Obamacare, Welfare and the Destruction of America

An address by Dr. David Duke given in June of 2013 (with some updates added for February of 2015)

Dr. David Duke served as a member of the Health and Welfare Committee in the House of Representatives. His long experience and insights into the issues of healthcare as well as social welfare are evidenced in this prescient talk. He spoke on some of the ramifications of the new Obamacare law as well as giving an overview of the failure of America’s social welfare system. Dr. Duke also shares his vision on ways to truly alleviate the host of deep social problems facing America.

In this talk, Dr. Duke shows how Obamacare, under the guise of relief to the American Middle Class,  actually has now morphed into an all-out assault on the well-being of the Middle Class and the working poor.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends: Thank you for this invitation. It is great to speak before people who have known me and listened to me my entire life, among people who courageously voted for me in spite of massive economic blackmail against our state.

Today, as promise, I will give a long talk today on Obamacare and the Social Welfare System in which it has been born.

In the early 1960’s President Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty. It was proposed as a noble attempt to eliminate poverty as well as the other societal ills associated with indigence.

The War on Poverty had the opposite effect of its noble goals. It accelerated the disintegration of the traditional family among both poor African Americans and European Americans. It was accompanied by vastly increased drug and alcohol addiction, and it played a huge role in the rising violence and criminality in the United States.

A tsunami of violence and criminality rose in the sixties and seventies reaching a peak in the early 80s that was only subdued by a concomitant massive growth of law enforcement, harsher criminal penalties, and a large increase in long-term incarceration. America is no longer the land of the free, but the nation with the highest per capita prison population on Earth.

Red China, a nation which most Americans view as a very oppressive nation, has far fewer prisoners than the U.S., which has one-fourth the population of China! (Sources World Bank, US Census)

An astounding $22 trillion dollars has been spent on the “war on poverty”.  That is three times the total cost of all American wars since the American Revolution.

Yet, real poverty levels have not appreciably changed, while poverty’s associated ills have skyrocketed.

Three attacks against humanity have grown much worse during the “War on Poverty”. They have been: (1) drug and alcohol addiction; (2) decimation of the traditional family; and, (3) increased criminality and the highest imprisonment levels in American and world history.

If this is “Social Welfare” the poor would have been far better off without it.

This mind-boggling $22 trillion expenditure, which was supposed to have bought us human welfare and human wellness, has only brought us this three-headed monster, like the mythological Greek dog, Cerberus, biting America with addiction slavery, family dissolution and criminal behavior and incarceration.

The health care system has always been an adjunct of the social welfare system. Obamacare is simply the latest failing attempt to address a massive failure of health care in America without a needed fundamental change.

Obamacare is quite deceptively titled the Affordable Care Act, when in fact it should be called the Unaffordable Care Act. While lowering insurance rates for some Americans it raises insurance and thus medical costs for at least an equal number of people.

On the positive side it has made insured healthcare more affordable for those with chronic sickness and preconditions. However, for the vast majority of those who are generally healthy, who have lived a moderately healthy life, who don’t smoke, don’t abuse alcohol or drugs, who eat and exercise responsibly – for most of those people, it rewards their healthy habits with unaffordable, yet at the same time, mandatory, insurance!

The Oppression of the Middle Class and Working Poor

Some of my progressive and socially conscious, liberal friends who listen here, may be shocked to discover that Obamacare denies good health care to many of the people who need and deserve it most, the hard-working poor in America.

Millions of men and women and their families who are poor, yet work hard, who are not on welfare or in public housing — are completely left out of the lofty goals of Obamacare. The very bottom of the economic ladder, the completely indigent welfare recipient already has access to health care at no risk. If they get sick they can walk into the emergency room of any hospital in America and get excellent treatment. Since they have no property, they don’t have to worry about the medical provider taking their family home. But it is not that way for millions of the working poor in America, they could lose everything from simply a minor accident or infection. Here is the shocking truth.

The Strange Case of Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal

In Louisiana, the darling of the media is the Republican whiz kid, Governor Bobby Jindal.

Like many other Republican governors, in April 2013, Jindal decided not to accept Federal Medicaid for hundreds of thousands of working poor.

To Jindal, complete medical coverage is fine for the welfare recipient who doesn’t work, even for those who haven’t worked for a lifetime. Yet, Jindal has decided to prevent hundreds of thousands of hard-pressed, hard-working people from qualifying for Medicaid in Louisiana!

In The Baton Rouge Business Report,  to which I subscribe, Jindal announced that he would not let the working poor who make less than the threshold of income for Obamacare, qualify for federally-sponsored Medicaid.

So chronic welfare recipients can get Medicaid, but people who are working hard but whose income is less than an arbitrary minimum income and above the floor income of Medicaid — are completely devoid of any sort of healthcare coverage or even insurance protection.

Even those who are supposed to qualify for Medicaid, under the income level for Obamacare, can find themselves disallowed if they have any real net worth, such as owning their home or farm.

It is not just Jindal and the Republicans who are responsible for this travesty. Obama and the Democrats are just as responsible for this vast human injustice. For the Obama bill allows states to disqualify the working poor from any sort of medical coverage if they fall in an income range under the Obamacare minimums.

So now tens of millions are caught in a position of being completely unable to afford insurance and at the same time are subject to losing their family home and land if they encounter sickness or accident because they don’t have insurance.

In truth, the government of the United States should be rewarding people who do try to escape poverty, who do work, rather than penalizing them severely.

Shafting the Hardworking Poor

These working poor are the millions of men and women who are not on the welfare system. They work hard but earn little.

They can’t afford health insurance, and they certainly can’t afford the skyrocketing costs of even simple medical care, especially when it comes to emergency room care from a sudden injury or illness.

Many of them own a small home or farm, and know that they could lose everything they have worked for as they would be liable for all healthcare costs.

Many of them actually don’t go to an emergency room when they should. Without insurance, many don’t go to the doctor when they have symptoms of serious illness. Thousands try to ignore serious symptoms only to finally discover a growing cancer or other illness when it is too late. This takes a massive toll in lives lost and sickness.

Shafting the Middle Class

It also direly affects tens of millions of struggling Americans in the heart of the American middle class, who already have great difficulty in making ends meet for their families. Many have seen a steep rise in their insurance costs because of Obamacare. Sometimes their insurance cost, barely affordable before, is now double what they previously paid, and now they are being forced like slaves to buy it from the mega health corporations no matter what it costs or might cost in the future.

Tightening the Economic Noose Around the Necks of Millions of Middle Class Americans

Many middle class Americans and their children are ravaged by this bill. For instance, tens of millions of middle class people who have children are quite aware that American public education has colossally failed. America has gone from the highest rungs of education quality in the Western World to near the bottom. In addition to educational mediocrity and failure, violence and degeneracy plague many public schools and thus cause millions of conscientious parents to not use the public schools that their own taxes finance. They make great sacrifices to keep their kids safe and sound.

They pay double for education by sacrificing mightily to send their children to private or church primary and secondary schools that often cost as much per year as many universities. It is not uncommon for the tuition, even for lower grades, to run well over $10,000 per year, per child.

When their family’s health care cost jumps 50 to 100 percent, millions of these people are financially put against the wall, forced to pay huge increases for healthcare that is inferior to what they had before, with the result that they now can’t afford a good and safe education for their children. I have already heard from parents who are forced to take their children from their private schools.

Health care in America has truly been horrendous for the working poor for decades. It has needed remedy for decades. During the time I served on the Health and Welfare Committee in the early 1990s, I was often visited by the people who I came to quickly learn were the forgotten victims of America’s healthcare crisis.

The Hard Working People Made Poorer

Here in Louisiana the poor are just as often rural working people as well as working city folk. They are poor and for the most part aren’t on welfare. They are small farmers or laborers who were often laid off or out of a job in the deteriorating economic currents of America. Tens of thousands of American companies have been closed with a loss of millions of jobs because the innocuous-sounding “free trade” policy, which is anything but “free trade”, wreaks a great cost on home-grown American companies and their American workers and management.

American companies are expected to compete with “free trade” goods manufactured in foreign nations that pay their workers one-tenth of our wages, and that don’t provide safe working conditions. They must compete with industries overseas that don’t have to spend the trillions spent in America to protect the environment of our country and our world.

The Destruction of American Industry and Good Jobs

These exploitative international corporations based on foreign shores not only exploit their people but our Earth’s environment as well. They have no worry about the great added expense of purifying or proper disposal of waste, which as a devoted conservationist, I know, as you know, is essential.

Not only do we need to stop the toxic poisoning of our land, air, and water for the benefit of the natural world around us, but it is vital to the needs of our own families’ health and well-being. By this time in my life I knew the relationship of the poisons in our food and water promoting a host of cancers and other diseases our forefathers and mothers seldom suffered. Here in Louisiana all we have to do is look to the Mississippi River corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, more industrialized than the Ruhr region in Germany, which, even after spending billions on pollution mitigation, spawns some of the highest cancer rates in the Western World for our people along the river.

The fact is that American companies couldn’t fairly compete on these unfair “free trade” grounds. So the super rich moguls of international finance, and the politicians they bought, destroyed the very home-grown American industries that created so much wealth and gave our middle class a life that many people today can only dream about. Our middle class standard of living has fallen dramatically in the last five decades.

America has been gripped in the iron fist of exploiters and big banksters who have bribed and corrupted to create America’s biggest business, runaway government. Control all powerful government and you have a license to steal.

If they could corrupt that big unwieldy cash cow called Uncle Sam, they knew there would be endless money, and there has been. These Wall Street money manipulators and money getters, not money earners, have grabbed control of the government and the economy of the United States by the throat, and there has been a real decline in the life of the average American ever since.

In my youthful political days in Louisiana I was embraced by the middle class, who knew that I represented their real interests and well-being. In a sort of “Rocky Story” in modern politics,  I had little campaign money, was reviled by the media, but average people knew I was always ready to listen to them and speak for them no matter how much hatred I would endure from the powerful forces who loomed above us all.

The biased media never mentioned that in my entire political career, though offered PAC and other special interest money, I
never accepted a penny of it. In fact, some PACS even sent me checks, which I returned uncashed. Of course, that was the time when our supposedly honest media came up with slogan, “Vote for the Crook, it’s Important.” If I ever run for office again, I think my slogan should be, “Vote for the Duke, It’s important!”

Elite-Controlled  Democrats and Progressives are as Bad as Elite-Controlled Republicans

I always found it hard to understand why progressives opposed me. But their thinking had been manipulated by the media which had also become a willing servant of everything they thought they opposed. The same financial establishment complex that they despised, opposed me with far more hatred than it did them.

Most of the thousands of men and women who had come to see me at my desk in the Legislature had worked all their lives, and when I say worked, they worked their hands and their lives to the bone.

Many had very small businesses that demanded long hours, and often little restful sleep, maybe the biggest source of health problems there is. Some months their small enterprise made almost nothing, and some months they made enough only to keep their business going and maybe even catch up a little on bills.

A Louisiana Capitol guard, A. Melacon, said the two things visitors most ask to see is “Where Huey Long was shot and where David Duke sits.”

After I was elected by these good people, and had captured the imagination of many across the state in my election against great odds, the guards and ushers at the Louisiana Capitol in Baton Rouge would tell me that the two things that people asked most to see at the Louisiana Capitol were “where Huey Long was shot, and where David Duke sits.”

They finally felt they had someone who gave them a voice.

Well, now I stand before you with the same voice I had when I sat in the House of Representatives, but my voice is perhaps even far more pertinent today than it was in the early 90s.

The incredible costs of the failing social welfare system have eclipsed even my most dire political predictions. Take a look at these charts of spending that has gone out of control. Everything I warned about then has come about!

Why We Lost the War on Poverty

For a few minutes, I turn now from the discussion on Obamacare to discussing my overall view on American social welfare issues. Specifically I want to talk about the deceptive programs which claim to be done in the name of increasing the well-being and welfare of the American people, but which have caused a real decline in the wealth and well-being of most Americans.

There is no question that we need serious health care reform in America and serious reform of the structure and character of the welfare system in America.

Unfortunately Obamacare, as it’s called, is simply the latest version of a long-time, corrupt system of healthcare injustice and misguided priorities that has caused a shocking deterioration in the health of the American people. The same failure of the health care system is at the root of the failure of the Welfare system.

I live in Louisiana, as do all of you here. It is a poor state, one of the poorest states in America.

It has long been my opinion, even before I served on the Health and Welfare Committee of the House of Representatives, that LBJ’s War on Poverty was one of the most disastrous failures of social welfare in the history of the world.

Unbelievable amounts of money streamed into what I call the Welfare Big Business. Ironic, isn’t it. We have made a lot of people rich supposedly helping the poor, but the poor are more beleaguered than ever.

The War on Poverty: $22 Trillion Dollars Wasted

American taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion in 2014 dollars on anti-poverty programs since LBJ. That’s more than three times the cost of every war in American history combined.

What is the result of this mountain of money spent?

Essentially, it is zilch, as poverty rates are about the same as before this $22 trillion dollars was spent.  Actually, in the sense of the most toxic of social ills besetting the poor and the rest of us, these programs have contributed to far more real human suffering than existed in the years before the welfare revolution.

If the annual budget for welfare was doled out proportionately to all Welfare recipients — they would receive an annual amount 20 percent higher than the median income in America!

 

Here is another chart for your examination. If you take all the money for social welfare programs in the United States of America, and simply divide the money into a check for all the poor in America, it would amount to $167 a day to those in poverty. $167 a day! That’s a 20 percent higher income than the median American income! But don’t be looking to blame the poor for this. They don’t get that money! And they are not the ones who started these programs.

More importantly, we must look at the abhorrent level of human suffering that is far worse than monetary poverty. These programs and our American media establishment have escalated human misery to levels unheard of before LBJ’s War on Poverty.

An Impoverishment far worse than Lack of Money

Millions of American poor and their families are afflicted by abundant ills far worse than poverty itself. Millions of people endure alcohol addiction and drug addiction, including the epidemic of prescription drug addiction — just one of the realities of social welfare in America. Millions more African American kids are struck down by drug and other addictions than by supposedly “racist” police officers.

In real human terms, being financially poor is not nearly as bad as other, more pernicious, forms of impoverishment, such as that suffered by those caught up in addiction, or caught up in criminality, whether as perpetrator or as victim.  America now has a per capita prison population far larger than that of any other nation on Earth and at least 50 percent higher than that of our closest prisoner competitor, Russia. This is shameful, and it is the opposite of our American reputation as the Land of the Free.

There are millions of poor children whose greatest suffering is not caused by their family’s low income, but rather by being raised in a home with no father for either provisioning or psychological support.  They are the victims of a system that has bred parental neglect rather than a strong family life. These kids grow up living in fear of criminality and violence, or they themselves have gotten involved in criminal behaviors and ultimately have paid the price in the prisons of America.

 Some white folks blame those young black kids for their own dissolution, when the truth is that the black people who lived in America when I was a ten-year-old kid had nowhere near the crime, drug abuse and destruction as today. Although black people had more per capita poverty, crime and social ills than did whites, they mostly grew up with their mothers and fathers. They weren’t hooked on drugs, and they weren’t committing the rampant crime of today.

What changed? If they changed, what caused the change? I will tell you what caused it: a corrupted system and the toxic values the media has drilled into our population, including young whites as well.

Generations have been raised in an unwholesome and an unhealthy home environment that the American government itself, manipulated by cultural Marxists, has created. Many have been ruined by a corrupt media and entertainment establishment that promotes every damaging human behavior imaginable.

One can be impoverished in many ways. One can suffer from a poverty of values, lack of hope, lack of healthy living, lack of lack of learning, lack of responsibility. And all of these impoverishments can easily be far worse than a lack of income.

Our American people were raised to know this in the past, and that’s why so many Americans were proud of their lives, however poor in income they may have been. Today what was former pride is replaced by a widespread hopelessness and bitterness.

Government Social Welfare Failures and Media Degeneracy!

A degradation in our people’s traditional values engineered by the masters of America’s mass media has resulted in far worse human suffering than financial poverty alone ever caused.

And that is how we really must look at social welfare, as being the whole welfare of people, all the components of a meaningful life, and not just as the amount of money in people’s pockets.

Consider the millions of poor who, since the Lyndon Johnson presidency, have embarked on robbery, rape, murder, and other forms of lawlessness, and who now comprise by far the largest imprisoned population on the planet.

Who are the victims of these criminals? It is, of course, all of us, one way or another. And not least the poor themselves, for these poor of spirit victimize their fellow poor as much as they victimize whites and all Americans. In short we all suffer from this insane system.

The Dissolution of the African American and European American Family

Among the African American population, it is often pointed out that the dissolution of the black family has played a huge role in the true impoverishment of their people. Well, “Duh.” Only the most ignorant person would fail to realize that not having a loving, present, contributing father in a household is not only a great source of woe for the children of that broken union, but also often locks the mothers of the children into a cycle of poverty and dependency that most poor women did not face when they had working husbands at home.

Are you not aware of the morality pushed by the mainstream media today that teaches every kind of family-destructive behavior and makes it cool?

Not only do African Americans suffer in this crucible of hopelessness, there are tens of millions of European Americans who are also living in a world degraded in ways far more devastating than a lack of wealth. In fact, two thirds of America’s poor are of European descent.

However, in our biased, anti-white, racist government and media you would think poor European Americans don’t even exist. It’s perfectly fine for the media and government to push massive, institutionalized racist discrimination against two-thirds of the American poor. Yet, these racist policies are not based on need, but solely on race. These young people already have huge disadvantages to overcome, and certainly don’t deserve to be discriminated against when they work hard and achieve much.

When I served on the Health and Welfare Committee in the House of Representatives, I spent a lot of time studying the failures of our welfare system, as well as looking for solutions. Although my policies were often distorted by a press that had an extreme bias against me, I happened to agree with a lot of the more progressive reformers who have looked incisively at some of the underlying causes of social problems.

Poverty and Accompanying Social Ills Are Self-Replicating

There is little argument today that one of the sources of the generationally impoverished and embittered class is the unfettered birthrate of children having children having children. In a vicious cycle, these scions face horrific challenges, and they pose a tremendous barrier to the educational betterment of their mothers.  For the most part these suffering children are without fathers, without supervision or direction. These children are easily exploited, addicted, sexually abused, mistreated and lured into seemingly easy ways to both pleasure and money, ways that lead, however, only to destruction.

For My Progressive Welfare Polices — I was Demonized

To break that cycle of poverty many progressives were correctly proposing more birth control information and instruction. I offered a Bill to the legislature that proposed just that. That every young unmarried person introduced to the welfare system should at least attend some elemental classes in the benefits and techniques of birth control, and/or abstinence.

My proposed bill never required people to practice birth control in order to receive assistance for themselves or their children. Instead, it was about educating them in ways that could better their own lives and the life of society as a whole. My proposals also included incentives and increased opportunities for showing responsibility in these areas.

I believe to this day that such programs would be of enormous benefit to these young people. When fewer children are born to unprepared mothers, those that are born will have more access to needed resources and education. On the Health and Welfare Committee and in every campaign I warned that if we didn’t change the system welfare costs would end up exceeding even education expenditures.

Looking at the latest statistics of federal I see that we have crossed that Rubicon.

In addition to obviously improving their own individual prospects in life, a decreased birthrate would have enabled greater per capita expenditures for fewer children, helping mothers to escape this cycle of poverty. There could have been real benefits in their educational opportunities, healthcare, housing, and numerous other areas.

Massive Illegal and Legalized Immigration on America’s Poor

The New York Times and other major publications have talked about how I was the first Republican candidate to warn about an out-of-control Welfare system along with massive illegal immigration would cause incredible strains on both the American taxpayer and the American poor. I accurately predicted that in this sea of red ink that neither the funds needed for relief of the poor nor the middle class would be attainable.

I warned that illegal immigration would also accelerate crime, incarceration and healthcare costs that would lead to the final defeat in the losing battles of the War on Poverty. I warned that the politicians had sold out the true interests of American citizens, including millions of long-suffering black and white Americans, lost in the flood of millions of illegal aliens whose social welfare demands would help sink the social welfare lifeboat.  And now we are all going down in a ball of fire.

I was willing to compromise on many of these proposals, but I believe the demonizing of me by the press, and the suggestion that my modest proposals were part of some sort of “racist” plot, prevented a much-needed and long-overdue debate and discussion of these issues.

The Media’s Poisoning of America

I truly believe that African American and European American poor are far worse off today, after $22 trillion dollars of crippling taxation and corruptive spending, than they were before the vaunted “War on Poverty” ever began. As I have said, there is a panoply of ills and insidious poisons of mind and body and spirit that plague every population segment of America, but they fall especially hard on the poor. I am more convinced that there is no chance for a true resolution of this human suffering without a revolution in the destructive values peddled by Hollywood and television entertainment media.

According to academic studies, American kids today are raised on an average of 17,000 hours immersed in TV and video media that is filled with bloody and sick violence, promotion of drugs, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse and degeneracy. The following is a scent from popular movie for teenagers produced by one of the biggest mainstream Hollywood movie studios Warner Brothers.

As one study recently showed, even the poorest household can afford a widescreen TV, and by golly they have them!  I have no doubt that such destructive modes of behavior paraded and glorified by the Hollywood TV, movie and music media, have more chance of wrecking the lives of children in such broken-down homes than they could in a strong family unit able to teach them right from wrong.

Over the years I have been more and more convinced of these realities, as well as increasingly persuaded that a multifaceted approach must be taken to save America’s youth. Unless we save the youth of America, we can’t save America at all.

The Health Part of Healthcare

Turning back to healthcare, the Louisianans who sent me to the Legislature as their Representative knew that the Louisiana, and the America, of their Daddies and Mommas was no more. The time had passed when the kindly old doctor, who was a neighbor, earning only a little more than they did, made house calls as a family friend. He was paid just a few dollars for what today would cost thousands of dollars for a few hours in a hospital emergency room.

I can still remember my wonderful family doctor, Dr. Perdue, who came to my sickbed when I was nine, treated me for chicken pox, gave me an awful, burning shot in my skinny rump, and stayed a while longer to tell me about his dreams for his own life when he was my age. I forgot my misery and fell fast asleep by the time he quietly left to minister his medicine and love to another sick little boy or girl.

These responsible people who were in every way responsible, to their family, their church, and their community, got swept away in a world that was being undermined.

There is no more neighborhood doctor for most of those folks. To get decent healthcare now you have to have insurance, but the Catch 22 is that so many folks can’t afford it. When a baby is born with serious health complications to the already financially burdened family, it is catastrophic. Many of these folks who have worked all their lives, and have some modest possessions, such as their land and home on a farm, or a city home they had dutifully worked and paid for. Their property may have risen in value, but often their jobs or businesses have been lost or their incomes have dropped.

When an illness or accident happens to any of their family members, it could cause them to lose the fruits of their life’s work, unlike a welfare recipient with nothing saved or owned.

An American Healthcare Horror Story

In the city of Lake Charles, Louisiana, when I was running for the U.S. Senate, I had an experience that still chills my bones, even when I remember it on a hot, humid, Louisiana summer afternoon. Although, during that period I shook the hands of tens of thousands of good citizens, the emotions sparked by the event etched even its smallest details in my memory.

After my speech at one of my campaign rallies for the U.S. Senate, a big, burly, weathered and sun-wrinkled man in his fifties approached me along with his wife who was a little younger. She wore a hat to guard her face from the burning sun, and was far less tanned than he, but still she looked like she had many more years of worry than she should for her age.

Their little girl Kara, who they told me was eight, sported a short, pixie haircut of dark auburn. She looked at least two years smaller than she should have looked and seemed a bit scared to meet me.  She kept looking down at her feet, but when she finally looked up, she had incredibly lovely large blue eyes that were beautiful and haunting.

“Representative Duke,” The father started, “I am Jim and this is Michaela and here’s my little girl, Kara. If you give me a minute I will show you something you need to see.”

He told me how from the time he was 16 he worked night and day on the tugboats and service boats on the lower Calcasieu River that fed down into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the main transportation network for the rapidly expanding offshore oil industry. When he later married, he and his young wife worked hard, saving every penny in pursuit of their own version of the American dream.

Jim’s plan was to buy an older tug, repair it and fix it up and start his own tug business. After a dozen years of hard work and sacrifices he finally bought his boat and then worked even harder building his business, until ultimately he had three tugs complete with hefty mortgages, but he had a thriving, profitable, solid business.

He employed a couple of dozen men, and paid taxes, both business and personal, that he estimated had totaled in the millions of dollars. He had built a great home, a successful business, and he was always generous to anyone in need. The people who worked for him and the community loved him.

In a common story repeated across America, he and his wife had delayed having children for longer than she had wished, but she finally had her first child in her late thirties, a son. Another son followed. She wanted one more child, hoping for a girl.

All these long years the family kept expensive health insurance. Like their other children had been, her new baby, Kara, was to be added to their policy after she was born.

Michaela disclosed to me that Kara was born with a heart defect but seemed like a healthy little girl at the time of her birth. When Kara was given the insurance required exam to add her to the insurance policy, the doctor became alarmed at an odd rhythm in her heart.

Tests were performed and it was determined she had a serious, ultimately fatal heart defect, that if not treated would inevitably take her life

“Let me show you something Mr. Duke,” Michaela said, as she crouched down beside Kara and gently and carefully unbuttoned her light, linen shirt, and modestly parted it down to the frail little girl’s breast bone.

Kara stared motionless, blue lotus eyes glowing with the reflection of the evening sunset off the lake, as her mom revealed the long red scar down the center of her chest.

Jim spoke slowly, “She has now gone through two heart operations, and a third is scheduled in three weeks.

“The insurance wouldn’t add her to the policy, a pre-existing condition they said. I have had to pay for all of them, done by a world class heart specialists in Houston.

“Doctors say she has a good chance to live to at least middle age, with a little luck, they say.

“The bills have now mounted to over $800,000 dollars. It took all my money, more than enough for me to lose the business, and still there is a lot more I will owe. My lawyer said that the medical consortium treating Kara will likely take our home, if we can’t pay the bills, which we can’t.”

I was saddened and told him that I could also try to help him raise some funds.

He dismissed my offer quickly, saying, “No, I can handle all of this, I have a lot of friends who will help me start over again. I would more than all I own, even give my life if I could for the life of my baby. The loss of my life’s work is painful, but it means nothing to me and Michaela next to Kara’s precious life.

“Mr. Duke, that’s not why I told you all this. I wanted you to see her scar so that it would never forget what I will tell you now, because you are the voice of people like me, the forgotten American majority, and like Paul Harvey, says, ‘And now, the rest of the story,’ a story I want you to know.”

His voice began to break and I saw Michaela’s eyes glass over with a thick film of tears filling her reddening eyes, yet somehow not falling down her checks.

Jim went on, “Each time Kara had an operation, it was hard not to notice that many of the patients were Mexican non-citizens who spoke not a word of English who were having heart operations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, paid for by American taxpayers. Even though these foreigners never contributed a penny in taxes they were getting all this free, at the same time I, as an American, was paying.

“I had paid enormous taxes over the last twenty years and now couldn’t get a dime from the same government doling out my money to people who put nothing in. The loss of my company would not only hurt me but the good people who worked for me all these years and depended on me. So, it hurt them and the well-being of my family, and my little girl who was suffering enough from her heart condition.

“At the time of the last operation, I asked the lead doctor about it.

“He told me that over half of his patients are Mexican nationals, illegal aliens, who, when they show up at the doors of the hospital penniless, cannot be refused.”

Jim continued to relate his doctor’s words, “We can get some reimbursement for their treatment here, but all of the operations and medical care cost the hospital and all the hospitals of this region millions.”

The Doctor continued, “We, like you, are tottering on bankruptcy. We try to keep prices as low as possible, but the cost of treating these non-paying patients causes every paying patient in this hospital to pay far more, including high costs that the hospital had to charge you to keep open their own doors.

“Additionally, the same is true for the insurance companies and your insurance costs. The hospital write-offs from the illegals and other domestic indigents are putting tens of millions of extra dollars onto every patient’s bills and the bills that insurance companies must pay.

“Of course, that in turn causes insurance rates to go sky high and poses a horrific burden for working families and struggling, working people who can simply not afford to buy insurance at all.

‘The poorest of working people are without insurance and because they fear the costs of medical treatment so much they often don’t go to doctors to check them out. Many wait until it is too late to avoid terrible injury and damage to their bodies, and even death. I witness this tragedy almost every day.”

The tugboat captain, who no longer had a tugboat, looked at me and pleaded, “It’s not that I don’t think their need of health care is as great as mine, but what about the needs of my daughter and my family? Is our need any less? How is it I can help pay for medical care of non-Americans and I can’t get a dime back for my own family, my own little girl?”

“Even Americans who are chronically on welfare, who I have supported all my life with my taxes, are also provided for, but my sacrifices are not worth one red cent of help for my child and my family.”

“In fact, our undefended borders and broken health care system, treatment of illegals and other deadbeats with preference over my family’s needs, probably made the difference in me losing my business. And the loss of my business and its jobs and taxes hurts a lot more innocent people than just me and my family. To a degree it harms every family in the United States of America.”

More with sadness than anger, he welled up like he would burst, it seemed he was out of breath, needing to stop and take some big breaths. Or maybe it was just his mental anguish of recounting once more his struggles. He was finished now except for one last comment asked in the form of a question. With tears in his eyes he asked,

“What has happened to America? –Mr. Duke, can you tell me what has happened to America?”

I had no answer for his question.

I just felt a deep throbbing pain in my chest, like a knife. I felt his loss, and I felt the loss of an America that had lost its way.

The Truly Oppressed

Before meeting Jim and Michaela and Kara, my talk that afternoon looked at the iniquities of welfare abuse and how so many young married people who work hard for a living and pay taxes and obey the law, are forced to forego children, often until it is too late, because they can’t afford them.

Young working, married couples often gave me the refrain that they didn’t have children, because they couldn’t afford to raise them right.

How wrong it seemed that they were being forced to pay for others who were able to work, but didn’t. They were decent people who didn’t mind helping the people who were infirmed through no fault of their own. But, they were sickened by the fact that they who were responsible and sacrificing, had to support many who irresponsibly had kids who would never have a loving present father. Instead they relied on the total sustenance of working folks’ taxes and sacrifice.

In retrospect, I realized over the years that it is hard to blame those young, lost and corrupted women, and I don’t blame them. Today, I see them as victims as much as the people exploited to support this corrupt system.

Today, I squarely blame the elite who control the media, finance, and government for this catastrophe of human loss and suffering.

These young men and women grew up in an America where all values have become inverted. A lot of European Americans think that African Americans should know better because some of us know better.

However, the truth is that some of us know better because we were raised that way and we grew up in a system that rewarded industriousness and gave us an ingrained ethic of hard work. This better world, by the way, existed also for the African American community, within my own memory. The change for the worse has been dramatic, and it has happened fast. I believe that our people have it within themselves to create a recovery that is just as dramatic, and just as fast.

We live in such a media and mainstream world of lies and deceit. It is not true, of course that all of us are born equal, we are different in a thousand ways more than we are the same in our bodies and minds. But, each of us should be born to achieve all that we deserve. What we may suffer in a quality we lack we can often make up in another that we possess. What one person may achieve by raw talent, another may achieve by raw determination. We all have the capacity and personal sovereignty to choose actions that truly benefit ourselves and our society.

It is in these fundamental decisions of life that an idealistic, nurturing media  could and should be so important to our youth and to our whole people. But, we have the blight of a toxic media invading every home in the land with destructive values.

Frankly, a great part of the destruction of the African American community, and all of our communities, is the result of generations being raised today with an entirely opposite ethic than was taught by our European American, Christian forebears.

And when I say “raised” I am not referring to how one is raised by one’s parents. In truth, even in intact families, the lords and moguls of the entertainment industry are the ones that raise our kids, especially the kids of those parents from whom the truth of the picture I am painting for you has been cleverly hidden. It is these super rich moguls of media who have poisoned the millions mired in hopelessness, dissolution, and apathy. And it is they who exploit our hard-working people, as well as those chronically enslaved on the public dole.

It must be clearly said that it is not just black families and black children growing up lost and misguided. Plenty of European Americans are lost and degenerated shadows of their heroic and self-reliant forefathers.

My views have evolved on these subjects a lot over the years. And these subjects include other catastrophes for our people that make this moment in our history into a life-or-death turning point leading either to the perpetual life or hideous death of our people. The healthcare crisis is greatly worsened by other calamities, including wars that in no way serve any interest of our people. Consider, from that perspective, the trillions of tax and debt dollars, and millions of lives, wasted and destroyed by the wars America has embarked upon in shameful obedience to Israel’s agenda, not our people’s interests, wars engineered by the Zionists themselves.

Consider, from this perspective, how our people’s future health and well-being, will be hurt by the Mt. Everest of perpetual crushing debt saddled onto the backs of your grandchildren and their grandchildren by the banksters who have utterly taken over all high finance in just one century from the enactment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

The Federal Reserve banksters, and the Wall Street fraudsters, like Goldman Sachs, exploiting forms of government welfare for their international corporations, have not only harmed the honest businesses which they compete against, they have also cost the American people untold trillions in what can only be called, corporate welfare. Corporate welfare to the most parasitic element of the System, the manipulators of money in the multinational predator banking houses like Goldman Sachs.

In fact the 2008 crisis and FED bailout of the very banks that caused the crisis transferred trillions of dollars to these criminal banks with just a stroke of the pen. Far more than even the wasted welfare levels of today.

I talked about the banksters’ massive thefts a bit back then in my campaigns, but I should have talked about these ultimate welfare cheats a lot more. Comparing welfare fraud to the fraud of Wall Street, the Fed and international bankers, is like comparing a floating toothpick to a supertanker. I will never make that mistake again. And welfare waste today is exponentially higher than it was when I last campaigned.

Other Thoughts on the Healthcare Crisis: Why the Focus Must be Prevention Rather than Cure

The declining health of Americans is not just confined to the poor, it affects every race and class in the United States, and is a growing problem all over the world.

In fact, I believe that the epidemic rise in diabetes and heart disease is far worse than perceived because it has been mitigated to a degree by miraculous medical science and the expenditure of equally miraculous amounts of money, problem is that the money just doesn’t materialize out of thin air for most people, except for the banksters that is.

However, the only ultimate cure for the health crisis is teaching people how to live healthy lives, rather than taking the latest $100,000 dollar a year patented medicine.

The nature of our food has changed the nature of our health. The changing lifestyles of people are making them sick both in body and mind.

The lunch I ate in the school cafeteria as an eight-year-old in 1958 was far healthier than the processed foods of today.

In just one supposedly healthy meal schools serve, the breakfast, a child gets far more sugar than I and my fellow students ate in an entire typical day of my childhood.

Despite the advantages of having a young and vigorous metabolism, the foods our kids are fed have caused child and adult obesity and diabetes to be epidemic. Widespread adult obesity, unknown in the 50’s, also proves the point that our people are being raised to be sick, not raised to be healthy. Again, the blame must be placed on a media that is economically fueled by toxic foods and drinks that make us sick not healthy and happy people.

Like the diseased social values the media spreads, in reverence to their holy god of dollars, they advertise foods for our kids and adults that kill more people and ruin more lives than heroin, cocaine and crystal meth combined.

If these foods can produce these conditions in children over just a few short years, what kind of an effect is produced on a person over thirty or forty years, over a lifetime?

Healthcare has failed all of America, but now I want to focus once more today on the one area of the American demographic who I believe is the most afflicted by lack of good medical care.

The Biggest Victims: The Working Poor

It may not surprise a few of you reading this that I believe the ultimate failure of healthcare in America is not its lack of availability to the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder.

In truth, the nonworking welfare recipient as well as those who are long-time wards of the state and afflicted by chronic disease, have abundant healthcare in our major cities, where most of them live.

Because they have earned little and owned little, there is no economic cost to them to go to the doctor or hospital, even an emergency room for relatively minor things. Emergency room visits have become immensely expensive for those who must pay themselves.

This very bottom economic rung actually seeks and gets good medical attention at a much higher rate than the uninsured, people who have not given up and work very hard to pay their own way in society.

In my opinion they are the most afflicted of all groups of black and white working poor, whether they be in the cities or the vast wide expanses of the United States. These are the people who are going to be caught in the unforgiving pincers of the onrushing Obamacare legislation and a toxic mass media. The result will be the devastation of millions of people.

These are the people that Obamacare is touted as helping. One more lie.

Where is the Incentive in Obamacare to Live A Healthy Life?

Why are there not provisions in the Obamacare law that would give insurance premium discounts to those people who can show that they don’t smoke, that they don’t have a record of abusing alcohol or drugs, and who are responsible enough to take care of their health? It should be noted that the only health habit included in the Obamacare questionnaire is about smoking — but it is not included in the section threatening perjury if one lies on the application. Smoking is the only such lifestyle question allowed in the Obamacare, and it carries no penalty for deception.

Such provisions on a healthy lifestyle could only help millions of Americans, and prevent the suffering and ill health and incredible cost associated with a system that rewards irresponsibility rather than healthy and wholesome lifestyles. How many lives would such incentives improve and save?

But what interest do the multi-trillion dollar drug industry and medical conglomerates have in people being healthy?

Are we so blind as not to see why people keep getting sicker as they keep eating the toxic food advertised by a morally toxic media. All this while the mega corporations continue to profit from the sickening of America.

We need a lot more than refinement and tweaking of healthcare insurance. We need fundamental changes, focused not on a non-existent “cure” of expanding illnesses, including obesity and all its accompanying health ills and costs, but on a real promotion of healthy food, lifestyles and values that will lead to far better human health.

Ben Franklin’s maxim that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is so true. It is true about poverty, it is true about health, and it is true about health care.

I hope that I have given you some good perspectives on social welfare policies in America, of which Obamacare is a part.

A thing that amazes me is that Democrat Obama, as well as the Republican governor of our state, Bobby Jindal, both give the shaft to the hard-working, most-needy and deserving poor in Louisiana and America.

It’s time to remedy this and reform the very nature of the entire welfare and healthcare system.

It is also time that we depose the unelected despots of mass media in Hollywood and New York, those who poison the body, the mind and the spirit of our people and the entire world. These despots of media power are literally killing us and destroying the lives of countless millions.

I say it is time for a revolution in American politics, a revolution in health care, a revolution in media, and a revolution in Social Welfare that truly works to eliminate human suffering rather than to increase it.

Only a comprehensive solution can save America.

I believe that revolution is coming. The mass media and corrupt political establishment will fight it tooth and nail, but people are waking up.

I know that most of you listening to me have already awakened.

The only real question before you is, “What will you do?”

I have pledged, often at great cost, my entire life to fighting for the values you want for America, for your children, for our future.

However, all that I have been able to do has  been possible because of you and others like you.

I will never stop standing up for you. All I ask is that you stand up for yourselves and all those who you dearly love.

David Duke