Month: February 2012

Death rattle of the MOUS

by digby

I have no idea if this piece in New York Magazine about the Master of the Universe finally being brought down to earth is true (or temporarily true) but it’s a fun, fun read, nonetheless:

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

Of course, described a little less colorfully, reducing the risk in the system at a cost of a certain amount of the banks’ profits was precisely what the government was striving for. All this has meant that Wall Street’s traders have found themselves on the wrong end of the market—a predicament that many of them have never seen before. Before the crash, when compensation slid, the banks risked seeing their top talent run for the doors to rival firms or hedge funds. Now, with a glut of hedge funds and an industrywide belt-tightening, bank chiefs are calling their star traders’ bluffs. “If you’re really unhappy, just leave,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman bluntly told Bloomberg TV a few days after his bank announced its meager bonus numbers.

The article features lots and lots of boo-hooing about how hard they work and threats to move to Silicon Valley and be the next Zuckerberg. But this article makes the case that Wall Street itself is in a very serious retrenchment the likes of which have never been seen before. The insane compensation structure is over and the industry is facing the unpleasant task of figuring out how to make money legitimately again. Part of it stems from Dodd-Frank, which everyone knows was inadequate, but is potent enough to have made the banks change their structure in anticipation of the presumed effects. But the bigger factor is that it finally dawned on these guys that their model was unsustainable — they were basically selling air. To each other.

Compromising with the Borgias

by digby

Oh hell. I should have known better than to be even momentarily happy about something in politics:

A key White House adviser on faith issues said Tuesday that several organizations with ties to the administration have approached President Obama’s aides about finding a resolution to fast-growing controversy over a new rule requiring many Catholic institutions to offer birth control and other contraception services as part of employees’ health care coverage.

“There are conversations right now to arrange a meeting to talk with folks about how this policy can be nuanced,” said Pastor Joel C. Hunter, a Florida megachurch pastor who has grown personally close to Obama and advised his White House on religious issues. “This is so fixable, and we just want to get into the conversation.”

Hunter’s comments followed a statement by David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama’s reelection campaign, who indicated on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that the White House might be open to a compromise on the matter.

“We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventive care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” he said.

Oh well. Maybe the “compromise” won’t be anything too substantial. But whatever it is, backtracking means social conservatives will have successfully opened another front in the War on Women. There will be ongoing battles over birth control as long nobody with any power in the political system thinks women’s issues are important enough to fight for. It’s daft. You can’t placate these people. You give them an inch and they’ll knock you down and run all over you. Isn’t it obvious?

This whole flap is surreal. Except for the priests and the nuns, most of the people who are arguing with the administration to give the Church an exemption are using birth control themselves. I guess they are so attached to their own hypocrisy — and some kind of faux religious pride — that they’ve become incoherent: “please let me keep pretending that I’m not using birth control by allowing the church to deny it to someone else.” Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

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The forces of bigotry lose again

by David Atkins

As you no doubt know by now, the 9th Circuit has ruled against California’s Proposition 8:

In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit announced its long-awaited ruling that Prop 8, approved by voters in 2008, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, in the court’s 128-page opinion, wrote that “although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.”

“All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships,” Reinhardt wrote. “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for ‘laws of this sort.’”

The panel also rejected arguments by Prop 8 proponents that the purpose of the initiative was “to promote child rearing by biological parents, to encourage responsible procreation, to proceed with caution in social change, to protect religious liberty, or to control the education of schoolchildren.”

“Simply taking away the designation of ‘marriage,’ while leaving in place all the substantive rights and responsibilities of same-sex partners, did not do any of the things Proponents now suggest were its purposes,” the opinion says. “Proposition 8 ‘is so far removed from these particular justifications that we find it impossible to credit them.’”

Now would be a good time to remind freaked out conservatives that if it had been up to the voters to decide these sorts of civil rights issues, anti-miscegenation laws would still be on the books in many parts of the South.

Maybe Ron Paul thinks that’s a good idea, but decent people don’t. There’s still an effort to get Prop 8 repealed by will of the voters, an act that may be necessary if the case goes to the Supreme Court and Proposition 8 is upheld. It would also be sweet to win this battle in the court of public opinion, not just the court of law.

Still, any victory against the forces of bigotry is a good one.

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Heckuva job Wyden

by digby

Brian Beutler reports:

[Paul] Ryan’s signaling he’ll swap out his old Medicare plan with a new one — one that he actually co-wrote with a Democratic Senator. That’s what Democrats think he’s going to do, and if they’re right, it will allow him and members of his party to claim they’ve moved significantly in the Democrats’ direction.

Here are all the details of the so-called Ryan-Wyden plan. There are two key differences between this plan and the original Ryan plan. The first is that Ryan-Wyden would preserve a Medicare-like public option as a competitor to private plans in its insurance exchange, and allow seniors to buy into it. The second is that it would leave the rate at which the program’s costs are allowed to grow exactly where it is in current law — forcing seniors to pay less out of pocket than would the original Ryan plan.

So substantively it is, indeed, a step or two left for the GOP. But here’s the key: it ultimately hands Medicare’s benefit guarantee over to a whimsical market, instead of keeping it in government hands, where it’s been for nearly 50 years. It would constitute a massive policy shift to the right. And that’s why Democrats abandoned Ron Wyden en masse the day the plan was unveiled.

Beutler characterizes this as a huge problem for Republicans and he may be right — assuming the Democrats are willing to play hardball and let Wyden twist in the wind alone. Unfortunately, even that won’t be good enough if the Villagers decide that this means a bipartisan accord that Medicare must be privatized and the Dems let it happen with their usual lame ducking and shirking. Before we know it, they will be breaking off and rushing to prove that they aren’t being obstructionists.

Paul Ryan’s a good politician. And a dangerous one. This might be a good year for the Democrats to try to defeat him. Of course, one would have thought that any year would be a good year to try to defeat him but for some reason they never seem to try.

You can donate to his opponent Rob Zerban, here. It’s doable.

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Uhm. I hate to bring this up, but it seems to be relevant:

October 1, 2007

The U.S. Supreme Court today turned down a request by Catholic Charities of New York to review a state court decision requiring insurance companies to include contraceptive coverage in drug benefit packages. The Court’s refusal to hear the case leaves in place a law that promotes women’s health and addresses gender discrimination while appropriately protecting religious freedom.

“Religiously affiliated organizations, such as Catholic Charities, that employ and serve people of diverse beliefs should not be able to discriminate against their female employees by refusing to cover basic health services,” said Louise Melling, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project. “Religiously affiliated organizations that provide nonreligious services to the public must play by public rules.”

The law at issue, the Women’s Health and Wellness Act, requires insurance companies to cover women’s preventive health care, including mandating that insurance plans that cover prescription drugs do not exclude contraceptives from that coverage. The law exempts religious employers such as churches, mosques, and temples, whose main purpose is to promote a particular religious faith and who primarily employ and serve people who share their religious beliefs.

“This law ended the practice of treating birth control, which only women use, differently than other commonly used prescription drugs — a practice that contributed to disproportionately high health costs for women,” said Galen Sherwin, Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Rights Project. “The Supreme Court’s decision not to review the case ensures that the state of New York can continue to protect women from this form of discrimination.”

Catholic Charities appealed a 2006 decision by the Court of Appeals for the State of New York, New York’s highest court, that concluded that the Women’s Health and Wellness Act was a neutral law designed to advance both women’s health and the equal treatment of men and women. That court also held that “when a religious organization chooses to hire non-believers it must, at least to some degree, be prepared to accept neutral regulations imposed to protect those employees’ legitimate interests in doing what their own beliefs permit.”

Ten religiously affiliated organizations brought the challenge against the Women’s Health and Wellness Act. The organizations included Catholic Charities of Albany and Ogdensburg and other Catholic and Baptist social service organizations. The ACLU and the NYCLU filed friend-of-the-court briefs at every step of the state court proceedings in support of the Act.

In October 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request by Catholic Charities to review a similar law, the California Women’s Contraceptive Equity Act. The ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief in that case, Catholic Charities v. Superior Court, as well.

Catholic institutions all over the country have been providing birth control coverage and the Supreme Court declined to hear their objections. Repeatedly. Maybe that will change now that it’s federal, but the fact is that Catholic organizations are already providing birth control coverage to their employees and have been for years:

Twenty-eight states already require organizations that offer prescription insurance to cover contraception and since 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control, many Catholic institutions offer the benefit to their employees. For instance, a Georgetown University spokesperson told ThinkProgress yesterday that employees “have access to health insurance plans offered and designed by national providers to a national pool. These plans include coverage for birth control.”

Similarly, an informal survey conducted by Our Sunday Visitor found that many Catholic colleges have purchased insurance plans that provide contraception benefits:

University of Scranton, for example, appears to specifically cover contraception. The University of San Francisco offers employees two health plans, both of which cover abortion, contraception and sterilization…Also problematic is the Jesuit University of Scranton. One of its health insurance plans, the First Priority HMO, lists a benefit of “contraceptives when used for the purpose of birth control.”

DePaul University in Chicago covers birth control in both its fully insured HMO plan and its self-insured PPO plan and excludes “elective abortion,” said spokesman John Holden, adding that the 1,800 employee-university responded to a complaint from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission several years ago and added artificial contraception as a benefit to its Blue Cross PPO.

Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn., offers employee health insurance via the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, a consortium of Christian Bible and other private college and universities. Its plan excludes abortion, but probably covers artificial contraception as a prescription drug, said C. Gregg Conroy, the executive director of the TICUA Benefit Consortium.

Boston College, the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, and other Catholic organizations that are located in one of the 28 states that already require employers to provide contraception benefits could have self-insured or stopped offering prescription drug coverage to avoid the mandate — but didn’t do so. Instead, they — like many Catholic hospitals and health care insurers around the country — chose to meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of Catholic women and offer these much needed services.

What this proves is that this is yet another partisan political move on the part of the very partisan Catholic Bishops. We saw how they tried to derail the health care bill on behalf of the Republicans — using Catholic Democrats in congress to do it. Similarly, they are trumping up this controversy on behalf of the GOP. Otherwise, we would have seen a similar rending of garments across the land over these 28 states making the same requirements. And the threats of closing Universities and hospitals rather than violate the “Church’s conscience” are obviously phony. If they were going to do that, they already would have.

No, this is not about conscience. It’s about the Bishops doing a solid for their Republican allies in an election year. It’s not about religion or morality either. It’s about politics.

Update: I should amend that to also say that the War on Birth Control is very real and heating up and the Catholic Bishops would love to make it a political hot potato like abortion. It gives them more political power. Here’s how they explain it:

“I don’t want to overstate or understate our level of concern,” said McQuade, the Catholic bishops’ spokesperson. “We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn’t make you sick.”

Considering the Church’s history with celibacy and sexual deviancy, they may want to rethink that argument.

Update II: Good Lord:

Catholic leaders are furious and determined to harness the voting power of the nation’s 70 million Catholic voters to stop a provision of President Barack Obama’s new heath car reform bill that will force Catholic schools, hospitals and charities to buy birth control pills, abortion-producing drugs and sterilization coverage for their employees.

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

Already Archbishop Timothy Dolan has spoken out against the law and priests around the country have mobilized, reading letters from the pulpit. Donohue said Catholic officials will stop at nothing to put a stop to it.

“This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” Donohue said.

I’ll let Tbogg take this one:

But how will this war be fought, besides Donohue being invited onto gasbag shows where we will bluster and saber-rattle against the godless heathens who would defile his religion with the condoms and NuvaRings of Satan?

Sources told Kramer that American bishops are contemplating a massive march on Washington, using people and school kids bused in from all over to protest the law.

Bus loads full of school kids handed over to the tender ministrations of Catholic Bishops. What could possibly go wrong?

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Blue America Chat: Cecil Bothwell, giant slayer

by digby

From Howie:

Today we’re kicking off a new day for our Blue America chats. Same time as always– 11am (PT) but on Tuesday’s from now on. And what better way than to start with a populist icon whose grassroots congressional just paid off with gigantic dividends a few days ago. Cecil Bothwell will be joining us over at Crooks and Liars at 2pm (ET). Last week, his classic grassroots organizing and door-to-door activist campaign astounded the political establishment with polling results that showed him knocking off entrenched conservative incumbent, Blue Dog Heath Shuler in the upcoming May 8th primary. Shuler saw the same results and beat a hasty retreat to, suddenly, “spend more time with my family.” He actually said that. The 11th CD will never be the same.

Cecil is the Asheville City Council Member who “everyone” said was “too radical” to be elected. But when the at-large primary came around he wasn’t just elected– he got more votes than anyone else in the race. He seemed buoyed when we talked with him after Shuler– who just months ago tried to rally reactionary Democrats against Nancy Pelosi in a race for House Democratic leader– hoisted the white flag. “We were confident that we were going to win the primary, based on informal polling across the District. We learned from recipients that someone hired a firm in Raleigh to poll voters here, so my bet is that he was seeing the same results. Now it appears that he has tapped another Blue Dog, his Legislative Director Hayden Rogers, to step into the race. So game on!” Rogers isn’t well known in the district but he is on K Street and Inside-the-Beltway. The DCCC would love to talk him into running. Cecil feels confident he could beat him just as he always predicted he would beat his boss.

Cecil is a decidedly progressive Democrat– a movement progressive– who has staked out populist positions in favor of federal job creation, single-payer health care and protection of the social safety net, as well as strong support for education. A participant in October’s Rebuild the American Dream conference, he endorses “Jobs, Not Cuts!” as a battle cry for middle- and working-class citizens who have been hammered by the Bush recession. Coming from a career in sustainable building and environmental journalism, with more than 20 years spent in a photovoltaic-powered home, he knows the coming green economy from the inside out, and he was one of the thousands of activists who surrounded the White House in November to protest the KeystoneXL pipeline. Although North Carolina is a right-to-work state, he is a member of the National Writer’s Union (AFL-CIO) and is unafraid to tell his constituents that unions are essential to introduce democracy into the work place. He is a strong advocate for fair trade instead of our current badly concocted free trade rules, and believes we need to get tough with China over its currency manipulation. Because he believes that black markets always create systemic problems in society he demands immigration reform that facilitates work-permits and a clear path to citizenship, and opposes the catastrophic failure known as the “war on drugs.” He has endorsed the Move to Amend and believes that we need to adopt public financing for all elections ASAP.

“We can do better,” he tells voters. “And you deserve better. I aim to represent the real people of this District, and I won’t take a penny from corporations or corporate PACs.” Blue America could hardly hope for a better candidate to back, anywhere. Please consider contributing to a people-to-people campaign that is already paying dividends for progressives in North Carolina. You can do that here at the Blue America ActBlue page.

Bothwell is an interesting candidate. He’s one of those Russ Feingold types, who people like for his convictions even if they disagree with him. He’s in a tough district, but if there’s a progressive who can cut against the grain, it’s him.

He’s running a hardcore grassroots campaign that others around the country should take a look at. He’s working very, very hard and has assembled a cadre of devoted followers who are breaking their backs for him. It’s one of the most intriguing progressive campaigns in the country.

Santorum surge

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

On Monday night, PPP released final data on new automated, recorded-voice surveys showing former Sen. Santorum (R-Pa.) leading in Minnesota and Missouri and running second to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Colorado.

Tim Pawlenty must be on IV Valium by this point. These Republicans really, really, really don’t like Mitt Romney.

Here’s the flavor of the week (uhm … )being all compassionate and caring like the good Christian he supposedly is:

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

GOP contender Rick Santorum had a heated exchange with a mother and her sick young son Wednesday, arguing that drug companies were entitled to charge whatever the market demanded for life-saving therapies.

Santorum, himself the father of a child with a rare genetic disorder, compared buying drugs to buying an iPad, and said demand would determine the cost of medical therapies.

“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” Santorum said, “but paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”

The mother said the boy was on the drug Abilify, used to treat schizophrenia, and that, on paper, its costs would exceed $1 million each year.

Santorum said drugs take years to develop and cost millions of dollars to produce, and manufacturers need to turn a profit or they would stop developing new drugs.
“You have that drug, and maybe you’re alive today because people have a profit motive to make that drug,” Santorum said. “There are many people sick today who, 10 years from now, are going to be alive because of some drug invented in the next 10 years. If we say: ‘You drug companies are greedy and bad, you can’t make a return on your money,’ then we will freeze innovation.”

Santorum told a large Tea Party crowd here that he sympathized with the boy’s case, but he also believed in the marketplace.

“He’s alive today because drug companies provide care,” Santorum said. “And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here. I sympathize with these compassionate cases. … I want your son to stay alive on much-needed drugs. Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don’t have incentives, they won’t make those drugs. We either believe in markets or we don’t.”

If a drug costs a million dollars a year, the only people who aren’t “compassionate cases” are multi-millionaires. But then that’s how fellows like Santorum think it should be. Maybe one of them will wake up one morning and feel generous and help this little boy out with some charity. If not, well them’s the breaks.

I think Santorum has a wee problem, however, with his religion. Worshipping “markets” isn’t in the Bible. I’m not sure where it fits with Catholic teachings. but it seems just a bit of a conflict. I guess being “faith-based” isn’t confined to the Church these days.

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It’s a brave new world. Will the media take note?

by David Atkins

Dave Dayen at FDL:

I didn’t think we had reached the point in America where providing free contraception would be seen as a risky political maneuver, but here we are.

Brian Beutler at TPM:

It’s shaping up to be spring 2011 redux. Just under a year ago, Republicans — euphoric after a midterm election landslide, and overzealous in their interpretation of their mandate — passed a budget that called for phasing out Medicare over the coming years and replacing it with a subsidized private insurance system for newly eligible seniors.

The backlash was ugly. But Republicans seem to have forgotten how poisonous that vote really was, and remains…because they’re poised to do it again. This time they’re signaling they’ll move ahead, with a modified plan — one that, though less radical, would still fundamentally remake and roll back one of the country’s most popular and enduring safety net programs.

Joan McCarter at DKos:

Still itching for a fight, some congressional Republicans want to take the December debacle of their resistance to middle class tax cuts, and anything that might help the economy and thus President Obama’s reelection, well into this year, while others recognize the PR disaster that would mean for them.

Forget all the other insanity this year and simply focus on this: Republicans are poised to take a stand this year against contraception, Medicare, and middle class tax cuts. If that doesn’t seem bizarre to you, step back, and focus your lens out to the past 40 years of American politics. Try to picture those stances being taken openly by a majority of Republicans during, say, the first Bush Administration in 1989. It’s hard to fathom. That Republican Party was alive and well only 20 years ago.

And yet the only people seeming to ring major alarm bells about it are dirty hippie liberal bloggers unworthy of even the basest journalistic cocktail party.

The sole arbiter of seriousness in mainstream journalism today is lack of opposition to the neoliberal/neoconservative global dominance of free-flowing capital and its biggest holders. Threatening to end Medicare, middle-class tax cuts and contraception? No problem–that’s just politics as usual. But threatening even mild forms of protectionism, or even the slightest corrections to the behavior of out-of-control capital markets? That’s scary crazy talk, whether it’s coming from Tea Partiers or Occupiers.

This perhaps more than anything else is the most destructive legacy of the dominance of the neoliberal paradigm: there is no right-wing extremism that will cause the press to even bat an eye unless it threatens the ability of the holders of capital to do whatever they please with it on a global scale. The occasional sex scandal or tabloid sensationalism will still sell well enough to hound a few Anthony Weiners out of office. But beyond that, anything goes.

As long as no one gets in the way of the almighty bond markets, the Very Serious People couldn’t care less. It’s not like they’re middle class, need Medicare, or can’t get their contraceptives from overseas. So why worry?

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So the argument over the triggers has begun:

In light of Congressional Republicans’ abandonment of a key part of the debt limit agreement, two senior administration officials briefing reporters at the White House Monday said automatic, across the board cuts to defense programs will happen as scheduled unless Republicans relent on their refusal to raise revenues.

The officials conducted the briefing under the condition that they not be quoted directly, but their position was unambiguous — the White House will not support any effort to swap out scheduled cuts to defense programs (and other automatic cuts) unless Congress passes a balanced package of deficit reducing legislation of equal or greater measure. That means new tax revenue from wealthy Americans and corporate interests, which Republicans have routinely refused to consider.

I guess we’re supposed to be happy about this. But I don’t know why. The best case scenario for a deal is that we get large defense cuts and large cuts in domestic spending. The second best case scenario is that we get millionaire tax increases in exchange for the defense cuts and large cuts in domestic spending. In other words, we’re getting large cuts in domestic spending no matter what.

We knew something like this was going to happen. But it was not previously characterized this way. This is what Ezra wrote about it back in November:

DIY Activism: Courage Campaign Freewayblogging

Building awareness one commute at a time. Check it out:

This morning at 8 freeway overpass locations all over California volunteers held giant signs touting the Millionaires Tax of 2012. This included Richmond (seen above) through which hundreds of thousands of commuters pass on their way into San Francisco.

Media from all over the state, including ABC News, has covered the banners and the powerful message behind them: Our tax code needs to reflect the interests of middle-class Californians, not the special interests of corporate CEOs and their lobbyists. Now is the time to revamp our tax code here in California so it’s fair to the 99% of us who play by the rules, not just the 1% who lobby hard and re-write the rules.

Banners were held for 2-3 hours in Los Angeles, Costa Mesa, Davis, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Oakland, Richmond, and San Diego. During the afternoon rush hour, a banner will fly in Fresno. All together, it’s safe to say we’ve helped educate hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions about the Millionaires Tax of 2012. Not bad for a day’s work!

Not bad at all. Freewayblogger would be proud.

If you’d like to learn more about the millionaires tax campaign, you can sign up here.

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