Suspicious Angels – Page 3 – Suspicious Angels

Plague on Your House

August 29, 2022August 29, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

People Over Profits

All hail the healthcare industry taking its place alongside big oil, big tech, slimy defense contractors and big banks as the oligarchic masters of the U.S. empire. If you thought America was the world’s greatest democracy, a revelation awaits. If, in fact, America was ever a democracy (the jury is still out), all traces of it went out with girdles and phone booths. If you still cling to your high school fantasies of living in the greatest democracy the world has ever produced, get a load of this —“Functioning democracy means that there’s a correlation between the will of the people and the policies that affect them… [The US] may call itself democratic, but in essence, it’s an oligarchy.” With oligarchy comes income inequality — tons of it. America now leads the advanced economies that make up the G7 in the inequality sweeps. You know where you’ll find lots of it? In healthcare where one hundred million people struggle with medical debt, 41% of all American adults. While the suffering among the people intensifies, there’s good news for healthcare oligarchs —the CEOs of 178 health care companies collectively made $3.2 billion in 2020, 31% more than in 2019. During the same period, millions of people were suffering and dying from COVID. You need a strong stomach to handle this —in 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was a stunning 351-to-1. There’s more, much more about how economic inequality is deepening the class divide between the haves and the have-nots. Check out “Plague on Your House” for all the nauseating details.

Partners in Crime: The ‘Supremes’ Couldn’t Have Axed Roe Without Plenty of Help from Democrats

July 11, 2022July 11, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Biden and Abortion

An enraged public has been haunting the houses of Supreme Court Justices threatening mischief and mayhem. Conversely little attention has been paid to their democratic enablers. Are they getting away scot-free? Not if Suspicious Angels can help it. Have you heard the indignation and outrage coming from top democrats, the likes of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and countless other democratic stalwarts? What they’d like you to forget is that several of those abortion-hating justices had plenty of help from their friends — presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden who promised to make Roe a federal law and didn’t, Nancy Pelosi and other leading congressional democrats expending a whole lot of energy to keep anti-abortion legislators in the House. To complete the perfidy, count on Bernie Sanders globe-trotting around the U.S. selling lefties out not for thirteen silver pieces but to preserve his place in the democratic hierarchy. In addition to their inaction on Roe, let us never forget their nearly 50-year history of authorizing the Hyde Amendment, a vicious law keeping abortion out of the reach of poor women. When all else fails, perhaps it’s time for some radical and extra-legal solutions. Suspicious Angels has you covered. Check us out in “Partners in Crime: The ‘Supremes’ Couldn’t Have Axed Roe Without Help from Democrats.

What Happens if You’re Poor, Female and Black in the Richest Country in the World?

June 10, 2022June 10, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Time To Go

In the richest, most powerful country in the world, inequality touches every aspect of poor peoples’ lives. We all know that. But how many of us have stopped to think that 20 million American women, mainly Black and Latina, face an inequality that affects their right to control their bodies. That right, for one-quarter of women in the U.S. of child-bearing age, a little known but poisonous part of the US budgetary process has kept poor women from being able to afford an abortion. American women celebrated the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 making abortion obtainable. For three years it was also affordable. All that changed in 1976 when a bigot, Henry Hyde, slammed the abortion door shut on poor women. Forty-six years and four democratic presidents later, many of them blessed with democratic majority Congresses, the Hyde amendment continues to threaten the lives and prospects of poor women. Where is the voice of powerful women rights organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood? Enraged by a recent Supreme Court leaked draft opinion overturning Roe, these organizations and others mounted furious campaigns to express their displeasure and rake in oodles of money from women afraid their right to obtain an abortion will go away and leave them with the same choice (none) that poor women have had for forty-six years. On the Hyde Amendment, a chilling silence. Check out “What Happens If You’re Poor, Female and Black in the Richest Country in the World?” for all the dirty details.

The Road to National Healthcare Turns Out to be a Dead End

May 2, 2022May 2, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

For Profit Healthcare

The United States is one of only two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (highly industrialized advanced economies) that does not offer universal healthcare. The fallout from this omission is grave and costly. Ever wonder why the U.S. with only 5% of the world’s population has the highest number of both COVID cases and deaths? Start with the 89 million Americans who were under or uninsured as the pandemic hit. Add in the fact that one-third of COVID deaths (330,000) could be traced to the lack of health insurance and what you wind up with is a dysfunctional system that is the real threat to U.S. national security. With so many Americans sick and dying in a country without a robust universal healthcare system, how can anyone ever feel really safe? Shocking to think that the U.S. spends almost twice as much as its nearest competitor on healthcare ($4.1. trillion or almost 20% of GDP in 2019) yet the life expectancy of its people has declined 2% from 78.9 years in 2019 to 76.6 in 2021. Better to move to Sweden or Denmark and expect to live to 83. Even America’s BFF, the UK has a life expectancy of 81years. Want to know more about the difference in healthcare in America and the rest of the developed world and how it affects our calamitous COVID experience? Check out “The Road to National Healthcare Turns Out to be a Dead End.”

Let Them Eat Cake —The New American Way

April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Nary a peep of protest on the streets. No sign waving, no marching, no anything. Yet here we are on the crest of an 8.5% inflation tsunami. The statistics are mind-boggling —gas up 38%, beef up 20%, used cars up 40%, everything the American people buy: food, fuel, rent, clothing, up double digits. How about that summer vacation that you can’t afford to take or the visit to grandma that isn’t going to happen? The biggest burden falls on the 45 million students who are up to their eyeballs in debt beholden to crooked bankers, hedge fund sharpies and, would you believe it, their own government. What happened? $1.8 trillion owed by sixty-five percent of college graduates to the tune of almost $40,000 each.. Remember the crowds on the street protesting the Iraq war? It was young Americans who got the movement going. Back in the day, Vietnam protests were student generated. But forty-five million students in debt peonage don’t have the time or energy to protest. Stifling dissent is becoming the new American way. But curbing protest is not the only reason to hog tie students with huge debts. Profit has become a constitutional right for rich Americans. Banks raking in the dough of cash-strapped students. Defense contractors and their investors pocketing billions as the Biden administration prolongs the Ukraine war with more killing machines. The oil companies take a back seat to no one when it comes to thievery. Where are the government regulators when gas prices explode? Good question. Enough corruption in plain sight to start hundreds of mass protests. But the young people are no-shows trapped in a market-based higher education system that hands out rewards to providers at the expense of recipients. Maybe that’s why both Biden and Obama made campaign promises about debt cancellation and free public college that they had no intention of keeping. It’s not just the first amendment that’s on the verge of disappearing, there’s much, much more. In Let Them Eat Cake — The New American Way, we follow the money and discover the enormous profit center forty-five million Americans have become.

Somebody Please Tell Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon that the First Amendment is Not Optional

March 29, 2022March 29, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Big Tech Censorship

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.” [Oliver Wendell Holmes] That was then almost a century ago. This is now at a point where free speech and a free press (First Amendment, U.S. Constitution) have become optional, regulated by the nine billionaires who control all forms of media. You would think elected representatives, up to the president, would be all over corporate censorship of free speech, using the power of the bully pulpit to force them to cease and desist. The silence from Washington is ominous. A free ride for the corporate hacks who increasingly tell us what to believe and refuse to allow contrary ideas on their sites. They even brag about sharing their tyranny with their partners in crime, the government — “We have shared information about our analysis with law enforcement, policymakers and industry partners.” Count on it, none of the political cowards in the executive or legislative branches of government are going to go toe to toe with the corporate scoundrels that keep them on the gravy train. Want to know how we got here? Why the real answer to “bad” speech is more speech not less? Check out “Somebody Please Tell Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon that the First Amendment is Not Optional.”

U.S. Hypocrisy and the War in Ukraine

March 10, 2022March 10, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Ukraine and U.S.

Not all refugees are equal in a world ruled by elites where incompetence, greed, and obeisance to wealth and power create calamitous conditions for the millions who are not wealthy or powerful. Along with their co-conspirators the mainstream media, the U.S. and its hand-maiden European countries would have you believe that there are two classes of refugees — the worthy and the unworthy [Noam Chomsky]. You can probably guess where the line of demarcation falls. On the worthy side, Europeans, in this case Ukrainians, majority white and with the patina of “civilized” stamped all over them. Here’s what’s in store for them as they flee home and country — “At the Polish border, guards hand out sandwiches to Ukrainians in waiting rooms. Polish citizens donate piles of toys and meet migrants with hot tea and free rides to where they need to go.” If you were both unworthy and fleeing war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria, you weren’t so lucky. As the bombs fell, and the refugee totals swelled, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán announced that Hungary’s restrictive immigration policies would remain in place — “[W]e aren’t going to let anyone in.” He’s not the only leader shaping his immigration policy to the skin color of refugees: “EU, fearful of refugee crisis, delays response on Afghan asylum.” [Aljazeera, 10/15/2021] Call it what you will — disgraceful, obscene, horrendous — chalk it up to the price extracted by one nation in particular whose dreams of a Pax Americana have spiraled down into a death grip on past glories fast slipping away. People all over the world are feeling the pain of that “grand delusion.” [John Mearscheimer] Check out what happens when racism determines the fate of millions in “U.S. Hypocrisy and the War in Ukraine.”

U.S. in the Crosshairs: Today an Empire, Tomorrow a Failed State

February 28, 2022February 28, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

WAR

Being an empire is hard work. Trillion-dollar military budgets, multiple countries to invade, sanction and turn into wastelands. For decades, it has consumed the half-wits that design and carry out what is laughingly referred to as U.S. foreign policy. As the Russia/Ukraine fiasco captures the world’s attention, it’s important to understand how the U.S. with its long history of fomenting international discord has been a major part of the momentum bringing the world to this perilous moment. Since 1945 the U.S. has embraced military solutions to world problems. It hasn’t worked out well for the U.S. or the countries in its crosshairs. Greece and Italy were among the first victims and once the CIA got through interfering, both countries were safely in the hands of rich oligarchs in business and finance. In a pattern that would be repeated endlessly, the U.S. sent troops to Korea. Much more than a losing a war, the toll included three million Koreans, 38,000 Americans and a destroyed country. It happened again in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, to name a few. Not that the U.S. with its impressive fire power hasn’t put a few in the win column. Solid victories in the Dominican Republic and Panama, two little countries with a combined population of just over six million and pathetically few military resources. How good is that? Nonetheless the U.S. keeps plugging along, alert to even an infinitesimal injury to its bloated self-worth. There’s lots more to talk about but little to brag about. For an unmatched tale of villainy and ignominy, check out U.S. in the Crosshairs: Today an Empire, Tomorrow a Failed State.

To Shield Corporate Healthcare Crooks, US Anoints COVID the Lone Perp

February 7, 2022February 7, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Fix For US Healthcare

It’s the worst kept secret in the world. Even the clueless media have to come to grips with it.

Hospital Outsourcing Often Prioritizes Profit Over Patients. “[Texas A&M Today 8/20/2021];

“The Catastrophic Cost of Uninsurance: Covid-19 Cases And Deaths Closely Tied To America’s Health Coverage Gaps” [Families USA 3/4/20210];

“Push for Profits Left Nursing Homes Struggling to Provide Care” [The New York Times 5/7/2020];

The invasion of private equity and other corporate criminals into the health industry has put a deteriorating healthcare system on life support. COVID made a bad situation a shit show. With only 5% of the world’s population and the biggest healthcare budget in the world, the U.S. is also first in the number of COVID cases and deaths. It’s clear that COVID isn’t the only perp. Could part of the answer be the 89 million uninsured or underinsured Americans that have been victimized by corporate honchos chasing profits? Or does it come down to a $4 trillion healthcare market, 20% of U.S. GDP, that has motivated a corporate gold rush? With 24% of hospitals under private ownership, more than half of emergency room physicians working for private, profit-making companies, 70% of nursing homes and 47% of doctors’ practices owned by private companies, America’s healthcare woes began long before COVID and will outlast it. Want to know how America’s healthcare grifters sacrifice people to profits and spin fairy tales to hide it? Check out “To Shield Corporate Healthcare Crooks, U.S. Anoints Covid the Lone Perp”

Author: Suspicious Angels