Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Let Them Eat Fancy Feast

by digby

Think Progress caught a great exchange between GOP Representative and a couple of callers on the health care crisis. The first caller was a 60+ year old woman who worked in retail who was complaining that she couldn’t get health insurance because she has diabetes. Here’s Davis’ answer:

DAVIS: Well, Dorothy, let me, let me say a couple things. First of all, you know, I understand the dilemma you’re in. I don’t know if you’ll be able to retire at 62 or not. Frankly, I mean all of our 401Ks are down. I wish I could retire at 62. I think you’re going to find Americans working longer than they had originally anticipated, given the economic downturn and some of the economic realities.

If you can find a job with a major employer, they’re not going to be able to reject you under those cases. I don’t think you’ll find, probably be able to find some health insurance but if its with a small business or you’re going out on your own, it’s difficult at this point. There may be a government plan or private plans that are mandated coming out of this that are maybe able to help you. But diabetes, particularly adult onset, is controllable. If you watch your weight, if you exercise, watch what you eat and, you know, continue I guess in this case to take your medication. I don’t know any reason why you shouldn’t be able to find something out there, but you want to look for an employer that has a health care plan. Good luck.

[…]

CALLER: I’ll make, I’ll make my comment then I’ll get off the phone. Anyway, one of the things that I noticed this morning was Tom’s reaction to the woman who called looking for the job with health care and his final statement was “good luck,” which I think encapsulates the entire Republican party’s attitude towards any problems that are facing the American people today. I also have a master’s degree in economics.

HOST: Did you want to respond to Rick?

DAVIS: Well, congratulations on — well, I wish her good luck at this point. We’ll see what comes out of the health care plan. It wasn’t a “good luck, you’re on your own type of thing.” I think we all feel for people that are in those kinds of positions. But it’s very difficult. When you start having the government take care of everybody with a problem, as I said you’re doing it with borrowed money, what you want to see is — these are not simple solutions. It is progressive to continue to borrow money, to spend to take care of people’s problems. This tends to be a pretty inefficient way of doing things, number one. And number two, down the pike, somebody has to pay for it. I think I’m fairly progressive in my views as well. I was the head of a county government before I came to Washington and had to run it, inherited a pretty big deficit and was selected two years later, after making a number of changes, as the best financially-run county in the country.

So I look at governance as a very very tough business and I don’t think “good luck” was like a kiss off. I would generally say good luck to you as you try to move through this problem. But I don’t know that she can count on Washington to solve it for her. She will be eligible for Medicare in 3 years. And at that point, you can probably get some relief on some of the issues she’s looking for. She wanted to retire at 62 years old. We’d all like to retire at 62 years old, but I’m not so sure government can guarantee that people can just retire at 62 years old or that we should be doing those kind of things and maybe that’s where I part company with the caller.

So this man who makes six figures and is covered for every hangnail until he dies is telling this woman that she needs to find a large employer who will hire a 62 year woman and then keep working (on her feet — that’s what retail usually is) for much longer than she hoped to. Sure, that’s doable. It’s just a matter of finding the right job after all, and who can’t do that? After all the two of them are in the same boat — the coiffed congressman who would like to retire at 62 but lost a bunch of his portfolio in the crash and this 62 year old shop clerk who’s been working at menial, backbreaking labor her whole life. Hey, he found a job with a large employer who covers him (the federal government) why shouldn’t she? He just can’t figure out why she can’t find a plan to cover her like he has.

The truth is that taxpayers can guarantee his health care and pension because he’s so special, no, so superior to people like this caller. The government can ‘t afford to provide health insurance for losers. Only winners like Congressman Davis.

Meanwhile, we have other Republicans declaring war on the seniors. Evidently, they are all a bunch of whiners who refuse to give up their precious entertainment to pay for their medication. Here’s Mark Steyn filling in for Limbaugh today:

STEYN: We’ve still got to do something to plug this little hole in the donut for the prescription drug plans for seniors. Because, heaven forbid, heaven forbid that these seniors, these seniors should have to choose between prescription drugs and Tony Danza doing South Pacific in dinner theater.

I guess they think this is a big electoral winner, but these gasbags had better watch out or they are going to lose the over 50 demographic just like they lost the under 30 demographic.

Conservative politicians and their wingnut welfare queens are just a bunch of heartless, rich jackasses, basically, always have been. But people are no longer quite so sanguine that they’re going to get the chance to be rich, spoiled jackasses too so these lines don’t read quite as hilarious or as “common sense” as they used to. A public servant telling some 62 year old retail clerk that she needs to stop bellyaching and find a job with a big employer so she can get health care is so “let them eat cake” that I can hardly believe he said it. And some overpaid creep calling senior citizens who are living on a thousand dollars a month “spoiled” is just asking for the guillotine, which in America is a metaphor for a tax rate of 90% on any fatuous wingnut gasbag who has the nerve to say something like this after what they’ve done to this country.

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The Old Machine Still Works

by digby

Here’s a perfect example of the Republican Noise Machine successfully working the refs:

Conservatives have been relentlessly attacking ABC’s upcoming health care special, claiming the network is going to try to “help sell” Obama’s health care plan. Diane Sawyer defended the special by saying that the program will include “questions from every single vantage point.” However, if today’s GMA interview with Obama’s health care team is any indication, one group’s questions and concerns with the health care plan may be left out: progressives.

You can see the video, here.

This is how it’s done. The right wing stages a hissy fit accusing the so-called liberal media of being in the tank for Obama. And the so-called liberal media, which is more afraid of being called the liberal media than being seen as corporate whores, stooges or fools, bends over backwards to ensure that every right wing talking point is aired with the authority of Zeus. They will push, they will prod, they will argue the conservative line vociferously, using their status as advocates for “the people” to make it sound as if they are expressing the doubts of the public at large. They will not mention any liberal concerns because as Atrios pointed out with respect to Froomkin’s firing, anyone who has concerns about the super liberal administration’s plans from the left is, by definition, a crackpot communist nutcase.

This will end up being a seminar for the American people to understand why they should believe the Republicans instead of their own lying eyes. Again.

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Leading Questions

by digby

Ed Kilgore makes an interesting point about bipartisanship vs elite village consensus. (He frames it as political bipartisanship vs grassroots bipartisanship, but I think my shorthand is more descriptive 😉

He has said many times that he thought Obama’s spirit of bipartisanship was aimed at the people rather than the political party in DC. I think the jury is still out on that, but for the sake of argument, I’ll agree that’s so. Therefore, his approach to health care should be calibrated to gaining the support of the people, which sounds right to me in any case. Kilgore writes:

[I]t’s worth emphasizing that the two most credible surveyors of public opinion on this subject, the Kaiser Family Foundation and CBS/New York Times, have both found that at least half of self-identified Republicans favor a well-described public option.

So the question must be asked: if Barack Obama wants to conduct a bipartisan approach to universal health care, what does that mean in terms of the public option? Killing or watering down the public option in order to (maybe) attract the support of Sen. Chuck Grassley, and not much of anybody else in the congressional Republican ranks? Or maintaining it to appeal to rank-and-file Republicans, who favor it despite the views of their “leaders” and the polarized atmosphere in Washington?

[…]

I understand that Obama and congressional Democrats may need cooperation from Grassley or a few others for short-term tactical reasons in the Senate. But ultimately, “bipartisanship” on health care may actually mean looking past congressional Republicans and pitting them against their own supporters across the country, particularly on the public option.

Yes, yes and yes. Indeed, if Obama still wants to emulate the great “game changer” himself, Ronnie Reagan, that is exactly what he would do. Reagan used his personal popularity to get rank and file Democrats to support his policies. And he rhetorically always framed his policies as the common sense policies of the everyman out in the country, and then they backed it up with polling that showed that the people trusted him.

Obama can pass health care with Democrats and then legitimately call it bipartisan by citing public support. But he has to not care that David Broder and David Brooks have a hissy fit over it. They do not speak for Americans; they don’t even speak for Republicans on this one.

This is what the bully pulpit is all about. He can take his case directly to the people and if he backs a real plan, with real teeth, he can get it passed, I don’t have any doubts. The party grassroots and the public at large, including a large number of Republicans, are with him. The only people standing in the way are the insiders in the ruling establishment who want to protect the status quo.

The Republicans and the financial elites (to the extent they are distinct) are both on the run at the moment. Their powers are sorely weakened by the messes they’ve created and the public distrust of them as individuals and institutions. There has rarely been a greater need or a greater opportunity for a politician to appeal directly to the people and create a positive, enduring legacy. He can lead the country or he can lead the village on this — it’s all up to him at this point.

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Slow-Motion Avalanche

by dday

This jumped past me last week, but a federal judge ordered John Yoo to testify in a case filed by Jose Padilla, who was held in a Navy brig for years and slowly driven insane under the enemy combatant policies of the last regime. Ady Barkan thinks this could actually provide some accountability.

In 2002, Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote a memo recommending that Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in the wake of 9/11 and held on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, be classified as an enemy combatant. Yoo also wrote memos arguing that American law does not prevent the president from ordering such enemy combatants tortured. This January, after enduring years of abuse in prison, Padilla sued Yoo for violating his constitutional rights.

And a week ago, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that Padilla’s allegations were plausible enough to justify denying Yoo’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. White was appointed by George W. Bush the year Yoo was writing his memos.

White’s decision is the first of its kind: Until now, although other lawsuits have been brought, no government official has faced personal liability for his role in the torture or deaths of detainees. But it probably won’t be the last. These cases are just beginning to address the fraught questions of justice that have emerged in the aftermath of the Bush era—what atrocities were committed in the name of national security, who bears responsibility, and how should they be punished? Although neither the Obama administration nor most members of Congress want to deal with these questions directly, they’re even more opposed to letting judges (and juries) take a crack at them. Padilla v. Yoo is an example of a surprising development: a conservative judge putting pressure on the Democrats in Washington to create some system of accountability for the Bush administration. It could help spawn more such rulings.

The Obama Administration actually defended Yoo’s plea to skirt testifying in this case, clearly to just close down this issue in the name of moving forwards and not backwards. But White really boxed in the White House now, and every option available to them plausibly leads to more disclosure and more court rulings that would force some measure of accountability. Barkan considers this ruling crucially important, and maybe it is. Remember that Bush lost case after case invalidating his national security procedures, and now Obama has mirrored his predecessor on many of those fronts. Taking the hard line on official secrecy and executive privilege has the benefit of delaying accountability, but as long as there are lawyers willing to seek justice – and there are – they will pursue the avenues made available by favorable rulings. This avalanche may be happening in slow motion, but it’s rolling downhill, and even a crafty efforts from the elites to shield themselves from a reckoning may not be enough to stop it.

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Educators

by digby

Over the week-end I wrote about and linked to Greg Sargent’s piece about Larry Sabato’s personal relationship with former congressman Virgil Goode and how that’s a good example of conflict of interest that defines the ethos of the insider class of villagers. Sabato’s school had been a recipient of many earmarks from Goode over the years and is now struggling since Tom Periello ousted Goode in the last election.

Sabato responded to Sargent’s criticisms today saying that he would do a better job of disclosing his various ties, which is good.

But my criticism actually runs deeper than disclosure. Wouldn’t it also be useful if Sabato jumped into the earmark debate and educated the public about what they are, the good and the bad? He could have done that at numerous points over the past few years as “earmarks” became a proxy for government spending and corruption — and nearly turned the stimulus debate on its head, if you recall.

As a respected academic and political commentator he could have pointed out many times that government spending (earmarks) is often used for important and valuable institutions and projects like his that benefit the locals and the public at large. The phony construct of “objectivity” made it impossible for him to do that, and I would guess that he didn’t want to be seen as some sort of liberal, defending government largesse. But the problem is that unless people like him speak up, the notion that all government spending is wasteful becomes even more entrenched, even to the point where the spokesman for the Republican Party insists that the government spending money on volcano monitoring is some sort of joke.

Over all those years, instead of making a public case for spending that directly benefited his school, he relied on cronyism. And the result is that the new congressman, who might ideologically have been inclined to fund his institution as a matter of public good, had to run as a “reformer” on earmarks and wasteful spending and can’t justify one for Sabato’s institution. Sabato did it to himself.

The system is corrupt because people are not honest about what government does and what the public needs it to do. And the political class is so insular it doesn’t even know when it’s hurting itself.

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When CBO Scores Vanish

by dday

When a partial Congressional Budget Office score revealed that health care would be more expensive than expected and not cover as many Americans, mainly because it was scoring something, you know, PARTIAL, the press had a field day, egged on by Republicans. Hell, they’re still talking about it.

“Meet the Press” has really got to step up its game on the health-care debate. Last week, host David Gregory tweeted “Compelling fact today: dem-wh health care plan would only cover 16 of the 50 mill uninsured. That makes it a harder sell. Info from cbo.” Problem was, his fact wasn’t much of a fact. CBO didn’t score a “Dem-White House” plan. It scored a partial version of the Senate HELP Committee’s plan. The White House wasn’t involved. And nor, for that matter, would that plan have only covered 16 million. The version of the bill examined by CBO was missing the employer mandate and the specifics on the individual mandate. It was missing, in other words, the parts of the bill that would cover people. Gregory was right to say that the CBO score was a setback. But not for the reasons he suggested.

By contrast, over the weekend, that same CBO scored the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill to determine the annual cost per household of a cap and trade system and a renewable energy standard.

On that basis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and the associated slowing of climate change. CBO could not determine the incidence of certain pieces (including both costs and benefits) that represent, on net, about 8 percent of the total. For the remaining portion of the net cost, households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020, while households in the highest income quintile would see a net cost of $245.

In other words, in another partial score, since it doesn’t take into account the benefit of mitigating climate change, low income households would actually benefit slightly from the impacts of the bill, while high-income households would see a fairly nominal cost. Republicans have argued for months that doing anything on greenhouse gas emissions would cost anywhere from $1,600 to $3,100 a family.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this score will have absolutely no impact on the debate over whether or not we should enact climate and energy legislation. Those who want to cover for polluting industries will still lie that the impact on “working families” will be too costly, and the press will “cover the controversy.” In other words, the CBO only matters when it matters.

Meanwhile, Democrats have, apparently, a global warming denier in charge of the House Agriculture Committee, and he’s doing whatever he can to stop the bill.

House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) on Friday said climate change bill negotiators are heading back to the drawing board after discussions between Democrats “blew up last night.”

A meeting between chairmen drafting the climate bill and Democrats on the Agriculture Committee “by and large blew up last night” over the issue of offsets, Peterson said.

Specifically, he said, Agriculture Democrats rejected a concept pitched by bill drafters that would set money aside for a new greenhouse gas conservation program tied together with some offsets […]

“We’re back to how do we deal — we want USDA to run our offset program; they want EPA to run it,” Peterson said. “Not that we’re necessarily against the EPA; they just speak a different language. They don’t have the infrastructure out there to deal with us.”

Added Peterson, “I’m tired of this running around in circles.”

Funny, I was about to say the same thing.

I’m beginning to think that humans have a better chance of adapting with gills than adapting legislatively with meaningful climate change legislation. After all, lawmakers have to protect those poor families from getting that $40 in ten years.

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1996

by digby

Over at the Economix blog at the NY Times, Catherine Rampell took a look at the correlation between actual government deficits over the years and how the public perceived them, according to the Gallup poll:

If public worries about the nation’s fiscal health were perfectly related to the nation’s actual fiscal health, these two charts should be near-mirror images of each other.

That is, when the deficit represents a higher percentage of G.D.P. (i.e., the red bars pointing downward get longer), you should see more people naming the federal budget as the country’s most pressing issue (i.e., the blue bars going upward should also get longer).

Read the whole post for a long explanation and many caveats about these numbers and why they should be taken with a grain of salt, even if they are interesting.

I am interested more in the fact that the public obsession with the deficit tracks very closely with the rise of the anti-tax conservative movement, actually peaking at a time when the deficit was in very serious retreat and turning into surplus. Large numbers of people still believed it was rising.

The fiscal scolds don’t stop when the numbers turn around. They keep up the fear mongering because it isn’t really about balanced budgets or paying down debt. It’s about keeping government from bringing positive results to the people. As long as they can keep people focused on debt, whether it exists or not, they always have the rationale to stop any sort of government action that could empower average citizens.

It’s no mystery why George W. Bush was so anxious to spend that surplus he inherited as soon as possible, or why Alan Greenspan actually said that surpluses were dangerous to the economy. Their whole program is undermined if people aren’t living under the impression that the economy is hamstrung by so much debt that the whole thing is in danger of coming apart at the seams if they don’t (perversely) keep cutting taxes and cutting spending. People hear that enough, they just absorb it and it becomes conventional wisdom.

Deficits are an abstract concept that people end up using it as a proxy for “financial responsibility” which is extremely imprecise, since the government is responsible for a whole lot of things besides the budget. But until somebody comes up with something that makes more sense to average folks, the deficit boogeyman will be a powerful symbol that can be used by both parties to keep the government from challenging the status quo.

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Freedom

by digby

Well at least we don’t have long waits and rationing like all those other horrible places:

In Framingham, Dr. James Kenealy, an ear, nose and throat specialist, said his patients increasingly cite copayments as a hurdle to continuing with allergy treatments. The care typically includes weekly shots for several months, with copayments ranging from $20 to $50, per shot, depending on the patient’s insurance plan.

“Probably once a week, there will be a patient deciding to discontinue allergy injections or not pursue that as a therapy because they have high copays,’’ Kenealy said.

Even patients without chronic illnesses are finding themselves in a copayment crunch.

“If you are a family with four or five kids . . . copayments are going to add up,’’ said Worcester family physician Dr. James Broadhurst, noting that children visit doctors frequently for illnesses and preventive care.

Especially in the past year, Broadhurst said he’s encountered more families asking him to treat or prescribe over the phone because they can’t afford the copayment of an office visit.

As part of Massachusetts’ pioneering 2006 healthcare overhaul, the state created the Safety Net program, which helps people of any income pay large medical bills. But it specifically excludes coverage for copayments.

“Oftentimes, these people end up using their credit cards to pay their copays and end up with medical debt,’’ said Kate Bicego, help line manager at Health Care for All, one of the state’s largest consumer groups.

Bicego said calls to the nonprofit group’s helpline are up roughly 65 percent from last year, and many of those seeking help are struggling with copayments and deductibles.

Other countries have systems that prioritize health care treatment on the basis of need — a triage system. We prioritize health care on the basis of who can pay. And in the most perverse form of rationing there is, we make the sickest people have the most difficult time getting access to health care. (The sickest, after all, can’t hold down a job, so the employer based system doesn’t really work for them, at least not in the long term.)

The idea that the US doesn’t ration health care is absurd. We certainly do. We just make people do it to themselves out of economic hardship. I guess that’s supposed to be a tribute to our sense of individualism and personal freedom.

Hey, nobody’s going to tell you you can’t be treated — you made that decision all by yourself when you opted not to have a lot of money. That’s what freedom’s all about. (Unless you’re sick and you want to die, of course, in which case the state won’t let you.)

The debate is really about irrational rationing vs rational rationing — and the US is the undisputed leader of the first method. When we set our minds to it, nobody can be as irrational as we are.

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Monopoly Money

by digby

Our good friend Senator Blanche Lincoln thinks it’s very dangerous for the insurance companies to have to compete with a public plan option:

“One of our biggest concerns is that it doesn’t need to be a government plan that usurps that ability to compete in the marketplace, which I’m concerned that a totally government-run option would do,” she said.

Right. It’s competition in the marketplace that makes this country great. Like the competition they have in Lincoln’s state of Arkansas, for instance:

The Justice Department considers an industry to be “highly concentrated” if one company has 42 percent of the market. In Arkansas — Senator Lincoln should take note — Blue Cross Blue Shield has 75 percent of the market. If you take government self-insurance plans out of the equation, it’s higher. The state ranks as the ninth most concentrated in the country. Is it any wonder that insurance premiums have risen five times as fast as wages?

Introducing a public plan option that individuals and businesses could choose instead of Blue Cross would be very detrimental to Blue Cross, that’s true. They would lose their monopoly for sure and very likely lose a lot of customers if they kept raising rates at the clip they’ve been raising them:

Here is a clue to the Arkansas problem — and the national one, too. From 2000 to 2007, the median earnings of Arkansas workers rose only 12 percent, from $20,328 to $22,692. Health insurance premiums for the average working Arkansas family rose over the same period by 66 percent.

It’s quite a racket. You can see why they don’t want to change anything except to have the government force the few stragglers they don’t already have in their clutches to buy their expensive product. Competition is the last thing they want.

Lincoln is all for the co-op concept now, which all the insurance company spokesenators are very happy about. They know that these co-ops won’t be able to do anything about costs, so they will fail as often as they succeed and in the end all but the really ill will be driven into their expensive private plans, thus turning the remaining co-ops into welfare programs. Huzzah, more money for greedy CEOs and corrupt politicians. What’s not to like?

Lincoln is one of the few Democratic members of the senate who sits on key committees and who is also running for re-election in 2010 in what could be a tough race. She needs to advocate for the people on this, not the insurance companies. Hell, even Arkansas Republicans hate insurance companies.

We’d like to send her a message and could use your help. If you have a couple of dollars to spare to help Blue America put some ads on the air in Arkansas to educate Lincoln’s constituents about where their Senators’ loyalties lie, you can do that here. Just a couple of bucks would help.

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Buyers Market

by digby

You’ve got to love it:

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

[…]

Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are among the European firms expected to register bumper profits, along with US banks JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley following the near collapse and government rescue of major trading houses including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland.

[…]

Critics of the bonus culture in the City said the dominance of a few risk-taking investment banks is undermining the efforts of regulators to stabilise the financial system.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said: “The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash.”

[…]

Until the release of its first quarter profits in April, it seemed inconceivable that a firm owing the US government $10bn would be looking to break all-time records in 2009.

David Williams, an investment banking analyst at Fox Pitt Kelton, said: “This year is shaping up to be the best year ever for investment banks, or at least those that have emerged relatively unscathed from the credit crisis.

“These banks are intermediaries in the bond markets where governments and companies are raising billions of pounds of new money. There is also a lack of competition that means they can charge huge sums for doing business.”

Last week, the firm predicted that President Barack Obama’s government could issue $3.25tn of debt before September, almost four times last year’s sum. Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds, is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds.

And there’s more:

Bank of America Corp., which is among the largest banks to receive government bailout funds, has been paying millions in bonuses to attract talent and retain investment bankers who management sees as vital, the New York Post reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources. Two former Merrill Lynch bankers are among those who are said to have received payouts, according to the article. A spokeswoman for B. of A. told the paper the bonuses were necessary as rival firms poach its best executives.

It would appear that the global financial crisis was just a convenient way for the masters of the Universe to cull the herd.