Month: July 2012

Our Blue America chat today at 11PDT/2EDT is with our good friend Raúl Grijalva. Apparently the Republicans have decided to run a ringer against him in a Democratic primary if you can believe that. As Howie says:

Like most progressive legislators, Raúl spends virtually all his time on policy and working on behalf of the ordinary American families who can’t afford to hire lobbyists. So he’s not doing hours and hours of call time, begging rich people, special interests and sleazy lobbyists to contribute to his campaign. He deserves our help– and he’s the only incumbent House Member we’ve endorsed this cycle. Please contribute what you can here at a special Blue America Raúl Grijalva page

He wrote a great guest post over at Howie’s place today, which I think is worth reading and circulating:

What Makes A Progressive Campaign?

-by Raúl Grijalva

It you had to pick the one thing that Progressives do best (aside from being awesome, all the time), what would you say?

That’s right, grassroots community organizing.

When it comes to mobilizing our folks to fight injustice, hold government and corporations accountable and make our communities the best they can be, Progressives can be counted on to do it right.

It starts with an idea, and through word of mouth and organized action, the idea grows into the change we demand. Over the years, as the Internet has brought people closer and facilitated the sharing of ideas and information, we’ve seen a steady crop of Progressive community organizers take note, look around, and realize that they can make a difference, not just for their own communities, but for our American community.

They’ve stepped their game up to the next level to fight for what we all know is right– equality justice, fairness, good government, and the right of every American to pursue the American Dream.

Candidates like David Gill and Ilya Sheyman in Illinois, Patsy Keever in North Carolina, Darcy Burner in the new first district up in Washington, Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania, Raul Ruiz, Lee Rogers and Normon Solomon in California, the unstoppable Alan Grayson in his new Florida district, Eric Griego in New Mexico are all fighting to make a difference. Some may not join us in Congress next year, but they all are great leaders who have many victories ahead of them.

As I head into my fifth re-election campaign, I feel even more inspired by the spirit of organizing and involvement that we’ve seen in all these Progressive campaigns around the country. I believe that the future of Congress and the direction of this country must be in the hands of Progressives like us– the stakes are too high for it not to be. Only when the people are in power can we keep corporations from calling the shots.

We’re facing an epic battle between the people and the powerful– corporate money is pouring into races all over the country, and mysterious super PACs are popping up to silence Progressive voices. They are keenly aware of our accomplishments– justice, equal rights, peace and prosperity for all– and they’ll stop at nothing to halt our progress. Fear and loathing isn’t just something out of a Hunter S. Thompson book, it is the way that big business, special interests and Republicans feel about Progressives. Four years ago, we saw hope trump fear and ideas trump ambition– and our opponents know that when we’re in charge, they are held to account. And nothing terrifies them more than that.

Two years ago, big business and the Tea Party tried to take me out-– but we beat back their aggression with people power and Progressive principles. They spent millions of dollars against me, and we won. But this time, they think they’ve found a new strategy-– I call it the Wisconsin strategy-– because, just like Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers, they’ve decided to run fake Democrats against me in the Democratic Primary. And we’ve got to let the voters know all about it. Fake Democrats won’t stand up for their constituents– they want the prize and none of the responsibility, sort of like the big corporations and Republicans that are backing them.

This primary is about whether corporate money can prop up someone with a “D” next to her name long enough to buy another seat in Washington. We believe Democracy is about ideas– they believe it is an auction.

I know you agree with me that Democracy is not for sale. And I know I can count on you as we fight harder than we ever have for the government and America that we believe in. Let’s keep fighting for Progress, and let’s do it together.

Please join us at 11 for a chat with a real progressive hero, Raul Grijalva. And you can donate to his campaign here. We cannot afford to lose him.

The bad luck of Irish women

by digby

A reader from Germany sent me this link to remind me that Europe has its fundamentalist throwbacks too:

The National Trust has defended its decision to include references to creationist theory at a new state-of-the-art visitors’ centre at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.

The move was hailed by a christian group which said the gesture “both respects and acknowledges an alternative viewpoint” on the origins of the earth.

But after facing criticism for including theories that the planet is only 6,000 years old, the Trust said it had merely acknowledged the presence of such views and was committed to scientific evidence on the origins of the Causeway.

The Causeway is a Unesco World Heritage Site and features more than 40,000 interlocking basalt columns formed millions of years ago by volcanic activity.

We’re not as exceptional as we think.

Ireland also boasts an abortion ban which is starting to cause serious problems in the down economy as women are finding it harder to get to England to have them. The charities that help women pay for plane fare and lodging are seeing an uptick.

And as we also do here in the US now that doctors are unwilling to perform late term procedures in many jurisdictions, women carrying fetuses with fatal abnormalities are being forced to jump through absurd hoops:

Already grieving from the knowledge that her baby would be born dead, Arlette Lyons, a 34-year-old sales representative from Dublin and her husband were stunned to find they would have to take a plane to England to end her pregnancy.

“Thinking of my other two children, the family, my baby, to carry on for another 28 weeks was inconceivable. I would have had to lock myself away, telling the kids would have been horrific, so carrying on with the baby never was going to be an option for us.

“We had the termination in March and I suppose I couldn’t believe that we had to leave our friends and family, and the treatment in our own maternity hospital was so fabulous, to leave all that support from everybody behind who were looked after us, I was just horrified.

“The world needs to know that this is happening in Ireland in 2012 and it has to stop.”

Ruth Bowie, a 34-year-old paediatric nurse living in Dublin, got pregnant in 2009 shortly after she married. Her 12-week scan detected that a large portion of the baby’s skull and brain was missing and that it would ultimately not survive. Thirteen weeks into her pregnancy Ruth and her husband flew to Birmingham for the termination.

“Because our flight [home] wasn’t until 7 o’clock that night we had nowhere to go [afterwards] so we wandered the streets of Birmingham for about four or five hours. At one point we considered going to the cinema because it was quiet and dark but in the end we didn’t. We just walked around the centre of Birmingham and pottered about. I was in pain, I was bleeding and we had just lost our baby and all you wanted to do was go home to your own bed, and have your family and friends around you but that was not possible.”

Amanda Mellet, 36 and originally from Michigan, learned 11 weeks into her pregnancy that there was something profoundly wrong with her baby’s heart. On her husband’s birthday the couple were told by the hospital there wasn’t even any point in seeing a heart specialist about defects in the baby girl’s heart given that if Amanda had gone full term the child would die. They travelled to England for a termination.

“I remember one of the midwives over there saying to me ‘You are doing the best thing for your baby.’ It was the first time that anyone from the medical profession had said that to me. And it dawned on me: ‘Jesus do I have to leave the country to get support because everyone in Ireland is so afraid to say anything?’

“I don’t believe that they don’t care, it’s just that people are so afraid of giving an opinion or seem to give an opinion.”

Look at how early those pregnancies are. And they still make them go through this horror. We haven’t gone quite that far here in the US, but the anti-abortion zealots are certainly trying to make sure we do. And it’s working to some extent.

Ireland is, of course, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church. Here we have the Catholic hierarchy joining with protestant fundamentalists. But it adds up to the same thing — women and their families suffering needlessly so that these people can make a point.

And they’re using the same dishonest tactics they use here:

What tears women apart is being forced by the state to bear dead and dying fetuses or travel long distances to end their misery. What tears them apart is the state demanding that they either be celibate or risk having children at any random moment regardless of their own own needs, goals and ability to support them. What tears women apart is having no right to control their own destiny.

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The key to fixing our broken economy: it’s not what you think

by David Atkins

With each new banking and finance scandal threatening to sequentially topple the world’s economy, it is increasingly difficult for many to understand why nations do not take more action against their financial industries. Corruption and institutional inertia are usually cited as the culprits.

But the key to understanding the lack of significant reaction lies in an awareness of the inevitable consequences of globalization under our current regulatory systems. Digby highlighted earlier a concise–and accurate–summary of the problem from the report of one financial institution:

With labor now much more abundant in the global economy, the share of income going to capital should rise and the share going to labor should fall.

The stubborn and inalienable truth is that this assessment is deadly accurate. Globalization created a surplus of labor. Even middle-school students understand the supply and demand factors at work: in a global economy with billions of people desperate for work, unskilled and semi-skilled labor costs will be driven to the lowest common denominator. Some of the cost savings on labor will go toward creating cheaper goods with ever advancing technology, but a great deal of it will also go toward capital gains and shareholder returns.

But the simplistic mechanistic effects don’t tell the entire story. As the capital of multinational corporations wins the long-term battle over national labor pools, corporations shed any patriotic loyalty they might have had to the nation states that spawned them. A new class of stateless global elites is created. Most of the productive energy of the brightest and most creative individuals increasingly diverts to the financial industry where the bulk of the money is actually to be made. The increased power of capital corrodes the responsiveness of governments to their people. Labor unions become marginalized and resented as they defend a narrowing band of increasingly government-based workers from the ravages of globalization. Older people hold onto even detestable jobs as a life raft. Younger people put an unhealthy emphasis on delaying the key markers of adulthood in order to stay in or return to educational systems until their late twenties or even mid-thirties, simply to grasp at the ever shrinking number of decent jobs that cannot be outsourced.

This is not how people were meant to live. The increasing power of capital perverts societies and creates a cultural malaise and yearning for simpler and easier times, rendering societies easy prey for the patriarchal, parochial and theocratic answers of the far right.

Politicians do their best to cope with the situation. Few dare tell the truth: that either the middle classes of industrial nations will be slowly ground into poverty, or the entire legal underpinning of the structures of corporations, banks and even nations themselves will need to change. Instead, politicians on the left attempt to mitigate the situation by expanding the safety net, enacting progressive tax rates and spending on government investment in infrastructure, while those on the right revel in the newly expanded power of wealth to corrupt democratic systems and expedite the transfer of wealth to the “betters” in society while scapegoating those unfortunate souls who happen to be drowning in the undertow. Both sides cooperate in expanding free trade, lowering the price of foreign goods and inflating asset and credit bubbles so as to disguise the downward pressure on wages.

But no matter the national culture and policy, the focus on assets over wages has produced increased income inequality in nearly every industrialized nation on the planet. This is true everywhere from hypercapitalist dystopias to Scandinavian social democracies. No matter what policies governments put in place, capital is winning the battle with labor. The only question at issue is the steepness of labor’s decline.

Social democratic policies like progressive taxation are laudable and can mitigate the damage, but it’s the economic equivalent of patching a leak without addressing the broken pipeline beneath it. That’s not to say that social democratic policies like expanded safety nets and government investment aren’t crucial in dealing with the problem: they certainly are. Stanching the bleeding and stabilizing the patient are necessary before more intensive surgery can begin. But without the surgery, the patient is unlikely to survive.

For the economies of industrialized nations to flourish, politicians must do more than simply treat the symptoms of income inequality with traditional Keynesian solutions. These are necessary but insufficient. In order to fix the problem, the root causes of the inequality must be dealt with. That means restructuring the undercurrents that create the income inequality in the first place.

But that would mean some truly radical changes. One of the first answers often cited is to simply roll back globalization through protectionist trade policies. Unfortunately, that would be catastrophic. Undoing free trade laws and enacting punitive tariffs on foreign goods would lead to global trade wars, driving up the prices of goods as each nation ironically attempts to protect its own manufacturing sector. That in turn would create a global economic collapse. In this regard the neoliberals are not wrong. There is little need or good to be done in expanding free trade laws, but there is significant damage that would entail from repealing the ones in place. To name but one example, the United States cannot afford to levy major tariffs on Chinese goods, as that would entail significant increases in the cost of basic standard of living. The Chinese in turn cannot afford to stop purchasing U.S. treasuries lest their economic bubble collapse, destroying China’s government in the process. And with most of the rest of the world dependent on U.S. consumers and Chinese growth, no one else is keen to see a trade war arise, either.

Furthermore, in a global economy multinational corporations will simply continue to do what they already do today: play each nation off one another in a bid to make policy more favorable to themselves, in exchange for desperately needed “investment.” This will occur with or without tariffs, as the jet setting elite don’t particularly care which country they call home, or where they happen to park their stolen billions.

The only way out of this mess is to make governments and workers more powerful than multinational corporations. At this point in history corporations have the edge on nation-states. Nations dance to the tune of corporations as companies manufacture products in a global supply chain, using globalized energy resources. Governments attempt to enrich companies owned by shareholders in each nation-state, even as the workers in each nation-state are themselves left in the lurch. Wars are fought to ensure access to global energy supplies on behalf of international corporations.

While banning the multinational corporation itself seems impractical and logistically problematic, a coalition of nation states banding together to prevent global labor arbitrage and the theft of energy resources seems more practical.

International treaties enforcing basic wages and worker protections are also an important piece of the puzzle. But in order for them to work, there will need to be credible enforcement on a global scale.

Underdeveloped countries will need to speed along development in order to prevent exploitation by multinational corporations and corrupt politicians. That in turn will necessitate global conventions to limit theocracy and protect the right of women to family planning, including contraception and abortion.

International conventions limiting the power of capital will also be necessary. Taxes on capital gains will need to exceed taxes on labor, and laws should encourage long-term investing in stable companies and organizations over short-term quick profits. Taxes on short-term trading will need to boosted to discourage speculation, and they will need to be implemented at a global level in order to prevent companies from simply moving their trading to a more deregulated stock exchange.

All of these are daunting tasks that the Westphalian system is ill-equipped to handle. But without them, the middle class of industrialized nations is doomed by structural circumstance to slip into poverty, with or without the help of corrupt and sociopathic elites. It’s not a question of if it happens, but simply how long it takes.

Solving these problems will take vision, trust, and a willingness to break free of outmoded conventions and assumptions about politics that have governed our lives since the 17th century.

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“It’s that big”

by digby

If you’re still wondering about the scope of the LIBOR scandal, this piece in the Economist will fill you in:

Over the past week damning evidence has emerged, in documents detailing a settlement between Barclays and regulators in America and Britain, that employees at the bank and at several other unnamed banks tried to rig the number time and again over a period of at least five years. And worse is likely to emerge. Investigations by regulators in several countries, including Canada, America, Japan, the EU, Switzerland and Britain, are looking into allegations that LIBOR and similar rates were rigged by large numbers of banks. Corporations and lawyers, too, are examining whether they can sue Barclays or other banks for harm they have suffered. That could cost the banking industry tens of billions of dollars. “This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” says the chief executive of a multinational bank, referring to the lawsuits and settlements that cost America’s tobacco industry more than $200 billion in 1998. “It’s that big,” he says.

The New York Times reports that the chairman of Barclays, Robert Diamond was stunned that he could possibly be held responsible for such a thing — because he’s one of the exceptional ones:

MR. DIAMOND seemed shocked to be pushed out. An American by birth, he probably thought he’d be subject to American rules of engagement when confronted with evidence of wrongdoing at his bank. You know how it works on this side of the Atlantic: faced with a scandal, most chief executives jettison low-level employees, maybe give up a bonus or two — and then ride out the storm. Regulators, if they act, just extract fines from the shareholders.

Indeed. But this story about JP Morgan via dday this morning makes me wonder about our overarching theory that sending these guys to jail is the magic bullet:

A U.S. judge has ordered JPMorgan Chase & Co to explain why the court should not force the bank to turn over 25 internal emails demanded as part of an investigation into whether it manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) filed a petition in federal court in Washington on Monday asking the court to order the bank to show cause as to why it would not comply with a subpoena issued by the commission as part of its investigation into the bank’s power trading.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly gave the bank until July 13 to submit an explanation as to why the court should not enforce FERC’s subpoenas. JPMorgan has asserted the emails are protected by the attorney-client privilege.

So JPMorgan allegedly manipulated the electricity market? Well,apparently they weren’t deterred by the fact that the big boys in Enron really did get nailed. Former president Jeff Skilling is doing 24 years in federal prison.CEO Ken Lay was convicted too but died before he could be sentenced.

These guys were hugely powerful, and close personal friends and supporters of the president of the United States and they lost it all. Somehow, that apparently didn’t deter JPMorgan from manipulating the energy market in its own way just a few years later. The example of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling didn’t stop them. I don’t know what will.

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Progressives and the states

by digby

Ed Kilgore takes on an interesting question in light of this piece by Scott Lemiuex about the Supreme Court’s Medicaid expansion decision. He asks whether partnering with the states is in line with progressive values in the first place.

Recall that the major purpose of the Medicaid expansion itself (as has been the case in a host of previous federal “improvements” to Medicaid) was to reduce the vast disparities in Medicaid coverage in the various states, a major source of the “uninsured” problem to begin with. Is the real offense to progressive values the enhanced ability of states to reject federal limitations on their control of Medicaid policies, or the original structure of Medicaid giving them that control in the first place? Certainly the decision to make a Medicaid expansion a key element in ACA was attributable in part to the desire to build on the most important existing program providing health insurance to those without meaningful access to private insurance (or to Medicare or VA), and in part to reduce, albeit not by that much, the federal costs associated with covering the uninsured. But as some state-level progressives have been arguing for decades, the continued reliance on federal-state programs to address national policy objectives comes at a considerable price of its own: the inevitable interstate inequities, a loss of accountability, and public confusion as to which level of government a central public function “belongs.”

As regular readers know, I’m personally not sold on a single-payer system (though I’m increasingly attracted to it), and don’t think just expanding Medicare to cover everybody necessarily makes sense or is the political silver bullet its proponents often assume it is. But the eventual goal of getting rid of the current patchwork system of government health insurance programs ought to be pretty fundamental to progressives. Would anyone designing a universal national system of health insurance (whether it’s single-payer or public-private) assume it was a good idea to make state governments central to its administration? Maybe, or maybe not. But the Court’s decision ought to make us reconsider whether the crutch of intergovernmental programs, so often utilized for short-sighted reasons, really ought to be the central instrument of progressive governance.

Indeed it should. I think this is one of the most important issues for American progressives to start thinking about as we try to formulate how best to proceed in the 21st century. My feeling is that the patchwork quilt of the American system in general is an anachronism. At the time the nation was formed, and even until fairly recently, this country did operate on a state and regional basis, both culturally and politically. I think that’s changing (even though the lines remain similar.) And I think we should get over this idea that these so-called sovereigns are necessary as “partners”.

More importantly, I think it’s worth fighting for the idea that this kind of inequity is morally wrong. We’re all Americans, whether from Mississippi or Vermont, and continuing this charade that we are so “different” culturally that it’s wrong to expect that people be treated equally regardless of what sub-state in which they happen to live is frankly disturbing.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that progressives shouldn’t take what they can get when it’s possible. If California comes up with a better plan, I’ll take it.(And with the way we are currently structured, it’s our best hope for a better system for all.) I’m specifically talking about this practice of federal laws and programs being relegated to the states for implementation, in which some states choose to deny their own citizens in order to make a point and we all behave as if the order that this be so came down from Mt Sinai. And after all, while the federal government is a cesspool of corruption and inefficiency, it’s nothing to the petty, second rate, cheaply bought (often term-limited, resume-building) lackeys at the state level.

I think if the program is for all Americans it should be implemented the same way in all of America. This notion that each state has unique “cultural” requirements is nothing more than a cover for the fact that a certain group of people still haven’t accepted that this is one country.

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GOP extremism shocks the establishment again

by David Atkins

Remember how Republican states were certain to accept the Medicaid money because hospitals would insist on it? And how establishment Democrats in D.C. were certain the states would accept the bargain? Well, the biggest Republican state isn’t having any of it:

Texas turned down an expansion of Medicaid coverage and said it will not create a state-run healthcare insurance exchange, joining the chorus of states that are rejecting two key proposals of the Obama administration’s healthcare overhaul measure.

In a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released on Monday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose bid for the GOP presidential nomination fell flat this year, rejected both healthcare proposals. The move, which had been widely expected, echoes similar pronouncements by other conservative Republican governors as well as the GOP’s overall opposition to the heathcare law.

“If anyone was in doubt, we in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamacare,” Perry stated. “I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our constitution and our founding principles of limited government.

“I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab. Neither a ‘state’ exchange nor the expansion of Medicaid under this program would result in better ‘patient protection’ or in more ‘affordable care.’ They would only make Texas a mere appendage of the federal government when it comes to health care,” Perry said.

Digby already covered Florida’s and South Carolina’s insistence on making poor people in those states get sick and die quickly while overburdening the state’s emergency health system. I’m sure the Neville Chamberlains in the D.C. Democratic establishment are scratching their heads over this.

Remember: it’s not just about the corporate money for these people. Accepting federal dollars for Medicaid helps their big dollar contributors, with very little downside. Ezra Klein thinks states will eventually come around, and he may be right. After all, some states resisted Medicaid when it was initially introduced. But even Ezra notes that the federal government forced states to take a much larger share of the burden for Medicaid and children’s health insurance. This expansion is basically gravy for the states, as the federal government foots the entirety of the bill at first, and 90% of it in coming years.

It’s not just about giving rich people more money. The modern Republican establishment is most obsessed with enforcing a cosmic law of reward and punishment wherein poor people suffer and die early because they didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps enough to be rich. It’s a matter of principle, and they’re more than willing to anger their allies in the hospital, health insurance and pharmaceutical industries to make it happen.

The Ayn Rand nonsense isn’t just rhetorical cover to enrich their already wealthy friends. These people really believe in it. They cannot be bargained with and cannot be reasoned with. It’s clear that pity and remorse are off the table, and they don’t even fear the retaliation of the electorate.

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QOTD: Ben LaBolt

by digby

(It was Saturday, but still.)This came from White House deputy press secretary in response to Buzzfeed’s stultifyingly dumb piece suggesting that the Obama campaign was using a font similar to Cuban revolutionary propaganda (you read that right) and calling for the head of the kerning vetter. Jayzuz.

Anyway, here’s the WH reaction:

“Your GOP operative should have had the courtesy to stay sober before noon, and BuzzFeed should go back to labeling cat slideshows.”

High-yo!

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Village poster boy: the bloodthirsty Harold Ford

by digby

I was going to remark upon this shocking Morning Joe segment with Harold Ford and others, but Glenn Greenwald does it so well, I’ll just excerpt a piece and link to him:

You just have to watch the reaction of Ford, neocon Dan Senor, and Mike Barnacle to appreciate the soulless rot that leads people so cavalierly to defend and dismiss the continuous killing of innocent Muslims by the U.S. But it’s Ford’s smirking, self-satisfied, effete ignorance — from a warmonger whose delicately manicured hands have never been and will never be near any of the carnage he reflexively defends — that is particularly nauseating. Like most mindless defenders of U.S. violence, Ford just repeatedly utters the word “Terrorist” over and over like a hypnotic mantra.

Even after Junod describes the heinous death of the indisputably innocent American teenager, Ford just smirks and pronounces that it’s better to Kill The Terrorists than to capture them. There’s nothing unique about Harold Ford, Jr. — as I said, he’s just the personification of the standard Beltway sicknesses, and the vacant “arguments” he makes to justify drones (“THE TERRORISTS!”) are the typical ones offered up — but there’s something about the way Harold Ford, Jr. speaks here, and who he is, that really vividly conveys what motivates this mindset:

Here’s the segment. And I have to agree that Ford is the most sinister of the group although they’re all horrifying:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And hey, it saves money! If we kill a few innocent teenagers in the process, it’s a fair trade-off.

Better late than never

by digby

This is a good idea, at least for positioning purposes:

President Obama will begin pushing for a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for Americans making less than $250,000, reports the New York Times. The announcement from the Rose Garden Monday will signal the president’s emphasis on tax fairness as a major issue just four months from the election. Pushing the issue is also meant to make House Republicans look unreasonable as they move this month to vote on a full, permanent extension of all of the Bush tax cuts.

I don’t think there’s really a downside to calling for only the middle class cuts to be extended. This economy still sucks for most people making less than a quarter of a million dollars a year so raising their taxes isn’t a good idea. But damn, I will never in a million years understand why they didn’t extend them for say, five years, when they passed the stimulus and take them out of the negotiating equation. Battling over cutting taxes on the wealthy is much friendlier turf for Democrats. (Maybe they tried, but I’ve never heard word of it …)

It’s good that they’re doing it now, but it’s a lot less clean than it could have been.

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Cutting off other people’s noses to spite them

by digby

This is a sick story about sick people from a sick state in a sick country:

Governor Nikki Haley, a Tea Party-backed Republican, was among the first state leaders to oppose expanding Medicaid after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can’t make states do so. Caught between poverty and pressure to curb government’s power, South Carolina illustrates the forces at play in the nation’s capitals amid the broadest changes to the health care system since 1965.
[…]
In South Carolina, the law would add about 500,000 people to Medicaid, said Tony Keck, whom Haley appointed to head the Health and Human Services Department.

“We simply can’t support this,” Haley and Keck said in a July 3 statement. “We are not going to jam more South Carolinians into a broken program, a program that stifles innovation, discourages personal responsibility, and encourages fraud, abuse and overuse of services — and that, by the way, costs us billions of dollars.”

Republican governors of Louisiana, Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, and Texas also oppose the plan to boost the scale of the health-care program. Texas Governor Rick Perry said today he won’t do anything to implement the president’s law. In his state, about 25 percent go without health insurance, the nation’s highest rate, according to Census Department figures.

“I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab,” he said.
[…]
The state where the Civil War began also long been suspicious of ceding power to the federal government, said Bruce Ransom, a political scientist at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina.

One of the state’s U.S. senators, Jim DeMint, is a founder of the Tea Party Caucus. In 2009, then-Governor Mark Sanford sparred with the Obama administration and his own Legislature, seeking to use $700 million from the stimulus program to pay down debt instead of spending on the economy.

“Federal aid, federal programs — unless it’s for the military — are not good things,” Ransom said, summarizing voters’ views. “That plays here. The conventional wisdom says that’s a winning hand.”

Keck, South Carolina’s top health official, said the state’s illnesses are driven by poverty and that money poured into Medicaid would best be used elsewhere. Keck said he and Haley favor block-grant funding that would hold the state accountable for set outcomes, such as lowering obesity.

“We should spend our money getting more people jobs with health insurance,” said Keck, the state’s top health official. “If we’re going to talk at all about targeting the uninsured, it has to be with a completely different system than Medicaid.”

Well at least he agreed to spend money on something, although I have no doubt that if you suggested they spend some money to hire people directly his head would revolve on his shoulders and he’d start spitting pea soup.

The only way they can resolve this is to repeal this law:

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is a U.S. Act of Congress passed in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It requires hospitals to provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. There are no reimbursement provisions. Participating hospitals may only transfer or discharge patients needing emergency treatment under their own informed consent, after stabilization, or when their condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.

Until they are able to do that — also known as letting them die — someone’s going to be footing the bill for people who are sick and have no insurance. I’m just surprised they haven’t worked up the moxie to formally propose it.

The irony here is that the Reagan era law that requires basic human decency has long been decried as an “unfunded mandate.” Here you have the Federal Government paying for 100% for the first years and then 90% thereafter and they still won’t take yes for an answer. So I think we can feel fairly confident at this point that it isn’t really about the funding at all, can’t we? It’s about their belief that “those” people who don’t “deserve” medical care shouldn’t get it.

A Democratic state rep is quoted in the story saying he believes he will be able to bring some Republicans along once they see how much it could help people in their own districts. Let’s hope they have enough humanity to put that before their ideology, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Something truly insidious has taken over the collective conservative subconscious and I’m not sure they’re quite sane anymore.

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