Dr. Thomas Woods, author of the 2009 best seller, “Meltdown,” describes in detail the financial collapse we are enduring at the present time. The federal reserve had been the chief cause of this depression.  Alan Greenspan put 8 million a week into the economy trying to prevent this depression.  Ronald Reagan in 1987 authorized the treasury department to spend billions to prevent a stock market plunge, it was called the “plunge protector“. These activities, and worse with this new administration,  is just digging the hole deeper, a hole that many generations will encounter as they carry bundles of money to the grocery store to buy anything.  Social security is and will be the biggest problem.  The older people who are drawing on social security now will probably draw $70,000 more than they put in.  The younger people will put in $300,000 more then they will ever draw out.

New polls show that 53% of Americans now prefer socialism and they are most certainly going to get their wish. The problem is, they have never seen socialism at work in a truly socialist country. Most of these people have never seen the dehumanizing of people, as in China, Russia, North Korea, etc. Americans can hardly wait to get socialized healthcare.  Only those with veterans administration experience in VA hospitals know the horror stories of socialized healthcare. (I am totally blind 100% disabled service-connected veteran)  I am one of a group of veterans who have the opportunity to go to private facilities for care on a “fee basis” accommodation because of my condition. But, I have spent much time in military facilities and VA facilities, as well as being a military medical officer myself.

I have had a variety of drivers drive me to VA hospital facilities for care.  Each one left in shock when they saw the impersonal treatment. It is a matter of taking a number and waiting.  Recently, on a trip to the VA Hospital Durham, NC, I was sitting next to a WWII veteran who, like the apostle Paul, showed the marks of his service to our country. He told me about running through a burning building getting patients out of a hospital. Of course he told me about his many decorations and his lifelong fight just to keep living. When I finally got into the room for the drawing of my blood, I said to the technician, “The colonel before me is a great hero. Did you notice how his entire body was scarred?” She said “ These old men ought to just go ahead and die.” I said, “ What about me? Should I go ahead and die too?”  This is the attitude in socialized healthcare.

3,500 innocent babies are killed everyday. If these folks do not care about the most innocent of life, you can be sure that the older people will be put to death. I sent a complaint to the VA hospital in Durham, NC about the fact that it is difficult for blind patients to get around the large facility, unlike Duke University Eye Center, right across the street, where they have volunteers to help the blind people to get from one clinic to another. The chief of staff called me and expressed his dislike for my suggestion and that they were just waiting for me to die. So, I could understand the attitude of the people who work in the hospital.

Governor Sebelius, Kansas tax evader, received thousands of dollars from Dr. George Tiller, the world's best known abortionist. Sebelius, catholic, is Obama’s choice for the chief of the Department of Health and Human Resources.  There are enough Catholics, members of the US senate, to block her confirmation, and Dr. Tiller was her chief supporter in her race for Governor. When will the pro-life Catholics in this country take a stand for life, against the promoters of abortion such as Obama, Sebelius, Pelosi, Biden, Kennedys, etc.

An experiment in socialism was conducted some years ago in one of our leading universities. The professor said as long as they came to class he would give everyone the same grade on their tests. It so happened that the first test everyone got a B. The next test everyone got a C, and finally everyone in the class got an F. Because when there is no incentive for excellence everything goes down. I found in my 3 trips through China, since it reopened in 1976, that there is an attitude of just “live and let live”, no reason for excellence, no reason for hard work. As one student told me, when I spoke at a Chinese university, “it makes no difference how hard you work or what achievements you make, you will always be in the same category with the ones who do the least. Your life, your future, your final exit, is all determined by the state.”

In China, everyone wears the same clothes, everyone’s hair is cut the same way, (men and women) four families share one bathroom and one kitchen, parents can have one child, but that child immediately becomes the property of the state. Each parent has a work assignment and the child shortly after birth is taken to a government facility. I understand things have changed in recent years because of exposure to western capitalism. But those who have seen and experienced socialism, especially socialized healthcare, want no part of it. But, as in Saul Alinskey’s book “Rules for Radicals,” you isolate your target and expend all your energy achieving that target. The target of Obama and his fellow liberals is socialism and this certainly includes socialized healthcare. Like Belshazzar in his big liberal party in Babylon, the hand writing is on the wall. (Daniel 5)

The catholic church has been held up as an example of socialism, because the officials of the church (Priest and Nuns) live “servant” lives with limited expenses and wealth.  Pope Pius 11th had 3 earned doctorates, yet was supposed to live a very frugal life.

It has always seemed strange for a man to have a house such as the Vanderbilt mansion (thousands of acres, hundreds of rooms) while decent American citizens live in poverty nearby. At least, in America, with our capitalistic system, we have the opportunity to achieve and to have a better house. In various businesses I have owned, I have put this system to the test and have always found it works. Just as the wait staff make better tips by good service and efforts of their own, I found that giving management a percentage of my profit from a business above a certain figure always worked. The commission basis of sales has made this country the commercial center of the universe.

A doctor's personality accounts for 80% of his success. The patient appreciates the careful attention of any caregiver. In a socialized system, such as a VA hospital, if you smile or say something nice to a caregiver, they look at you like you're crazy. Many times, while at my residence in Manhattan, I would go to the VA facility in lower Manhattan, it was a total horror story. I remember one time, because I was a medical officer with rank, from the nurse who took my blood pressure to the last doctor I saw at the facility, each asked me to write a letter of commendation for them. Like the post office or any other socialized facility, they try to work free enterprise in a very perverted way.

The greatest problem with the socialist security system, which will be the next really big bail out, is that abortion has taken 50 million people out of the workforce. Those who would be working, paying taxes into the social security system, were murdered. The illegal immigrants, flooding across the borders, pay little into the system, but are bringing disaster to all healthcare facilities. If you wish to see nations that have already attempted suicide, look at Europe.

One million citizens of the world take their own lives each year. In most countries, it is young men. In China, there are about as many women suicides as men suicides. The dehumanizing of people, everyone just becoming a number, leads to the despair of suicide, especially with young men who have ego and ambition.

The Final Exit for most of us who have been fortunate enough to not have been aborted, in spite of the trials of living in the enslavement tax system of this country and if we are fortunate enough to escape euthanasia, we have the wonderful expectation of eternal life with joy beyond comprehension.

The Price of Healthcare

As if we did not already know it, in the onslaught of the Obama socialist administration, NEWSWEEK Magazine stated last week that we are now a socialist country.  Socialism does not come all at once.  The segment of our society that is now socialized is that of healthcare.  45% of every tax dollar is now spent on healthcare.  If the presidential administrators and the power brokers in the congress had been exposed to the care given veterans at the VA facilities, they would be more aware and afraid of such. ( I am a totally blind 100% disabled service connected veteran for over 40 years). If you want to see the treatment of the 26 million veterans of this nation who are entitled to VA care, you should visit a VA hospital and walk amid the phalanx of wheelchairs and the many waiting endlessly holding a number.  The veterans I know, do not complain about their care because they realize there are 126,000 of their fellow veterans buried on foreign soil in military cemeteries, to say nothing of thousands buried in this county, where the only care involved is mowing grass.

Under Obama’s plan, families who make less than $85,000 a year are entitled to such care.  The question has never been answered as to where the doctors and others will magically arrive from to care for all these patients.  I remember the first issue of “Medical Economics” when the profession had determined that medical care was a business. When I graduated, there were advertisements for operating room doctors with salaries of $10,000 to $12,000 a year. Doctors, nurses, highly specialized technicians today, get very high salaries.  Countries where socialism has taken over, have a continued loss of healthcare personnel because after the long years of expensive, strenuous education it takes to get a license in any professional health field.  Most expect to make a better than average living. Castro’s Cuba graduates many physicians each year, an estimated 2,000 overflow. This is the reason Cuba always sends doctors and other specialized healthcare workers to places of disaster throughout the world. But you never hear of any exciting discoveries made in Cuba, nor do you find sick patients from the rest of the world going to Cuba for treatment.

Dr. Merrill Matthews, a specialist in medical economics, has said , “ the quality of healthcare goes out the window with the single payer plan.”

Socialized healthcare will have the same empathy as the IRS, just faceless, heartless people getting paid a livable wage for doing a job. I attended one of the first seminars at Duke University pertaining to Medicare when it was introduced. I remember asking the speaker from New York University, Dr. Alden Haffner, (I was the only one with guts enough to ask about this matter), “what will happen when the government decides to cut the fees for services, as they have done constantly.” The others at the conference, were just thinking of those government checks that were going to pour in for this socialized care, without them having to go through the process of collections. Many doctors have left the profession because of the uncertainty of the socialized system. The paperwork involved and worst of all the scrutiny and slavery involved.

We are all aware of the incompetence of assembly line care, the little rooms where you wait while the doctor runs from room to room, confused and constrained by expensive facilities and help. Most offices in recent years have been full of white haired seniors there because the bill was being paid by the government. Home remedies went out the door when it became cheap to get professional care at the government's expense.

When I was young, you went to a doctor or a doctor came to your house only in the matter of life and death, home remedies worked real well. Over many centuries remedies had been developed and remembered by our ancestors. I do wish I had kept records of the knowledge of one uncle who knew certain plants and roots from which teas and plasters could be made that were as effective as most modern treatment.

In the socialized system which is now in effect, your care will be determined by a team of bureaucrats about 15 in number who will make the decision about your care and give instruction to the doctor, hospital, nursing home, etc.  In a nation that has had no problem electing the most pro-abortion politician in history.  If the most innocent of life can be slaughtered before or shortly after birth, certainly the thinking person can predict that the vast number of elderly patients filling nursing homes and specialized care facilities, will be put to death (85% of all healthcare dollars are spent in the last years of elderly patient's lives, the oldest group of Americans are those over 85 years of age). Euthanasia has become a fact of life in some countries of the world, particularly Holland.

Recently, a man who works for me carried his father, who is about my age, to a local hospital emergency room because he was not feeling well. They said Mr. Rush, leave him in the hospital overnight and we will do some tests tomorrow. When he went back the next morning, they apologized that his father had died during the night.

We do not hear of these tragedies very often because, sad to say, most families are just ready for the old, sick and disabled to get out of their way anyhow.  Families accept the death of a disabled or old person with great tolerance because the involvement of lawyers and autopsies is more of a burden than the deceased.  They just go home and wait for the neighbors to bring the potato salad and fried chicken. And , in most cases now, make minimal final services.

Life has become very cheap and with the increase of health care 2.3% each year concern has become a lost word in our vocabulary. It takes all our tax dollars to finance social security, medicare and medicaid, all other dollars to finance wars, grants, highways, airports, entitlements of military and bureaucrats must be borrowed. FICA now claims 15% of your paycheck, it will be increased to 30%. Just to keep the Chinese Mafia, debt collectors from the door, taxes must be raised, and services must be cut. Everything pertaining to economic “artificial respiration” has been a failure.

Asleep At The Wheel

This month, we celebrate the 200^th Anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille who gave to the world a method whereby blind human beings could read, correspond and from their cocoon of blackness have a real relationship with the world. It is essential that children, born blind, learn Braille in spite of modern technology. If I had known, at my early age, there would be such a lackadaisical attitude on the part of science and technology I would have learned braille.

Of all the breakthroughs in the world of technology, absolutely nothing has been done for the blind. When I have talked with scientists who know something of blindness research, and there are very few of them, they tell me that the only research being done to improve the life of blind people involves genetics. As a totally blind, 100% disabled, service-connected medical officer, I was promised by the VA, that I would be furnished with a reading machine. There are such things, machines which will read to you correspondence, books, magazines etc. Fifty years later, I am still waiting. I hope the new blind of the recent wars, young men and women who should be treated better, will be supplied with such technology. I must hire someone to read everything that comes my way.

I never had one minute of rehabilitation which would have greatly assisted me in my lifestyle...taking care of myself in my own house...learning to use a white cane more effectively...learning to do house work easier, cooking, laundry, etc. I came back, was just thrown to the dogs, have never been approached yet about the service of a dog although I know there are citizens who have a dog for assistance.

I learned early and I continue to learn, almost daily, just how little the government and the citizens of this country care for the country's largest minority (estimate 32%) the disabled. Most of the disabled will say nothing, their families will say nothing, because in this time of political correctness and “big brother watching” they are so afraid they will lose whatever pittance in the form of a government check that may be coming their way.

Good luck! My pension, with VA, has never been established. It took 30 years for me to get the housing adaptation allotment which should go to every 100% disabled veteran... particularly blind veterans. It took 30 years for the VA to approve the security system for my house. The greatest threat to a blind citizen: living alone. For all those years, I used cement blocks against the entrance doors to my house to give me some time on the phone to get help in case of a break in. My windows are all nailed shut.

There is no one for the disabled person, particularly the blind person, to go to for assistance. My senator, Senator Burr, on Veterans' committee, my representative, McIntyre, armed services committee. The only concern of the blind veterans association (BVA) is their desire for you to pay a membership charge. In fact, several times, in calling BVA for assistance as with your congressional representative asking your address, they want to know if you are a member and your dues are paid up. It is these big salaries, for well-paid employees that are the concern of those who should be concerned about the veteran, the citizen soldier.

At the veterans hospital in Durham, where I went many times over many years, I merely made the suggestion to the chief of staff that, like the Duke Eye Center directly across the street, and where I had spend much time as a patient, at my own expense, trying to save a shadow of vision in one eye, “it would be nice to have a volunteer to help blind patients get around the maze of clinics and other territorial boundaries in such a large facility”. The response, from this person, by phone to me, “we are just waiting for you to die”. My last time at this hospital, the doctor looking in my records said, “there is a notation here that you are a trouble maker.” From that time to this, the so-called representative of the blind at that facility has never contacted me. One representative there, Julia Roberts (not the movie star), arranged for me to get a “talking watch”. She could not understand why VA so abused and so neglected blind veterans. Perhaps, it was because she was concerned, that her stay there was very short.

Across the street, at the Duke Eye Center, during the Vietnam War because, again, VA and Duke were trying to save a smidgen of vision, I was in a room on the second floor corner, closest to VA, a patient of doctor Banks Anderson Jr. A black attendant (this during the height of the Vietnam protests) spat on me in the bed. Which was worse, a black woman spitting on me in the bed or a chief of staff, years later, “waiting for me to die”?

Over the years, as an activist for the disabled, particularly veterans, I have been told, in no uncertain words of the callousness from both the federal and state level. For instance, I know the state furnishes funds to the NC State Commission for the Blind to assist blind citizens. I have been a totally blind citizen most of my life. I have lived in the house where I am sitting now, most of my adult life. Only once, in all those years, has the Commission for the Blind ever been to my house. I heard on the radio, that a radio could be obtained from NPR which would read the newspaper to blind people. I called the station and told them I would like such. Showing up at my front door, the first time ever, was Becky Koziah of the NC State Commission for the Blind with a radio which lasted a few weeks. It has been non working for years. I have talked with elected legislative representatives, as well as the State Attorney General, about such treatment. These people are just paid to sleep. Unless you pay a lobbyist to interdict them or smooze them in some manner, nothing will happen. The very thought of young children, the poor and disenfranchised of the world being treated so harshly, just because of a disability, is almost more than I can comprehend. God must have a special place in hell for these hypocrites. “[Ye] serpents, [ye] generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (Matthew 23:33)

It is too late for me. Twenty seven times in the psalms, our blessed lord states, “the mercies of the lord endures forever”. On the radio, in print, I appeal to those who have the authority, to those who make big salaries from the largest of government and private sources...memberships, grants etc. to become alert to the most forgotten word in the English language...concern. Become concerned about the disabled, who live with terrorism every day of their life. Become concerned about those of us who worked long and hard in school and went to serve this country, only to have the country dis-serve us.

I did not learn to read braille. I did not get a reading machine and, was DENIED services from the library for the blind in Raleigh; although I appealed both locally, Raleigh and ADA, for such service. Blind people cannot use cell phones, I talked at length with lawyers at FCC and FTC about this problem. They assured me that it would be brought to the attention of the manufacturers of cell phones. As you well know, everyone, including children, have a cell phone attached to their body. Everyone, except blind people. Finally, I do have one that I can speak into and get a few emergency numbers. If you are not able because of your own work and investing...not because of any money given to you by government, to hire someone to drive you, read for you, etc., God help you. This applies to the veteran as well as the citizen born blind...many of whom I have known. At least, when born blind, staying at the school for the blind, you are more acclimated with rehabilitation and other resources than the veteran, the elderly—losing vision because of disease—are ever exposed.

You will not hear much about Louis Braille during his bi-centennial. You will not hear much about the Blind Veterans Association. Don't disturb any veterans group from their lethargy, their cocktail parties where they are concerned about future promotions. These folks are asleep at the wheel.

In the early 60s, standing with the state president of a large civic club, I was in full military uniform, when he handed to a state senator, money to get legislation passed. Is this what our democratic republic has come to? Are you too, asleep at the wheel?