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Podcast 2: Rick Staggenborg: The Privatization of Health Care and the Connection to US World Hegemony

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Podcast Transcript: Rick Staggenborg: The Privatization of Health Care and the Connection to US World Hegemony

By John Kendall Hawkins

Rick Staggenborg is a former staff psychiatrist at the Coos Bay VA hospital. He is anti-war, because it is anti-people; the wars serve only the corporate overlords turfing out and pawning American patriots into hegemonic actions that often run counter to what makes America the exceptional democracy it often claims to be. Rick ran for the US Senate in 2010.

At Rick's website, SOLDIERS FOR PEACE INTERNATIONAL, he describes a goal for the soldiers he supports:

To challenge the US Congress to put the needs of the people above those of their plutocratic sponsors. We can only establish democracy in America and the world by working together to abolish the "rights" of corporations and those who control them to determine the collective destiny of the Peoples of the United States and of the world.

Recently, Amazon announced plans to go into the Health Care and to accelerate the movement toward the privatization of all health care. This could help some Republicans achieve their goal of eliminating the Social Security Administration all together. Republican Senator Rick Scott wants all federal legislation to "sunset" in five years, with review panes established to determine whether an agency's operations will continue and, if so, under what conditions and with what budget. Staggenborg sees this as a freeing up money from agencies for gambling at the Wall Street Casino. He connects some more dots, too.

The following discussion took place by Zoom on September 24, 2022. Here is a Soundcloud version.

It is edited for condensation and the usual grammar doohickies that ruin flow.

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Hawkins: [00:00:10]

Hello and welcome to another podcast with John Hawkins.

Back in 2010, PayPal, and Peter Thiel its CEO, led the way and cutting off fund transfers to WikiLeaks, helping the U.S. State Department to lean on the publisher by doing what a warlike American government likes to do best go after the enemy's money. Later, PayPal got absorbed by eBay and Pierre Omidyar, who helped Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras start up The Intercept, which itself was modeled on a public interest newspaper that Omidyar started up in Hawaii.

Amazon, which used to sell books only, today is actually eBay's biggest competitor selling all kinds of stuff from blue books to red pills to animal underwear. They not only sell stuff, but, in doing so, collect data and, by widening their offerings, are able to collect more and more personal data. They also work closely with the U.S. government, offering Web services to the CIA and other agencies associated with the Pentagon. Paypal, eBay and Amazon are giants in the collection of our financial data. Now Amazon wants to get in to private health care.

Today we are talking with Rick Staggenborg, from Soldiers for Peace International. Staggenborg says war is the enemy and we are each soldiers of peace when we resist the warmongers who only want to profit from such enterprises. Staggenborg is a former VA physician and has made a push for Medicare for All part of his activist journey. He is here today to talk about Medicare and the consequences of a push toward privatization, especially by a giant like Amazon.

And without further ado, here is Rick Staggenborg.

Hawkins: [00:03:51] Hey, Rick.

Staggenborg: [00:03:52] Hey, John. How you doing?

Hawkins: [00:03:57] Yeah. Thanks for meeting with me again. I just wanted to talk a little bit today about the announcement that Amazon is going to get into the private health insurance business and that that seems aligned with the fact that some Republicans are looking to close down Social Security altogether, including by forcing agencies to justify themselves again, to get re-legislated; a kind of annual review process.

Staggenborg: [00:04:37] Well, I don't remember any details about Amazon getting into the insurance business. Of course, they've been involved in buying up provider organizations. They bought a couple of them or they bought one, and they're in negotiations to buy another larger one. And of course, when I heard that, I immediately got suspicious because Amazon does this. They tend to go for horizontal integration of the corporations that they control so that they control supplies as well as everything on the supply chain with their books and other products. They not only are actually manufacturing some of them now, but they store them in warehouses. They've got their own trucks. They didn't have all that to begin with. Now they do. So at the very least, they buy in mass, make special deals with these corporations, the manufacturers and monopolistic type deals. They're always just one step ahead of the Justice Department right now.

Amy Klobuchar has got a bill in Congress to really clamp down on them, investigate what appears to be monopolistic practices and hold them accountable.

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Hawkins: [00:06:14] Yes, she says they are engaging in business practices that raise serious anti-competitive concerns, including for small businesses on its site to buy its logistics services as a condition of preferred platform placement using small business non-public data to compete against them. And as we recently disclosed, the new documents in the House Judiciary Committee potentially restricting advertising by competitors who could offer lower prices and better service. It's anti-competitive, as you say, monolithic antitrust. And part of a trend. It's part of a trend of some of these big data companies.

Hawkins: [00:09:27] And one of my main concerns with that situation is that they're moving towards a fusion database system where these companies, behind our backs, share information with each other. And as Edward Snowden put it, the government has produced a permanent record for each and every one of us, and they fused all of these places that we give data to and put them all in one big dossier, electronic dossier that allows them to screw with us one day. They always find a reason, in the end, if they need to.

Staggenborg: [00:11:43] My first reaction was that there are pretty stringent laws in place about controlling how health information can be shared. The problem is that Bezos is the richest man in the world right now, as far as we know. We, of course, don't know how much wealth is in the royal family of England, or the various people who have money in the Vatican Bank. We don't know how much the Rothschilds have, but as far as people whose finances are on the record basis is the richest man in the world, and that gives him a lot of political power, as it does corporations he controls.

So to go back to the Klobuchar letter, it actually introduced legislation to force an investigation. It's getting nowhere. And that's because of the political power that he has. Money talks. This is not a democracy. It never has been. When you have a system of privately financed elections, our members of Congress and the president, what do you expect? It's not going to happen. This is not a democracy. Never has been. So, yeah, that information could end up in the wrong hands. Like I said, almost all of our information is accessible to the NSA.

Hawkins: [00:13:21] Yes. I recently reviewed the late great Ed Asner's book on the state of demoracy, The Grouchy Historian: An Old Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right Wing Hypocrites And Nutjobs. And he flat out says that the founding fathers, who we pretend to worship so much, were really out to protect property owners after the Revolution. And that only in the last couple of days of the convention that the Bill of Rights was thrown as a bone to placate Anti-Federalists and was not really taken very seriously. The founding fathers just wanted to get the hell out of Pennsylvania and get home.

Staggenborg: [00:14:26] Something interesting on that point is, if Thom Hartmann reported it accurately, that Thomas Jefferson actually proposed to write into the Constitution that states could always revoke the charters of corporations. Corporations would always be creatures of the state, and other members either lacked foresight or didn't want that to happen. So gradually corporations accreted more and more powers, and eventually rights were granted to them by the Supreme Court. So I'm sure you're familiar with that story.

Hawkins: [00:15:23] Joe Biden from Delaware. There are more corporations registered in Delaware (1.8 million) than there are citizens (1 million), which when I read that, I was a little bit shocked and I'm not shocked very easily anymore. But it tells you something about his politics, what the expectations are of any company that moves to Delaware. And, you know, what kind of legislation is going to be passed. And again, he's a corporatist president. The Democrats really should just change the name to the Corporates.

Staggenborg: [00:16:07] That's completely fair. The Republicans are just as bad. The difference is, in my view, that the Democrats pretend that that's not how they are, but it's built into the system. Both parties depend on money from corporations and rich individuals to get elected, and they serve their interests above ours. But like you said, it's in the law too. The Founding Fathers created a system that favored property over people. In fact, people were considered property, some people, and those enslaved persons didn't have rights, [although their designation] did give a 3/5 extra vote for every slave in the South.

I want to mention Ben Price, a founder of the Center for Environmental Legal Defense Foundation, who wrote a great book, How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property (2019). The book talks about how the Constitution was designed to give powers to rich individuals, primarily put property over people. But the way it's evolved is [that] after slavery was abolished, then they ended up giving rights to corporations. So property had more rights than people. It's kind of interesting. Before it was people, people were treated as property, and rich people had more. But now it's corporations are people and they have more power than individuals. And that's what us all about is trying to create a movement of what I call civic disobedience to get towns to ignore all of these laws and and Supreme Court rulings. They aren't even laws. The interpretation of Commerce Clause, certain principles like the principle that the federal government can overrule states and states can overrule localities. More importantly, the Dillon rule. If we don't deal with all that, we have no hope for democracy. As far as I'm concerned, the first thing we have to do is create a publicly financed system of elections or there's no reason to fight all these individual battles. If we can't do this, we're going to lose this. I don't mean there's no reason to fight, but we can't possibly win.

I mentioned the last time I was on the show that I was working on something for several years. It started out about eight times, moved to amend, started the idea I was promoting was to get candidates for national office to pledge to support an amendment that would declare that money is not speech when it's used for the purpose of purchasing politicians and that corporations are not people. Most people just said we needed a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. And the reason it had to be a constitutional amendment was because the Supreme Court made it up. So the only way to overrule it was a constitutional amendment. Now, most people, when they heard about this, said, well, how are you going to do that? Everybody in Congress is crooked. I said, Well, so you need to elect people who aren't. You look for these people. We publicize these people, people for the American way. In 2010, when I ran for the Senate on that platform primarily. They were they were doing that. They were collecting names of people that were willing to take a pledge to at least overturn Citizens United. Well, so they got the idea. I was promoting the idea I found by personally making phone calls, I found I think it was 50 maybe certainly well over 30 candidates who are willing to take that pledge.

And I got their promises in writing and put them on my website. But when I you know, obviously we didn't elect a majority in the Senate that way. The point was to get it going, keep it going and build it over time.

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Hawkins: [00:30:30] Well, let's just change the subject towards health care again. And, you know, there's probably a conjoining of purposes when it comes to the Republican desire to sort of close out Social Security and the whole FDR era once and for all. I was that Republican Senator Rick Scott wants all federal legislation to sunset in five years. If the offering up to the master works, then Congress can pass it again. Well, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were all created by legislation. And now Democrats are saying Republicans want to end those programs by suggesting that the SSA would have to justify what it's doing and therefore put up the question by partisan politicians, and see what would get passed or what not passed?

Staggenborg: [00:32:37] That's a really complicated question because it depends on the issue. It's pretty clear what they want to do is they want to force people to put their retirement funds into the stock market. But most people put it in the stock market, and that tends to be manipulated, as we've seen many times. And it's not a safe way to invest your money. Social Security is like a pension that's guaranteed. It's not very generous, but it adds up when you take all the citizens [who put into it}. And that's [money] that the wealthy want to get their hands on, the same kind of asset stripping that we've been doing to Third World countries forever. And we're turning into a third world country. They want to do it to us. But the strategy of having a five year sunset, what that does is it gives the Republicans, even when they're in the minority, basically the ability to decide if something's going to pass or not. I mean, and so if you look at health care, the answer might be different. The Democrats are just fine with privatizing Medicare. They're working on doing that right now. And it's a privatization of Medicare. And they are guaranteed that they can keep 15 or 18% on Medicare Advantage, and under Obamacare, small group insurance and individual can be as much as 20% that they keep out of the dollars they're are given to provide care to authorized care pay providers. That's what Medicare does, too. They pay the providers and the authorized care. The difference is Medicare does it at 2% overhead. These are the ones between overhead and profit and advertising. It can be as high as 20%.

Now we get back to where I started, which is the current plan is to allow just about anybody that can afford to pay somebody to do this, to pay the bills for them to take advantage of that tremendous profit margin. So private equity can create their own corporation that will hire pencil pushers to do what Medicare does at 2%, and they'll be able to keep the theoretical limit [up to] 40%, but probably a more realistic estimate is 25%. It'll be better than what they're getting now. That's why private equity is getting involved with those kinds of rate of returns. Of course, they're going to get involved, and I read that right now, of the contracting entities under the program started by Trump, over 50% of them were controlled by investors, whether it was private equity or publicly traded corporation.

So and there are other hospitals, so called nonprofit hospitals, they control some of the doctors groups. But doctors groups are being bought up to right now. 75% of doctors are employed by some corporation or another. So the ultimate goal is to get everybody in Medicare into this privatized version. It could be right now they say it could be either Medicare Advantage or this new system, ACO, which is what it's called. But I think they're all going to go into ACO reach because it's got a higher profit margin. So this was introduced or the basic program was introduced by Trump in 2016, direct contracting entities, corporations, they called them. They could contract to do what Medicare did for a hell of a lot of money. Now we've got the ACO Reach program, which is a Biden program. It's essentially the same thing. So Biden is basically changed the name under pressure, but didn't change the system much. And the goal is to privatize Medicare.

Yeah, I forgot to say. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Innovations also announced that the goal was to get everybody in traditional Medicare into that system by 2030. But like I say, I think they want everybody on Medicare to get in there because it's more profitable than Medicare Advantage. And providers of Medicare Advantage have already applied to become ACO, ACOs, accountable care organizations, a euphemism for what they are.

Hawkins: They're accountable to shareholders, is what they are.

Staggenborg: Exactly right.

[00:38:32] Just getting back to Amazon. If I was just going to go back to Amazon, I was going to say, I predict that Amazon is if they haven't already filed the paperwork, that they're going to file paperwork to become an accountable care organization. They could do it either as a provider, or they could do it by creating their own, their own company of pencil pushers.

I don't think Amazon's ever going to control the whole market. There's too many big players in there. But it does raise an interesting question. These large investment corporations that are contracting to run Medicare, are they going to have more power than Bezos? Is he going to be able to compete with them? You know, that's a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of connections that own these large corporations. And many of them are quite rich, too.

Staggenborg: [00:46:32] Let me say one thing, though, without getting into a whole other topic, is that it's important to look at the financial structure of the world at large. We're a globalized world. And the richest people in the world have -- we don't know how much money. We don't know where it is. We don't know how much they own of BlackRock, Vanguard and the other large asset management companies, because they don't say whose money they've got, but they've got a tremendous amount of power. I've seen different lists that I should try to name them, but definitely BlackRock, Vanguard are the two biggest, and there's a bunch of other ones below them that collectively control entire industries.

You know, you think of a corporation like Coca-Cola. Well, Coca-Cola has a whole bunch of subsidiary corporations, and then they have controlling interest in Coca-Cola. And that's how they control the soft drink, and Pepsi too, whatever the biggest ones are. I don't keep track of all that stuff, but the richest people control these things, or I should say because these asset managers control so many corporations, they control entire industries that way. So this is all interlocking. The same people are invested in the same asset managers and the same corporations. They directly invest in those corporations. The upshot of that is the success of these heavy duty investors depends on the whole system growing at a certain rate, and a good rate of return might be 8%. Well, now it's going to be much higher because of inflation. They have to they have to exceed inflation by a certain amount. That's their goal. And they get it any way they can. So it is true that the same people that benefit from weapons manufacturing also benefit from controlling oil.

The bankers have their hands in everything. I say bankers, any bankers and financiers, which sometimes are the same thing. But if you look at the largest international corporations in the world, the top 100 are almost all financial institutions. So the bankers are at the top and some of them are publicly traded. And so I generally just say Wall Street, but people don't know what that means. Wall Street controls the world. Sure, they have partners in London and they have partners in Germany and they have partners in France and Switzerland. Those are the biggest players. And Japan also has a piece of it. But the US dominates very much. They dominate this international system of banking and corporate control, and that's why they can do pretty much whatever they want, like start a war in Ukraine and impose sanctions on Russia and tell Germany, Oh, you can't buy your natural gas from Russia at a cheap price. You have to punish them by not buying their natural gas. You have to buy it from less than ten times the price. Liquefied natural gas. And we'll have and you'll have to spend the money to put in the ports to process those. So it'll be a cold winter, but probably next year you'll be able to start buying ours at ten times the price. And Germany does it. Because these globalists really do control governments all over the world, or at least the Western world. And they want to get Russia. That's why they provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. They've been working on this plan since the [Berlin] wall fell. They hoped that some other puppet would always be in power. It didn't work out that way. Putin came in 1990.

Hawkins: [00:51:01] I've got a "conspiracy theory" on that one. Russiagate in 2016 was the beginning of a pre-text build up to go at Russia. Our IC may even helped rig the election that let Trump in, so that they can say the clown was in league with Putin, leading to a national crisis and a need to chastise Russia. Biden said, A little incursion might be okay. That now looks like, Here, kitty, kitty. Just like Afghanistan. By the way, where is Cofer Black now? He was the self-acknowledged architect of all things CIA in Afghanistan. Last I heard he was on the board of Burisma.

Staggenborg: [00:51:57] Quite a bit before 2016. Probably [more like] 2000. And Putin made it clear that he wasn't just going to do whatever he was told. It's just been a process. You know, we were behind the so called revolution in Ukraine in 2014. And Victoria Nuland was caught. She wasn't just talking about this intercepted cell phone call. She actually said it in a forum which is available on YouTube that we had invested $5 billion into basically overthrowing the government. And therefore, we have the right to decide who's going to be in the government. This was weeks before the actual coup. There were protests in Maidan. She was handing out cookies, and what not, and she was talking to the ambassador to Ukraine. And that's what she said, she said. She was saying, oh, we're going to put you in as president. He said, Well, the EU is not going to like that. And she said, f*ck the EU. We just spent $5 billion on this. We get , it's our right to choose who is going to run this puppet government of ours. So they put in a government that was dominated by neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, and we've controlled it ever since the the plan to get Russia to invade. Ever since 2014, the US, the CIA, special operations and regular military command have been training Ukrainian troops as well as arming them. So they went from a ragtag bunch that couldn't even defeat the separatists in 2015, and had been fighting even with a bunch of Nazi battalions. And the US trained them to the point where they're really a good fighting force now.

The casualties of their assaults are horrendous, and Russia has three times the population of Ukraine and they're crushing Ukraine. We're just being lied to about how well Ukraine's doing. But at the rate they're going, they're not going to have anybody left to fight. And it's complicated. But Zelensky is a puppet, and we're not letting him negotiate. Several times he's tried to negotiate. Several times he's been shut down. And there is at least one prominent neo-Nazi who publicly said that if he tries to negotiate with the Russians, that he will end up on a street hanging from a street lamp in the largest park in Kiev. So it's a matter of public record that Zelensky's got a gun to his head. The US does not want him to surrender. We're making a fortune on selling weapons and we're weakening Russia and that's the goal. They want to Balkanize it, like they're trying to do in Syria.

We're reaching the limits of empire, I do believe. And at the rate we're going through weapons and NATO is going through weapons, we already are at a point where we couldn't fight a war with Russia if this did explode. Which means the only option would be to either back off or go nuclear. And we act like, Oh, that Putin is crazy. He's talking nukes. Well, why are we punching him in the face, when we know Russia has almost as many nukes as we do? I mean, they have way more than they need to destroy the world, as do we. And we're calling him crazy. Look at all the money that Halliburton would make if we destroyed the world, right? I mean, this is the way these guys think, obviously.

Hawkins: [00:59:20] They're from outer space or something. (shakes his head)

Staggenborg: [00:59:22] Yeah, you can make the argument.

So anyway, John, we've been talking about a whole lot of issues that most people tend to see as disconnected. It is very complicated and I don't expect people to be able to follow everything that I was saying unless they're already familiar with those topics, as I'm sure a lot of your listeners and viewers are. But the thing I want people to remember is that if you want to begin to understand what's really going on, you need to look at the Big Picture. And when I say follow the money, I don't mean just look at who's contributing to a political campaign, because most of it's dark money anyway. You need to study the system. That's what I did. And I studied who rules financially. How they do it by controlling think tanks. By controlling the media, by controlling politicians, by basically establishing foreign policy through their control of think tanks and politicians mostly. If you understand those things, then things start to make sense. One of my main interests is foreign policy, because what I see is that the US is an empire, which is something the vast majority of Americans don't even recognize.

The US is an empire and in league with NATO and their allies in Asia primarily they're out to rule the world. The Middle East was a way to try to get control of the main sources of oil, with Israel strengthened. The position of Israel would be the vanguard there. We were never intended to be there forever. I don't know why we pulled out of Afghanistan exactly when we did, but I think it has to do with the fact that we're overextended. So if you look at geopolitically, the thing is you want to control the resources of the world. That's the main goal. To do that, you need to control the places in the world that might possibly challenge US hegemony. And ultimately what you want to do is you want to control Eurasia. That's Russia to China. We already control Europe. Africa is important because it has a lot of very valuable minerals and whatnot, but it's relatively easy to force governments in Africa to do what we want. We assassinate leaders who don't.

But what we're seeing now is the development of a multi-polar world. It's a resistance to this US plan to take over the world. There's resistance in Iraq now to the US; there is resistance in South America, with a number of governments becoming more leftist; and, there is resistance in Africa. None of them have gone along with the Russian sanctions, and a whole lot of other countries in the US who are heavily pressured by the US or in debt to the US, many of them refuse to go along with it. If I'm not mistaken, 80% of the world's population is represented by governments that did not endorse the sanctions. And I think a lot of European countries wouldn't have endorsed the sanctions if they weren't completely, financially and politically controlled by the United States. So there is hope. That the US attempt to finally control the world completely is falling apart.

It started in Syria. That's the first country that successfully resisted a concerted effort at regime change. It started in Syria, which is an ally of Russia and an ally of Iran. That's what we call the axis of resistance. So if you understand these basic principles of geopolitics, it all becomes clear. Russia is the next big target. But the big target, as we've said many times publicly, is China. But you can't attack China until you weaken Russia. So that's what they're doing right now. And that's why it's important that we not support the US giving weapons to Ukraine. The longer they drag this out, the more chance there is that Russia is existentially threatened and going to react with nuclear weapons. We, the people, have to recognize we're an empire. Then they have to recognize that the days of empire are over. And if we don't allow Russia and Iran and the BRICS countries, all the axis of resistance, the global south, if we don't if we don't free them from the grip of American empire it could mean the end of the world -- because the people who run this country are so desperate to control everything that they might go that far. That's why they're so nuts in Ukraine. That's what's at stake. And that's what people don't understand.

Hawkins: [01:17:12] Well, let's leave it there.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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