Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Barack Obama and the Disengagement of American Leadership" video.

@dothemathemathics7537 Peter isn’t partisan. He just follows a dispassionate analysis of the facts. His assessment of Obama is spot-on, backed by the events. If you’re a partisan zealot, it’s going to be very difficult for you to follow real analyses.
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@ChrisAlvarezAlvarezImaging Or how they inconvenience others. Obama’s most difficult job in his own words was when he worked at Baskin & Robbins. He said it hurt his wrists scooping ice cream out of the large tubs. He also complained that he got a diversity-hire job for a CIA front company doing economic analyses, where his supervisors told him he could clock-in late, take long lunches, and clock-out early. He was verifiably the most unqualified candidate for the Presidency, not even Senate material. Zero executive experience, never managed anything. That’s a terrible recipe for a Chief Executive.
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@jlvandat69 Our policy went from $369/mo to $869/mo until we lost it. I was forced off of the new policy since I have VA, but I preferred going to the private sector with modern care. That’s gone now. Deductibles increased, lost our Primary Care Provider, and procedures previously covered were dropped. What’s not to like? Similar things happened to many people I know, but their premiums were way higher than mine at $1200-$2200/mo, massive jumps from pre-ACA. Most of the people who weren’t covered were college students who didn’t want to spend money on plans because they were young and healthy. The US still had Medicare and Medicaid. We spend $1.2 Trillion on Medicare and Medicaid per year. Then mental midgets come along and tell me I’m racist for not liking ACA. That’s how you fomented the Tea Party.
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@MrNicoJac Yes, US media is almost entirely slanted to the left, as is most European media. The US had largely moved away from racial division and strife by 2008, evidenced that many people voted for Obama across party lines because of the “hope and change” mantra that was in most of the news. European media is largely run by the remnants of the IOJ, so America is always presented in a negative light in Europe. I have lived in Europe on-and-off since 1979, as my mom is from Finland. I follow European news from various sources, and have done so since 1980. I remember watching the 1980 election results when we were in West Germany, just for context of how far back this goes for me. George W. Bush is anything but a "dumb religious cowboy”. He comes from an Eastern financial establishment blue blood family that moved to Texas, attended one of the most difficult prep schools in the US before going to Yale, was Governor of one of the largest land area/population/industry/agricultural States in the Union, and is the only American President who was a supersonic interceptor fighter pilot. Bush flew the F-102 interceptor in the Texas Air National Guard, which was a high mishap-rate fighter that was difficult to land (couldn’t see forward from the cockpit on final due to AOA). If you have grown up on European news, depending on the country/region, it’s very likely you are just about as misinformed as most people in the US were prior to the great disengagement of corporate presstitute legacy media, but with far superior orientation to the European geography. Germans tend to be better-informed, but still suffer from politically-biased, leftist media. Scandinavians and Nordic countries have very simplistic views of the world and swallow whatever their governments tell them, from single source state media as a general rule. Italians and Greeks just assume everything is corrupt and go about their lives. Brits still are under the impression that they deserve to be treated like heads of the empire that hasn’t existed in 70 years, now barely coming to terms with the reality that they are a middle power at-best. Yugoslavians are still trying to get people to understand what has happened to them since 1992.
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@jlvandat69 The people who organized the nuts and bolts of ACA in Obama’s cabinet were tied into the insurance industry, financed for decades. It was a massive transfer of revenue to insurance, not a panacea of coverage. They also mandated arbitrary shelf lives on a multitude of medical devices and products, so that they had to be disposed of and replaced by new ones more regularly, benefitting the medical device manufacturers who wrote obscene cost benchmarks into the bill for themselves. It was nothing as advertised. The US was and still is way ahead of the “other advanced nations”, who rely on US research, devices, products, EMS service infrastructure, new treatments, and bulk rate wholesale pricing for US drugs, while the US patients and providers pay inflated prices for those same drugs. This is something I’ve studied for many years now, especially living in those “more advanced nations with better healthcare” that don’t exist. It’s all a fraud. We have significantly better access to healthcare in the US than the Nordic nations, where my mom is from. Better than Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, etc. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant of the reality, or misrepresenting data.
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@MrNicoJac I have dual citizenship with US and Finland, so I can live anywhere I want in the Eurozone, have watched the Eurozone evolve from the 1970s economic pacts through the 1990s and to the present, have lived in multiple European countries under their NHSs, and have many close and distant family members in Sweden and Finland. I have also lived in 8 different US States across almost every region (SW, NE, South, Atlantic Coast, PNW, Mountain-West), and have been in the formal medical system in Emergency Medical Services as an EMS technician. More importantly though, I have been studying the medical market realities of the US, several States, Canada, and European nations for many years. What I have seen is that the numbers don’t add up to the general statements I see common with this topic, and all of my and my family experience anecdotes support the numbers I have researched, not what is reported in US and European media, or academia in the US. So in the US, if I have an emergency condition, accident, or sudden illness, I will get into an ER and have specialists on-me like white on rice. I will have diagnostics performed with the latest equipment, including CT Scan, MRI, X-Rays, blood tests, physical exams by senior nurse practitioners, PAs, and MDs specific to that set of symptoms. For urgent priority, I will have an MRI or CT scan within an average of 1.5 hours of arriving in the ER. For transport methods and times, States with lower populations than Finland or Sweden have more ambulances, more paramedics, more Life Flight helicopters with flight medics (called Air Ambulances in Europe), and faster transport time to a Level 1 Trauma Center (which there are more of per capita). In Finland, I have literally sat in the ER with my father (patient) waiting for over 6 hours before anyone saw us. The doctor he was supposed to see came and said “bye” to us on her way out off-shift. I’ve never seen that in the US. In Finland or Sweden, you get taxed no matter what to fund the NHS and other government-managed programs, where there is very little accountability. We definitely pay more in the US, but we also have higher quality and quantity of care available. That includes specialists, Emergency Medicine, oncology, dentistry, orthodontics, orthopedics, prosthetics, internal medicine, etc. The US has far more medical and technical universities where doctors, nurses, and medical professionals are trained. We also attract a lot of doctors from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. As to medical tourism, out of the 30 different nations I have been to, none of them would attract me to go there for any of the common procedures, especially anything surgical-related. I live in probably the best place on earth for orthopedic surgeons because we have so many people in sports, athletic teams, with an unusually-young population even for the US. I am very critical of the US internally from a position of seeking excellence, but we out-perform anything I have seen in Europe or Canada. Canada has a very US-like access to equipment and larger hospitals, but run by their sad NHS, which is why they complain so much about wait times. Canadian MPs come to the US for a lot of their procedures, rather than wait in NHS and suffer or die like the rest of the people must do. Short story is most of what is reported on this subject is grossly-erroneous, and misses fundamental facts about population size, regional climate, water sources, diet, and other truly-factorial variables, while focusing on policies that don’t manifest in reality.
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@dothemathemathics7537 I’ve been following Peter’s work since he was with STRATFOR in the 2000s. He’s an independent, not engaged in partisan diversions. That’s why his work is so refreshing, because he looks at fundamental factors in the market, which is how everyone should be doing it. One of the most embarrassing things to watch is someone trying to talk about foreign policy from a domestic partisan perspective, without even knowing geography.
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@jlvandat69 ACA is one of the most damaging pieces of legislation that my family and I have personally and directly suffered from. Normally when Congress does something stupid, it takes a while for the consequences to settle in downstream. ACA was swift and immediate, and I’m not the only one who got hosed by it. That’s why the Tea Party gained traction against both sides of the DC coin. Then they were labeled racists, which set the stage for people to disconnect from legacy media en masse.
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@jlvandat69 This sounds like partisan zealot rhetoric. We need that to disappear from American politics. It’s why I enjoy Zeihan’s dispassionate analyses so much. He isn’t a dogmatic ignoramus who only sees the world through D and R lenses, which have no counterpart to reality when it comes to the fundamentals.
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@virtualalias Peter is focused on geopolitics, not US domestic politics, so his assessment of Presidents is given in that light. Any mention of Tea Party or IRS weaponization would be a distraction from the foreign policy picture.
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@jlvandat69 I only know Ecuadorian immigrants to the US, not anyone from the US who is even thinking about moving to Ecuador. Immigration stats seem to magnify the anecdotes, not contradict them. I could live in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, etc. The security and opportunities, as well as healthcare and taxes all favor the US, and it isn’t even close. I have lived in several of those places and love Europe, but I don’t like government getting involved with my personal healthcare decisions or those for my family. That should only be between me and the doctors, and who is paying. We don’t have universal home, car, or life insurance, but responsible people spend trillions on those financial products each year in the US. We don’t need anyone else getting involved. This is why I and many others see government involvement in healthcare as a form of control. 2020-present has only confirmed those suspicions.
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@jlvandat69 Thank you for your kindness. I'm seeing more people sticking to facts vs personal attacks, which is refreshing.
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@MrNicoJac This is an example of a partisan slant trying to make sense of the world, and failing at every single bullet point.
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@jlvandat69 ACA was a shake-down for insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and medical device manufacturers. Medicare and Medicaid already covered uninsured and hospitals aren’t allowed to deny life-saving care. The talking points used to sell ACA didn’t have basis in reality. Examples: “Millions of Americans are going bankrupt because of medical costs!” Reality: Anywhere between 738,000 down to 424,000 US bankruptcies are filed each year in total, including businesses, with bankruptcy rates falling each year, not increasing, even as the population increases. We just don’t have millions even filling each year. A smaller % of total bankruptcies are attributed to medical costs, but these were avoidable in most cases had the patients applied for Medicare, Medicaid, and even Social Security. ACA is one of the biggest scams hefted onto the US, but was a windfall in money for the corporate interests who control DC.
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@jlvandat69 I see the power of the internet as a place where people from backgrounds who wouldn't normally encounter each other, can share information and ideas.
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@thomasdsimic2833 Finnish Parliament internal Audits of NHS Swedish Healthcare failure articles from Swedish media UK NHS watchdog CQC Canadian NHS watchdog Fraiser Institute Short story: Wait times, services, unnecessary deaths, lack of options, and high costs are the norm.
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@deaddocreallydeaddoc5244 That and Fast & Furious were 2 of the most damning aspects of his White House, along with killing the F-22 program before we could go into Full Rate Production, the Hillary Uranium One deal with Putin, VP Biden’s batting for Putin in Ukraine when Ukraine was trying to oust the Russian puppets who were embezzling Ukrainian energy (Burisma), destroying the military culture within by promoting more Soviet plant generals and admirals, SECDEF Gates, Hillary email espionage scandal that compromised all of our assets in China, who were then arrested and executed after torture/interrogation, etc. Obama was raised from childhood to be a Manchurian candidate for the Soviets. The Chinese hopped on board and followed the same model, but with more aggressive measures. They financed his campaign with micro-donations laundered through online accounts.
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@ribbonwing Look at how many times in the Clinton WH CIA and military were denied the chance to take out Bin Laden. Then look at who mandated Banks to give mortgages to people without jobs or bank accounts, which created the sub-prime crisis. The role of Congress IS to stonewall Presidents, not rubber-stamp them. The Founders built equal and separate powers into our system to provide checks and balances against the inevitable power-grabs. Partisanship is antithetical to the US system though, and we were warned against it. There is no such thing as Democrats and Republicans in DC, only millionaires doing the bidding of crony-capitalist billionaires who see socialism as a way to enslave the people.
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@alankwellsmsmba LBJ was already being investigated for murder-for-hire before he became VP. He had been in the Senate and Congress for decades, was Whip of the Senate. He would corner Congressmen in the restroom with his towering stature, and badger them until they agreed to vote on a bill he sponsored or was co-sponsoring. They called it, "getting Johnsoned". He would lurk around the Congressional restrooms like a vulture, waiting for Congressmen who he knew didn't support it. The guy was a crook through-and-through, a product of the good ol' boy Texas crony network where he acted as a representative for finance men in Congress. Just a terrible example of a human being in about every respect.
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@RoycePipkins Watergate's true nature has not really been reported either. Federal Judge put a gag order on the "plumbers". DNC offices were being used to coordinate all the prostitutes and narcotics that attendees of the DNC would need while in town. The bugging of the phones by the plumbers was ordered by a cut-out intelligence team operating for the Nixon WH. Obama used the Intelligence Community and IRS against his political opponents, without consequence, where electronic break-ins aren't easy to catch, like the plumbers were.
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State Dept, Secret Service, White House interns, etc.
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