Ticky-Tacky

Ticky-Tacky

There is a roller coaster at Cedar Point, in Sandusky, Ohio, called the Blue Streak.
It is the largest, fastest, highest and safest of its kind in the entire world. One fine Sunday afternoon, a few friends accompanied my husband, David and me to Cedar Point with the sole objective of riding the Blue Streak.

We made our way through the park, leisurely riding what we wanted to, eating funnel cakes and candy-apples, until at last we stood before that which we had come to conquer.
High and wide it was, touching the clouds and extending, it seemed, over angry Lake Erie. The line for the Blue Streak was long, giving me plenty of time to watch white-faced people disembark and shake their way through the turnstile. My stomach was churning.

Finally, it was our party’s turn to be loaded into the cart that would climb to the clouds and whirl us over the lake. I handed my tickets to the turnstile keeper, and then turned around. “Keep the tickets,” I said to him over my shoulder. “I’m not going.”

David grabbed my arm. “What’s wrong, Honey?” he asked, tugging me in the direction of the cart. “We’ve been waiting almost an hour for this!”

“Look at it, David,” I told him. “Just look at it. The substructure of that thing is made entirely of big Popsicle sticks.”

“Aw, Honey,” he begged. “It’s just your perspective!”

Everyone else rode the Blue Streak and had a wonderful time. I sat on a bench waiting for them and catching a glimpse of David every once in a while, but not regretting my decision. Because of my perspective, I did not like the substructure.

I always believed that our government exists on substance – gold, land, minerals and real cold hard cash from us taxpayers.

I was wrong. Our government sits on a substructure of Popsicle sticks and ticky-tacky,
and the stock market is THE major player for our local and state governments. Not commonly known about are the LGIPs (Local Government Investment Pools) which the taxpayer did not vote on, and information about which has been largely suppressed. I am not speaking of a “cover-up,” mind you – that would be even more illegal. I am speaking of a suppression of information which is kept suppressed “For the Greater Good.” We, the American public, the taxpayers, do not need to know about such things, the governments reason. Let us ask the question: Why don’t we need to know? The answer is obvious. We wouldn’t like the government playing the stock market with our hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

On November 2, 2002, an investment firm called National Century Financial Enterprise from Dublin, Ohio, filed bankruptcy. It was the shot felt around the world, but not heard anywhere.

The NCFE bankruptcy and its horrible devastation to the medical world, and to low-income elderly and disabled Medicaid recipients, was like the President passing gas in Church. No one admitted they heard it, but the moral stench of it carried all over the United States. Thanks to the suppression of information on every level, most of us did not know what we were smelling.

The impoverished elderly and disabled had been shot bad; and no one had the courage, the honesty nor the nobility to tell them that the gun had even been fired, much less name the shooter.

National Century Financial Enterprises was a company which bought medical accounts receivable from health care providers around the USA, then financed the purchases by selling securities to large institutional investors outside Ohio.

Even though NCFE was called “the lender of last resort” by the National Securities Commission, Arizona local governments still invested heavily with NCFE through the LGIPs, encouraged to do so by the State Treasurer.

The facts need to be carefully examined by all who hold a clean government dear:
Enron was a dirty scandal upon which the American Public was continually updated, vs. the reporting of NCFE only one time on CNN news.

Even though the people most hurt by the NCFE fallout were the elderly poor, disabled and frail adults; even though school funds were drastically lost in Arizona, the NCFE bankruptcy was largely unreported. We, the American taxpaying public, were not given a play-by-play and blow-by-blow as we were with Enron. NCFE executives were guilty of white-collar crime at its finest hour – the financial raping of the poor – but we, the public, were not informed.

This suppression of information “for the greater good” translates to cover-up of information by those politicians in power who might have florinal poured on their lily-white hands, making the blood of the poor and elderly visible for the entire world to see.