Month: October 2013

Restoring my faith in humanity

by digby

With everything feeling so mean all the time, stories like this are tonics for the soul:

A South Florida mother who was caught shoplifting this week is now receiving help from the public to feed her family.

Jessica Robles, a struggling single mother of three, was caught shoplifting $300 worth of groceries at a South Florida Publix store by Miami-Dade police officer Vicki Thomas, WSVN Channel 7 in Miami reports.

Saying the act was out of desperation, Thomas decided to not take Robles into custody, charging her with a misdemeanor and a notice to appear in court instead. Thomas then decided to purchase $100 worth of groceries for Robles and her three children — a 12-year-old daughter and two younger boys, ages 2 and 5.

“I made the decision to buy her some groceries because arresting her wasn’t going to solve the problem with her children being hungry,” Thomas told WSVN.

After the story aired locally Monday, viewers across South Florida reached out to help Robles.

h/t to @Chicago_todd

Mayra Lapierre saw the piece and decided to offer Robles a $700 shopping spree at Walmart, with $200 coming from Lapierre and $500 from Restoration 1 of Miami, a water and fire damage restoration service company.

When Robles was done with her shopping spree, the remaining $271 was given to her, in cash, by Lapierre.

“I’ve been there,” Lapierre told WSVN about being a single mother. “I’ve had plenty of times where I’ve had to say [to] my kids, ‘[Drink] a glass of water, let’s go.'”

Viewer John Challenor interviewed Robles for a job with PhoneDoctor.com, a Miami-based company that installs business phone lines. She was offered a customer service representative position where she will be answering phones and taking messages.

Robles told WSVN that her children “will never go hungry again,” thanks to the help of some local good samaritans.

“There’s no words I could tell you right now,” she said. “I’m grateful that you took the time and helped somebody out, especially somebody like me.

If only we could find a way to ensure that mothers in the richest most powerful nation on earth aren’t forced to steal to feed their kids in the first place.

.

Right wing scare tactic #674: cancelling your insurance because of Obamacare

by digby

I knew this was going to freak people out:

A top Florida Blue official said Wednesday that the cancellation of 300,000 individual health insurance policies does not mean affected customers will lose coverage. Rather, it’s part of a “transition” to the Affordable Care Act.

Those customers, though, will receive notice by mail that their existing policy is no longer available and they should reach out to the Jacksonville-based company for guidance.

The canceled policies are those that don’t offer coverage broad enough to be considered as “qualified health plans” under the Affordable Care Act. Qualified plans must include coverage for things like maternity and newborn care, mental health, substance abuse services and emergency services, among other things.

“Essentially, we have to put them into plans that are filed an approved as qualified health plans,” said Jon Urbanek, one of the company’s senior vice presidents.

The Times-Union reported the cancelations Tuesday, but company officials were unavailable to answer follow-up questions.

Health insurance companies across the country have been going through similar cancellations as they remove plans that are not qualified plans.

This happened in California too. I know that because it happened to me. (I wrote about it here.)

I can’t vouch for the letters in Florida, but mine said they were cancelling my insurance because of Obamacare’s requirements for more comprehensive coverage than I was carrying. But it also said they could put me into a new plan that costs almost twice as much as my old plan. It then had a long passage about how I can go on the exchange and buy new insurance and that I may qualify for subsidies and that they are offering some plan on the exchanges that I might like which would provide seamless coverage with my current providers. It then said that I could do nothing, they’ll enroll me in a new plan at twice the premium and everything would be hunky dory. If you don’t understand what’s going on it could look bad, depending on your point of view. At first glance all you see is that you’re being cancelled because of Obamacare and any new insurance is going to cost twice as much. Because of Obamacare.

The good news is that only a small portion of the population, those who already have health insurance in the private market, are getting letters like this and I would guess that it’s only those who currently have lousy plans who are seeing the sticker shock. Until you can calculate your subsidies, it produces a bit of anxiety.

I’m not sure how this aspect of it could have been done differently. Maybe more lead time for people to absorb the changes would have been helpful. But for those most in need — the one’s who have no insurance at all — “more lead time” could be life-threatening. Maybe there could have been a better education program for people who are on the private insurance market, but I’m not sure who could have done that. It certainly wasn’t going to be the insurance companies. The way the letter from mine reads, they are hedging their bets and hoping that some people will just pay the higher premiums either out of ignorance or some misguided belief that they are getting better coverage by staying out of the exchanges. Let’s just say that they aren’t exactly being clear.

Still, the above article from Florida shows that the right wing hysteria over “cancelled policies” from Obamacare is manipulative and misleading. Yes, people are technically losing their current policy. But they are being offered better policies, either from their insurance companies directly (at higher premiums) or ones that will be cheaper if they go to the exchange and qualify for subsidies, as most of them will. (One assumes that wealthier people already have high quality plans that include all the required coverage, so their insurance shouldn’t be going up substantially.)

The federal web site problems are the focus of most of the sturm und drang over the rollout so far. But there are probably a bunch of confusing stories like this one that are happening at the local level and are making it difficult for people to understand what’s going on. But as I’ve written before, the people who are in the private insurance market already are the best educated about it and are the most likely to hang in there as the system comes on line. The money involved is so substantial that even the right wing ideologues who are shrieking and complaining about the whole thing will very likely end up going through the exchanges simply because they can’t afford not to.

If they refuse to do that out of some misguided political tribalism, that’s on them.

.

The problem isn’t deficits, it’s income inequality

by David Atkins

I’ve posted this before, but frankly if I posted this video on the reality of income inequality once a week it might not be often enough:

That we’re still talking about deficits while this is going on, even when inflation is low and U.S. treasuries are strong, is simply mind boggling. This is the #1 problem in America right now.

Remember: the rich do not create jobs. The goal of a corporation is to create as few jobs as possible. More jobs means more overhead; more overhead means less profit. The only reason for a business to create jobs is if employing more people can generate more business to create more profit. And that can only happen if there are paying customers out there.

Fact is, the richer the CEO and the higher the profit, the more that CEO is able to extract from the company at the expense of layoffs, lower wages, and higher prices on consumers.

Record income inequality, record high financialization of an economy, record profits and record gaps between highest and lowest paid employees means a very real theft from wage earners and loss of true productivity, resulting in loss of consumer demand and higher unemployment that ultimately hurts an economy.

That’s what we need to be concentrating on, not deficits. The only other issue that comes close is energy and climate policy.

.

Moment of zen: underwater bear

by digby

That’s a Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner for “animals in their environment.” Click through to see all the winners. Phenomenal.

.

The Social Security actuaries are not as dumb as rocks

by digby

One of the things that drives me nuts about the Social Security “debate” is the this notion that way too many people have that the whole thing happened because everyone just noticed that the baby boomers are getting old and there’s a whole bunch of them. This is just nonsense. No matter how stupid you think the government is you can’t possible believe that they don’t take demographics into account when they project Social Security. That’s pretty elementary.

And, of course, they did. Indeed back when most boomers were already in or entering our peak earning years, there was a big bipartisan deal made to raise the retirement age and raise the contributions so we boomers would pre-pay for our own retirement. (That’s the SS surplus.) It extended the funding for the program for many years.

Current projections show that we might have a shortfall in a couple of decades. That is not because they failed to plan properly. It’s because something unexpected happened in our economy:

The SS payroll tax currently applies only to income below $110,100 a year, while any dollar an individual makes over that amount is not subject to the tax. So the growth in inequality since the late 1970s has pushed ever more income out of the reach of the payroll tax. When the formula for setting the cap was reformed in 1983, only 10 percent of earnings in the country escaped the tax. By 2008, that had grown to 16 percent…

What if the cap had remained the same as it is, but inequality had not taken off? Which is to say, what if wage growth had maintained its historic connection to productivity growth, instead of decoupling since the 1970s, and median wages had not stagnated?:

If real wage growth had kept up with productivity from 1983 to 2007, the trust fund would now be larger by roughly $450 billion, equal to 8% of the $5.4 trillion shortfall.

Going forward, the Social Security actuaries project relatively slow wage growth of 1.2% above inflation, but wage growth of 1.8% above inflation (the average productivity growth rate over the past quarter century) would eliminate 43% of the projected shortfall, according to the trustees’ 2010 report. All together, then, slow wage growth accounts for roughly half (51%) of the projected shortfall that has emerged since the system was last restored to balance.

The rest of that could easily be made up by raising the amount the high earners pay in beyond what it would have been.

Programs always need tweaking as time goes on — projections that go out decades are little more than educated guesses. In this case, rushing to cut benefits as both parties’ leaders have proposed to do through the adoption of the Chained-CPI is just a further reward to the people who have caused the imbalance with their pursuit of policies that pushes more and more of the money into their wallets and leaves average people with less and less at retirement. There are better ways to deal with any potential shortfall in Social Security. (We could, for instance, just fund it …)

More importantly, I think it’s fair to assume that making a deal with today’s terroristic Republicans is going to be a bad deal. Doesn’t it make more sense to wait and see if we can unseat some of these freaks before we go “fixing” something that may or may not happen and is easily fixed down the road?
We have plenty of problems that do require immediate attention. Why would we negotiate with this freakshow unless there’s absolutely no choice?

.

Speaking of torture

by digby

So we have some Guantanamo prisoners facing death sentences for their alleged involvement in September 11th and The bombing of the USS Cole. The problem is that they were tortured, which in a decent society would probably mean that a death sentence is no longer on the table.

But no. We are so far down the rabbit hole on this stuff that it’s like trying to read a foreign language to be able to figure out what’s going on:

On Tuesday, October 22, the lawyers for the September 11 accused argued that the Guantanamo military commissions’ protective order violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The protective order states that the defendant’s “observations and experiences” of torture at CIA black sites are classified. Defense counsel say that this violates the Convention Against Torture’s requirement that victims of torture have “a right to complain” to authorities in the countries where they are tortured, and makes the commission into “a co-conspirator in hiding evidence of war crimes.”

It is not only the defendants’ lawyers who object to the protective order. The ACLU has called the restrictions on detainees’ testimony “chillingly Orwellian.” Earlier this year, the Constitution Project’s bipartisan, independent Task Force on Detainee Treatment (for which I served as staff investigator) found that the military commissions’ censorship of detainees’ descriptions of their own torture could not be justified on grounds of national security, and violated “the public’s First Amendment right of access to those proceedings, the detainees’ right to counsel, and counsel’s First Amendment rights.”

This month, the European Parliament passed a resolution that called on the United States “to stop using draconian protective orders which prevent lawyers acting for Guantánamo Bay detainees from disclosing information regarding any detail of their secret detention in Europe.”

Basically these prisoners are being denied the right to present evidence of their torture f even though they are facing execution. And this is the reason:

In April 2009, over the CIA’s objections, Obama declassified four Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions that described in graphic detail the brutal techniques that the CIA used against captives after September 11, because in his judgment their release was “required by the rule of law.”

But today, the administration takes the position that the release of the OLC memos only declassified the CIA’s use of torturous interrogation techniques “in the abstract.” The details of any individual detainee’s treatment in CIA custody are still top secret. The CIA claims this is necessary because disclosures about individual interrogations would “provide future terrorists with a guidebook on how to evade such questioning,” and “provide ready-made ammunition for al-Qa’ida propaganda.”

Wait. “The US does not torture.” Everyone says so:

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

So basically, while we “do not torture” we have admitted “in the abstract” that we did torture, but if any of those tortured reveal the details of that torture the terrorists of the future will know how we torture and learn how to evade it. So we’re obviously still torturing. Am I missing something? Update: If you want to watch and interesting exchange, this one between then Senator Joe Biden and Attorney General Michael Mukasey on what “shocks the conscience” means.

.

The “other” among us

by digby

Here’s some information about an exotic species that citizens of this country fear more than terrorists:

Here’s what we know about self-described atheists and their beliefs:

1 The number of people who identify themselves as atheists in the United States has been rising, modestly but steadily, in recent years. Our aggregated data from 2012 show that 2.4% of American adults say they are atheists when asked about their religious identity, up from 1.6% in 2007.

2 Atheists, in general, are more likely to be male and younger than the overall population; 67% are men, and 38% are ages 18-29 (compared with 22% of all U.S. adults). About four-in-ten atheists (43%) have a college degree, compared with 29% of the general public.

3 Although the literal definition of “atheist” is “a person who believes that God does not exist,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, 14% of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit. That includes 5% who say they are “absolutely certain” about the existence of God or a universal spirit. Alternatively, there are many people who fit the dictionary definition of “atheist” but do not call themselves atheists. More Americans say they do not believe in God or a universal spirit (7%) than say they are atheists (2.4%).

4 Not all atheists see a contradiction between atheism and spirituality. A quarter (26%) say they think of themselves as spiritual people, and 3% consider themselves religious people. Four-in-ten atheists (41%) say they often think about the meaning and purpose of life.

5 Among atheists, 82% say they either often (52%) or sometimes (30%) feel a deep connection with nature and the earth; among all American adults, 85% either often (58%) or sometimes (26%) feel such a connection.

That’s wild that these weirdo atheists often think about the meaning and purpose of life. I’m mean, why bother? If it isn’t to please God, what on earth could it possibly be.

And anyway, according to Oprah Winfrey, most atheists aren’t actually atheists even if they say they are. The cool ones at least:

*FYI, in case my sarcasm isn’t coming through and you’ve never read my blog before: I’m an atheist. And not a particularly spiritual one either (sorry Oprah.) On the other hand, my atheism makes me very tolerant of anyone who believes otherwise. Why should I care? Unless people are trying to make me behave in ways that comport with their religion (and don’t comport with my principles, morals and values) then I’m fine with whatever people believe.

The “deficit hawks” are full of crap, part XXVI

by David Atkins

Why do all these “deficit hawk” conservatives hate Obamacare, again?

The Affordable Care Act is already working: Intense price competition among health plans in the marketplaces for individuals has lowered premiums below projected levels. As a result of these lower premiums, the federal government will save about $190 billion over the next 10 years, according to our estimates. These savings will boost the health law’s amount of deficit reduction by 174 percent and represent about 40 percent of the health care savings proposed by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles commission—in 2010.

Moreover, we estimate that lower premiums will lower the number of uninsured even further, by an additional 700,000 people, even as the number of individuals who receive tax credits will decline because insurance is more affordable.

In short, the Affordable Care Act is working even better than expected, producing more coverage for much less money.

It’s arguable, of course, whether we should even be worrying about the deficit right now. Some of us don’t think it’s even close to our biggest concern compared to people actually being able to get healthcare, so the fact that Obamacare is also saving money not just for real citizens but also the federal government itself is just icing on the cake.

But there is an entire political party and pundit class out there that professes to believe that deficits are the scariest thing ever, and we need to do something about them right now. They also happen to be the same people who are the most opposed to the Affordable Care Act. How does that work, exactly?

It works because most of the deficit fetishists never actually cared about the deficit, per se. The deficit is just a symbol to them of a moral laxitude about a culture of dependency that can only be fixed by slashing social spending and forcing people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. It’s a social, moralistic fetish, not a regretted position based on actuarial review.

Obamacare makes real people’s lives a little easier, and makes insurance company CEO’s lives a little bit harder. The deficit fetishists don’t actually care whether it saves the country money. Morally, it feels wrong to them that the poor aren’t suffering more. It never was about the deficit in the first place.

.

Oh come on ladies. Why are you trying to vote anyway?

by digby

Hey if women want the right to vote, they should learn how to follow the rules:

“What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,” 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts said.

Watts has voted in every election for the last forty-nine years. The name on her driver’s license has remained the same for fifty-two years, and the address on her voter registration card or driver’s license hasn’t changed in more than two decades. So imagine her surprise when she was told by voting officials that she would have to sign a “voters affidavit” affirming she was who she said she was.

“Someone looked at that and said, ‘Well, they’re not the same,'” Watts said.

The difference? On the driver’s license, Judge Watts’s maiden name is her middle name. On her voter registration, it’s her actual middle name. That was enough under the new, more strict voter fraud law, to send up a red flag.

“This is the first time I have ever had a problem voting,” Watts said.

Just because there’s zero evidence for voter fraud doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, amirite? Can’t be too careful.

And how hard can it be to zip down to the DMV and get a proper ID? According to Ari Berman, it’s pretty damned hard:

Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a “poll tax”); there are no DMV offices in 81 of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closet location. Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car). “A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,” a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.

Of course. Suppressing the votes of the young, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities and women would be the point. We know who they tend to vote for don’t we?

Luckily there is one group that won’t have to worry:

Texas has the distinction of being one of the few states that allows you to vote with a concealed weapons permit, but not a student ID.

Hey, I don’t see why they should have to show a permit. They should be able to just hold a gun to the poll workers head and demand a ballot. That ought to be enough to prove they’re a Real American, right there.

.

Are not, will not, “does not”?

by digby

Sam Stein notices that the White House does not admit to spying on Angela Merkel, but rather says they are not doing it and will not do it.

Readout of Obama’s call with Merkel pic.twitter.com/1BEfouqUeR
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) October 23, 2013

Well, at least they added the “will not” which is more than they do with the bizarre circumlocution they always use when someone brings up torture. On that they (Obama included) just assert as fact that “the US does not torture” despite the fact that we know it does. Then again, this one doesn’t carry war crimes charges so you can understand why they’d be a little bit more forthcoming.

Once again, I urge people to read this article about this subject.

.