Yesterday I fell even further behind. By the time I returned home from pulmonary boot camp, I felt pooped and went to bed. So, I’ve gone two days in a row without replying to comment or visiting blogs. I shall, at least, reply to all comments today and visiting blogs tomorrow.
Today’s Jig Zone puzzle took me 4:04. To do it, Click Here. How did you do?
Short takes:
Has the Nevada Leg Hound grown a pair? If you remember, the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill was so bad, I named it BARF (Baucus against a real fix.) Now I’m naming the Senate Finance Committee’s jobs bill BARF2. Almost immediately after release, Harry Reid scrapped it, because it was loaded with GOP giveaways, including tax cuts for big corporations and even an extension of the heinous PATRIOT Act’s most undemocratic provisions.
Bill Clinton is recovering well after surgery, in which he received two stents in a coronary artery. I wish him a speedy and complete recovery.
The five largest health insurance companies earned record profits in 2009 by dropping 2.7 million clients and denying them coverage.
The level of GOP hypocrisy is going up faster that the economy went down under their governance.
Almost immediately after Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab failed to detonate a bomb on an airplane on Christmas Day, conservatives rushed to politicize the attempted terrorist attack. “People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) said before he’d even been briefed on the incident. Karl Rove and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) criticized President Obama for issuing a statement on the failed bombing 72 hours after the event, even though President Bush waited longer to comment on “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid’s failed attempt to bring down an airliner in Dec. 2001.
The drumbeat of political criticism from conservatives since then has been unrelenting, especially focusing on the fact that Abdumuttalab was read his Miranda rights after he awoke from surgery. Recently, the Obama administration has begun pushing back at the GOP’s political onslaught. On Meet The Press this past Sunday, Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, pointed out that he had kept key Congressional Republicans informed of Abdulmuttalab detainment by the FBI:
On Christmas night, I called a number of senior members of Congress. I spoke to Senators McConnell and Bond, I spoke to Representative Boehner and Hoekstra. I explained to them that he was in FBI custody, that Mr. Abdulmutallab was, in fact, talking, that he was cooperating at that point. They knew that “in FBI custody” means that there’s a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of a magistrate. None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point.
Brennan followed up his critique with a USA Today op-ed arguing that “too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points.” Brennan’s op-ed included the highly-charged assertion that “politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”
Republicans have responded to Brennan’s pushback with incredulity. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, citing former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen’s misunderstanding of the facts, called Brennan “troubling” on Fox News yesterday. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called Brennan an “egomaniac.” Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) declared Brennan “needs to go,” and is no longer “credible.” On Fox News today, Hoekstra, who repeatedly referred to Brennan as a “White House staffer” as opposed to an intelligence “professional,” said Obama should “fire” him. Watch it:
On MSNBC today, Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie grilled Bond about whether the “Republican Party deserve[s] some blame” for terrorism becoming “too politicized.” Bond responded in denial, saying, “give me a break.” “They’re the ones who went out and called politics and they played politics,” said Bond of the White House. In an ironic twist, however, he then claimed that criticisms of the Bush administration’s terrorism policy during the past eight years had been “political attacks.”… [emphasis original]
The principal GOP argument to deflect the criticism that their leadership was informed is that they had no idea that Abdulmuttalab had received Miranda rights because FBI representatives are included in a special group to deal with terrorists. Bull! Brennan told then Abdulmuttalab was in FBI custody, not that of a new terrorism group. When asked about Richard Reid receiving Miranda rights under Bush, Newt Gingrich claimed it was because Reid is a US citizen. If fact, Reid is a Brit. This is a manufactured issue, made up weeks after the fact.
Admittedly, Abdulmuttalabshould not have had a Visa, and would not have were it not for a misspelling of his name in the State Department database. That database, like everything else that deteriorated under Republican rule, desperately needs updating. That is not Obama’s fault. It’s part of the conditions he inherited. Since that original error, our performance in dealing with Abdulmuttalab has been nothing short of magnificent.
If the GOP does show up, the only thing I expect Obama to accomplish during the health care summit is to make fools of them by slicing and dicing the talking points they parrot.
Despite the demands of Boehner and Cantor that a reconciliation fix for healthcare refrom be ruled out, Obama is staying open to that option.
White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Tuesday that Republicans coming to the West Wing for the much-anticipated February 25 meeting would be better off arriving "without preconditions." Asked whether Obama would commit to not using reconciliation — which would allow aspects of health care legislation to be considered in the Senate by an up-or-down vote — Gibbs replied: "The president is not going to eliminate things based on preconditions. And if that’s one of their preconditions, the president doesn’t agree to limiting the way we are going to discuss this."
Good thing, because healthcare reform isn’t going to happen without it. That’s pretty clear from the actions of one of those "moderate" Republicans, Susan Collins. Here’s an editorial from the Portland Press Herald on the latest from her:
Sen. Susan Collins wrote a column for this newspaper explaining her objections to the package that she voted against in the Senate on Christmas Eve. ("Cost control essential if health care reform is to succeed," Feb 1)
Collins said that she would not vote for the bill because it didn’t do enough to control costs and listed several areas in which it could be better.
One was a practice called bundling, in which providers are paid in lump sums to treat patients instead of by the service. Another was penalizing hospitals that have high infection rates.
Both are good ideas, both have support from health care economists as likely ways to cut costs while providing better care. And both, as Collins admits in her piece, are already in the Senate bill that she voted against….
As someone who wants to see comprehensive health care reform, I should be encouraged by Collins’ common sense and practical ideas that would probably make the whole package better if they were part of the law.
But Collins never said that she would vote for the "whole package." While she and other Republicans say they are waiting to engage in bipartisan talks on health insurance reform, they seem to be gaining too much politically by letting the Democrats flop around on the dock gasping for air.
As long as there is no political cost to Republicans for wasting a whole year and accomplishing nothing other than maintaining an unsustainable status quo, don’t expect them to move.
That’s why, in this case, practical, common-sense proposals are just another way of saying "no."
Since Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are conjoined twins, don’t expect Snowe to touch bipartisanship with a ten-foot pole now. If anything approaching meaningful reform is going to happen, it’s through the reconciliation sidecar coupled with the Senate bill… [emphasis original]
Not much of this is new, but the article provides good overall perspective.
Reckless greed on Wall Street is a dog-bites-man story. Still, the renewed feeding frenzy of the alpha dogs of finance in the embers of the bonfire of their own vanities has inspired amazement and disgust across the political spectrum.
Despite the damage it yet may cause, though, the spectacle does seem to be helping to disarm some of the banksters’ ideological weaponry. In the debate over why the financial system collapsed and how to rebuild it, economic assumptions that have enjoyed hegemony for the past 30 years are being questioned, and a swelling chorus is supporting a return to stronger regulation.
David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, recently weighed in: "The baleful reality is that the big banks, the freakish offspring of the Fed’s easy money, are dangerous institutions, deeply embedded in a bull market culture of entitlement and greed."
Stockman welcomed President Barack Obama’s proposed tax on banks because its message is that "big banking must get smaller because it does too little that is useful, productive or efficient."
While the United States economy remains mired in a weak, jobless recovery, the financial sector has used its political clout and government largesse to once again go for the gusto. In the third quarter of 2009, according to economist Dean Baker, finance grabbed 34 percent of all U.S. corporate profits, a far bigger share than at the peak of the housing bubble.
In the political arena, too, Wall Street is back in force. As Congress debates proposals for financial re-regulation, the financiers have cried "Havoc" and let slip the canines of K Street against the reforms.
At Goldman Sachs, the leader of the pack, any embarrassment over the savaging of the global economy is well-hidden. The investment bank, popularly dubbed "Goldman Calf", reportedly has given its employees some 13 billion dollars in bonuses for 2009. That nearly triples its largesse in 2008 when, according to the Wall Street Journal, 953 employees received bonuses of over one million dollars each.
The bank reported earnings of 13.4 billion dollars for 2009, nearly matching the 15 billion dollars combined total of the five other biggest banks. Its net profit margin was 23.85 percent.
Goldman received 10 billion dollars in funds from the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008, which it paid back with interest in 2009. The firm also benefited from other forms of government generosity, including an estimated 12.9 billion dollars as a counterparty of AIG.
The failed insurance behemoth used bailout funds to pay off credit default swaps and other complex wagers on bond markets at allegedly inflated values to Goldman and several other U.S. and European financial giants. For some time before the crash, GS had reportedly been betting against the mortgage market.
The apotheosis of Goldman Sachs has relied on a revolving door between the firm and lofty precincts of the federal government. Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush administration’s secretary of the Treasury responsible for TARP, formerly served as the firm’s CEO. Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, and many other power brokers in both major parties are also alumni.
A long year after the industry’s near-death experience, Goldman’s glass is either full or overflowing, depending on how you look at it. So is popular anger against it. Rolling Stone magazine writer Matt Taibbi celebrated the investment bank as "a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
Satirist Andy Borowitz reported tongue-in-cheek that Goldman was in talks to buy the Treasury Department. He quoted an apocryphal Treasury spokesman as saying that the merger would create efficiencies for both because of the high volume of employees and money already flowing back and forth between them. The only hard part, the spokesman said, "is trying to figure out which parts of the Treasury Department we don’t already own."
Belatedly, Obama and the Democrats seem to have decided that popular anger on the right and the left churned up by the financial industry may be a political wave they can ride.
In December, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would create an independent financial protection agency for consumers, a measure long lobbied for by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, director of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bank bailout.
The legislation would also increase banks’ capital requirements and limit their leverage, the extent of their reliance on borrowed funds. And by requiring lenders to hold on to some proportion of the loans they make, the law would restrict securitization, the practice of bundling mortgages into complex derivatives that frequently have turned toxic, dragging down financial institutions that hold them.
In the Senate, though, prospects for 60 votes to break a potential filibuster look dubious. Republicans appear to be nearly unanimous in their opposition to the reforms…
I’ve discussed my solutions enough times that I won’t repeat them today, but one thing is clear. The only way to accomplish even minimal banking reform is through reconciliation.
Yesterday I did my online grocery shopping, when I returned from my volunteer work. That left no time to even reply to comments here. Today is pulmonary boot camp, so today I may do no better at all. I will reply to every comment by the end of Friday.
Today’s Jig Zone puzzle took me 4:51. To do it, Click Here. How did you do?
Isn’t it amazing how Republicans fought the stimulus tooth and nail but are handing out the money at home as though they fought to get it?
If there’s one thing that unites the Republican Party it’s that the stimulus bill was a job-killing piece of legislation that was the worst thing in the whole entire world for the economy, right? Or maybe that’s just what unites them in public, because in private the Washington Times reports they’ve been working overtime to get their hands on job-creating stimulus cash.
Sen. Christopher S. Bond regularly railed against President Obama’s economic stimulus plan as irresponsible spending that would drive up the national debt. But behind the scenes, the Missouri Republican quietly sought more than $50 million from a federal agency for two projects in his state.
…
In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Mr. Bond noted that one project applying to the USDA for stimulus money would "create jobs and ultimately spur economic opportunities."
Bond isn’t alone. Remember Joe "You Lie" Wilson?
Rep. Joe Wilson, South Carolina Republican who became famous after yelling, "You lie," during Mr. Obama’s addresses to Congress in September, voted against the stimulus. Nonetheless, Mr. Wilson elbowed his way into the rush for federal stimulus cash in a letter he sent to Mr. Vilsack on behalf of a foundation seeking funding.
"We know their endeavor will provide jobs and investment in one of the poorer sections of the Congressional District," he wrote to Mr. Vilsack in the Aug. 26, 2009, letter…
In hope we never become immune to the stories of real people suffering from Big Insurance criminal abuse and from having no health coverage. Sometimes, though the stories are so far removed from human decency that indignation is the only appropriate reaction.
PAUL AND MARIA VanNocker are filing a federal lawsuit today on behalf of their 5-year-old son, Kyler, whose insurance company, HealthAmerica, refuses to pay for the latest treatment needed to prolong his life.
The complaint raises lots of questions that I assume will be answered at trial, should it come to that. The question it won’t answer is one that’s been gnawing at me since I first wrote of Kyler’s plight in December:
How do HealthAmerica’s overlords sleep at night?
I know my own dreams would be haunted if I acted as arbitrarily, capriciously and abusively – to borrow some pointed adjectives from the complaint – as the VanNockers allege HealthAmerica has regarding their little boy.
The Harrisburg-based company’s denial of benefits to Kyler, the lawsuit claims, is the result of "a biased, self-serving misreading and misinterpretation" of everything from Kyler’s medical records to the company’s own internal documents.
HealthAmerica’s Kendall Marcocci told me yesterday that the company won’t comment on pending litigation. Center City attorney David Senoff, though, was happy to explain why he is representing the Van Nockers for free in the lawsuit.
"These companies have to be brought to the courthouse to get them to do the right thing," said Senoff, a specialist in insurance disputes. "This child needs this treatment, or else."
He didn’t need to explain what "or else" meant.
Readers may recall that Kyler has neuroblastoma, a rare, deadly childhood cancer that attacks the nervous system, creating tumors throughout his body.
He was diagnosed in 2007 and endured a year of medical treatment, with complications he barely survived. Thankfully, it knocked his cancer into remission for 12 lovely months, and he got to revel once again in the glories of childhood.
Last September, the disease came roaring back. This time, only one form of treatment, something called MIBG therapy, could help save his life.
But HealthAmerica refused to pay for the MIBG, which it considers "investigational/experimental" because there is "inadequate evidence in the peer-reviewed published clinical literature regarding its effectiveness." Nor is MIBG approved by the Food and Drug Administration, another criterion that HealthAmerica requires.
How come, then, asks the lawsuit, HealthAmerica covered not one but two prior therapies for Kyler that did not possess these supposed requirements?
In April 2008, the company approved Kyler’s use of a drug to treat a life-threatening blood-flow complication, even though the drug wasn’t FDA-approved, wasn’t manufactured in the United States and wasn’t "peer-reviewed."
However, it was the only known drug to treat Kyler’s condition, and he responded well to it. Four months later, HealthAmerica paid for another medication that wasn’t FDA-approved for neuroblastoma treatment.
Again, Kyler responded well.
So why, pray tell, is HealthAmerica playing the "experimental therapy" card in the case of the MIBG treatment Kyler now needs? Gee, money couldn’t have anything to do with the decision, could it?
In my December column, HealthAmerica’s Marcocci was emphatic that her company declined Kyler’s MIBG therapy not because of its cost but because of its experimental nature.
But that doesn’t mean MIBG is ineffective.
"It’s considered the standard of care in Europe and the United States for recurrent neuroblastoma," Kyler’s oncologist, Stephan Grupp, told me then. "It’s not an unproven treatment with no basis in medical science. Actually, the results are often very good."
Regardless of how you describe MIBG, one thing became clear last week when Paul and Maria got the results of Kyler’s latest tests to track his neuroblastoma.
The MIBG is working.
Children’s Hospital, where Kyler receives much of his care, proceeded with two rounds of MIBG therapy for Kyler – at a cost of $110,000 – despite the VanNockers’ inability to pay for it…
I have nothing but praise for the hospital that saved Kyler’s life with no guarantee of payment. I have nothing but scorn for the insurance company death panel that denied his treatment and for the Republicans and DINOs that are blocking reform.
Meanwhile, the uninsured are still dying at a rate of several 9/11s per year.
Since the unlikely election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, hardly a day goes by in Washington without a torrent of speculation on what loss of a filibuster-proof majority will mean for the healthcare reform legislation that both houses have already passed. But as the president recently noted, the intense focus on the process of moving the bill over the finish line has done much to obscure the actual human stakes of the policy being debated.
Particularly striking is the near-total absence of the voices of those most acutely affected by the capriciousness of our current healthcare system, the millions who have no insurance. Despite the fact that 30 million of these folks have arguably the largest stake in the legislative outcome, they’re almost totally absent from the national conversation over its fate.
Here at The Nation, we have been working to right this in our own small way. We’ve spent the last two weeks searching for stories from the uninsured. Despite our chosen tools (Twitter and e-mail), or perhaps because of them, we received 185 responses from a diverse group of people. From recent college graduates, to struggling single parents, to recent retirees, the storytellers ranged vastly in age, background and occupation. However, a common thread held them all together: the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with being uninsured.
Many stories expressed great, unshakeable fear that one medical emergency would ruin them. "I would say my wife and I are one medical emergency away from losing everything, but actually I’ve pretty much resigned myself in my head to the reality that if I have a medical emergency I am going to die," says a used-book seller in California.
The responses included wide array of opinions and varied hopes for the future of healthcare reform, but what an overwhelming majority agreed upon was that the United States government, particularly Congress, had failed to represent them within the debate…
Under the headline "Social Security Races to ‘Negative’: Rash of Retirements Push Fund to Brink," USA Today‘s February 8 front page presented an alarmist view on a story that is regularly misreported in the corporate media (Extra!, 7-8/95, 1-2/05; FAIR Action Alert, 10/19/07).
Reporter Richard Wolf leads with this warning: "Social Security’s annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years." But several paragraphs later, readers are told that the program has been "accumulating a $2.5 trillion trust fund"–which certainly sounds less ominous than the headline’s warning about being on a "brink." And by a "nearly evaporated" surplus, USA Today means that Social Security "took in only $3 billion more in taxes last year than it paid out in benefits."
The story tries to justify the alarm nonetheless by pointing out that "because the government uses the trust fund to pay for other programs, tax increases, spending cuts or new borrowing will be required to make up the difference between taxes collected and benefits owed." Two "experts" are quoted to endorse that view, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Maya MacGuineas, a former adviser to the McCain campaign.
Actually, the fact that Social Security would begin paying out more in benefits is neither alarming nor particularly surprising. In the 1980s, Social Security taxes were raised and benefits cut in the name of covering the retirement of the Baby Boomers–and, not incidentally, so that the system could loan its surplus to the Treasury Department to cover for Reagan’s income tax slashing (Extra!, 1-2/88; Nation, 3/2/09). That money was to be paid back with interest, just like the U.S. Treasury’s debts to China, Japan, private U.S. citizens and everyone else who owns Treasury bonds. If Social Security fails to collect the money that is owed to it by the Treasury, that would amount to a massive fraud and transfer of wealth, as trillions of dollars specifically collected to pay for workers’ retirement benefits would never be used for that purpose, and instead would merely transfer the general cost of government from progressive income taxes to the regressive payroll tax (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 1/27/05).
The money borrowed from Social Security is currently scheduled to be paid back by 2037, at which point the program will have an actual deficit. But many experts have argued for years that this projected future shortfall is not a short-term crisis, and can be addressed with minor changes like eliminating the cap on taxable income, so that the wealthy would pay the same percentage of their income as middle-income and poor workers (Social Security: The Phony Crisis, 1999).
A story that presents Social Security as on the "brink," then, is giving readers a decidely skewed perspective on an important matter of public policy. As economist Dean Baker noted recently on his Beat the Press blog (2/8/10): "If nothing is ever done to change the program, the projections still show that it will be able to pay close to 80 percent of scheduled benefits. This will still provide future retirees with a benefit that is considerably larger than what current retirees receive."
If USA Today were to present these less-alarming facts, the headline might read, "Social Security Continues to Pay Benefits as Expected." That would be much less alarmist–and more accurate.
ACTION: Ask USA Today why it presented such a one-sided report on Social Security. Encourage the paper to include experts who would disagree with the notion that Social Security is in some sort of crisis.
I removed USA today from my source feeds list a long time ago for two reasons. First, they offer so much infotainment and so little hard news that getting at the minuscule real content is not worth the effort of digging through all the fluff. Second, they tend to spin their coverage so far to the right that they have compromised their journalistic integrity. This story was particularly unethical, because it raised a bogus alarm at a time when the GOP wants to eliminate Social Security. I hope you will call or email. I did.
