Month: January 2014

Good news. Lynne Stewart released from prison.

by digby

By coincidence I wrote about this case just three days ago. And now she’s been given a compassionate release:

Lynne Stewart has arrived in New York upon her release from prison Friday after federal Judge John Koeltl ordered her “compassionate release.” Watch Thursday’s Democracy Now! for our interview with Stewart, her husband and grandchildren, and her attorney.

Koeltl wrote that “Stewart’s “terminal medical condition and very limited life expectancy constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant the requested reduction [of her sentence.]… It is further ordered that the defendant shall be released from the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons as soon as her medical condition permits, the release plan is implemented and travel arrangements can be made.”

If you don’t know about this case, which was a travesty to begin with, you can click the link to my post and/or read the story at Democracy Now.

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Obamacare is up and running. But that’s not the end of the story.

by digby

When Capitalism: A Love Story came out I was lucky enough to be at a screening with Michael Moore present and there was, as you might imagine, quite a bit of discussion about the Health Care Reform that was ending its way through congress since Moore was so influential in raising the public consciousness about the horrors of the system with his previous film Sicko. He was, at the time, very positive about President Obama and optimistic about the eventual outcome.

But he’s been watching the law unfold with clear eyes and is unsparing about the shortcomings of the new program. In an op-ed in the NY Times he pointed some of them out including this one:

For many people, the “affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act risks being a cruel joke. The cheapest plan available to a 60-year-old couple making $65,000 a year in Hartford, Conn., will cost $11,800 in annual premiums. And their deductible will be $12,600. If both become seriously ill, they might have to pay almost $25,000 in a single year. (Pre-Obamacare, they could have bought insurance that was cheaper but much worse, potentially with unlimited out-of-pocket costs.)

But he’s also clear-eyed about the benefits:

And yet — I would be remiss if I didn’t say this — Obamacare is a godsend. My friend Donna Smith, who was forced to move into her daughter’s spare room at age 52 because health problems bankrupted her and her husband, Larry, now has cancer again. As she undergoes treatment, at least she won’t be in terror of losing coverage and becoming uninsurable. Under Obamacare, her premium has been cut in half, to $456 per month.

There are lots of people like that and it’s a Big Deal.

Moore offers up the right analysis and the best advice:

Let’s not take a victory lap yet, but build on what there is to get what we deserve: universal quality health care.

Those who live in red states need the benefit of Medicaid expansion. It may have seemed like smart politics in the short term for Republican governors to grab the opportunity offered by the Supreme Court rulings that made Medicaid expansion optional for states, but it was long-term stupid: If those 20 states hold out, they will eventually lose an estimated total of $20 billion in federal funds per year — money that would be going to hospitals and treatment.

In blue states, let’s lobby for a public option on the insurance exchange — a health plan run by the state government, rather than a private insurer. In Massachusetts, State Senator James B. Eldridge is trying to pass a law that would set one up. Some counties in California are also trying it. Montana came up with another creative solution. Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat who just completed two terms, set up several health clinics to treat state workers, with no co-pays and no deductibles. The doctors there are salaried employees of the state of Montana; their only goal is their patients’ health. (If this sounds too much like big government to you, you might like to know that Google, Cisco and Pepsi do exactly the same.)

All eyes are on Vermont’s plan for a single-payer system, starting in 2017. If it flies, it will change everything, with many states sure to follow suit by setting up their own versions. That’s why corporate money will soon flood into Vermont to crush it. The legislators who’ll go to the mat for this will need all the support they can get: If you live east of the Mississippi, look up the bus schedule to Montpelier.

So let’s get started. Obamacare can’t be fixed by its namesake. It’s up to us to make it happen.

That’s a fact. It’s going to take years to build up a real, universal system and much of that is going to come from work in the 50 states. It means we will be living with an unequal system for many years, but that’s an old story in America, isn’t it? Maybe the best we can hope for is that the speed of eventual universality is faster than it used to be.

It’s better than it was, but it needs to be better than it is. Hopefully it will be excellent for everyone very soon.

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2013 was a fabulous year for the asset class. Not so much for normal people.

by David Atkins

If you’re part of the asset class, congratulations. 2013 was a very good year for you:

The stock market was unstoppable in 2013.
A U.S. government shutdown, fear of a default, the threat of military action in Syria, big budget cuts, a European country looking for a bailout – any number of events might have derailed the stock market. But they didn’t.

And if skittish investors had jumped out of stocks, they lost out.

The year “2013 would have been a good year to wear noise-canceling headphones,” said Dean Junkans, chief investment officer for Wells Fargo Private Bank. “There were a lot of things that happened, and the market kept moving higher.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 had its best year since 1997, gaining 29.6 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 26.5 percent, its best annual gain since 1995.
Instead of worrying about the wider world, investors focused on the Federal Reserve and the outlook for its stimulus program.

The Fed bought $85 billion in government bonds each month in 2013. The purchases were designed to hold down long-term borrowing rates and encourage spending and investment. The stimulus also prodded investors to move from low-yielding bonds to stocks.

Everyone else? Not so much:

Median household income has begun to recover over the last two years, but households still have not come close to regaining the purchasing power they had before the financial crisis began, a new study says.

The study, issued on Wednesday by two former Census Bureau officials, suggests why many people remain glum even though the economy is growing and unemployment has declined.

Although median annual household income rose to $52,100 in June, from its recent inflation-adjusted trough of $50,700 in August 2011, it remained $2,400 lower — a 4.4 percent decline — than in June 2009, when the recession ended. This drop, combined with the 1.8 percent decline that occurred during the recession, leaves median household income 6.1 percent — or $3,400 — below its level in December 2007, when the economic slump began.

Since the end of the recession, the study said, household income has declined for all but a few population groups. Some of the largest percentage declines occurred for groups whose income was already well below the median, like African-Americans, Southerners, people who did not attend college, and households headed by people under age 25.

There’s no reason to believe that 2014 will be any different given current policy, though an asset-destroying crash certainly wouldn’t be a surprise. The asset classes can only go so long building castles in the air while normal people’s wages continue to slump before gravity starts to take effect.

The big question is who will take the blame when it happens. Because someone will.

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Happy New Year Everybody

by digby

What are the most memorable movie New Year’s Eve parties?

This one for the movie buffs?

Or this one for the romantics?

Either way, these are the only New Years Eve parties I go to these days. Especially since it sounds like a really fun time if you are trying to get through traffic in LA:

The upcoming New Year’s crackdown on drunken driving will include a new test for many people who are pulled over — an oral swab that checks for marijuana, cocaine and other drugs.

The voluntary swabbing has been used just 50 times this year. But Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer is pushing to use it at more checkpoints and jails as officials try to limit the number of drivers impaired by substances other than alcohol.

“Traditionally, our office has focused on drunken driving cases,” Feuer said at a news conference Friday. “We’re expanding drug collection and aggressively enforcing all impaired-driving laws.”

Individuals arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs must submit to a blood test. But prosecutors said the eight-minute, portable oral fluids test could eventually become a more effective use of resources in drugged-driving cases.

The test screens for cocaine, benzodiazepine (Xanax), methamphetamine, amphetamines, narcotic analgesics, methadone and THC representative of marijuana usage within the past few hours. City prosecutors have yet to use results from the test as evidence in a case.

The city attorney’s office filed 598 DUI cases in the last year that involved drugs, compared with 577 drunken driving cases during last year’s winter holiday period alone.
This year, about 1,520 people across Los Angeles County were arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol during the two weeks leading up to Christmas, local law enforcement agencies announced earlier this week.

The stepped-up enforcement will continue through New Year’s Day.

What could go wrong?

Be careful out there…

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Best columnist of the year

by digby

In my book this “award” goes to Margaret Sullivan, the NYT ombudsman. She understands journalism’s role in a democracy and the specific role of the New York Times in the global media ecosystem than any who have come before her. I hope they listen to her. The readers certainly do.

This last column of the year in which she surveys the issues that were important to the Times audience is a case in point. There are lots of excellent observations but I thought this was especially on point:

6. The surveillance state. Despite what Time magazine decided, the person of the year clearly was the whistleblower Edward J. Snowden, and the story of the year was the far-reaching, secretive, everyday surveillance of Americans and many others by the United States government. (Not every news organization shares my view; ABC News’s Monday night look-back at 2013 managed to feature Batkid, at some length, but Snowden not at all.) The continued persecution of leakers and the press is a related issue of great importance, and the federal government’s misguided insistence on pursuing Times reporter James Risen is just one part of that, an affront to the First Amendment.

Mr. Snowden’s initial massive leak of classified information went to Barton Gellman at the Washington Post, the filmmaker Laura Poitras, and to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who wrote for the Guardian U.S. and who now is forming a new media company. As a result, The Times found itself last spring and summer playing an unwelcome game of catch-up. It responded by breaking some good stories, and – through a strong alliance with ProPublica and the Guardian – The Times managed to get a piece of the action.

Perhaps the challenge most important to the democracy in 2014 is to push back harder, to put the weight of The Times behind that push through every means possible: the legal battles as they arise or continue, the bully pulpit of editorials, the revealing light of aggressive news reporting.

That’s a real journalist folks, and the very best of institutional journalism. May more mainstream papers and networks pay close attention to Sullivan in the next year and follow her advice.