Month: November 2011

Econ4

by tristero

Now, we’re talking, a genuine attempt to operationalize and expand upon OWS, by focusing expert attention on one of its most compelling and apt observations: the extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of a few contemporary America:

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For more info on Econ4, a group of economists who are committed to changing the way economics are understood and taught, go here for a mission statement, more information, and other information.

Your Daily Grayson marathon

by digby

Howie has posted a fabulous Thanksgiving series over on Down With Tyranny called “Today we are thankful for Alan Grayson” in five parts.

Premium Randroids

by digby

Gosh, for some reason every time some group of political elites get together to deal with the devil deficit the consensus position moves farther and farther to the right:

Though it reached no agreement, the special Congressional committee on deficit reduction built a case for major structural changes in Medicare that would limit the government’s open-ended financial commitment to the program, lawmakers and health policy experts say.

Members of both parties told the panel that Medicare should offer a fixed amount of money to each beneficiary to buy coverage from competing private plans, whose costs and benefits would be tightly regulated by the government.

Republicans have long been enamored of that idea. In the last few weeks, two of the Republican candidates for president, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have endorsed variations of it.

The idea faces opposition from many Democrats, who say it would shift costs to beneficiaries and eliminate the guarantee of affordable health insurance for older Americans. But some Democrats say that — if carefully designed, with enough protections for beneficiaries — it might work.

The idea is sometimes known as premium support, because Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government…

John C. Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, which represents consumers, employers and providers, said, “The supercommittee may have laid the groundwork for future reductions in the growth of Medicare.”

Today, however, “premium support” will add up to Paul Ryan’s vouchers. That’s all. It’s not complicated. It adds up to elderly people with less money buying sub-standard health care policies (like I have now) that basically force you to wait until you are dying before you get medical care. I’m sure it will save money. After all, many people are going to die much earlier than they otherwise would. Silver lining, I guess.

One of the New Dem experts who originally devised the term “premium support” disavowed the idea earlier this year.

Here’s the conclusion:

In brief, current proposals are not premium support as Reischauer and I used the term.In addition, I now believe that even with the protections we set forth, vouchers have serious shortcomings. Only systemic health care reform holds out real promise of slowing the growth of Medicare spending. Predicted savings from vouchers or premium support are speculative. Cost shifting to the elderly, disabled, and poor and to states is not. Medicare’s size confers power, so far largely untapped, that no private plan can match to promote the systemic change that can improve quality and reduce cost. The advantages of choice in health care relate less to choice of insurance plan than to choice of provider, which traditional Medicare now provides and which many private plans restrict as a management tool. Finally, the success of premium support depends on sustained and rigorous regulation of plan offerings and marketing that the current Congress shows no disposition to establish and maintain.

I think that last goes without saying.

“Premium support” as we know it is an obvious step to the dismantling of Medicare. There’s a reason why Paul Randroid Ryan took up the phrase and doubled down on its premises. And it has the added benefit of making the health care reforms (which need Medicare to be a government cost leverager) unworkable too. A twofer!

I think one of the major lessons from all of this is that, as predicted, the Rube Goldberg contraption of the health care reform is going to be subject to a whole lot of malicious tinkering, any piece of which could bring the whole thing down. That’s always been a weakness of such a uselessly complicated, politically restrained program run by special interests. In the grand scheme of things it may turn out to be better than nothing over the long run, but as everyone knows, in the long run we’ll all be dead. If this current wrecking crew has its way, we’ll be dead a lot sooner than we need to be.

Update:

Also too:

In their initial analysis of the Ryan Medicare plan, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined, “Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system… Under the proposal, the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the traditional program…That greater burden would require them to reduce their use of health care services, spend less on other goods and services, or save more in advance of retirement than they would under current law.” [CBO, 4/5/11]

666 alarm pepper spray

by digby

Uhm:

A woman who pepper-sprayed other shoppers Thursday night at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch had armed herself with the caustic spray to gain an advantage in the fight for merchandise at the Black Friday sale, a fire captain said.

The woman, who is still being sought, used the spray in more than one area of the Wal-Mart “to gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store,” said Los Angeles Fire Capt. James Carson.

“She was competitive shopping,” he said.

Twenty customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident. Shoppers complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats, he said.

So much for the idea that Americans are losing their religion (consumerism.)

I wonder if she’ll be charged with assault?

Speaking of Black Friday, the economist Robert Frank had a terrific piece in the New York Times yesterday about how to end this Black Friday nonsense: the 6-6-6 plan.

Update: It’s a trend!

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99.9%

by David Atkins

Paul Krugman has a great op-ed today with a reminder that it’s not just the 1% that is the problem, but the upper one tenth of one percent of Americans who constitute the biggest problem. It’s an issue that Hacker and Pierson have covered at some length, as has Matt Taibbi. The rewards of our skewed economy increase exponentially as you approach the top of the income chart.

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

All of the goodies have gone to the top one tenth of one percent:

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

And they’re not really contributing much to the economy:

Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Bottom line?

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

It’s pretty obvious, and conservatives don’t really have a good answer for these facts and figures. If we had a decent media in this country, this stuff would be all over the airwaves.

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A better turkey sandwich

by digby

Isn’t it time to make a better turkey sandwich?

To call a turkey sandwich the stuff of memories sounds far-fetched (few have waxed Proustian about a turkey club), but that’s what it is to Peruvian chef Ricardo Zarate. The chef behind Los Angeles’ Mo-Chica and Picca came to know and love the turkey sandwich not in his native Lima but while working at the Millennium hotel in London early on in his culinary career. The object of his craving: roasted turkey with fried sweet potatoes and jalapeno-cilantro aioli between two slices of buttery brioche.

“To be honest,” says Zarate, “Peruvians eat turkey only for Christmas. Christmastime it’s crazy — you know at dinner we have to have the turkey … marinated with Peruvian spices, garlic, salt, pepper, a little Pisco, soy sauce.” Now he’s inspired to make it for Thanksgiving — so he can make the sandwich he still remembers.

This week, the leftover-turkey sandwich looms especially large. According to the NationalTurkey Federation, 91% of Americans eat turkey — about 675 million pounds of it — for Thanksgiving. And much of Thursday’s bird will probably end up between a couple of pieces of bread. So, what better time to revisit the turkey sandwich?

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Happy Taserday

by digby

Another sad story in the war on the disabled:

The call came on Monday night, and it made mention of a man who had fallen off his bicycle and injured himself in a parking lot. So Officer Turner pulled up to the scene, and found Roger Anthony — a local fixture who people call “Rabbit” because he had big ears — rolling down the street on his bicycle. Turner followed Anthony in his patrol vehicle, sirens blaring, and ordered him to pull over. Anthony didn’t respond.

Williams said Turner then saw Anthony take something out his pocket and put it into his mouth. At that time, Turner got out of the car and yelled for Anthony to stop. When Anthony didn’t stop, the officer used a stun gun on him, causing him to fall off of his bike.

Anthony was taken to a hospital, where he was declared brain dead. He was taken off life support on Tuesday. According to Anthony’s sister, her brother was disabled, had frequent seizures and trouble hearing. He lived in an independent living community, and “used to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and ride his bicycle around town.” That’s what Rabbit liked to do.

This is about terrible police training that says it’s better to taser first and ask questions later, a terrible Robo-cop tactic that’s turning the streets of the nation into electroshock torture chambers for the mentally ill and disabled.

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Something to be thankful for

by David Atkins

Karoli of Crooks and Liars has a reminder of what communities of color have been dealing with for generations now:

Earlier this week, Elon James tweeted this:

“Oh? The NYPD are treating you badly? Violent for no reason? Weird.” – Black People

You can buy the T-shirt here.

You might think this is snark but it’s not. I spent some time tonight looking at police brutality in the pre-Occupy Wall Street days. You know. The stuff that doesn’t make the national news because it’s sort of icky and ugly and people don’t really want to know that in this day and age, police are still brutal. That pepper-spraying children as young as 9, killing 7-year olds in police raids, and beating special needs students in the school hallway with no provocation still happens in this country. It does, and I’m hearing a whole lot of stories about it because the outrage doesn’t ever seem to begin until, well…it’s not black or hispanic people in front of the billy clubs.

Those of us who were born into white privilege have the benefit in many cases of only recently being directly exposed to the problem of police brutality via Occupy Wall Street.

On that note, BlackCanseco has a biting open letter to OWS that deserves wider reading, reposted here with his permission:

Dear Occupy Wall Street:

Police brutality in America did not begin with you. It’s older than you, older than your encampments and older than your sudden awareness of it.

As one of the 99% you claim to champion, I for example, have seen police brutality firsthand throughout my childhood and my adult life right on to this day. As an African American male I have seen what happens when you occupy black skin in the presence of a police officer. I’ve buried friends who were shot by police despite having broken no laws. I’ve seen police batons and fists, backs of squad cars and squad car hoods used as weapons—not because I or my fellow African Americans were protesting or making any public statements, but simply because we were breathing and existing outside our homes.

As one of the 99% you claim to champion it’s my belief that Occupy Wall Street’s best hope of addressing police brutality is to first understand that police brutality did not begin with any occupation movement nor has it ever been limited to the parks, college campuses and gatherings where you are.

For every OWS encampment there have been hundreds of unarmed Black men have been shot by police—sometimes in the back for occupying little more than their own skin. For every OWS participant that has been pepper-sprayed there have been hundreds upon hundreds of African American who have been beaten by police often within their own neighborhoods. For every OWS participant that’s been zip-tied and carted off to jail legions of African Americans and Latinos have been unfairly prosecuted and excessively sentenced by local, state and even federal courts.

But until OWS protestors were exposed to police mistreatment it was a complete and total non-issue for the Occupy Movement. There was no outrage from current OWS supporters when even the most famous of police injustices occurred. Unfortunately it has taken the faces of victims of police brutality to become Whiter, seemingly more educated, seemingly more “mainstream” for police brutality and injustice to even register as blips on OWS’s radar. (And don’t think that this obvious and observable fact has been lost on the millions of people of color who have yet to join the occupy movement.)

In the days and weeks since many of the police vs. OWS confrontations I’m not surprised by the lack of calls to “#OccupyTheCops”, “#OccupyTheCourts” or “#OccupyThePrisons” as policing issues most OWS participants must deal with in their communities or daily lives beyond their OWS protest activities.

But let’s be clear: There’s no greater injustice than being so selfishly blind as to selectively claim suffering or fight suffering only when doing so benefits your agenda while willfully ignoring that very same suffering as it festers elsewhere around you. Police injustice is not something any one or any community should be subjected to. But there’s something distateful and alienating about seeing folk scream about something that we normally have to beg them to even passingly acknowledge.

To that end, I strongly encourage those in the Occupy Movement to take a long hard look at the issues of Police brutality not just as it relates to OWS, but as it continues to impact the 99% you so proudly fight for.

Let’s enjoy our dinners with family tonight. But tomorrow and forward, the fight for justice for everyone in our communities continues.

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Out of horror may come good

by digby

Whoa:

The HIV virus may be about to become a new weapon in the fight against cancer as initial tests have shown it can drastically minimize and even help cure the most common form of leukemia.

A research team, led by Dr. Carl June working out of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has been experimenting with using a harmless version of the HIV virus combined with genetically modified white blood cells as a new way to fight cancer. The cells are taken from patients and modified with new genes that make them target cancer cells, but just as importantly, they can also multiply once injected allowing them to scale up as a small army inside the body.

The results have surprised everyone. These modified cells have acted like serial killers, multiplying and killing all of the cancer cells in two patients, while reducing them by 70% in a third. The equivalent of five pounds of cancer cells has disappeared from each patient. More good news stems from the fact that the modified cells remain in the body and have been seen to reactivate and kill new cancer cells as long as 12 months after they were first injected.

Amazing. And it’s even more of a miracle that this research was done at all:

It’s important to note that this small trial involving just three patients was lucky to go ahead at all. The study was rejected by pharamceutical companies and the National Cancer Institute. It was only through a grant awarded by the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy that these patients received the treatment. We suspect the next trial will have more than enough interest, and therefore money, to go ahead.

If there’s enough money in it.

h/t to @natashchart

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The level where everything is really weird

by digby

The author Josiah “Tink” Thompson, author of the book “Six Seconds In Dallas” (which considered the “umbrella man”) invokes a piece of writing by John Updike:

In December 1967 John Updike was writing “Talk of the Town” for The New Yorker. And he spent most of that “Talk of the Town” column talking about the “umbrella man.” He said that his learning of the existence of the umbrella man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research where things sort of obey natural laws and the usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen. And then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.

Via Deathandtaxesmag.com