Author: digby

Puckered Gun Nutz

by digby

I surrendered in the gun wars a long time ago because, well, they won.It’s pointless to keep banging your head against a wall. And frankly, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom of giving the Bill of Rights an expansive reasding because it’s more fragile than I thought.

But I’m still a little bit freaked out by the gun zealots, if only because of the fact that they don’t actually make sense, and armed nuts make me nervous. Take for example NRA president Wayne LaPierre at CPAC insisting that the 2nd Amendment is the foundation of all of our freedoms and that all rights and freedoms are nothing but “stains on a rotten piece of parchment paper in a museum somewhere” until they are “guarded by the blued steel and dry powder of a free and armed people.”

Ok. I guess I get his point is that armed citizens might have to defend the constitution against a rogue government or a military coup or something. I wonder why these very same people supported the Unitary Executive theory of George W. Bush, but whatever. Apparently, they didn’t find that threatening to the constitution because he wasn’t threatening the foundation of all our freedoms (unless you were someone with an Arab name.) It’s a romantic, revolutionary notion, which you can see played out to its logical conclusion with the brave citizen soldiers who blew up federal buildings.

But in the same speech LaPierre made this comment:

“I don ‘t care if their butts pucker from here to the Potomac, the Founding Fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules”

Now aside from the repellent thuggishness of that comment (which would have been cheered by crips and blood from coast to coast if they’d heard it) LaPierre seems to be missing one major point: the whole notion of libertarian rebellion against gun control is based on the idea that the government is made up of “men with guns” who make all the rules. If these gun owners want to start measuring their … guns to determine who makes the rules, I have to put my money on the state over some fly-by-night militia or gun club.

The whole idea that “the guys with the guns make the rules” is something right out of a police state — or Mad Max. In both cases the Second Amendment isn’t really necessary at all once you start thinking along those lines.

The constitution — and the second amendment itself — is not protected by Wayne and his little toy soldiers. It’s protected by the revolutionary idea that the country is to be governed by the people. Not just the ones with guns either. Even the ones without guns have a say in it. If you don’t respect that, then you are not a believer in the constitution and the rest of us have little reason to defend your second amendment, which nobody cares about but you, since its alleged function as the “foundation of our freedoms” is laughable, anachronistic bullshit. When these second amendment fanatics march on Washington prepared to open fire on the US Army to defend my right to free speech, maybe I’ll be more impressed. (And let’s just say that if that becomes necessary, we will be long past the point where the 2nd Amendment is actually relevant.)

I’ll stand behind the Second Amendment because I don’t want to start mucking around with the bill of rights. This country just isn’t mature enough to function unless they are considered sacred pronouncements from oracles of the past (which I’m sure would be a sad disappointment to the founders themselves, who had much higher hopes for their revolutionary heirs.) But somebody needs to tell Lil’ Wayne to put a sock in the “guys with guns make the rules” commentary. After all, we do still have a constitution, which has a whole lot to say about who makes the rules and it says absolutely nothing about the men with guns having more rights than the rest of us.

If they get too cute with that kind of talk they may find themselves on the receiving end of the guys who think the rules are actually the “rule of law.”

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He Said Earmark

by digby

…heh… heh.

I’m listening to this ongoing nonsense about “earmarks” and “bridges to nowhere” in the stimulus package as the Beavis and Buttheads Republicans and their giggling fangirls in the media and it’s frustrating. I noticed several days ago that Jack Cafferty actually dropped his facile worldweary cynicism for a couple of minutes and featured some reader responses that actually made the case for necessary government spending, even though the names of these expenditures make the mentally pre-pubescent gasbags dissolve into laughter.

Here’s a typical segment today between Tamron Hall on MSNBC and reporter Bob Franken:

Franken:These earmarks are important to the poeple back home. It’s very easy — I’m going to make something up here — to rail against a study of the sex life of catfish, for instance. But catfish farming is very big in many southern states and perhaps it’s very important to understand the sex life of catfish. Important to those states that rely on catfish farming.

Hall: (giggling) Maybe they should change the name of some of them. Because when you hear some of them, you know, pork sweat and whatever, it sounds odd. But it can have a good use.

So true. Beavis and Butthead are in important national political and media positions and they just can’t help having a fit of the giggles when they hear these things. Somebody should find different words so these programs don’t “sound” funny. It’s at least a step in the right direction that they are having the conversation. (And frankly, I think it’s probably due specifically to Paul Krugman. He used exactly the right metaphor to get their attention.)

Earlier on CNN there was a long feature story about a stimulus infrastructure “road to nowhere” that you really have to see to completely comprehend the condescending yet sophomoric level of the reporting on these things. (Kyra Phillips needs to be grounded and told that she won’t be allowed to go to the spring dance if she doesn’t stop acting up in class.)I’m sure we will be forced to endure many more of them as the press searches madly for these cheap shots which mainly serve to give the wealthy TV celebrities an excuse to look down their noses at the dumb rubes who are foolishly grateful for the projects and the money these projects are providing.

Unfortunately, this problem wasn’t just created by the B&B conservatives, although they are the ones who have really turned it into a hypocrisyfest with their maidenly tutting about overindulgence as they waddle and roll over each other getting to the feeding trough. Democrats asked for this too, with their sanctimony about earmarks. Their complaints about the culture of corruption under the Republicans were right on, but in using earmarks as an example of “the fleecing of America” they misdirected the anger of the public to public works programs when it should have been squarely aimed at the cozy relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists. They had Abramoff and they had Ted Stevens taking bribes. Why make such a fetish of earmarks?

They didn’t need to make a fetish of the Bridge to Nowhere, which, as it turns out, was a false impression, one I actually didn’t know until Bob Somerby pointed me to it (and I have connections to Alaska!) The multi-million dollar bridge, which “everyone” knows was being built to a nearly uninhabited island was actually being built to connect the town of Ketchican to its airport:

Two years ago the small Alaska town of Ketchikan, where five generations of my family have lived, became the poster child for all that is wrong with the United States government. We wanted a bridge to connect us to our airport, which is on a different island from our town. The bridge had been promised to us 30 years ago when the government chose—over the objections of many in this community—to put our new airport across the narrows from Ketchikan. Unfortunately, when it finally arrived, the money for that bridge came in the form of a congressional earmark.

Earmarks were once considered a good way for elected representatives to meet the needs of their communities. The federal bureaucracy could not move fast enough or act specifically enough to meet those needs, whereas a targeted earmark could.

But since then earmarks have become synonymous with the worst excesses of federal spending, the pork-barrel projects that bloat our budget, compound our deficit and raise our taxes.

Earmarks actually make up less than 1 percent of the federal budget, but they are the political equivalent of a big, slow softball floating toward the plate. Politically, it’s as pointless to be “for” earmarks as it is to be “against” moms and apple pie.

But the politics of earmarks didn’t mean much to us up here in Alaska. We were too busy focusing on the need for a bridge to get to our airport. Then somehow our bridge became known as the “Bridge to Nowhere.”

To us, the name seemed odd. Ketchikan was never “nowhere.” It is 90 minutes north of Seattle by plane. The rest of Alaska, including Anchorage, with a population approaching 300,000, lies to the north—well beyond “nowhere.” The media reports never seemed to mention that Ketchikan has a year-round population of 14,000—making it the fourth-largest community in the state. And they forgot to account for the more than 250,000 people who pass through our airport every year, and the nearly 1 million visitors who come here each summer, mostly on cruise ships.

Why the next thing you know those bastards will be asking for earmarks to monitor volcanoes and earthquakes too! (heh heh … heh heh.)

Now, there is no denying that Ted Stevens was a crooked piece of work. It was pure delight to see him run out of Washington on a rail. But the problem wasn’t his penchant for earmarks, which for a small population state like Alaska with far flung communities with many unusual needs are often necessary. The problem was with his cozy relationship to the oil companies and contractors. The crime wasn’t the earmarks, it was the kickbacks.

But our trusty Dem message strategists, who never think beyond the cute soundbite of the moment, jumped on the bridge to nowhere meme and put it into the common vernacular so now the gasbags can just say “earmark” and the whole country starts snorting like Beavis and Butthead at the mere mention of the word. Democrats should never feed into this pernicious anti-government rhetoric, especially when it comes to funding things that actually benefit communities and real people. That’s the fundamental function of government, it’s what we think it should do. Cost overruns, of course. Corruption, absolutely. Insist on transparency, no doubt about it. Shoddy work? Sure. But joining the Beavis and Butthead crowd and laughing at government work because it “sounds funny” is shooting themselves in the foot and they shouldn’t do it.

*I’ll put up the relevant portion of the transcript when it becomes available.

Big Bank Strikes Again

by dday

Seriously, I am so done with these elites.

WASHINGTON – The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits up to $250,000, tried for years to get congressional authority to collect the premiums in case of a looming crisis. But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized – and that bank failures were so infrequent – that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.

Now with 25 banks having failed last year, 17 so far this year, and many more expected in the coming months, the FDIC has proposed large new premiums for banks at the very time when many can least afford to pay. The agency collected $3 billion in the fees last year and has proposed collecting up to $27 billion this year, prompting an outcry from some banks that say it will force them to raise consumer fees and curtail lending.

So for ten YEARS, these banks didn’t pay their insurance premiums, secure in the knowledge that they were the masters of the universe and nothing could ever hurt them. Keep in mind that the Asian financial crisis hit right in the middle of that time. But these banksters were invulnerable. But now the FDIC is eating banks left and right, and everybody expects the money just to magically appear in their account.

And I’m not leaving the policymakers off the hook, either. This was clearly a bipartisan swoon, a fealty to rich Wall Street greedheads that shouldn’t be bothered with the imposition of insuring their customer’s deposits. Congress agreed that there was enough reserves in the fund not to charge banks for ten years. That’s a corporate welfare giveaway and nothing else. Sheila Bair was, if anything, a hero in this, pleading since before she took over the FDIC that the program needed more capital.

Bair said yesterday that the agency’s failure to collect premiums from most banks “was surprising to me and of concern.” As a Treasury Department official in 2001, she said, she testified on Capitol Hill about the need to impose the fees, but nothing happened. Congress did not grant the authority for the fees until 2006, just weeks before Bair took over the FDIC. She then used that authority to impose the fees over the objections of some within the banking industry.

“That is five years of very healthy good times in banking that could have been used to build up the reserve,” Bair, a former professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said in an interview. “That is how we find ourselves where we are today. An important lesson going forward is we need to be building up these funds in good times so you can draw down upon them in bad times.”

It is astonishing what is being revealed about how much banking interests ran the country for the last 15 years. Now, after taking hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers, they’re whining about all the burdens the acceptance of public money is placing on them, like executive pay caps and selling corporate jets. Of course, they’re not going to give back the money, just whine about it enough so that Congress loosens the reins. And even if they did return a portion of the TARP money they’d just make an end run to grab their corporate welfare through AIG. Because we wouldn’t want a crisis on our hands by not paying them out.

So when times are booming, the banks want no regulation and won’t even condescend to meet their own financial obligations with the government. When the casino closes up and they’re tapped out, they come back for a handout. Which they get, at massive expense without taxpayers sharing in the upside. But don’t you dare tell them how they can and can’t spend the money. After all, they know best, right?

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The Continuing Assault On Reason

by digby

A few years back Al Gore wrote a book called “The Assault on Reason.” I’m sure many of you read it. We were in the middle of that bizarroworld period after 9/11, when post-modern “conservatives” were openly admitting to creating their own reality:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

That Bush official (*cough Rove *cough) was talking specifically about foreign policy (I think) but it is really much bigger than that. It’s the basis of the conservative worldview. Gore wrote in his book, with the same sense of shocked incredulity I felt every single day:

Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it…

We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong.

He wasn’t. But I think for some reason many of us made the mistake of ascribing this to the particular malevolence of Dick Cheney or the empire fantasies of Straussian neocons and failed to recognize the fact that a good portion of this country is simply living in another dimension of the public square from the rest of us. They create their own public square with its own logic, its own reality. And we are seeing this play out once again with the economic meltdown.

Powerful Republicans are now talking about spending freezes because if the average American has to pull in its belt then the government should too. For years, they told us the government should be run like a business. Now it should be run like your household budget. And perhaps we could chalk that up to simple economic ignorance, not a break with what we know to be reality (even if it is beiong said by one of the most powerful men in the world.) Except today we get news that Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina is now seeking to redefine what stimulus is:

Now we’ve got South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford announcing that he will ask President Obama for a stimulus “waiver” that will allow him to apply $700 million worth of stimulus funds to paying down South Carolina’s “very sizable state debt and contingent liabilities.”

Aside from not appearing to understand what the word “stimulus” means, Sanford is displaying a distressing level of ignorance as to the nature of our current economic problems. In a letter to state legislators, Sanford wrote that “[W]hen one is in a hole, the first order of business is to stop digging.”

That kind of thinking might apply to, oh, I don’t know, enacting tax cuts without matching spending cuts, or waging a war without coming up with a source of revenue to offset its cost. But it does not apply to the problem of confronting a collapse in demand. To put it in Sanford’s own terms: to stop digging now runs the risk of making the hole much bigger.

Krugman had to explain the “paradox of thrift” yesterday on television, something that seems pretty elementary to me just from my rudimentary understanding of Keynesian economics, but is apparently something that is entirely rejected by most conservatives. It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they refuse to believe it. They make their own reality (or, as I used to say during the Bush years, it’s the politics of “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes,”) by building an edifice of knowledge and scholarship to make it appear that their “revisionism” is common knowledge. They are not content (or able) to make their arguments from the standpoint of a commonly agreed upon set of facts. They insist on offering a completely alternate narrative based on entirely different facts — post modern politics at its most sophisticated.

For instance, back in the beginning of this financial meltdown I observed in passing that Amity Schlaes was to this crisis what Laurie Mylroie had been to 9/11 — crackpots who nonetheless find their way into the highest circles of conservative intelligensia and end up having enormous influence within the Republican establishment and the right wing media. (Clare Starling had a similar influence on the conservative thinking about state sponsored terrorism back in the 1980s.) They have a need to base their worldview on common received wisdom from an designated oracle of the moment.

Jonathan Chait has reviewed Schlaes’ New Deal revisionist history called The Forgotten Man, which is now the economic bible of the conservative chatterers:

A generation ago, the total dismissal of the New Deal remained a marginal sentiment in American politics. Ronald Reagan boasted of having voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Neoconservatives long maintained that American liberalism had gone wrong only in the 1960s. Now, decades after Democrats grew tired of accusing Republicans of emulating Herbert Hoover, Republicans have begun sounding … well, exactly like Herbert Hoover. When President Obama recently met with House Republicans, the eighty-two-year-old Roscoe G. Bartlett told him that “I was there” during the New Deal, and, according to one account, “assert[ed] that government intervention did not work then, either.” George F. Will, speaking on the Sunday talk show “This Week,” declared not long ago, “Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn’t work?”

When Republicans announce that the New Deal failed–as they now do, over and over again, without any reproach from their own side–they usually say that the case has been proven by the conservative columnist Amity Shlaes in her book The Forgotten Man. Though Shlaes’s revisionist history of the New Deal came out a year and a half ago, to wild acclaim on the right, its popularity seems to be peaking now. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard recently called Shlaes one of the Republican party’s major assets. “Amity Shlaes’s book on the failure of the New Deal to revive the economy, The Forgotten Man, was widely read by Republicans in Washington,” he reported. “So were her compelling articles on that subject in mainstream newspapers.”

This is no exaggeration. The Forgotten Man has been publicly touted by such Republican luminaries as Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Sanford, Jon Kyl, and Mike Pence. Senator John Barrasso was so eager to tout The Forgotten Man that last month he waved around a copy and announced, “in these economic times, a number of members of the Senate are reading a book called The Forgotten Man, about the history of the Great Depression, as we compare and look for solutions, as we look at a stimulus package.” Barrasso offered this unsolicited testimonial, apropos of nothing whatsoever, during the confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Chu politely ignored the rave, thus giving no sign as to whether he had heard the Good News. Whether or not The Forgotten Man actually persuaded conservatives that the New Deal failed, in the time of their political exile, which is also a time of grave economic crisis, it has become the scripture to which they have flocked.

I leave it to Chait to thoroughly dismantle the book. (It is not really a book about economics and Schlaes isn’t an economist, so it’s not all that hard.) His larger observation about how the whole Republican establishment has adopted her thesis is what interests me. As St Ronnie famously said, “there they go again.”

When reality doesn’t fit their worldview, they simply create another reality. For example, when 9/11 happened, they didn’t know or care about terrorism. Their worldview was formed around the threat from totalitarian states. Therefore, they had to blame a totalitarian state for 9/11. Voila, Laurie Mylroie and Iraq. Today, the economy is melting down as the result of wild speculation and deregulation of the financial markets. The conservative worldview was formed around the idea that unfettered free markets cannot fail. Therefore, they have to blame interference in the unfettered free market for the failure. Voila, Amity Schlaes and New Deal Failure.

Obviously, the one thing we have going for us is the fact that they lost so much credibility on Iraq that they are not running things at this crucial moment. All you have to do is watch John McCain’s gibberish to know how important this really was. And they are still hugely influential, especially in the media, which sees these discredited thinkers as valid since they are so fully embraced by the Republican Party. Among the Republican base it’s as if we are back in 2002 listening to the 101st keyboarders insisting that Saddam has to be taken out or we will all be killed in our beds. (Read the comments to Chait’s piece for an excellent education on just how fully the hard core right believes this propaganda. It’s startling.)

Right now it seems to be a waste of time to even think about what these people are saying. Their movement has lost all discipline and they are fighting among themselves. But at this point we have no way of knowing how bad things are going to get and it would be unwise to ignore how successful these people were just in the recent past. Things can change quickly. As bizarre as they sound in light of the current crisis, it’s still important that they be challenged. Worse things can happen.

In today’s Financial Times, Martin Wolff writes the first in a series they are calling “The Future of Capitalism.” He makes the observation that this is one of those moments, like the Great Depression, where everything is up for grabs. He reminds us:

Remember what happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment rose to one-quarter of the labour force in important countries, including the US. This transformed capitalism and the role of government for half a century, even in the liberal democracies. It led to the collapse of liberal trade, fortified the credibility of socialism and communism and shifted many policymakers towards import substitution as a development strategy.

The Depression led also to xenophobia and authoritarianism. Frightened people become tribal: dividing lines open within and between societies. In 1930, the Nazis won 18 per cent of the German vote; in 1932, at the height of the Depression, their share had risen to 37 per cent.

As I have written before, when I was a kid it was just accepted, even in my conservative home (where Roosevelt was not popular, by the way) that he saved capitalism and prevented a possible revolution. Now, that’s an unknowable thing, and could well be hyperbole, but that’s how we thought. It wasn’t that everyone was convinced that everything he did was great, far from it, it was that everyone knew that if he hadn’t taken drastic measures something far more terrible could have happened. And that’s because everything was unstable and bad things were happening all over the world.

The 2000s have been fraught with crises with the United States at the center of all of them. The actions of this government are going to be decisive for the next few decades. And we are dealing with a Republican party and a conservative movement which is still living in their alternate universe of unreason and faith based reality. They are weak today, but until their worldview is successfully dismantled they will remain a serious impediment to successfully navigating this crisis. If things don’t turn around quickly, and they are able to regain their discipline, there is every reason to fear what might happen if they regain power. If the invasion of Iraq was a bad decision, just imagine what they will do if these fantasists get back in power during a depression.

Update: Here’ the current intellectual leader of conservative economic thought:

Every administration has its movie. George W. Bush seemed too often on the wrong side of guerrilla warfare in “The Battle of Algiers.” Bill Clinton mixed business and pleasure with the predictably messy results of “The Apartment.” Now Barack Obama has dropped us all into “The Matrix.”

In the Obama Era, it seems, we all pick our way through anxious lives that have something to do with software. Like Keanu Reeves’s Neo, we realize hour-to-hour that we are being manipulated by a system that has its own larger plan.

If only we keep a cool head, we tell ourselves, our powers of logic will help us escape the web. But each move we make, even the one that feels independent, takes us deeper into the Matrix.

Peggy Noonan must be pea green with envy that she didn’t think of that first.

h/t to bb

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The Health And Welfare Crisis

by dday

The combination of soaring costs and economic meltdown means that more and more people have to forego health insurance. That’s what part of the stimulus tries to stop by offering subsidies to keep the jobless on their old coverage through COBRA. But since health insurance does not translate into health care, we’re seeing an additional crisis – people with insurance scrimping on treatment because they can’t afford the co-pays.

Take South Dade Realtor J. Berry Hamilton, 57. She’s gone to a policy with a $5,000 deductible, meaning she has to pay most costs out of her own pocket. Recently, she brushed off her doctor’s request for a diagnostic exam when she got a sinus infection. As her business has declined, she figures: “Let me see if the antibiotic works first, and if it doesn’t then maybe I’ll have the X-ray.”

“Patients are spending less, no question about it,” says Bernd Wollschlaeger, a primary care doctor in North Miami Beach. “A patient needs a echocardiogram. And they say they can’t afford the $100 or $200 co-payment, so they’re deferring. In the long run, this just can’t be good for healthcare.”

People are certainly pinching their pennies. For the five hospitals in Baptist Health South Florida, Vice President Karen Godfrey reports that patients are now hesitating on tests and procedures even with co-pays as low as $15, “which is very surprising.

“One of the registration managers was telling me some are negotiating for services. If a woman gets a prescription for a mammogram and an ultrasound, she wants to know the co-pay for both,” then pick the test with the cheaper co-pay.

I should mention that this is the DESIRED state of health care for Republicans. It’s what they’ve argued for years. They think Americans should all be smart shoppers with health care and then the spending won’t be as wasteful. Of course, when this means neglecting needed drugs or tests, it cuts into preventive care, which when used effectively actually saves the patient and the system money. So a short-run savings causes long-term catastrophic costs, and raises overall spending. Not to mention the fact that people get sicker as a result.

This is not to say that there aren’t wasteful treatments and procedures offered to patients – that’s why comparative effectiveness research, to measure and weed out those less useful treatments, is an important element of reform. But that’s a far cry from what’s happening now, which actually is the dreaded “rationing” that Republicans like to warn everyone about. In fact, controlling costs and making treatment more affordable is the only way to actually be able to improve health outcomes. Right now we spend and spend, more in some regions, less in others, without value for that spending.

And if you’re aging and have some aches and pains and need to be freaked out more than just about the fact that health care becoming too expensive, your pension just shrunk, too.

A wave of US companies are suspending payments to their staff 401(k) retirement plans in a bid to cut costs amid the economic downturn.

Saks, General Motors, newspaper group McClatchy, clothing company J.Crew, FedEx, UPS, Coca-Cola Bottling, Reader’s Digest, Motorola, Regions Financial and Sprint Nextel are among the growing list of companies which have suspended contributions in recent months.

Even the AARP, the influential advocacy group formerly known as the American Association for Retired Persons, will suspend contributions to its staff 401(k) plan from March 22 for the rest of the year.

The growing number of suspensions appears to strike a blow against the viability of 401(k) plans, which were introduced 30 years ago as the main way that Americans should save for retirement, replacing defined benefit pension plans. Companies typically offered to match employee contributions up to 5 per cent of annual salary.

Considering that so much of that 401(k) wealth vanished in the stock market, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. But with defined-benefit pensions going the way of the dinosaur, these defined-contribution plans were, other than a too-small Social Security benefit, the only retirement planning a lot of people had. And now that’s evaporating.

And this is why we have to tackle multiple issues at once right now, regardless of the short-attention spans of corporate media. Of course the economy and the financial sector need to be managed, but our craptacular social services structure was decaying in the 1990s, and just barely limped along during the post-9/11 jobless recovery. A downturn just finishes it off, and we have no choice but to rebuild it or leave behind entire classes of Americans.

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Food

As mentioned previously, I’ve become quite interested in the topic of food, something I know very little about, but am trying to learn (and I hope readers here will chime in to help). To a layperson who is taking food – and cooking for my family – seriously for the first time, it’s a surprisingly complex topic (cue foodie commenters to respond with some variation of, “No kidding, you fool!” ). Something as seemingly mundane as popcorn has not only nutritional but even cultural/political subtleties that I barely imagined. So this is both helpful, and encouraging:

In her first weeks in the White House, Mrs. Obama has emerged as a champion of healthy food and healthy living. She has praised community vegetable gardens, opened up her own kitchen to show off the White House chefs’ prowess with vegetables and told stories about feeding less fattening foods to her daughters.

White House officials say the focus on healthy living will be a significant item on Mrs. Obama’s agenda, which already includes supporting working families and military spouses. As the nation battles an obesity epidemic and a hard-to-break taste for oversweetened and oversalted dishes, her message is clear: Fresh, nutritious foods are not delicacies to be savored by the wealthy, but critical components of the diets of ordinary and struggling families.

That sounds exactly right. Unfortunately, as Britain learned, it’s not easy to get people to change their diets, even if what they’re eating is just one step above garbage:

Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.

The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?

“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader. Instead, en route to school recently, he was enjoying a north of England specialty known as a chip butty: a French-fries-and-butter sandwich doused in vinegar…

“Parents are giving their children packed lunches, which are invariably inferior from a nutritional point of view to the school meals from which they were recoiling,” [Professor Kevin Morgan] said…

Andreas Petrou insists that no amount of explaining will convince him that a French fry sandwich is not a decent meal. If confronted with the school food, he said, he will do what all his friends do: gather as much bread as he can, “put half an inch of butter on each slice,” and call it lunch.

Mmmm…

It’s probably not feasible – yet – to ban trash from public school lunches here in the US, let alone provide American kids a genuinely healthful lunch. After all, there’s a lot of money available to create one more phony culture war, this time over corporations’ right to inflict epidemic levels of diabetes and heart disease on the American people. But Michelle and Barack Obama’s example can only help encourage a change for the better.

PS As an aside, the article about Michelle Obama notes:

It is a notable shift in direction. The former first lady, Laura Bush, insisted that fresh, organic foods be served in the White House, but did not broadcast that fact to the public, according to Walter Scheib, who served as executive chef under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

“She just didn’t talk much about it outside the house,” Mr. Scheib said of Mrs. Bush. “Mrs. Obama is taking a higher profile.”

Clearly, eating organic [translated: Dirty Fucking Hippy] foods conflicted with Bush’s well-earned image as First Lout. And nothing Laura Bush did publicly could be permitted to interfere with that. Meanwhile, obesity levels rose to alarming levels during the past 8 years.

Man, how I hated Bush being president.

Moving On

by digby

It looks like the Religious Industrial Complex is swimming against a strong tide:

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels, according to a major study of U.S. religion being released today.

The survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of last year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990.

[…]

The survey substantiated several general trends already identified by sociologists: the slipping importance of denomination in America, the growing number of people who say they have “no” religion and the increase in religious minorities including Muslims, Mormons and such movements as Wicca and paganism.

The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had “no” religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.

These trends really do fly in the face of the RIC, especially the self-identified liberal lobbyist types who have been beating the Democrats over the head for years trying to get them to become social conservatives. The fact is that the religious vote has always been misrepresented, especially during the past decade when every religion lobbyist was running around taking credit for garnering the all important “values vote” when such a constituency never existed outside the hard core right.

One of the only only upsides of this miserable economic situation is that at least we seem to have moved beyond that puerile obsession for the moment.

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How To Get Out Of Iraq Quickly

by dday

Send Citibank in to help their banking sector. The public will be rampaging with torches, sending the military on hastily arranged choppers out of the country in no time.

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Waiting For the (Blue) Dog Days

by digby

According to Stephanoupoulos, EFCA isn’t going to come up for a vote any time before summer. I had heard it had pretty much fallen off the agenda early on, and believed it when I read this comment from Obama back in January (which Steph also links to.)

I think the basic principal of making it easier and fairer for workers who want to join a union, join a union is important. And the basic outline of the Employee Fair Choice are ones that I agree with. But I will certainly listen to all parties involved including from labor and the business community which I know considers this to be the devil incarnate. I will listen to parties involved and see if there are ways that we can bring those parties together and restore some balance.

You know, now if the business community’s argument against the Employee Free Choice Act is simply that it will make it easier for people to join unions and we think that is damaging to the economy then they probably won’t get too far with me. If their arguments are we think there are more elegant ways of doing this or here are some modifications or tweaks to the general concept that we would like to see. Then I think that’s a conversation that not only myself but folks in labor would be willing to have. But, so that’s the general approach that I am interested in taking. But in terms of time table, if we are losing half a million jobs a month then there are no jobs to unionize. So my focus first is on those key economic priority items that I just mentioned.

That seemed to me to be a pretty clear signal that the administration wasn’t going to push to pass the bill that passed last year. And so they aren’t. If the unions don’t mind, I guess nobody else should. And they don’t seem to mind. So, we’ll see where we stand in four or five months I guess.

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Da Man

by digby

Blue America congressman Alan Grayson is over at FDL right now discussing the appalling lack of transparency with the various bank bailouts. He’s one of the few who have been pressing on this issue.

Here’s a sample:

I used to think that war profiteering in Iraq was the crime of the century. But this is bigger.

Remember: Tell members of Congress that you want them to take action here.

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