Open Thread

The masters of the universe don't believe they should be regulated simply because the world economy was broken, after all, they didn't do anything wrong. And they got the money to make sure they won't be.

Letter From California

02/28/10 0441.22 PST
San Jose, California

We are pretty late but next weekend the youths at St. Jude’s and I will finish their strawberry garden, 5 automatically irrigated raised boxes--380 square feet--are waiting from the excellent soil prep they performed last Fall for around 300 ever-bearing plants. With just 1,000 square feet the St. Jude’s garden will never seriously feed a lot of people, it may just be a foodie hobby or playground, but I always hold out hope that good political and social lessons can be one of its crops.

I think I was a little too much firebrand Chavez the first time I worked with the youths in the strawberry garden, explaining emphatically that the California strawberry market had presented California with enormous problems in the past, only to deliver a snow-topped piece of shit fruit at the end of it all. None of them knew of our horrifying methyl bromide history (sealing off fields to be pumped up with incredibly toxic gas, the rapacious strawberry capitalists hate profit-eroding bacteria) or the terrible problems and injustices of picking the fruit. Inherently fragile, the strawberry is picked unripe so it can travel to stores, it’s just maddening to be in strawberry season only to be presented with crappy fruit at the expense of all that often-illegal backbreaking labor and terrible environmental degradation. We still get so-so fruit at Safeway, but at least methyl bromide has been banned.

Open Thread

Finally even deficit hawks are acknowledging that focusing on job creation is critical now.

So what types of jobs can government help with? Greening our homes with Home Star.

Open Thread

Just in case you didn't know:

You have to work really, really hard to delete emails.

None of the former DOJ-ers who spoke to TPMmuckraker said they would have known how to delete emails permanently.

So the question is, what did it take to make John Yoo's emails disappear so completely?

Calling Then Out

One of the fundamental weaknesses in Obama’s philosophical approach to executive-level politics is his assumption that he faces rational, willing participants on the other side who want to reach consensus and make government work. Whether he is just now realizing the fallacy in that assumption, or whether his team was responsible for this terrible miscalculation is almost irrelevant now, given that he has lost a year and a good deal of political capital because of these missteps.

Just one day’s snapshots of what Democrats face in an opposition would convince anyone of the hopelessness of playing nice with such a group of cretins.

Alabama Senator Richard Shelby is damaging national security without knowing why he’s opposed to Obama’s nominees.

GOP representative Steve King defends the hoard of lobbyists who have bought the GOP caucus.

Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning rejects an extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans because the vote on the bill made him miss a collegiate basketball game. Well, I wish it were that craven, but instead the doddering Bunning refuses to assist millions of Americans because the Senate won't pay for these UI benefits by finding $10 billion in cuts elsewhere. Funny, he didn't show such a concern when he routinely shoveled billions to the war in Iraq and to Blackwater.

GOP representative Dean Heller thinks it is unwise to extend unemployment benefits because the unemployed will just be "hobos".

Obama and his administration need to make the case that bipartisanship only works when there are two parties committed to the people and making government work. We’ve reached a point where painting the opposition as a cancer to representative democracy is not distasteful but essential.

The HSA Myth

Remember all that talk yesterday from the House and Senate GOP members about the virtues of high deductible policies coupled with health savings accounts as an alternative to more government involvement in the marketplace and universal coverage? That is, until Obama rightly smacked them down by pointing out that a $40,000/year working class stiff had no disposable income to put into a HSA, unlike a well-fed congressional Republican with an annual income nearing $200,000 (not counting bribes from the industry).

Guess which policies have seen some of the largest increases, threatening to bury small businesses?

Tom Simmons, president of an Oakland design and consulting firm with four employees, said he had just read about the Anthem increases when he opened a letter from his insurer, Blue Shield of California, informing him his monthly family premium would go up to $1,596 a month from $908, a nearly 76 percent increase.

[snip]

(B)usinesses in the small-group market - those with fewer than 50 employees - are reeling from the latest spikes in their health rates.

Those who reported the highest rate increases appeared to have a high deductible Blue Shield policy paired with a savings account.

Funny, I don't recall the GOP mentioning this yesterday, in all their ranting against government involvement, and talk of letting the marketplace work.

California insurance experts say other health insurers have had to raise their small-group rates, particularly for HSAs.

"Every carrier has been mispricing the product because we don't have the data," said Steven Lindsay, a lobbyist for the California Association of Health Underwriters and an insurance broker.

Yet the GOP's alternative to health care reform is to send families and small businesses off a cliff into financial ruin with a product designed to maximize industry profits and minimal tax benefits for everyone but the wealthy. Too bad that didn't come up yesterday.

The Goalposts of Misery Keep Moving

Not long ago a sustained unemployment rate of 8% would have been deemed horrifying and unacceptable, and one can be dammed sure that if a Republican president tried to sustain it as part of normal reality the liberal netroots would be constantly up in arms about it, official logos made for the opposition groups that would spring up winking on websites everywhere. Yet with this Democratic President Obama here we are at a steady 10%, oh well, liberal, suck on it, we’ve got a Republican worried about inflation to get appointed to the Fed.¹

With leadership like this one imagines a 15% rate before Democratic President Obama would eventually decide a crisis really had arrived for the little people, why, maybe $600 billion annually for Defense and a war in Afghanistan could be a bad idea in times like these. Ya think? The saintly Atrios thinks the unemployment metric is useless, it means nothing to these people, and he’s certainly got a point, everyone knows the best way to make an American administration skip those $4,000 a night Hawaii vacations to get the job done is to have a stock market crash. Or a big bank failure.

Open Thread

Listening to the BBC News tonight on the topic of the Health Care Summit, I found out that the little story about Obama's mother having to dicker with her insurance company while she was dying was not really relevant because all Americans can get health care when they want. In fact, this fellow said things are much better than they used to be 20 or so years ago. Because it turns out that if an American shows up at a hospital, the hospital is required to care for that person if they are really sick. So Americans are actually much better off then we think and trying to fix the problems in our health care system isn't worth going to the trouble. The fellow who they were talking with is someone called the American Thinker. Aren't you glad to be set straight by someone who knows?

Finally, Reconciliation

Well, for those of you who watched it, I'd be interested in hearing your observations. The best, concise summary of the differences between the two parties is here. But after a year of bad political strategy from the White House, and outright obstruction from the GOP, the end result is that Barack Obama is finally ready to move the reform bill through reconciliation, something he could have done right after it became clear that his naive hopes for Olympia Snowe to come aboard the phony Max Baucus/Chuck Grassley Love Train came crashing down.

Pssst!

Don't tell anyone...

The Cost of Doing Business

Remember, Wellpoint's need to jack up rates on its individual policyholders in California is all about "medical cost inflation", and the fault of hospitals, drug companies, and costly members. It has nothing to do with the millions in executive compensation they pay, or the lavish executive retreats they have for these hard-working folks. And yet there still were enough excess profits from the California operation to send over $4 billion back to the corporate parent company in Indiana since 2004.

Yet those GOP governors feel the market should be left alone to dictate prices, and object to the government having any role in rate increases at all.

Update: Looks like the moribund Jerry Brown campaign just found an issue.

No Journalism Corps for Mandates

Reading Steve Benen and his extremely pertinent reminder of “just how effective the right-wing noise machine can be” it’s time to bring my opposition to this version of healthcare out of the footnotes.

Were it not for mandates in the bill (mandates Obama opposed in the campaign) I would be coolly approving and languidly calling my reps to do their god damn jobs and pass the bill, but the idea of forcing Americans to buy insurance if they don’t have it and then enforcing the authoritarianism through the IRS stops me cold. I’m actually ambivalent on the policy (Krugman approves), but we don’t have the journalism corps or political talent to pull this off in the American environment, not even close.

Open Thread

So just how good is that recovery going?

Here's Ben Bernacke in front of Congress on Wednesday: Job forecast tempers good signs: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sees positive economic glimmers but expects high unemployment.

Here's his predecessor's assessment Tuesday: Greenspan Says Crisis ‘By Far’ Worst, Recovery Uneven

Guess those guys playing with the stock market must be thrilled.

David Axelrod's Theory Of Leadership

Really?

“If the president weren’t tough, if the president weren’t committed, if the president didn’t believe that this was an imperative for the future of American families, businesses and the sustainability of our budget, this thing would have been dead six months ago,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview. “I would love to live in a world where the president could snap his fingers or even twist arms and make change happen, but in this great democracy of ours, that’s not the way it is.”

So, Obama gets credit for the process remaining a process, even though he essentially handed the process off to Congress. But that change stuff? A president can't do that. A candidate can campaign on it, but an elected president can't actually do it. Or maybe it was something else.

Goods News

Good riddance.

How Did Insurance Companies Become Inviolate?

Reading Matt Taibbi and the absurdity of the Obama administration trying to reform healthcare without repealing health insurance anti-trust exemption a plain fact forever clicked into place: nobody represented the little people in this outrage called reform, so the little people can expect little or nothing to change for the better when this Lucy-kabuki-summitry-insanity is finally over.

Single Payer? The one solution the rest of the industrialized world uses that could make such a difference for everyone? Surely you jest, liberal. Public Option? Mandates were campaigned against but suddenly here they are¹, and after a cruel tease to the Democratic base the public option was finally dropped, God forbid competition could enter this hell of a forced market. Anti-trust? A year after starting a pathetic attempt will fail, according to Taibbi. Transparency and fairness? Right from the git-go of this torturous nightmare big pharma and Billy Tauzin got a secret deal so the drug industry got all kinds of breaks and protection. Did a group for the little people get a secret deal for all kinds of benefits at the end? Right.

Open Thread

Taking a page from Digby, perhaps these headlines have something to do with consumer confidence?

Why would anyone think that?

(Headlines courtesy of Barry Ritholtz)

Lost My Internet Connection

For unknown technical reasons my AT & T modem went kaput last night and the nice competent tech just brought it back up with a house call. I had medical tests that negated coffee this morning so my day started most foully with no caffeine, no internet and an ultrasound.

I baked an apple pie when I got back, brewed some blessed coffee, wound it all down. An unusual experience for me, it's been nice. Perhaps I can get a post in today, likely not.

Be well, Left Coasters, we shall see what happens.