from the CC Corp. crooks. Maher got in the last word, The Whole Country Just Sucks!
(You can parse a "hospital bill" and find the same schemes folded-in, whether billing the poor sap with 0-insurance or the Fed (where, at least there are some Caps on their infinite capacity to invent new 'procedures'.)

So per Warren, seems the too-big-to-fail folk are Out There playing the exact same game. And, collectively and severally: we're just Too Effete/Obtuse to attack the most obvious mondo-scams because.. because..??
Finance can field a Hill operative every hour for every Rep; "people" ... maybe one per week (Is that generous enough?)


Yep, We Suck, They Suck and all our 'Professionals' intone the mantra, I Can't Hear You ... whenever a risk surfaces, that they shall next be prevented from engaging in activities which are borderline criminal ie. unconscionably lucrative.

And we want to export this System to every new invasion target.
And we wonder why the new victims tend to become adept at making IEDs.
(And they wonder, "Just How corrupt IS Murica, anyway?". OK, that was a Japanese guy's query.)
Answer: Nobody Does Corruption Better than US, Motherfucker!

Funny.. none of this was mentioned in my HS 'civics' classes. Was there a conspiracy?
('Course, back then, Corps. paid taxes and stuff, survived handily with some tax brackets >80%, etc.)
Let us prey that that Light at the end of the tunnel, all are hoping for -- is not followed in nSecs by gamma rays, neutrons and a blast wave.


ED: PS, here's Glenn Greenwald's take on some of the mechanics of the Medical Industrial Complex scam, yet another indicator of the complexity and, dare I say recursion? of our National Lying Contest --

The Democratic Party's deceitful game
http://www.salon.com...source=newsletter

Sample:

. . .

In other words, Rockefeller was willing to be a righteous champion for the public option as long as it had no chance of passing (sadly, we just can't do it, because although it has 50 votes in favor, it doesn't have 60). But now that Democrats are strongly considering the reconciliation process -- which will allow passage with only 50 rather than 60 votes and thus enable them to enact a public option -- Rockefeller is suddenly "inclined to oppose it" because he doesn't "think the timing of it is very good" and it's "too partisan." What strange excuses for someone to make with regard to a provision that he claimed, a mere five months ago (when he knew it couldn't pass), was such a moral and policy imperative that he "would not relent" in ensuring its enactment.

The Obama White House did the same thing. As I wrote back in August, the evidence was clear that while the President was publicly claiming that he supported the public option, the White House, in private, was doing everything possible to ensure its exclusion from the final bill (in order not to alienate the health insurance industry by providing competition for it). Yesterday, Obama -- while having his aides signal that they would use reconciliation if necessary -- finally unveiled his first-ever health care plan as President, and guess what it did not include? The public option, which he spent all year insisting that he favored oh-so-much but sadly could not get enacted: Gosh, I really want the public option, but we just don't have 60 votes for it; what can I do?. As I documented in my contribution to the NYT forum yesterday, now that there's a 50-vote mechanism to pass it, his own proposed bill suddenly excludes it.
. . .

I no verbs.