Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

I was just reading Susie Madrak (of Suburban Guerrilla) on how the New York State Insurance Department is looking into charges that Cigna Corp. mislabeled $5 billion in health care premiums in reports to state regulators, thus making its "medical-loss ratio," the percentage of premiums actually paid out in claims, look bigger than it actually is.

And that phrase hit me for, I have to admit, the first time: "medical-loss ratio." Not "medical-expense ratio" or "medical-cost ratio" or "medical-claim ratio," but "medical-loss ratio." The insurance companies regard the money they pay out as a result of you giving them your hard-earned money in premiums as a "loss." Not a cost, a loss. By definition, every time they pay a claim, their attitude is "We're losing money on you!"

No wonder they try so hard to deny claims: They think that every premium dollar that comes in should be theirs to keep by right.

Labels: corporations, health care, human rights

Don Durito, my blogger colleague at Notes from Underground, informs one and all that November 5 is the anniversary of the birthday of Eugene V. Debs.

You can celebrate the occasion by checking out an archive of his works (thanks, DD) or the work of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, or maybe by just looking at some of his more memorable or significant quotes.

Or, just maybe, you'd want to take a gander at the website of the political party he helped found over 100 years ago.

Labels: activism, democratic socialism, history, personal, resistance

You all know about the deeply upsetting loss on Maine's Question 1. It hurt and I mean that literally: I had had a knot in my stomach from early on and there was a genuine pain when I heard the final result. The pain has subsided by the upset remains and the same question keeps running through my head:

What is wrong with these people?

The ads run by the anti-justice people in Maine were the same, literally word-for-word the same, as the ads they ran in California on Question 8. How many times are people going to get fooled by the same fucking lies, the same fucking fear-mongering, the same fucking distortions, deceptions, deviousness, the same ... the same ... the same fucking lies before they realize they are being played for rubes by a bunch of crackpot reactionaries whose sanctimonious invocation of the "sanctity" of marriage is merely a smokescreen for their bigotry?

But, oh, didn't we hear that oil being poured on thick? "This isn't about hating anyone," they crooned, "it's about protecting our families!" Protecting them? From what? From the possibility that two men or two women could actually love each other and want to declare that bond in the way society has chosen to recognize it for others?

Protect them from what? From the knowledge that gays and lesbians are pretty much just like them, with the same sorts of hopes and fears and the same desire to have a stable household with someone they love, with the same desire to be treated with dignity and respect and not be singled out as somehow alien or "other?"

Protect them from what? From discovering by the experience of day-to-day observation that same-sex marriage does not damage, degrade, or devalue their own marriages?

I suppose you can call it progress that the bigots had to plaster smarmy smiles on their faces in order to hide their fangs, that they couldn't just come out and say "kill the queers," that, in fact, the fight against same-sex marriage is a rear-guard action by a retreating enemy, but it is bigotry nonetheless. Wrapping it up in the rubric of "protecting families" and hiding it behind phantasmagorical terrifying images of 3rd graders being forced to watch gay sex instruction videos does not reduce the bigotry, it amplifies it.

Oh, but wait! I can't say that! No, no, no! Because, according to some, saying things like that makes me a bigot! I am "intolerant of their views!" In the eyes of some, consisting mostly, I have found, of those particularly desperate to avoid facing their own biases, bigotry is not the only bigotry - objecting to bigotry is bigotry!

Well, I call bullshit. Compete and thorough bullshit. In fact, not even firm, formed, bullshit but floppy, wet, mucusy, particularly-stinky bullshit.

We are not the bigots. They are. Not just the open homophobes, not just the lunatic paranoids like Fred Phelps with his positively creepy obsession with the word "fag," but those who would deny their fellow citizens full equality under the law - and I mean full, not this "separate but equal" crap that not only ices same-sex couples out of the federal benefits of marriage but persists in labeling them as "other" - because they feel icky about how those fellow citizens like to have sex.

So no, don't bother trying to hand me any of that "You're the real bigot!" nonsense. Get this straight, you whiny-ass chowderheads:

Bigotry is bigotry. Objecting to it is not.

Intolerance is intolerance. Objecting to it is not.

Homophobia is bigotry and intolerance. Just as racism is bigotry and intolerance and sexism is bigotry and intolerance and anti-Semitism is bigotry and intolerance and the myriad other forms of religious, ethnic, and personal discrimination to which we are too often heir are bigotry and intolerance. Objecting to them is not.

Yes, I know you're scared. I know you're confused. I know it's disorienting to be told that things you were brought up to believe about "right" and "wrong," about "natural" and "unnatural," won't hold. I know it can be overwhelming to feel the world changing in ways you don't fully understand. But that doesn't alter the fact that denying your neighbors and fellow citizens equal rights because they are not like you, judging people on fears rather than facts, is bigotry.

So yes, if you oppose same-sex marriage, which now is the only way for same-sex couples to have equal rights, you are a bigot.

And those who call you on it - at least in this case - are not.

Labels: gay rights, human rights, personal, prejudice, social justice

In what a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor called "a stunning victory," just two days after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that US courts can't challenge the White House on "security" matters, a court in Italy has convicted 23 American CIA agents of kidnapping in a case involving "extraordinary rendition." The BBC reports that two Italian secret agents were also found guilty as accomplices.

The Americans were convicted in abstentia because the US refused to extradite them.

The Center for Constitutional Rights noted rather bitterly that "Rendition victims can get justice in Italy and Canada but not in the US" and that "Our global reputation as a country of laws continues to suffer under the Obama administration" as Obama continues to endorse Bush administration stances.

The Italian case arises out of the seizure of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar. Italian prosecutors

told the court he had been kidnapped in daylight on a Milan street in February 2003 and flown to Germany, and then Cairo, where he was held for years until being released without charge [in 2007].

Nasr told Human Rights Watch that while imprisoned in Egypt "I was hung up like a slaughtered sheep and given electric shocks" and prosecutors charged that he was tortured with electric shocks, beatings, rape threats and genital abuse.

Sentences in the case ranged from five to eight years plus requiring payment of 1.5 million Euros (about $2 million) to Nasr and his wife. Charges against three other Americans and five other Italians had been dropped on grounds of diplomatic immunity and - dammit, every victory is tarnished somehow - "state secrecy rules."

Labels: Constitutional rights, Europe, international, law, torture

Okay. We've got a case here that Obama had nothing to do with, at least not in any direct way. Both the conduct and the legal briefs involved came before he was president. It involves Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized at JFK Airport in 2002 while waiting to change planes as he returned home to Canada after a vacation. As I wrote when I first mentioned the case in November 2003, he

was snatched by INS agents, questioned, held incommunicado for nearly two weeks, and then deported - to Syria. All based on "evidence" from what Tom Ridge called the "international intelligence community," evidence which of course neither Arar nor anyone else working on his behalf has ever been allowed to see.

After a year in captivity in Syria during which time he was tortured and held in solitary confinement for 10 months, on October 5 he was released to Canada. No charges are filed and the Canadian government says it has no information that would have justified his detention.

When Canada launched an investigation into the incident, both Syria and the US refused to cooperate. In fact, Scott Horton recently wrote in Harper's,

[t]he United States tenaciously refused to acknowledge ever having made any mistakes - even after its own sources did so. It stonewalled Congressional probes and issued a travel ban to stop Arar from testifying before Congress.

However, the Canadian government proceeded with the inquest, as a result of which, Glenn Greenwald noted on Tuesday,

[i]n January, 2007, the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar for the role Canada played in these events, and the Canadian government paid him $9 million [US, $11.5 million Canadian,] in compensation. That was preceded by a full investigation by Canadian authorities and the public disclosure of a detailed report which concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada."

Meanwhile, Arar, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, sued the US government over the policy of extraordinary rendition. That case, Arar v. Ashcroft, brings us to the point here. (The CCR's site about the case, including background, timeline, and links to filed briefs, is here.)

The government had - of course - insisted the case be dismissed on "national security" and "state secrets" grounds with which the courts had no business interfering. Government lawyers even insisted at one point that foreign citizens merely passing through American airports have almost no rights. That even if they never attempt or even intend to enter the US, they still have to show that they could do so if they desired. If they can't, they can be seized and have no constitutional or legal rights. They can be detained without charge, denied the right to consult a lawyer, and even refused necessities such as food and sleep. And that would remain true, the government insisted, even if they are imprisoned in the US - because, the government claimed, they still would not have "entered" the country.

On Monday, the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the government's "national security" claims.

Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing[, Greenwald wrote]. ...

[But y]esterday, the Second Circuit - by a vote of 7-4 - agreed with the government and dismissed Arar's case in its entirety. It held that even if the government violated Arar's Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him. Why? Because "providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns." In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context - even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured - and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

In different other words, "Don't bother me," "It's not my job," and "I don't wanna get involved."

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary[, Greenwald continues,] the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them. Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have.

Greenwald, who notes how the case reflects "how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war," refers to Horton's analysis of the case and its telling last line:

The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the “enemies of all mankind” now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.

Footnote: Greenwald appends a description of what was done to Arar in Syria, provided by one of the dissenting judges. Read it while imagining the majority of the Court washing their hands.

Labels: Constitutional rights, foreign policy, free speech, human rights, international, law, loss of freedom, secrecy, social justice, torture

No, it isn't. He certainly - to be more exact, his DOJ - does bear a significant portion of the blame, but not all of it. To illustrate once:

Back in May, the Obama administration did a good thing by deciding not to appeal a Second Circuit Appeals Court decision from 2008 that struck down part of the Traitor - excuse me, "Patriot" - Act as unconstitutional.

The case involved a suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of an ISP that had been served a so-called "national security letter," or NSL, demanding information and which contained a gag order requiring the ISP to keep the matter secret, including even saying it had received such a letter - which is why the suit, which challenges the gag order, was filed under seal and is known as Doe v. Holder.

The lack of an appeal meant the case went back to District Court, where the government had to justify the gag order. Which it did, in June - in a secret submission that even the ACLU lawyers in the case were not allowed to see. An unclassified "summary" was prepared, but most of the evidence used to justify the gag order remains secret.

So maybe it's no surprise that just over two weeks ago the District Court upheld the gag order, ruling that the DOJ can continue to order the ISP (and as its lawyers, the ACLU) to keep silent even about its identity.

What makes this even more bizarre, if there can be something more bizarre than NSLs themselves, which amount to secret, extra-judicial warrants issued without even a facade of court oversight, is that the original NSL in the case was issued longer than five years ago and the government gave up trying to get the information in question over two years ago.

So a dead case has a live gag order on a secret party based on a secret warrant justified by a secret filing. Land of the free.

Oh, wait! The District Court is who I was pissed at here, but let's not forget, the decision was based on a secret filing from the Obama DOJ in June. So yeah, to a significant degree, this one is Obama's fault.

Hang on, I can do better.

Labels: ACLU, Constitutional rights, free speech, human rights, Obama, secrecy

At some point along these past few posts, someone is going to say (or at least think), "Oh, so I suppose you would rather have John McCain as president, huh? Huh?"

To those people, I say: If he was, at least you would be complaining about crap like this!

(Along with Afghanistan, drone attacks in Pakistan, the Middle East, and some other matters I've neglected of late.)

Labels: Afghanistan, Asia, blog stuff, international, Middle East, militarism, military weapons, personal

Oh, the bad old days when everyone was so upset with the ridiculous, error-riddled, intrusive, police-state-like "terrorst watch lists." But now that President Hopey-Changey is in office, that's all behind us, right?

Uh, not so much. From Sunday's Washington Post:

Newly released FBI data offer evidence of the broad scope and complexity of the nation's terrorist watch list, documenting a daily flood of names nominated for inclusion to the controversial list.

During the 12 months from April 2008 through March 2009, intelligence agencies proposed, on average, 1600 names a day be added to the list based on "reasonable suspicion." The FBI said that the additions may not be new people but "an alias or name variant for a previously watchlisted person." Even so, the ever-expanding list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million total entries. That's something like six and a-half times the number on the list in June 2004.

Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI needed initial information that a person or group was engaged in wrongdoing before it could open a preliminary investigation.

Under current practice, no such information is needed. That led [Sen. Russ] Feingold to ask how many "assessments" had been initiated and how many had led to investigations since new guidelines were put into effect in December 2008. The FBI said the answer was "sensitive" and would be provided only in classified form.

In other words, none of the public's fucking business. However,

Feingold was given brief descriptions of the types of assessments that can be undertaken: The inquiries can be opened by individual agents "proactively," meaning on his or her own or in response to a lead about a threat. Other assessments are undertaken to identify or gather information about potential targets or terrorists, to gather information to aid intelligence gathering and related to matters of foreign intelligence interest.

So you can get on the list for pretty much any damn reason at all, including some individual FBI agent thinking you're "some kinda radical." I suppose it could be worse, though:

Feingold pointed to a November 2008 Justice Department inspector general audit showing that in 2006, approximately 219,000 tips from the public led to the FBI's determination that there were 2,800 counterterrorism threats and suspicious incidents that year.

That is, more than 98.7% of such tips involved - nothing. Not even up to the level of "suspicious." But we're not paranoid, we haven't been driven to suspect strangers who "look funny" or even neighbors or co-workers who say the wrong thing, oh, no. Not at all.

One other thing:

Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government's "no fly" list.

Which means, unless that's a misprint or a misunderstanding (and as of Wednesday afternoon there is no correction to the online article), that 91% of those on the no-fly list are in addition to the "400,000 unique names" involved here.

Footnote, Actually It Could Be Worse Div.: The Daily Censored, a website of Project Censored, has a rundown of recent news chronicling the disturbing, even frightening, growth of the police state apparatus of the UK, including parents needing criminal background checks to supervise their own children in a public park; a nationwide tracking system of cars owned by people who have participated in demonstrations; allowing "town hall officials and civilian investigators" employed by government agencies the powers to "search homes, seize cash, freeze bank accounts and confiscate property" of minor offenders like fare dodgers; deliberately ignoring European court decisions against maintaining DNA databases of innocent people; a 1700% increase in spending on surveillance to include "giv[ing] officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen" even though such information is inadmissible in court; and - and this is the one that got me - a new internet "game" with players "scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers," with monthly cash prizes for those who "catch the most criminals."

I used to really like traveling to the UK - I've been there seven or eight times - but now, even apart from the creepiness involved in flying anywhere and even though as a tourist who would only be there for a couple of weeks it would be extremely unlikely for any of this to affect me personally, the UK is increasingly becoming a place I just would not care to go.

Labels: Constitutional rights, Europe, international, law, loss of freedom, privacy, secrecy, social justice

Subtitled "There, I've Said It Again." In fact, I've said it, by actual count, in 15 different posts since March: In it's approach to presidential powers and secrecy in so-called "national security" (or anything that they can so label) matter, the Obama administration is all but indistinguishable from the Shrub gang.

In fact, the day after the election, I said that I suspected one reason for Obama's disgraceful flip-flop on FISA was that he began to contemplate having those same powers himself. In March, I wrote "Is it too soon [to say that Obama is embracing Bush policies]? Nah, it's not. No way." The months since have given me no reason to amend that judgment. Glenn Greenwald brings just the latest example.

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the "state secrets" privilege - which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) - to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government's domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday - just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead - as predicted - the DOJ continues to embrace the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration - which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned - and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

The case is Shubert v. Obama, originally Shubert v. Bush, in which the plaintiffs charge that the Bush administration engaged in a massive and illegal "dragnet" surveillance of Americans, one that continues to this day. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is acting as lead counsel.

The lawsuit's central allegation is that the officials responsible for this program violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA and can be held accountable under the law for those illegal actions.

In response, the Obama crowd invoked the bogus "state secrets privilege," arguing that the case must be thrown out without a hearing because allowing it to proceed would "require" the government to reveal "highly classified NSA sources and methods." The word "must" - as opposed to "should" - was chosen deliberately to reflect to White House's position, because

[a]ccording to the Obama administration, what were once leading examples of Bush's lawlessness and contempt for the Constitution - namely, his illegal, warrantless domestic spying programs - are now vital "state secrets" in America's War on Terror, such that courts are prohibited even from considering whether the Government was engaging in crimes when spying on Americans.

The Obama administration is arguing, in essence, that on "national security," the president is above the law - just as the Shrub gang did. That the president can order any conduct, no matter how outrageously and blatantly illegal, and be able to avoid any possible consequences or even examination simply by waving the "secrecy" banner. That is what Obama is advocating. There is no way around this.

The EFF noted that in making the claim, the administration

demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called 'state secrets' privilege. ...

EFF was skeptical when the Obama Administration announced in September its new policy on when the Executive Branch would assert the state secrets privilege in litigation. We argued that the Administration's promise of self-restraint was no replacement for Congressional reform of the oft-abused privilege, considering how the new administration had already embraced the Bush Administration's position on warrantless wiretapping and secrecy.... Based on that experience, we feared that the purported change in policy would result in no change at all when it came to lawsuits over the NSA spying program.

Our fears proved to be well-founded....

Greenwald pointed out how none of the excuses previously offered by the Obamabots can fly any longer. First, this was not something done by a Shrub holdover: AttGen Eric Holder said on Friday that he approved of the asserion of the privilege.

Alternatively, it was often claimed that Obama was only asserting these Bush-replicating theories because he secretly hoped to lose in court and thus magnanimously gift us with good precedent - but the Obama administration has repeatedly lost in court on these theories and then engaged in extraordinary efforts to destroy those good precedents, including by inducing the full appellate court to vacate the decisions or even threatening to defy the court orders compelling disclosure.

A president who is above the law when it comes to "national security." That is what Barack Obama is advocating.

Footnote: In case you're still wondering, two leftover items from September should help put those doubts to rest. The first from September 22:

"There is growing concern that [the] Bagram [detention center in Afghanistan] has become the new Guantánamo – except with hundreds more prisoners, held indefinitely in reportedly harsher conditions, with no access to lawyers or courts," said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, in a media advisory. "Yet the public is still in the dark when it comes to basic facts such as whom our military is holding there, for how long and on what grounds, and the rules that govern their detention, release and treatment. As long as the Bagram prison is shrouded in secrecy, there is no way to know the truth or begin to address the problems that may exist."

So after months of being denied the information, the ACLU has sued the DOD, the DOJ, the State Dept., and the CIA to obtain records on those prisoners.

As a sort of Footnote to the Footnote, back in April, US District Judge John Bates ruled that those prisoners should be provided habeas corpus rights, that is, the right to challenge their detention in a US court - rights which prisoners at Gitmo had obtained. The Obama crowd's answer came on September 15: It filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals in Washington, seeking to have the ruling overturned and claiming what applied to Guantánamo does not apply to Bagram.

The other item is from September 24, when the administration announced it would not seek new legislation authorizing the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects being held without charges at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - because it decided it didn't need it. The post-9/11 resolution authorizing the use of force against "those nations, organizations, or persons" involved in 9/11 gave the administration all the authority it needs, the White House said.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

This was despite Obama having said in May that he would not "decide alone" on the matter. Now it's that his pledge to "work with Congress" doesn't mean legislating, it means "consulting" - or, as it's better known, telling a handful of committee chairs "This is what we're going to do."

Labels: ACLU, Afghanistan, Constitutional rights, EFF, human rights, law, military prisons, Obama, secrecy

Last Wednesday, the same day that Barack "Some stuff I do is good and some stuff is really, really crap" Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, he also signed a "Homeland Security," i.e., Defense of the Fatherland, spending bill which effectively blocks the release of photos of the abuse of prisoners in US custody abroad.

The ACLU said in a statement that

[t]he amendment, which would allow the DOD to exempt photos from the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), is aimed at photos ordered released by a federal appeals court as part of an American Civil Liberties Union FOIA lawsuit for photos and other records related to detainee abuse in U.S. custody overseas....

Obama initially agreed to release the photos in response to the appeals court ruling. But the military high command and the right wing raised a ruckus, arguing that release of the photos would endanger US troops - apparently under the theory that it's that photographs rather than the actual torture which generates the anger.

At issue are 21 photos of detainees in US custody that the Department of Defense has been fighting tooth and nail from releasing. ...

Major General Antonio Taguba, the author of a report on allegations of detainee abuse in U.S. prisons in Iraq, said that photos exist depicting the following:

–An American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.
–A male translator apparently raping a male detainee.
–A female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Other photographs depict sexual assaults on prisoners with a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, according to Taguba.

The ACLU urged DOD Ubermeister Robert Gates to decline to use his new-found authority to conceal evidence of "misconduct" - that is, torture, rape, and other brutalities - but I suspect that is just a formality of argument as I don't believe for an instant that the ACLU thinks that the same administration which has fought it every step of the way will suddenly do the right thing.

One important sidebar is that the court ruling compelling release of the photos still stands, but enforcement was delayed to allow time for the adminsitration to appeal to the Supreme Court, an appeal which is now pending. If SCOTUS either declines to accept the appeal or hears it an upholds the appeals court, the photos could still come out, the new law notwithstanding.

Footnote, It Can't Be All Bad News Div.: The Defense of the Fatherland bill also allows Guantanamo Bay prisoners to be moved to the US for trial, bypassing the illegal and absurd military commissions. And in a related matter, on Monday the ACLU obtained additional documents on the Shrub gang's torture program. With the help of the courts, the group has over time pried hundreds of such documents out of the Executive Branch.

Labels: ACLU, Constitutional rights, Democrats, foreign policy, human rights, international, militarism, Obama, social justice, torture

According to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Huh?), the healthcare reform bills before Congress threaten the existence of the two-party system. In an interview with the reliably wacko CNSNews.com, whose corporate slogan is "You think Fox News is nuts? Hah!" Hatch claimed that health reform is a "step-by-step approach to socialized medicine" that will lead to Americans being dependent on Democrats for their health and other issues.

"And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, 'All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party,'" Hatch said....

Which amounts to an admission that Americans cannot look to GOPpers to address critical needs but I doubt meeting needs is what Hatch is concerned with.

Meanwhile, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Non Compos Mentis), claimed on the floor of the House that health care reform is a bigger threat than a terrorist attack, calling the bill the source of "the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom."

"I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country," she added.

Just the idea, merely a nod in the direction, of providing access to health care to just some of those who lack it - which is all the bill would actually do - just the notion of saving the lives of some of the tens of thousands who die every year for lack of such access, is more than these people can handle; the passage of such a plan, they say, is worse than a terrorist attack and a threat to the political system. Which tells us a great deal about them and about the America in which they would wish to live.

Labels: health care, human rights, right-wing foolishness

Sort of a Footnote to the preceding.

White House senior advisor David Axelrod, appearing on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, repeated the long-running White House gibberish on health care reform, telling Bob Schieffer that Obama believes a public option is "valuable," but said "I'm not going to deal with" the question of it he would sign a bill that lacked it.

It's one thing to be open to negotiation. It's quite another to be unable to stake out an actual position to negotiate from.

Meanwhile, another Obama surrogate was very clear on another point related to health care reform, how to pay for it.

"The president has been clear - he does not want to impose a tax on the middle class," senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett told ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

So the Obama crowd is capable of expressing clear desires on what should (or should not) be in a final bill. So long as it's a really, really, politically safe desire.

Just a couple of days ago, I sent this message to the White House:

Mr. President, it is time - indeed, it is well past time - for you to stop just referring to what you would "prefer" or "think is best" in a health care reform bill and step directly into the field of battle.

It is time - indeed, it is well past time - for you to lead instead of playing "duck and cover," more interested in not losing than in actual winning.

It is time - indeed, it is well past time - for you to expel the dybbuk of a dead bipartisanship.

It is time - indeed, it is well past time - for you to declare, firmly and clearly, that a strong public option must be part of a final bill and a bogus "trigger" must not be.

That is, it is time - indeed, it is well past time - for principle and for people, and for you to prove you are more president than politician.

Two months ago, I said that what health care reform needed from Barack Obama was "a little less Dalai Lama and a lot more LBJ." We haven't gotten it.

The hard fact is, we will get a health care bill - the absence of the word "reform" is deliberate - this session of Congress. It increasingly looks like it will be a bill that will require people to buy insurance, will put no restrictions on the insurance industry (which is more than happy to do away with pre-existing condition exclusions for the sake of getting tens of millions of new customers) but will instead provide the industry billions in indirect taxpayer subsidies through subsidized premiums, provide no meaningful competition, create a "public option" not worth having, undermine state-level drives for single-payer, set back real reform by at least a decade, and 10 years from now will still leave 18 million uninsured and an unknown additional number underinsured, all of them without access to adequate health care.

And to a significant extent, that will be Barack Obama's fault.

Footnote: Just a quick note to say this is worth a look - and, as usual, some of the comments are really just depressing.

Labels: corporations, Democrats, health care, human rights, Obama

Updated All the recent attention on health care issues has been given to the Senate, where the argument centered almost exclusively on whether or not a "public option" - some kind of public option, any kind of public option - would be part of the bill to be brought to the floor. The idea was, as I said myself just the other day, having the provision in there

sharply increases the chances of it being in what the Senate ultimately passes, which in turn clearly increases the chances of a decent public option being part of whatever final bill comes out of a Senate-House conference.

Underlying that idea was another one, that the House bill would be clearly better than the Senate bill.

Well, that last idea still holds true - but the gap is shrinking as the House bill worsens.

First, the House Democratic leadership stripped out of the bill a provision that said that rates for insurance obtained through the public option would be based on Medicare plus 5%, and replaced it with one where the government would negotiate rates with doctors and hospitals, as private companies do - thus guaranteeing that premiums will be higher than they otherwise would. That gives away one of the advantages for consumers in the whole plan while propping up the health care industry and particularly the insurance companies, who will not face any actual competition.

Even beyond that, it will likely make public option insurance more expensive than private insurance. As Miles Mogulescu, writing at Huffington Post, explains, big insurance companies can get volume discounts from providers because of the size of their subscriber base.

But without the ability to tie pricing to Medicare rates, the public option will have no ability to negotiate volume discounts. It will start out with no subscribers. ... [P]roviders will have no incentive to give volume discounts to the public option, which will end up paying more than large private insurers. This in turn will make the public option more expensive than private insurance. As a result, it will sign up few subscribers. With few subscribers, it will be continue to be unable to negotiate volume discounts.

And so on.

As a result, when the Congressional Budget Office first evaluated the Senate negotiated-rate public option plan, the CBO concluded that it would end up with no subscribers. ... [T]he CBO is now projecting that by 2019, approximately 6 million Americans would be enrolled in the negotiated-rate House public plan. The CBO also projects that "a public plan paying negotiated rates would ... typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for private plans."

Mogulescu describes it as being like "a brand new Mom and Pop store trying to compete with WalMart" and charges, as others have, that it is "a public option designed to fail." Considering that 10 years from now it would reach only a little over 10% of the currently uninsured and that it is intended to be unavailable to those who can get insurance through an employer (no matter how sucky that coverage is) and provide zilch in the way of competition, while still leaving, by CBO projections, 18 million uninsured (plus who knows how many underinsured), it's hard to argue with that conclusion.

And it seems to confirm what I said nearly five months ago, that the public option

increasingly looks like it will be consciously designed to be no better than existing private plans - in which case, exactly what is the point?

But remember, that was just the first. The second tells you just who is running things:

House Democratic leaders quietly stripped a single-payer provision from the House version of the healthcare overhaul Thursday. The measure would have allowed states to set up their own state-run healthcare systems, where local governments would have become de facto health insurers for residents.

That is, it specifically empowered states to set up their own single-payer plans. It was proposed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich and was added to the bill by a bipartisan 27-19 vote in the Education and Labor Committee. The majority was a combination of progressives who support single-payer and conservatives who support states' rights.

Significantly, according to Consortium News (via Corrente),

President Obama told the committee chairman, George Miller, to oppose Kucinich's amendment, and he did so, leading off the voting with a resounding "No." But the Democrats voted 14 to 14 with one member passing and two failing to vote. And the Republicans voted 13 to 5 with one member failing to vote.

And now it's gone. Because somebody - gee, I wonder who that could be - is so against single-payer that they want to, ahem, insure that it can't even be tried, even voluntarily, even by a single state.

According to News Junkie Post, as quoted by Raw Story, Kucinich was "livid" when he learned the amendment had been removed.

Kucinich’s amendment passed the House Labor and Education Committee in July. "No one gave me any rational reason," Kucinich said. "I can only assume the insurance company interests brought pressure to take it out. Otherwise I would have heard from someone."

Appearing on MSNBC's The Ed Show on Friday, Kucinich basically called the bill a sham and "a bailout for insurance companies." He pointed to section of the bill which says, quoting the bill as read on the show by Kucinich, "that rates shall be set at a level that does not exceed 125 percent of the prevailing standard rate for comparable coverage in the individual market." That is, it allows for an immediate 25% rate increase in premiums.



Referring to his amendment, Kucinich said in a statement:

If a state wants better health care than can be provided by the federal government in the health care bill we are seeing today, the federal government should not stand in their way. ... The removal of the Kucinich amendment constitutes yet another capitulation to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries who are already reaping billions of dollars from the bill.

Third and finally (for now), the Progressive Caucus, obviously unhappy with what's happening, is staking out some positions it wants adopted via Manager's Amendments. In what TPM called a "curt, terse letter," caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva laid them out:

- The public option must be available without triggers or opt-outs.
- If rates are to be negotiated, a ceiling will be set.
- The health and medical malpractice insurance industries must lose their antitrust exemption.

He also said he wanted an up-or-down vote on tying reimbursement rates to Medicare plus 5% - but Nancy "I gotta please the Blue Dogs but stomp on progressives" Pelosi has made it pretty clear she doesn't want that to come up. If she really doesn't have the votes for it, then I don't see what the problem with an up-or-down vote is - unless the brave, bold, Dimcrats are just afraid of being seen voting no. Or wait - maybe it's that some of them, enough of them, are afraid of being compelled by logic and back home support to vote yes even as their insurance industry overlords look on. Yes, that could be it.

Footnote: House GOPpers, at the last minute, say they intend to offer their own plan.

John Boehner, the House's top Republican, said his party hoped to introduce one single bill with a "step-by-step approach" that would include allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines, letting people group together to buy it at lower prices and ending "junk lawsuits."

The bill will include eight or nine healthcare ideas that have already been introduced separately, he said on CNN's "State of the Nation."

So it's just an amalgamation of the same old crap of undermining the ability of states to require more than lowest-common denominator coverage, ineffectual co-ops, and "tort reform" to protect corporations and the powerful against responsibility for the damage they cause to individuals.

Boehner, whose name I still give the more fitting pronunciation, said the GOPper plan wouldn't try to cover all the uninsured but said "We will cover millions more" while refusing to give an exact number. Well, now, either they ran the numbers or they didn't. If they did, he should have been able to offer something better than the incredibly vague "millions." If they didn't, then he was just freaking making it up.

Updated to add my quote from five months ago.

Labels: corporations, Democrats, health care, human rights, right-wing foolishness

Well, according to the money boys, the economists, the US economy is growing again.

The long-awaited ray of good news came from the Commerce Department, which announced Thursday that the U.S. economy grew a modest 3.5 percent in the third quarter of this year - the fastest pace in two years

and one above most projections.

Ain't that nice. Or it will be. Maybe. At some point in the future. Possibly.

"We're no longer simply on the roller coaster to hell," says Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics consulting firm. "But the idea of returning back to normal growth levels? That will be well into next year."

Unemployment is expected to continue growing over the next several months, peaking at over 10 percent. Consumer confidence is still dropping, and new home sales fell unexpectedly last month.

Confidence is not the only thing of consumers that is dropping, spending is as well. According to the Commerce Department, it dropped 0.5% in September, the first drop in five months and the biggest decline in nine. In fact, these is real reason to believe that it was only the Cash for Clunkers program that had been propping up spending - and when it ended, so did a lot of the spending.

Meanwhile, incomes were flat, falling 0.2% in September after gaining 0.2% in August, with the weakness of the labor market giving companies a means to hold down or reject wage or benefit increases. As a direct result,

[t]he Labor Department said Friday that the cost of wages, health care and other benefits increased by 1.5 percent in the year ending in September, the smallest increase since such records began in June 1982.

That's down from a 2.9 percent rise in the 12 months ending in September 2008....

What's more, even the GDP increase may not be all it seems.

[Gus] Faucher[, the director of macroeconomics at Moody's Economy.com.] notes that much of the jump in gross domestic product last quarter can be traced to the Obama administration's stimulus spending. This suggests that the underlying economy might be bouncing back more slowly than the 3.5 percent growth figure might indicate.

And which also, let's be sure to note, demonstrates the value of government intervention in the economy. Still,

[e]conomists worry that the recovery could falter in coming months if households cut back on spending to cope with rising unemployment, heavy debt loads and tight credit conditions

and there are predictions

that consumer spending will slow sharply in the current quarter, lowering GDP growth to perhaps 1.5 percent. Analysts said the risk of a double-dip recession cannot be ruled out over the next year.

And that may not even be the worst of it.

Job growth could be a bigger problem. Even in typical recessions, rebounds in employment lag behind GDP growth. But the gap could be even larger this time. ...

[B]eyond the 9.8 percent unemployment rate, there are also record numbers of underemployed Americans - those working part-time but seeking full-time work. When companies need to boost their output, they will likely boost the hours of those part-time workers before hiring new ones.

"We have more of these part-timers we have to burn through before we can start hiring than ever before in history," Luskin says. "The people who are really hurting - the ones who are working zero days a week - are actually last in line to get relief."

Just how bad is it?

[Ron] Blackwell[, the chief economist at the AFL-CIO,] said there is less risk of wage deflation than there had been six months ago because compensation appears to have stabilized at these low levels.

"The door to second Great Depression would [open] if we had falling incomes in real [adjusted for inflation] terms," Blackwell said. Consumers would be crushed by their high debt levels, he said.

So we're less likely to have a second Great Depression. That, friends, is the good news.

Labels: corporations, economics, labor, social justice

Updated This year, 2009, has been the worst year for bank failures since 1992. The total so far this year is 115, including nine seized on Friday. That was

the most in a single day since the financial crisis began and the latest stark sign that substantial parts of the nation's banking industry are being crippled by bad loans. ...

More lenders are expected to go under this year as the industry tries to get a handle on commercial real estate loans that will continue to worsen, as more strip malls go vacant and residential developments stall.

In other words, it ain't nearly over.

The assets of the banks closed on Friday were acquired by US Bancorp, which has been aggressively buying up failed banks.

"This transaction is consistent with the growth strategy that we have outlined many times in the past, which includes enhancing our existing franchise through low-risk, in-market acquisitions," said Rick Hartnack, vice chairman of consumer banking for U.S. Bancorp.

Thus does "too big to fail" get even bigger, an unhappy fact which gains extra relevance in light of Thursday's testimony to the House Financial Service Committee about proposed "financial reform" legislation by Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, an advance copy of which was obtained by the Campaign for America's Future.

The discussion draft appears to take the most problematic and unpopular aspects of the TARP and makes them the model for permanent legislation[, Trumka testified]. ...

The discussion draft would appear to give power to the Federal Reserve to preempt a wide range of rules regulating the capital markets - power which could be used to gut investor and consumer protections.

The problem is two-fold. First, as the CAF explains, the proposal would give the Federal Reserve authority to decide on its own which financial institutions are bailed out in a crisis rather than it being one of a few agencies which together make that decision. The thing is, the Fed regulates bank holding companies, including the parent companies of the nation's largest banks. But while regulatory authority rests with the Fed's Board of Governors, responsibility for oversight has been delegated to the regional Federal Reserve Banks - and those banks are controlled by their member banks, whose holding companies the Fed regulates. Those member banks pick the majority of the members of the boards of the regional banks, which in turn select the presidents of the regional banks, who are in essence the boss of the regulatory staff.

In other words, turning the decision about bailouts over to the Fed amounts to turning it over to the banks themselves. The second problem is what happens when a bailout takes place.

We are also[, Trumka said,] deeply troubled by provisions in the discussion that would allow the Federal Reserve to use taxpayer funds to rescue failing banks, and then bill other non-failing banks for the costs.

Which would make everything a win-win for any bank or financial institution deemed "too big to fail." In fact, it positively encourages them to renew (or continue) the riskiest sorts of behavior of the type that nearly brought the entire economy down in a smoking ruin just one year ago. The riskier the investment, the bigger the payout if it succeeds. But if it fails, then under this plan other banks, healthy banks, the ones who proceeded safely, are the ones who would bear the cost of the loss, not the giant playing long shots with other people's money.

There is another important point here, one raised by Prof. David Moss of the Harvard Business School, which is

the explicit requirement in the bill that the identification of systemically dangerous financial firms by federal regulators remain entirely secret, and never be revealed to the public.

(Via Corrente.)

The bill says there will be “no public list of identified companies,” which means there is supposed to be no way for the public to know what financial institutions have been identified by federal regulators as "systematically dangerous," that is, which are in danger of failing. Even regulators' reports to Congress are supposed to be confidential. This clearly protects the banks, but how it protects the public is a mystery.

Rep. Brad Sherman calls the proposed bill "TARP on steroids," arguing

that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program at least had a cap on spending, an expiration date, congressional approval, independent oversight and some executive pay limits for the banks on the receiving end of the taxpayers’ largesse,

none of which safeguards are in the current proposal, which by its lack of limitations would also allow for the Fed bailing out banks into the trillions of dollars without Congressional approval or involvement and without even informing the public.

In short, it simply increases the power of the powerful. "They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Reform, reform,' they say, when there is no reform."

Footnote: There is an alternative, one sufficiently middle-of-the-road that even Paul Volcker has endorsed it: Reinstating the authority under the Glass-Steagall Act (or something like it) to separate investment banking from commercial banking, a wall that existed from 1933 to 1999.

Writing at the Huffington Post last May, Sam Stein remembered some of the senators and economists who "got it right" during the debate over the move to dismantle that wall, with several warnings about banks becoming "too big to fail." As one economist put it, "nobody will be able to discipline a Citigroup" once the legislation passed.

And, stroking my own ego, in March 1991, facing an earlier attempt by Shrub Sr. to dismantle Glass-Steagall (which failed; we had to wait for a "liberal Democrat" president to sign it), I wrote in the print version of Lotus that

[i]f the bill passes, big banks will get bigger and start dealing in stocks, mutual funds, and insurance - while brokerage and insurance houses ... will start running their own banks. ... Not only does this raise obvious threats of an even greater concentration of wealth than already exists, but ... allowing, indeed encouraging, an already-shaky industry to engage in potentially wildly-speculative ventures seems dumb on its face; doing it with the experience of the $1 trillion S&L bailout staring right at us is downright stupid.

So why do it? The real answer was revealed, probably inadvertently, in a largely fawning newspaper article about the glories of the new "financial services landscape." It was headlined "Bush reform proposal will help the giants."

Precisely.

Reinstating Glass-Steagall is reasonable, workable, and its provisions for decades provided protection against the sort of self-interested stupidity among the banks and bankers that nearly took us under. Which of course means it's completely off the table.

Same as it ever was.

Updated with the issue raised by Prof. David Moss.

Labels: corporations, Democrats, economics, social justice

Greenland is melting.

Well, not exactly, the land isn't of course, just the ice that's on top of it. And of course that ice is always melting, always has been, as glaciers move oh-so-slowly to the sea, and slowfall replenishes them.

So what's the big deal? Simple: It is - or, again to be more exact, the glaciers are - melting faster than they used to.

[T]he remarkable thing about the Jakobshavn Isbrae[, the most productive glacier in the northern hemisphere, shedding 35 billion tons of ice a year] – and nearly all of Greenland’s glaciers, and most of the glaciers in the world – is how fast those outward waves are flowing now.

In 2002, the Jakobshavn Isbrae was moving at the rather brisk clip (for a glacier) of 20 meters a day. Now, it's moving 40 meters a day and dumping twice as much ice into the fjord. Another large glacier, the Hellheim glacier, accelerated from 8km a year in 2000 to 11km a year in 2005 - and the speed is still increasing.

The reason the glaciers are speeding up is simple: Greenland is getting warmer. Jacqueline McGlade, director of the European Environment Agency, says: “The amount of ice that is being lost is far more than we thought. Greenland is warming faster than the computer models predicted, and that is a worry.” The Arctic has warmed at three times the rate of the rest of the world in the past 100 years, and temperatures continue to rise. Ola Johannessen, chief of Norway’s Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre, has worked on ice for more than 30 years. He has never seen anything like the current situation. “There is no doubt that what we are seeing is the result of global warming.”

That warming is already having an impact, not only on the glaciers but on the people of Greenland as the hunting on which they depend declines: Traditional quarry of polar bears and walruses struggle against shrinking habitat and the hunting season shortens because for months the ice is no longer thick enough to reliably bear the weight of their dogsleds and skidoos.

Greenlanders are not likely to be the worst affected by warming, as what they lose in hunting they may well regain in farming. Still, it is yet another example of how global warming is having an impact right now rather than off in the future.

But what's to worry? According to all the nanny-nanny naysayers, average world temperatures are actually declining! It's global cooling!

Which of course they're not and it isn't. We knew that already, but now it's been demonstrated mathematically in an analysis of data by independent statisticians.

The analysis was conducted at the request of The Associated Press to investigate the legitimacy of talk of a cooling trend....

The statisticians, reviewing two sets of temperature data, found no trend of falling temperatures over time. ...

Statisticians say that in sizing up climate change, it's important to look at moving averages of about 10 years. They compare the average of 1999-2008 to the average of 2000-2009. In all data sets, 10-year moving averages have been higher in the last five years than in any previous years.

What gave this extra significance is that it was a type of blind analysis:

[T]he AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented.

The data was NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years plus the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

In short, the numbers say global cooling is a crock. Again, we knew that but it's always nice to have confirmation.

I found this part of the article bitterly amusing:

One prominent skeptic said that to find the cooling trend, the 30 years of satellite temperatures must be used. The satellite data tends to be cooler than the ground data. Key to that is making sure that 1998 is part of the trend, he added.

What happened within the past 10 years or so is what counts, not the overall average, contends Don Easterbrook, a Western Washington University geology professor and global warming skeptic.

In other words, to find this supposed "cooling trend," you have to use a specific set of data gathered over a specific period and then toss out most of that data and start at a specific year within that period. And ignore everything else.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a microtrend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina. ...

Grego produced three charts to show how choosing a starting date can alter perceptions. Using the skeptics' satellite data beginning in 1998, there is a "mild downward trend," he said. But doing that is "deceptive."

The trend disappears if the analysis is begun in 1997. And it trends upward if you begin in 1999, he said.

Cherry-picking of data is exactly what the nanny-nanny naysayers have been reduced to. And yet the media still treats them as if they were part of a legitimate dispute. Damn.

Labels: economics, environment, global warming, international, media, right-wing foolishness