission has failed because it has lacked a certain kind of moral courage, a certain kind of moral vision that we are in need of."

In his speech he also said of the President: "When he said, 'Yes, we can,' it may have been politically clever," but, "He never defined for us what he said. So those of us who felt that we needed change filled in that space with our own images of what we thought he meant only to find out we are all disappointed because none of those things have been satisfied."

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