Obama To Implement Hitler's T4
and Fascist Economics—By Fiat
by Nancy and Edward Spannaus
Dec. 30—Lyndon LaRouche and EIR warned you back in 2009, that President Barack Obama's so-called health-care reform was a carbon copy of Adolf Hitler's T4 (Tiergarten 4) policy, a scheme for eliminating those the government considers to be "useless eaters," with "lives not worthy to be lived." Now, Obama is moving, by fiat, to put that policy into effect.
Although Obama succeeded in ramming through his Hitler health bill, including the "death panel," called the unconstitutional Independent Payment Advisory Board, last year, the opposition roused by LaRouchePAC and others prevented him from getting every fascist measure he and his British Blairite advisors wanted. Specifically, the Senate killed Section 1233 from the House bill, a measure that outlined an extensive program of "death counseling" to be paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.
No matter to the Nero-like Obama. Having gone around Congress to appoint Dr. Donald Berwick, an open advocate of Tony Blair's genocidal NICE (National institute of Health and Clinical Excellence) program, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), without being subject to Senate confirmation, Obama had Berwick implement—by regulation—the measure Congress had rejected. Like the dictator he would like to be, Obama simply rammed it through.
If not stopped, either by the removal of the insane Obama by the 25th Amendment, or other means, the regulation pushing this euthanasia-promoting procedure will go into effect on Jan. 1, and will be followed by many others. Nor is this the only fascist measure Obama is implementing by executive fiat. At the same time, he intends to have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) use its regulatory power to ram through murderous cutbacks in so-called "greenhouse gases," usurping the will of Congress, and directly assaulting the American people's well-being.
Do you see now why LaRouche says Obama's ouster is the top priority for any sane, patriotic citizen in the days ahead?
Pushing Euthanasia
The regulation CMS director Berwick promulgated in November, for implementation in January, is written to appear innocuous. It authorizes Medicare to pay for "voluntary advance care planning" as part of the annual physical examination ("wellness visit") provided for in the Obamacare bill. Unlike the original Section 1233, which called for such counseling every five years, the regulation encourages it on an annual basis.
It's like your doctor coming back every year, and asking, "Have you decided to forgo treatment yet? Aren't you ready to throw in the towel, and die?"
There is no question but that this is what Berwick and the Obama Administration intend. Berwick, who was recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his role as a counselor to Blair's NICE program of rationing, has devoted years to attacking the medical profession and its so-called "over-treatment." Among his more telling statements, published in a recent article in the American Spectator, is:
"Using unwanted procedures in terminal illness is a form of assault.... In economic terms, it is waste. Several techniques, including advance directives and involvement of patients and families in decision-making, have been shown to reduce inappropriate care at the end of life, leading to both lower cost and more humane care" (emphasis added).
But it would be a grave error to see this regulation as a mere "suggestion," for, behind the raising of the so-called choice, is the clenched fist of the Federal government.
Under Obamacare, this death counseling is an element of the "Physician Quality Reporting System," a system of evaluation of physicians which determines how much they are paid. The number of individuals whom a physician convinces to sign "living wills," or other documents which commit them to forgoing treatment, will actually count as an element in their "quality" evaluation.
Doctors will be paid bonuses, or will be penalized, depending on how many patients they convince to agree to forgo costly medical treatment and die quietly.
As former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey argues, this arrangement makes it clear that such counseling is not "voluntary," because the government is writing the script, and doctors are penalized if the government doesn't like the outcome. In a Fox News interview Dec. 27, she warned, "It's going to be a drumbeat, a drumbeat of 'spend less,' 'let's let you die sooner.' "
Just Like the Nazis
Called on its sneaky move to implement the death-counseling plan behind the back of Congress, the Obama Administration has protested that they are doing nothing that the Bush Administration didn't do. Horrid as the Bush Administration was, that statement is false. While Bush did authorize one-time end-of-life counseling upon the entry to Medicare, Obama's policy is systemically based on the premise of Adolf Hitler's policy: Identify sections of the population which are "useless eaters," who are costing too much to keep alive, and get them to agree to die.
Hitler too first promoted euthanasia as a "voluntary" measure, with mass propaganda films about how "inhumane" it was to keep suffering people alive. Wouldn't a "mercy" death be better, the Nazis asked—just the way the right-to-die lobby does today. Don't you want to prevent people from suffering?
But this also went along with massive Nazi propaganda about how expensive it was to take care of those allegedly incurably ill. The German population was bombarded with figures about the cost of caring for the sick—when the money could better be spent on the healthy! There's no qualitative difference between the Nazis' arguments, and those today, which assert that we shouldn't "waste money" on people at the "end of life," when it could be spent on "preventive care" instead.
In the Fall of 1939, Hitler formally made his decision. In a secret memorandum, written by him, but signed by his personal physician Dr. Karl Brandt, under the title, "The Destruction of Lives Unworthy of Life," the Reich authorized physicians to act "to the end that patients considered incurable, according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be accorded a mercy death."
The first round of mercy deaths under this program, called T4[1], were not explicitly violent. They were done by denying treatment, actually starving to death those designated as incurably physically or mentally ill—the very same procedure that many "advanced care directives" call for. It was only later that the concerns of "efficiency" led to sending those considered "useless" to treat, to killing centers.
How long it would take the Obama Administration—if it is not stopped—to get to this point, is unknown. But the ubiquitous talk of cutting Medicare and Social Security to "cut the deficit" indicates it would not be long.
Letting It All Hang Out
While the Obama Administration as such may be at pains to lie and say they are not pushing euthanasia, there is no such inhibition felt by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon "Democrat" who proudly takes credit for introducing the end-of-life counseling provision (Section 1233) into the original health-care bill. Blumenauer says he co-authored the provision with the Hemlock Society—that's "hemlock," as in the poison that was administered to Socrates. That society has now been reincarnated under the name "Compassion and Choices," the better to sell their death dealings.
Blumenauer is an outspoken proponent of euthanasia, including physician-assisted suicide. In a posting on his personal website, he promotes an October 1960 Harper's magazine issue which directly advocates euthanasia, and decries what they called the prevalent "irrational, phobic, and sentimental attitudes about voluntary death." Other articles in the issue sound as if they could have come from former Obama Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag, or the President himself, in their sharp attacks on skyrocketing health-care costs and medical "waste."
Blumenauer reported in 2009 that he referred the Harper's magazine to President Obama, to shape his thinking on health care—and then saw Obama cite the issue in his speech to the American Medical Association in June of that year.
According to the New York Times Dec. 26, Blumenauer was on the inside of reviving his end-of-life counseling provision through the regulatory route. The Times reports on an e-mail sent by Blumenauer to his supporters in November, weeks before the regulation was made public, saying: "Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch.... The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it."
NerObama
LaRouche warned in April of 2009, that Obama was a Nero/Hitler type personality, a narcissist under British control, who, as President of the United States, represented a deadly danger to the nation and the world. With his death-care bill, pursuit of losing wars, and murderous economic policies, Obama has more than vindicated LaRouche's warning.
Nor is the President "upset" with the fact that he no longer has a Democratic Congress to carry out his orders. As was obvious in the so-called tax deal he made with Republicans in the lame duck session, Obama is totally at home with the fascists on the other side of the aisle, whom he can use to bash the remaining FDR instincts of the Democratic party into submission.
But, where he feels it necessary, Obama plans to work not by deals, but by the exercise of raw Executive power, using Executive Orders, regulations, and whatever corporatist instruments he can create, to ram through his fascist policies. One of the most notable, besides the Hitler health deal, is his intended use of the regulatory power of the EPA to impose carbon-emission standards on power plants, which he couldn't get through the Congress. This measure will be used to further rip up the productive potential of the U.S. economy—dismantling coal plants in favor of solar panels and windmills, which will take us back toward the 14th Century, in the twinkling of an eye.
Germans have been excoriated for decades, because they did not move to stop the genocidal horrors of the Hitler regime before it was too late. What will be said of Americans, if we do not stop Barack "Hitler" Obama in his tracks?
[1] For a detailed report on Hitler's T4 program, see, Nancy Spannaus, "Hitler's T4 Program Revived in Obama's Health-Care Reform," EIR June 5, 2009.
