Follow The Buck

Some of my favorite people are the conspiracy theorists.

Sometimes I'm not entirely sure where they're coming from, but, if I understand them correctly, one of their basic ideas is that some tiny group of very powerful people in the world meets somewhere between once a month and once a year and makes all the important political and economic decisions and then these edicts are disseminated through the Power Elite and then onto the people.

I've often wondered how much substance these ideas have, but, having listened to more than my fair share of Power Elite rhetoric, I actually have entertained the notion that there may, in fact, somewhere out there, be not just a small group of people making all the major decisions, but, in fact, just a single human being calling all the shots.

Occasionally I have tried to follow the threads of information and even speculation to find this person - this elusive "Dark Leader Of The Earth".

Very often people of good conscience attribute the ills of the world to the "corporations" and the "CEO's". Well, of course Michael Moore once made a movie called Roger & Me where Michael Moore seemed to be laying the blame for the woes of laid off auto workers in Flint, Michigan right at the feet of the then CEO of General Motors.

Well, I once had a conversation with a Power Elite about this film and the Power Elite pretty much said, "I HATE Michael Moore. Doesn't he know that a CEO is accountable to a board of directors?"

Indeed, as most American public companies are set up, the CEO reports to the board of directors and the board of directors are ultimately accountable to the shareholders of that company.

Now, we often think of "shareholders" as perhaps employees who have accumulated shares over the years, but, fortunately, in the case of publicly traded companies, the major shareholders of companies is publicly available information, and certain "shareholders" keep popping up over and over again.

Take for instance the major managed health players. An interesting name on the list of Top Institutional Holders for each of these companies - Humana, Aetna, UnitedHealth, and Wellpoint is Barclays, and Barclays is a GINORMOUS bank based in England.

Now, what's a little scary is this story making the rounds in tomorrow morning's Guardian that Barclays is selling part of itself to the governments of China and Singapore so it can take over a Dutch company called ABN Amro.

Uh oh.

If I'm following the buck here properly, that will mean that the Chinese government will have a significant ownership interest in all our major health insurance companies.

And of course the Chinese have recently de-socialized their health care system and have a reputation for being one of the most brutal countries on Earth in that area.

You see, hypothetically, in the United States if you don't have insurance and you get mangled in a car accident or something of the sort, they'll take you to UC Medical Center and they'll patch you up, but they'll send you a bill for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars that they will either hound you over for life or use to force you into bankrupcy.

Not so in China.

No matter how sick you are ...

No matter how mangled you are ...

No matter how pitiful you are ...

They will ask for payment UP FRONT and if you don't have it they will quite literally leave you to die in agony.

Is this what's going on?

Is the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, and, yes, even the Learned Elders of Zion - the tiny secret groups purported to control all our lives - actually just a single person?

And is that person ... Chinese????