Taking on the Religious Right

God and His Demons
By GREGORY ELICH

Michael Parenti has written a compelling work, whose themes are so relevant for our time: the essentiality of rational thought, the struggle to maintain a secular and tolerant society, and the abuse of religion for reactionary political and obscurant objectives. As Parenti points out, "That 'old-time religion' is still very much with us and having a considerable impact on U.S. political life." And that impact has only grown in recent years.

Parenti launches his account with that bedrock of old-time religion, the Bible, examining it for what moral lessons it has to impart. Assessing the Bible in the light of literal interpretation as advocated by fundamentalist Christians, rather than inspiration Parenti finds a deeply troubling narrative. There have been many excellent analyses of the absurdities and twisted morality of the Old Testament, but this is among the best. Parenti's romp through the Old Testament is highly entertaining, sharply observed, and simultaneously hilarious and disturbing (in that so many point to it as a source of moral authority). Parenti writes:

"The god of the Holy Bible - so much adored in the United States and elsewhere - is ferociously vindictive, neurotically jealous, intolerant, vainglorious, punitive, wrathful, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sadistic and homicidal. As they say, it's all in the Bible. Beware of those who act in the name of such a god. Were we to encounter these vicious traits in an ordinary man, we would judge him to be in need of lifelong incarceration at a maximum-security facility. At the very least, we would not prattle on about how he works his wonders in mysterious ways."

Unlike some detractors of the Old Testament, Parenti does not give the New Testament a free ride, holding it up to the same standard of rational analysis he gave to the older section of the Bible. Parenti finds that the "biblical Jesus qualifies quite well as founder and forerunner of an intolerant Christianity."

Parenti is devastating in his critique of the efficacy of prayer and the incongruous nature of religious belief in divine intervention, which he notes is partly based on selective perception: "When over 22,000 people were killed in a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, one survivor, convinced that his god had saved him - and taking no notice of the thousands who had perished - shouted 'Allah is great'. In 2003, when a U.S. space shuttle blew up in midair killing seven astronauts, thousands of pieces of wreckage rained down on East Texas. Fortunately, no one on the ground was hurt. Many believers praised their god for watching over them. One marquee in Hemphill, Texas read: 'Thank you God. You protected us all here on the ground. You are amazing.' Not a word was proffered regarding God's less than amazing performance in regard to the astronauts." As Parenti observes, "when people survive a danger, they proclaim that their prayers have been answered." But when people perish, no one is quoted as saying their prayers went unanswered, "and no news story is inclined to voice a lament about the futility of prayer."

Indeed, Parenti points out, some of the faithful regard death and destruction as direct retribution, such as Christian evangelist Jerry Falwell's statement that the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were divine punishment upon America for harboring "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians." Then there was Republican congressman Richard Baker's equally insensitive and deranged comment after Hurricane Katrina: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

One of the strengths of God and His Demons is its refusal to back away from exposing the underside of those widely-admired mainstream icons of modern religion: Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and Tibetan Buddhism. Mother Teresa's "clinics and hospitals" were in actuality hospices, where medical care was lacking. One young doctor was appalled at the conditions and reported that many of the dying were suffering from hunger and malnutrition rather than fatal diseases, and could be saved with an improved diet and vitamin supplements. "But he could not persuade Teresa, who showed no interest in medicine or in treating patients with vitamins." Expensive medical equipment donated to Mother Teresa "was left to rust, completely unused."

Meanwhile, Mother Teresa jetted around the globe, "to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion, and birth control." In Egypt, "she urged housewives to 'have lots and lots of children' - at a time when the Egyptian government was trying to promote family planning to counter the nation's population explosion." Mother Teresa's opposition to contraception was unwavering. "Her concern for the unborn child," observes Parenti, "was matched only by an indifference toward the living child. What social conditions caused hundreds of thousands of children to die of malnutrition and disease in Asia and elsewhere was a question that failed to win her attention."

Fast-tracked on the path to sainthood by Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa was beatified in 2003. She was only one among many of the frauds launched upon that path by John Paul. Similarly beatified was Msgr. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, supporter of Franco's fascist government and founder of the right-wing Opus Dei. The self-promoting Padre Pio was another, and Parenti delightfully exposes Pio's outlandish claims about himself, leaving one to wonder how anyone could have taken the man seriously, let alone canonized him. Then there was Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, that fervent supporter of the Hitler-era fascist puppet government in Croatia, with its extermination of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma.

But it is for his political role that Pope John Paul II is most revered. As Parenti points out, "John Paul, that most political of all popes, remained up to his ears in counter-revolutionary politics in Latin America and elsewhere." Noted for his close collaboration with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, "the pontiff directed no critical attacks against right-wing dictatorships, which he valued as bulwarks against communist revolution." Through the Vatican's secretary of state, he intervened on behalf of Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist leader of Chile, who was then under arrest in Spain for his crimes. And it was John Paul who did the most to undermine the spirit of Vatican II, replacing it with what one church historian has described as "a law-and-order, fear-driven, clerically controlled Church."

Most in need of myth-busting has been the widespread illusion about Tibetan Buddhism, with its reputed beneficence. This section alone is worth the price of the book, so revealing is it. "Religions have an age-long relationship not only with violence but also with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence." The Tibetan theocracy was no different, even up through the time of rule by the Dalai Lama, when "most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs and owned by monasteries and secular landlords. Just how harsh life could be for a Tibetan serf is described in moving and eye-opening detail by Parenti. Change for Tibetans since 1959 has been substantial, and Parenti provides a balanced narrative of developments, with an honest portrayal of what has been positive and what has not. Certainly, the worst excesses of religious oppression have been expunged.

In a chapter entitled, Cashing in on Heaven, Parenti focuses on the self-enrichment by many religious leaders at the expense of their followers. The extent of sheer greed is astonishing. Often the message today in fundamentalist churches is that of what is termed prosperity gospel, promising "material affluence." Such a retrograde ideal has predictable results. "Prosperity televangelists like W.V. Grant and Robert Tilton collected tens of millions of dollars from poor, sick, and desperate viewers, while claiming to be supporting orphanages that did not exist. Meanwhile, both live in utter opulence. Tilton does not directly trust in God for financial miracles, preferring to get his money the old-fashioned way - from other people." By no means are these isolated examples, and the emotional extortion of money from the gullible for personal enrichment has, if anything, been the hallmark of fundamentalist Christian leaders.

Similarly abusive have been a great many of the cult leaders and gurus, a subject that has not always received the attention it has deserved. "Pretending to an inner quietude and profound modesty, many are endowed with raging egos and immersed in nasty rivalries that are played out with a vehemence redolent of less spiritually advanced individuals." While leaders live a lavish lifestyle, in many cases adherents are compelled to live in poverty as they work long hours for the cult with little or no pay. In these "totalistic, self-enriching, guru-worshiping cults," the "master is elevated, the followers are infantilized and diminished." The outright child abuse that occurs in many of these cults and churches is one of the more disturbing sections of the book.

Too often today, religion is placed at the service of reactionary political goals. "Backed by moneyed interests, the right-wing Christianist media propagate free-market corporatism, militarism, and super-patriotism." And their influence is powerful. "It is no accident that we hear almost nothing about the religious Left and so much about the religious Right. Progressive dissidents usually are denied access to mass media audiences. As with politics, so with religion: there is no free market of ideas, no level playing field. Conservative organizations possess a vast constellation of publications, television and radio networks, and satellite and cable channels that gather millions of listeners and viewers." But "the secular corporate-owned media also show a striking favoritism toward the religious Right. On the major television networks, cable news channels, and PBS, conservative religious leaders have been quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 400 percent more often than progressive ones, and over 250 percent more often in major newspapers." Those statistics are taken from a 2007 report, and my initial reaction was surprise that these percentages were not higher. Surely in the last three years, the gap has only grown more skewed.

The all-too-frequent abuse of position by religious leaders for sexual predation makes for one of the book's more harrowing chapters. "How the religionists and their political counterparts wish to lead their private lives is their business, as long as they bring no harm to others," writes Parenti. "What is at issue here is the moral chasm between what is preached and what is practiced. Also at issue is their homophobia and - in the case of pedophiles and rapists - their criminal venality and the damage they inflict upon the innocent." Parenti recounts the record of hypocrisy and harm with compassion for the victims and outrage over injustice.

Fundamentalist Christian leaders make no secret of their desire to transform the American political system into a theocracy. Already, alarming inroads have been made, as outlined by Parenti with so many examples as to alert one to the dangers ahead. One wishes this information could be presented to as wide an audience as possible. These people mean business. "In the mind of theocrats, 'religious freedom' means the right to roll back secular culture and impose a monochromatic belief system upon everyone. Right-wing fundamentalist leader Randall Terry told an audience of the like-minded faithful: 'I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you... Our goal is a Christian nation... We are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism'." The goal, Parenti writes, "is to take over the U.S. government and replace civil law with biblical law."

Islam, too, has its fundamentalists. "Today's Islamist reactionaries, however, bear a closer resemblance to today's Christian reactionaries in their intolerance toward secularism and their conviction that both heaven and earth are their exclusive province. But unlike the Christianists who await their return to state power, the Islamists can already boast of existing bona fide theocracies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan (under the Taliban), and Kuwait." And in a number of other countries Islamists are such a strong force that they manage to impose Sharia law. Theirs is an appalling record, as demonstrated by the examples mentioned in this book.

Parenti does see some glimmers of hope, with the continued adherence to the ideal of a secular and tolerant society by a meaningful portion of the American public. Our aim, Parenti concludes, should be to "roll back the theocratic aggrandizement while strengthening our right to entertain our beliefs and disbeliefs openly and with impunity. Only secular strength and organized democratic activism on our part will counter the sectarian intolerance and state-assisted tyranny of reactionary theocrats.

God and His Demons is exceptionally well-written book, infused with the author's characteristic style, wit, no-nonsense analysis and deeply-felt humanism. This ranks among the author's most important works, deserving of the highest praise.

Visit Michael Parenti at: http://www.michaelparenti.org/

An Historic Confirmation of Corporate Power

Closing Time

By CHRIS FLOYD

It looks like heaven but it feels like death;
It's something in between, I guess:
It's closing time.

-- Leonard Cohen

Official transcript of remarks by President Barack Obama after the March 21 vote in the House of Representatives on H.R.3590: Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments to Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

My fellow Americans. As many of our more serious commentators have noted, Democrats and progressives have sought genuine reform of our broken, bloated, unjust health care system for almost a hundred years. Today, I am proud to say that we have brought that century-long struggle to a close. Together with our visionary partners in the House and the Senate, we have finally killed genuine health care reform for many years to come -- perhaps even for another century!

The struggle is over, the deal is done, the fix is in, and corporate power -- unbridled, unchallenged, coddled, protected, and larded with the endless pork of government-guaranteed profit -- has triumphed at last. This is an historic achievement. This is a mighty legacy we will bequeath to future generations.

This, my friends, is what change looks like.

Now, you know and I know that such change never comes easily. It never comes without opposition. It never comes without controversy. Even in this hour of victory, we know that the doom-sayers will be out in force.

And I'm not speaking here of the Republicans, whose opposition has simply been a lurid, baseless "Red Dawn" fantasy about "communism" coming to America. "Communism" -- in a bill that has been written by our visionary partners in the corporate community, by our hyper-capitalist friends and patrons on Wall Street, by the lobbyists and bagmen of Big Money! It's true there is a tinge of socialism in the bill, but it is, of course, the only kind of socialism that is tolerated in America: socialism for the rich, where the masses shoulder the risks -- and the costs -- while the wealthy reap the profits for themselves. The health-care barons, the bailed-out banks, the farm-devouring agriconglomerates, the war profiteers ... we've got plenty of boardroom bolsheviki out there -- but it sure ain't "communism" like Castro used to make! So let them hoot and holler down this false trail all they like; for as I learned back in my Senate days, when I was considered part of the "anti-war" faction, opposition without substance only entrenches the status quo.

No, what we must look out for are all those -- or rather, those very few -- nattering nabobs of negativism who have opposed our historic corporate empowerment bill out of -- get this -- principle. Like barnacles hanging onto the butt of the Titanic, they have clung to the idea of truly universal, equal, single-payer health care, a system that is less expensive, more efficient, more secure, more democratic, more popular and more effective than the heroic measure we have passed here today.

These poor wretches -- who now must face the wrath of Kos and the wroth of Rahm for their tragic apostasy -- are simply not savvy enough to see that our 2,000-page boondogglepalooza, riddled with fine-print exceptions, toothless regulations (which we will 'enforce' every bit as rigorously as Wall Street has been regulated all these years), impenetrable phase-in and phase-out schedules, and mild benefits that won't even begin kicking in for years -- and that even after a decade will still leave millions of people uncovered -- is much better than a simple, streamlined system that could be implemented by the end of this year, bringing genuine relief from intolerable, life-degrading financial burdens and medical problems to millions and millions of people in dire need right away.

Or as that avatar of negativity, Ralph Nader put it:

"The health insurance legislation is a major political symbol wrapped around a shredded substance. It does not provide coverage that is universal, comprehensive or affordable. It is a remnant even of its own initially compromised self — bereft of any public option, any safeguard for states desiring a single payer approach, any adequate antitrust protections, any shift of power toward consumers to defend themselves, any regulation of insurance prices, any authority for Uncle Sam to bargain with drug companies, and any reimportation of lower-priced drugs."

Hey, Ralph, thanks for reciting my credits! All those "berefts" you cited were the result of my own super- savvy negotiations! It's 11-dimensional chess, man, a really heavy-duty Matrix Zen Jedi Master use-the-Force kind of thing, where you win the game by giving away everything you have in the opening move! But you're too much a dinosaur to understand. 'Anti-trust protections!' Hey, Teddy Roosevelt -- your horse-and-buggy is waiting! Just listen to this guy:

"Most of the health insurance coverage mandated by this legislation does not come into effect until 2014, by which time 180,000 Americans will die because they were unable to afford health insurance to cover treatment and diagnosis, according to Harvard Medical School researchers."

Well, what can I say? 180,000 is a lot of dead people. This is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.

Then there's this Chris Hedges guy. He used to be a "serious" journalist, reporting on the imperial wars for our corporate partners in the stovepiping community -- what old-timers and barnacles still like to call the "news media." But he went off the rails a long time ago and joined the carpers and cranks on the sidelines, those malcontents who, unlike so many of our progressive partners today, have never imbibed the timeless wisdom of Warren G. Harding: "Don't knock, boost!"

Just get a load of Hedges here, making the big-whoop observation that our historic bill is just a bloated version of the already-failed, Republican-created Massachusetts plan:

"Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for what we will get nationwide. One in six people there who have the mandated insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the state program because of budget cuts. The 45,000 Americans who die each year because they cannot afford coverage will not be saved under the federal legislation. Half of all personal bankruptcies will still be caused by an inability to pay astronomical medical bills. The only good news is that health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting upward. ..."

Again with the credits! Stocks going up, corporate heads filling their pockets, pols gorging on backroom baksheesh, Big Money controlling the debate ... Earth to Hedges: That's what we're here for! That's the whole point! You're an old Seventies guy, aren't you, Chris? You remember ZZ Top? "Jesus Just Left Chicago"? (If you'll pardon the immodesty.) What do they say? "Taking care of business is his name." They got that right.

So who cares if the plan "fails"? Who cares, if, as you say,

"[the plan] will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors."

Listen, Hedgie: If the plan was to reform the health care system for the benefit of the people, then we would have, like, reformed the health care system for the benefit of the people. You follow? The plan was, is, and will always be to appear to be reforming the system -- to make the rubes believe that something is being done to alleviate their pain -- precisely to avoid really reforming the system, which is just too good and greasy for too many of us at the top of the imperial pyramid.

And when this plan fails -- as it will, as it will -- then you rig up another boondoggle, another "great debate" full of sound and fury, signifying zilch, to keep the rubes at bay. Meanwhile, we can get on to the real job our corporate colleagues and patrons want us to do -- bringing that other old dream of social amelioration for the common folk to an end at last: Social Security. Scalpel, Nurse! The doctor is in!

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues

Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Health Insurance Bonanza

Insurance Execs to Live High, While More Americans Die
By JOHN V. WALSH

Let there be no doubt about it. The health care “reform” bill voted into law Sunday in the House is a capitulation which will leave 30 million more Americans at the cruel mercies of the insurance companies – precisely what the single-payer movement had been battling against.

In the end the defenders of the legislation and those who signed on to it putting loyalty to themselves and their careers in the Democrat Party above principle, like the narcissistic twerp Dennis Kucinich, were left with only one real argument. How could anyone turn his/her back on the 30 million who would “benefit” from being brought under the control of the private insurers? The most succinct answer was given by Ralph Nader in a joint interview with him and the traitor Kucinich, who caved when his vote and a few others might have halted this legislative atrocity, conducted by Amy Goodman.

Thus, Nader:

“First of all, that (the legislation) won’t even begin until 2014, 180,000 dead Americans later (The number of unnecessary deaths over a three year period due to a lack of any insurance - jw). Second, there’s no guarantee of that. The insurance companies can game this system. The 2,500 pages is full of opportunities and ambiguities for the insurance companies to game the system and to make it even worse.

“And let’s say there are more people covered, right? Well, they’re being forced to buy junk insurance policies. There’s no regulation of insurance prices. There’s no regulation of the antitrust laws on this. Everything went down that Dennis was fighting for. There’s no regulation that prevents the insurance companies from taking this papier-mâché bill and lighting a fire to it and making a mockery of it. There’s no shift of power. There’s no facility to create a national consumer health organization, which we proposed and the Democrats ignored years ago, in order to give people a voice so they can have their own non-profit consumer lobby on Washington. …

“This is really a disaster.”

This bill is a bonanza for the Insurance Industry, which has therefore been uncharacteristically quiet during this so-called debate on health care. Or as Obama, ever the lackey for vested interests especially the ever expanding finance sectors of the economy, put it, the bill extends “our system of private insurance” to more people. Put another way, some more people may be covered with lousy policies with lots of fine print, but even to do that the insurance companies must be guaranteed their take. And to do that, the taxpayers along with the purchasers of the “insurance” will be billed.

There are three essential features of private, for-profit health insurance that make it despicable and inhumane. First, the insurers use their premiums “to enforce inequality in health care,” as Dr. David Himmelstein likes to put it. That is the system is fundamentally non-egalitarian, so that one’s health is not a right but depends ever more on one’s wealth. Second, the insurers work to maximize their profits and so that the Insurance bosses can live like kings. Thus these parasites refer to minimizing the dreaded “loss ratio,” as they call it, which is the fraction of the premiums given over to actual care. To them that is just a “loss”! And finally, the law basically caves in to what is a protection racket or a blackmailing racket by the insurers. That is, if you want health care you must pay off the insurers for doing nothing but denying you some care. That is “our system” of private insurance as Obama calls it. And it is increasingly characteristic of our economy where the ever growing giant parasite which is finance capital demands a take for essential needs – whether it be health care or pensions or education or housing or a decent life for our dependents should our life be suddenly terminated. Thus a nation like ours which such wealth leaves so many without essentials for a decent life.

And not only did Obama foist this on us, but those supposed “crusaders” for single payer succumbed in to pressure from their Party. And thus did Dennis Kucinich cave to another atrocity just as he did when he backed the prowar Kerry in 2004 and the prowar Obama in 2008. There can be no more powerful evidence that the Democratic Party is a worthless vehicle for change than the performance of Obama, the dream candidate of the progressives, and his Congress on the issue of health care. And when push comes to shove the Kuciniches, there to make the Party look like it has a sliver of decency, always cave in. After all what could be more important than the careers of these narcissists? To adapt a slogan from the 70s, Insurers and Congressmen live high while sick Americans die.

The Democrats' Health Care Bill

Defeat in Victory

By SHAMUS COOKE

What looks like a big victory for Obama and the Democrats may be their greatest undoing. It’s true that the passage of Obama’s health care bill represents a significant political victory for the Democrats. But sometimes a battle won could equal a lost war.

It’s telling that Obama had so much trouble in getting his own party to pass the bill on a simple majority basis: the bill was so blatantly watered down with the corporate hose that anyone with their name attached to it feared future electoral doom.

This kept the Democrat’s left wing — the so-called progressive wing — from initially giving their seal of approval. It must be remembered that some of the left Democrats initially claimed support for single payer health care. After being scolded by the Party leadership that this demand was “off the table,” the lefts moved to the right and demanded a “strong public option.”

The public option grew weaker and weaker as the health care bill evolved. The left Democrats pinned all their hopes on it; they ignored the rest of the health care bill, which slashed Medicare and taxed the “Cadillac” health care plans of union workers, all in the hopes that a miniscule public option would give the lefts some political cover.

It wasn’t meant to be. The final health care vision is the brainchild of the monopoly corporations who dominate health care in America. Their power will remain untouched. Indeed, it will only grow.

Dennis Kucinich, the most “radical” of the progressive Democrats, waited until the last round before he threw in the towel to the health care industry. His capitulation is especially symbolic, as many progressive activists around the country remained in the Democratic Party solely because he was there. His inglorious surrender signals what many progressives already knew: the Democrats are a corporate dominated party, where liberal ideas are tolerated so long as they have no actual effect on policy.

With Kucinich and the other left Democrats now fully discredited, the Democratic Party has further undermined its credibility — what little remained. Those who hoped that the party could be reformed— that the corporate wing could somehow be out-muscled— will be duped no longer.

Also, the bill’s taxing of “Cadillac” health care plans will further alienate organized labor from the Democrats. What little faith the unions had in the Democrats will be badly shaken.

More significantly, those millions of people who are soon to be mandated to buy shoddy, corporate insurance will vent their rage solely at the Democrats. A significant portion of the currently uninsured will remain without insurance, and be penalized at tax time for not buying into the corporate healthcare scam. These millions will be never vote Democrat again.

The Democrats have a won a congressional battle against the Republicans, while sawing off the branches of support on which they are perched. The party that was once “the lesser of two evils” is now competing on equal footing with the Republicans.

With both political parties dominated by the big banks and corporations, there is ever growing political vacuum to the left (the vacuum to the right is being filled by the tea partiers).

There have been countless attempts to organize a mass third party. The numerous progressive political parties that currently exist do so on an insignificant scale.

What remains missing is the support of labor unions, which represent millions of working members. Labor is the only social force that currently exists on the left capable of creating a mass-based party with the resources capable of competing with the two parties of big business.

What the unions lack in funds they make up for with potentially millions of volunteers — door-knockers, phone bankers, fund raisers, community organizers, etc.

If labor were to finally declare its independence from the Democrats, and announce the drive to create an independent labor led party representing the majority of working people in this country, the “fractured left” would find instant cohesion.

If this labor based party were based on a progressive platform —including Jobs, Peace and Medicare for All — not only would the country’s millions of union members join and vote for it, but the tens of millions of working people disenfranchised by the Democrats would instantly jump on board.

The political void to the left needs to be filled quickly. Tea Partiers and Ron Paul Republicans are benefiting from this political black hole: many people who are progressive at heart are being tricked by these right-wing populists. A bold showing from America’s Labor Movement would stop this trend dead in its tracks and open the way for true majority rule.

Recovery for the Rich

Getting Worse More Slowly

By DON MONKERUD

Feel upbeat about the economy? You should be. The economy is getting worse more slowly.

That's the learned conclusion of two economic experts who debated paths to recovery at the 2010 Panetta Institute Lecture Series in Monterey in March 2010.

Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman, and Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, find troubling signs in the economy, including high unemployment, risky long-term debt, frozen credit markets, overvalued bank assets, and a failed regulatory system.

Neither addressed why they call the economic downturn a "recession," when it's a depression that Sylvia Panetta said could "end up rivaling the Great Depression."

In the past, both men supported the reconfiguration of the American economy through cheap credit, monopoly control of markets, rising concentrations of political power, the dominance of banks in the economy, and shipping American's jobs overseas. By the end of their discussion, it became evident that both men continue to support the boom and bust cycles of neo-liberal capitalism. They would like to reduce the risk to the overall economy but not restrict growth.

Nevertheless, their sobering assessments find long-term problems and a fractious political system that makes any positive Congressional solutions almost impossible. Beneath the surface ran very different assumptions about the development of the economy.

A Bush appointee, Harvey Pitt pushed deregulation, whitewashed the SEC investigation of Cheney's Halliburton illegalities, and refused to release the SEC report on Bush's insider trading scheme. He recently founded the Kalorama Partners, which advises corporations on avoiding problems with regulators, and was forced to resign as SEC chairman due to his cozy ties to the Big Five Accounting firms during the Enron scandal. One Congressman described the SEC under Pitt as "a total shambles," and the GAO found Pitt's leadership dysfunctional and chaotic. Yet, now he's a recognized expert on the economy.

During the debate Pitt said, "the regulatory system totally failed," even though the New York Times reported him "watering down corporate governance reforms mandated by Congress" when he headed the SEC. Pitt criticized the stimulus package for giving money to companies "whose conduct created the problem in the first place." We could have "gotten more bang for the buck" by putting money into the hands of voters.

Reich agreed with Pitt, although he quickly pointed out that no one fully grasped the problem at the time or "knew how bad things would get." The $800 billion stimulus "was not large enough," and although it preserved two million jobs, Reich would like to have seen more of it invested in infrastructure instead of shoring up failed banks.

The men reserved a great amount of criticism for Capital Hill gridlock, although their views of the causes were at odds. "I've been in Washington 42 years, and in my view it's the worst it's been," said Pitt. He mused that a Democratic majority was "a prescription for disaster," because they could pass "pet projects" with no need to compromise.

Reich pointed out that bipartisanship "changed dramatically with Newt Gingrich" in 1994, which led to "incredible polarization." Obama's tendency to compromise cannot overcome Republicans hostility. By compromising on healthcare, and environmental and regulatory reform, Obama is losing his followers and undermining his electoral mandate.

Reich asserted that Obama should keep his campaign promises and push through his agenda. Without reform, healthcare costs are "on the way to 20 percent of GDP," which will "eat up the economy." The financial sector is becoming "so complicated, no one understands it," and the anti-government, anti-spending public won't allow us to spend our way out of the recession.

Both men decried political animosity and gridlock, with Pitt reminiscing about the days after 9/11 when everyone pulled together. Reich asserted that the middle class cannot pull together because they are demoralized by the wage stagnation of the past 30 years. Meanwhile, the 400 wealthiest households increased their income 31 percent in 2007. "How can people pull together when the rich are taking the lion's share?" Reich asked.

In 2001, the wealthy averaged $131 million per household, but by 2007, they increased their incomes to $345 million per household. Thanks to the Bush tax cuts, they paid 17 percent in taxes, less than many middle class families pay. "It cannot work if the middle class isn't sharing in the wealth," said Reich.

Like an out-of-touch grandfather, Pitt claimed such talk leads to "class warfare" and suggested that "everyone must pull together." He wants leadership that "gets people working together toward common goals" and warns against oversimplifying issues.

The back-and-forth exemplified larger issues in the on-going economic debate. Unfortunately, the exchange didn't provide any new light on the subject. Much more interesting is the radical restructuring of the economy that is going on behind the scenes. Reich pointed out that people who lost their jobs were pushed into lower-paying jobs and that full employment is years away. Meanwhile, the banks are getting richer, the gap between rich and poor is widening, corporations are consolidating power, and property is being redistributed upward. After Bush's mismanagement, the economy may never recover its health from before the downturn.

Debunking Myths About the Health Care Bill

Myth	Truth
1. This is a universal health care bill.	The bill is neither universal health care nor universal health insurance. Per the CBO: Total uninsured in 2019 with no bill: 54 million Total uninsured in 2019 with Senate bill: 24 million (44%)
2.Insurance companies hate this bill	This bill is almost identical to the plan written by AHIP, the insurance company trade association, in 2009. The original Senate Finance Committee bill was authored by a former Wellpoint VP. Since Congress released the first of its health care bills on October 30, 2009, health care stocks have risen 28.35%.
3. The bill will significantly bring down insurance premiums for most Americans.	The bill will not bring down premiums significantly, and certainly not the $2,500/year that the President promised. Annual premiums in 2016, status quo / with bill: Small group market, single: $7,800 / $7,800 Small group market, family: $19,300 / $19,200 Large Group market, single: $7,400 / $7,300 Large group market, family: $21,100 / $21,300 Individual market, single: $5,500 / $5,800* Individual market, family: $13,100 / $15,200*
4. The bill will make health care affordable for middle class Americans.	The bill will impose a financial hardship on middle class Americans who will be forced to buy a product that they can t afford to use. A family of four making $66,370 will be forced to pay $5,243 per year for insurance. After basic necessities, this leaves them with $8,307 in discretionary income out of which they would have to cover clothing, credit card and other debt, child care and education costs, in addition to $5,882 in annual out-of-pocket medical expenses for which families will be responsible.
5. This plan is similar to the Massachusetts plan, which makes health care affordable.	Many Massachusetts residents forgo health care because they can't afford it. A 2009 study by the state of Massachusetts found that: 21% of residents forgo medical treatment because they can t afford it, including 12% of children 18% have health insurance but can't afford to use it
6. This bill provide health care to 31 million people who are currently uninsured.	This bill will mandate that millions of people who are currently uninsured must purchase insurance from private companies, or the IRS will collect up to 2% of their annual income in penalties. Some will be assisted with government subsidies.
7. You can keep the insurance you have if you like it.	The excise tax will result in employers switching to plans with higher co-pays and fewer covered services. Older, less healthy employees with employer-based health care will be forced to pay much more in out-of-pocket expenses than they do now.
8. The excise tax will encourage employers to reduce the scope of health care benefits, and they will pass the savings on to employees in the form of higher wages.	There is insufficient evidence that employers pass savings from reduced benefits on to employees.
9. This bill employs nearly every cost control idea available to bring down costs.	This bill does not bring down costs and leaves out nearly every key cost control measure, including: Public Option ($25-$110 billion) Medicare buy-in Drug reimportation ($19 billion) Medicare drug price negotiation ($300 billion) Shorter pathway to generic biologics ($71 billion)
10. The bill will require big companies like WalMart to provide insurance for their employees	The bill was written so that most WalMart employees will qualify for subsidies, and taxpayers will pick up a large portion of the cost of their coverage.
11. The bill bends the cost curve on health care.	The bill ignored proven ways to cut health care costs and still leaves 24 million people uninsured, all while slightly raising total annual costs by $234 million in 2019. Bends the cost curve is a misleading and trivial claim, as the US would still spend far more for care than other advanced countries. In 2009, health care costs were 17.3% of GDP. Annual cost of health care in 2019, status quo: $4,670.6 billion (20.8% of GDP) Annual cost of health care in 2019, Senate bill: $4,693.5 billion (20.9% of GDP)
12. The bill will provide immediate access to insurance for Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition.	Access to the high risk pool is limited and the pool is underfunded. It will cover few people, and will run out of money in 2011 or 2012 Only those who have been uninsured for more than six months will qualify for the high risk pool. Only 0.7% of those without insurance now will get coverage, and the CMS report estimates it will run out of funding by 2011 or 2012. There is a loophole allowing for insurers to raise rates to levels which will price most people in the pool out of insurance, working as a backdoor to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions.
13. The bill prohibits dropping people in individual plans from coverage when they get sick.	The bill does not empower a regulatory body to keep people from being dropped when they re sick. There are already many states that have laws on the books prohibiting people from being dropped when they re sick, but without an enforcement mechanism, there is little to hold the insurance companies in check.
14. The bill ensures consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to challenge new insurance plan decisions.	The internal appeals process is in the hands of the insurance companies themselves, and the external one is up to each state. Ensuring that consumers have access to internal appeals simply means the insurance companies have to review their own decisions. And it is the responsibility of each state to provide an external appeals process, as there is neither funding nor a regulatory mechanism for enforcement at the federal level.
15. This bill will stop insurance companies from hiking rates 30%-40% per year.	This bill does not limit insurance company rate hikes. Private insurers continue to be exempt from anti-trust laws, and are free to raise rates without fear of competition in many areas of the country.
16. When the bill passes, people will begin receiving benefits under this bill immediately	Most provisions in this bill, such as an end to the ban on pre-existing conditions for adults, do not take effect until 2014. Six months from the date of passage, children could not be excluded from coverage due to pre-existing conditions, though insurance companies could charge more to cover them. Children would also be allowed to stay on their parents plans until age 26. There will be an elimination of lifetime coverage limits, a high risk pool for those who have been uninsured for more than 6 months, and community health centers will start receiving money.
17. The bill creates a pathway for single payer.	Bernie Sanders provision in the Senate bill does not start until 2017, and does not cover the Department of Labor, so no, it doesn t create a pathway for single payer. Obama told Dennis Kucinich that the Ohio Representative s amendment is similar to Bernie Sanders provision in the Senate bill, and creates a pathway to single payer. Since the waiver does not start until 2017, and does not cover the Department of Labor, it is nearly impossible to see how it gets around the ERISA laws that stand in the way of any practical state single payer system.
18 The bill will end medical bankruptcy and provide all Americans with peace of mind.	Most people with medical bankruptcies already have insurance, and out-of-pocket expenses will continue to be a burden on the middle class. In 2009, 1.5 million Americans declared bankruptcy Of those, 62% were medically related Three-quarters of those had health insurance The Obama bill leaves 24 million without insurance The maximum yearly out-of-pocket limit for a family will be $11,900 (PDF) on top of premiums A family with serious medical problems that last for a few years could easily be financially crushed by medical costs

*Cost of premiums goes up somewhat due to subsidies and mandates of better coverage. CBO assumes that cost of individual policies goes down 7-10%, and that people will buy more generous policies.
Documentation:

March 11, Letter from Doug Elmendorf to Harry Reid (PDF)

The AHIP Plan in Context, Igor Volsky; The Max Baucus WellPoint/Liz Fowler Plan, Marcy Wheeler

CBO Score, 11-30-2009

Affordable Health Care, Marcy Wheeler

Gruber Doesn t Reveal That 21% of Massachusetts Residents Can t Afford Health Care, Marcy Wheeler; Massachusetts Survey (PDF)

Health Care on the Road to Neo-Feudalism, Marcy Wheeler

CMS: Excise Tax on Insurance Will Make Your Insurane Coverage Worse and Cause Almost No Reduction in NHE, Jon Walker

Employer Health Costs Do Not Drive Wage Trends, Lawrence Mishel

CBO Estimates Show Public Plan With Higher Savings Rate, Congress Daily; Drug Importation Amendment Likely This Week, Politico; Medicare Part D IAF; A Monopoloy on Biologics Will Drain Health Care Resources, Lancet Student

MaxTax Is a Plan to Use Our Taxes to Reward Wal-Mart for Keeping Its Workers in Poverty, Marcy Wheeler

Estimated Financial Effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009, as Proposed by the Senate Majority Leader on November 18, 2009, CMS (PDF)

ibid

ibid

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Health insurance companies hang onto their antitrust exemption, Protect Consumer Justice.org

What passage of health care reform would mean for the average American, DC Examiner

How to get a State Single Payer Opt-Out as Part of Reconciliation, Jon Walker

Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies, CNN.com; The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Section by Section Analysis (PDF)

Underemployment At Record 20% According To Gallup

A stat that is far more accurate on the state of employment for 1/5 of all able to work Americans. The number of freelance gigs I get lowers each month (not counting the months when I've gone without any freelance gigs, which is up higher than I care to admit).


Underemployment At Record 20% According To Gallup

Just in case anyone needed confirmation that the DOL data is just a little, how should we say it, cooked, here comes Gallup with their March 15 undermployment number, which just hit a 2010, and series, high of 20%. This is obviously worse compared to both the beginning of the year (19.5%) and February (19.8%). Unlike the Dept of Labor's arcane voodoo which lately is based more on executive confidential memos and snowfall observations, Gallup's underemployment measure is based on more than 20,000 phone interviews collected over a 30-day period and reported daily. Furthermore "Gallup's results are not seasonally adjusted and tend to be a precursor of government reports by approximately two weeks." We wonder if the abnormally hot March weather will used as an excuse for a deterioraiton in the most recent NFP numbers.

A summary of underemployment trends as per Gallup:

A profiling of the two components of the Underemployment index indicate that while Gallup's unemployment rate declined marginally from February and was at 10.3%, the percentage of those emplpoyed part time and seeking full time work surged to 9.7%.

Focus on Underemployment, Not Unemployment

Even with historic healthcare legislation under consideration, Congress passed and the president signed a new jobs creation bill on March 18. No doubt, national attention will shortly shift to unemployment and anticipation of the government's April 2 report of the March unemployment rate. In this regard, Gallup's mid-March unemployment rate is likely indicative of the not-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate the government will release in April, as is Gallup's broader underemployment rate.

The danger associated with focusing on unemployment is reflected by the recent statement of Morgan Stanley economists suggesting that the U.S. may add as many as 300,000 jobs in March owing to an improvement in the weather, economic growth, and the government's hiring of temporary census workers. If anything close to this number of new jobs is announced by the government in early April, there is likely to be an enthusiastic, possibly even celebratory, response. Government officials are liable to tout the continued benefits of last year's stimulus and the future benefits of the new jobs bill. Many Wall Streeters will likely argue that the surge in jobs is simply another confirmation of the strength of the overall economic recovery.

However, before policymakers celebrate too much, they should note Gallup's recent findings involving its new, more inclusive measure of underemployment. To be sure, there are some benefits associated with the unemployed getting part-time jobs, no matter the source. For example, Gallup's self-reported spending data show that part-time workers who want full-time work spent on average 24% more per day ($51) during the past 30 days than did the unemployed ($41). While this represents an improvement and is good for the economy, it is not nearly as good as the 85% higher daily spending of those having full-time jobs ($76).

It is also often suggested that a growth in part-time jobs may indicate future growth in full-time work -- that companies hire part-time workers before committing to hiring new full-time employees. While this is sometimes the case, it may not be so at this point in the U.S. economy: Gallup data show that one in three part-time employees who are wanting full-time work are currently "hopeful" about finding a full-time job in the next 30 days -- not much of an endorsement of the idea that today's new part-time work will progress to full-time jobs.

Regardless of how one interprets the shifts taking place between part-time and full-time jobs, it is important that policymakers focus on the broader goal of reducing underemployment, not just unemployment. Part-time, temporary jobs like those associated with census-taking are far better than no job and may reduce the unemployment rate, but they do not represent the kind of job creation needed for a sustainable economic recovery.

Health-Care Stocks Up After House OK's Overhaul

Did this take anyone by surprise? When the mandates kick in, expect these stocks to skyrocket. That's one of the reasons they passed the corporate healthcare bill.

Health-Care Stocks Up After House OK's Overhaul


THE NEWS: Health-care stocks led the stock market higher Monday after the U.S. House Sunday approved a historic health-care overhaul designed to bring health insurance to 32 million more Americas while subjecting U.S. industries to a dramatically redrawn and newly regulated marketplace.

The Dow's pharmaceutical components strengthened, as drug makers are expected to profit from the expansion of health-care coverage. Merck rose 2.3%, while Pfizer climbed 1.5%.

Hospital operator Tenet Healthcare rose 6.1%, while insurer Cigna gained 1.9% and Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit manager, rose 2.1%. Pharmaceutical companies also climbed, with Eli Lilly up 1.3% and Bristol-Myers Squibb up 0.6%.

WINNERS & LOSERS: Health-care providers, drug companies and device makers are expected to see a neutral or even a positive impact from the legislation. Hospitals, clinical laboratories and pharmaceutical companies will see a deluge of new customers and could potentially benefit if millions of more Americans are insured.

The outlook may not be so rosy for insurers. Though they will gain enrollees, they also face a raft of new regulations that would bar insurance companies from denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions -- and limit their ability to differentiate insurance premiums based on a customer's age and other factors.

Also, Medicare providers will face both cuts and new regulatory restrictions.

Business groups have lambasted the legislation, saying the requirement to provide health coverage would be an impediment for future hiring.

NEW TAXES, COSTS: The health-care overhaul bill will be paid for by nearly $ 438 billion in new taxes and fees on high-income Americans, drug and medical device makers and health insurers.

High-income earners will face a 3.8% Medicare tax on investment income, a 0.9% surtax on earned income, higher Medicare taxes and a 40% excise tax on generous health-care plans, dubbed "Cadillac plans."

A tax on medical devices manufacturers was reduced to 2.3%, but will apply to a broader range of devices.

Pharmaceutical companies would face $28 billion in fees over the next ten years and would have to provide deep discounts on prescriptions filled in the Medicare Part D program.

STUDENT LOAN CHANGES: The health-care bill included a major shake-up of the student loan industry Sunday, ending most private banks' ability to originate lending in the market. Ending such origination fees will save the taxpayers an estimated $68 billion over 10 years. However, private banks still can earn money servicing student loans.

WHAT THEY SAID:

"There're a lot of people who were uninsured, who will start behaving differently in an environment where they will go to the doctor, get lab tests and take prescription drugs," says Derek Taner, a lead manager of the AIM Global Health Care Fund.

"We will have an effort to repeal the bill" House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R, Ohio) told NBC's "Meet The Press," on what the Republicans will do if they retake the House in the fall elections. "I'd have a bill on the floor the first thing out, to eliminate the Medicare cuts, eliminate the tax increases, eliminate the mandate that every American has to buy health insurance, and the employer mandate that's going to kill jobs," he said

"I look forward to the campaign in November . . . and I very much look forward to the Republican Party running on a platform of repealing this bill,"" Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio)

"It even puts new taxes on medical devices like wheelchairs, oxygen and pacemakers and incredibly, on drugs used to treat cancer and heart disease," Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas) said.

"I was unable to find anything in there that would cause me to have anxiety if I were a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company," said Ira Loss, a senior health-care analyst at the research firm Washington Analysis.

Sanofi-Aventis SA (SNY) Chief Executive Christopher Viehbacher said in an interview that the impact of the legislation will be neutral to slightly negative "but better for the industry than if healthcare reform didn't pass."

"I don't think the market was surprised by the passage, and we should remember that when the Senate passed their bill on Christmas Eve, the market held up fine," said Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at BTIG, an institutional broker.

Marketing Ate Our Culture

I spent the bulk of my career in the marketing industry. Now I am 4 years removed from it. I make less money, but I'm a happier person. And I'm not paid to lie anymore.




Marketing Ate Our Culture
By Terry O'Reilly, AlterNet
March 22, 2010

Editor's Note: Terry O'Reilly is the author, with Mike Tennant, of the book Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture from Random House Books. The essay that follows was written for AlterNet and based off that book.

What if I told you that you should be watching more commercials? Yes, I’m an adman. And yes, you’d expect me to say that. But you just might have a moral obligation to watch more commercials. Let me explain.

A few decades back, Texan Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson gazed down the highway and didn’t like what she saw. Billboards blocked her view of the plains, of the distant hills, and of her beloved wildflowers. So she complained to her husband. He had a fairly influential job. He was President of the United States. Like all good husbands, Lyndon Baines Johnson knew what was good for him, and prompted Congress to pass the Highway Beautification Act, which placed limits on the spread of posters - or billboards as they’re popularly known -- and preserved the views that Ladybird Johnson loved so much.

The new restrictions drew rave reviews, particularly from one British ex-pat, who later wrote: "As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"


It’s a remarkable manifesto considering its author is the legendary advertising mogul David Ogilvy, he of Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency fame. Throughout his career, he railed at large outdoor posters, even though his advertising agency created hundreds, if not thousands, of them for their various blue-chip clients.

Let’s stick a bookmark in here for a moment, and go back in time a bit further. At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the most powerful advertising agencies in America was Lord & Thomas, headed by the most influential, albeit most forgotten adman ever to stride purposefully down Madison Avenue (even though he was based in Chicago, but stay with me). Inspired one day by Canadian copywriter John E. Kennedy’s famous insight that advertising really was “salesmanship on paper” and not just “news,” Lasker took that seemingly obvious tidbit and built Lord & Thomas into one of the world’s largest advertising empires.

Radio was just coming out of its wrapping back then, and Lasker initially paid little attention to the medium as it struggled for the economic model that would sustain it. What he couldn’t ignore, however, was the success of radio advertising pioneers such as Bernard Gimbel, of Gimbel’s department stores and Saks Fifth Avenue. Even harder to ignore was Lasker’s client David Sarnoff of RCA, who was also happened to be the founder of the NBC radio network in 1926. Eventually, Lasker decided to experiment with radio advertising and asked his New York office to create a program based on some sort of Broadway entertainment as a vehicle for Palmolive.

Meanwhile, NBC president Merlin Aylesworth didn’t believe in radio advertising as you hear it today, but preferred that sponsors (a word not yet invented in the late twenties) be mentioned before and after a program with a passing phrase like, “The following program comes to you through the courtesy of Lucky Strike.” Clearly, he hadn’t met Albert Lasker. But he was about to. The locomotive that was Albert Lasker had a completely different point of view: He reckoned that in exchange for underwriting a broadcast, brands should be offered an opportunity to present the sort of “reason why” advertising they did in print, but adapted for sound. Instead of parcels of space, they would occupy parcels of time. And that is how the broadcast “commercial,” as it came to be known, was born. Merlin, meet Albert.

In no time, Lasker was basking in the success of sponsored radio programs, like Amos ‘N Andy and The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope, and quickly embraced the new medium on behalf of other clients. In solving a problem for his clients, Lasker provided the economic model radio had been struggling to find: big-name advertisers could provide big money to underwrite high-caliber entertainment for a mass audience. The bigger the audience, the greater the value to advertisers, and theoretically, the more they would pay for production. Radio would provide top-rank entertainment, but it would not be free.

Listeners would pay by allowing themselves to be exposed to a commercial. It seemed just the right fit in a world of compromise. You want to go camping? You tolerate mosquitoes. You want to fly? You tolerate removing your belt at airports. You want Groucho Marx in your living room? No problem, provided the nation’s three thousand Plymouth-De Soto dealers could tag along. And there it was: The Great Unwritten Contract. Sponsors funded programming, and in return, they took some of the listener’s time and attention.

And it was good.

When television took off in the 1950s, it suffered few of the birthing pains that radio had; Albert Lasker had provided a readymade economic template. At the same time, the postwar economic boom gave consumers enough cash to buy television sets, and as TV viewership grew, the value of its audience became increasingly attractive to advertisers. Sponsors lined up to pour fresh buckets of money into the new medium.

A large part of the attraction was the “mass audience” experience of the new medium; like radio, it drew millions of people to the same event during the same time span. The morning after a broadcast, it seemed that the talk was all about what “everyone” had been watching the night before: Ralph and Norton’s latest get-rich-quick scheme or which dress Uncle Miltie wore on Texaco Star Theatre. It was the shared experience, as much as the programs themselves that caused a buzz around the broadcasts. There was a thrill in knowing that millions of others were watching the same show at the same moment. Sponsors’ ads were a small price to pay.

OK, back to the bookmark. Here’s the point, and even Ogilvy agreed with this: Advertising has to uphold its end of the Great Unwritten Contract. Put simply, advertising has to give you something back in exchange for your time. At the low end of that transaction, the ads themselves have to at least be entertaining, or informative, or dramatically interesting. In other words, the advertiser has to reward you with a smile or a bit of information that you didn’t know before. That’s motherhood in this debate.

At the high end, the advertising has to give you something substantive back in exchange for your attention. Advertising should underwrite the entertainment. The ad revenue should be plowed back into creative production. So when CBS makes $271M per year from advertising revenue on Late Night With David Letterman, a big chunk of it goes to making more David Letterman shows. The ads in news programs fund the travel and salaries of the news gatherers around the world. The ads in a magazine fund the magazine content. Ads in a newspaper pay the reporter’s salaries. Paid keyword searches fund that wonderful little thing you call Google.

That’s the basis of the Great Unwritten Contract. The ads underwrite the programs or content you love, you sit through the ads in return. It was and is a good deal.

When advertising breaks that contract, trouble brews. I truly believe that you can chart the start of ad-induced bathroom runs to when advertising started to take but not give. When the ads themselves stopped being interesting, and became repetitive and relentless and unrewarding, people started getting annoyed with them. When 1950s ad gurus like Rosser Reeves believed that high repetition of kindergarten-like ad propositions (Anacin relieves headaches! Anacin relieves headaches!! Anacin relieves headaches!!!) were the path to big sales, he and admen like him, broke the contract. When one of his own clients asked Reeves whether the ice-pick-to-the-forehead strategy wasn’t turning people off, Reeves answered with a famous question: “Do you want to be liked, or do you want to be rich?”

I dislike telemarketing not just because it’s annoying, but also because it breaks the contract, disrespecting the customer and interrupting without apology. It breaks all the rules of good marketing, which is to say it isn’t pleasantly surprising or polite or humorous or meaningful. Telemarketers make no attempt to build a relationship with their clients, nor do they try to live up to the Contract: offering something in exchange for the customer’s time. Telemarketers don’t give you anything. They just call to take, and leave you with a cold bucket of the Colonel’s chicken.

Let’s talk cinema advertising. Unless I’m very wrong, ticket prices didn’t come down when ads went up. These days, the moviegoer has been demoted from welcome guest to mere chattel, whose time and attention are commodified and sold to a growing number of advertisers.

And for this you pay them.

Billboards have to figure out a way to give back. Ladybird was simply reacting to the fissure in the Contract. She didn’t know it then, but she was. Where was the giveback? Where was the reciprocity? Cut to Mr. Johnson having to introduce billboard legislation to keep the Mrs. happy while juggling civil rights and Viet Nam. No one said marriage was easy.

By now, you must think this is quite a rant for an adman. Followed by the question – will he ever work again?

Yet I believe in the Contract. Wholeheartedly. But here’s the thing: Every contract has two sides. A contract isn’t a contract until two people shake hands. Which means, if you have some favorite television programs like the Letterman show, or Survivor, or 60 Minutes, you should be honoring your side of the Contract, and watching the commercials embedded in those programs.

Because if you’re not, you’re breaking the Contract. You are in breach.

Every time you leave the room to go to the fridge, or to the bathroom during a commercial break, or fast-forward through the ads with your TiVo, you are quietly, surreptitiously, covertly, violating the Contract.

You get away with it because it’s not enforceable by law. If a roofing contractor took your money, and didn’t replace your roof, you’d be outraged. If your dentist sent you a bill but didn’t fill the cavity, you’d bounce off all four walls.

So how do you justify not watching the commercials that underwrite the programs you watch and religiously record?

Screw ‘em, I hear you say. The commercials they put out are crap, most are barely watchable. But there are also scores of good commercials. Just like there are good and bad movies, books and songs. As a matter of fact, the United States constantly ranks first or second internationally every year when it comes to creative advertising. It’s a verifiable fact.

So here we are at that rarely talked-about impasse. Advertisers break the contract with bad commercials, you avoid their commercials to punish them, but still take the programs. It’s like a Quentin Tarrantino standoff, where everyone has a gun.

So here’s an idea: Stop buying from advertisers that send you bad commercials. Every time you buy from those advertisers, they come to people like me and ask for more bad commercials. When I protest, they just point to their sales results, and the air goes out of my argument. They believe that bad ads work, because you, the consuming public, are enablers. Instead, only buy from the advertisers that assume intelligence, that make you smile, that give you advertising that tells you something you didn’t know 30 seconds ago, advertisers that respect you.

Then, stop the TiVo when you see one of their ads go whizzing by, rewind the machine, and watch the commercial. Don’t punch that button on your car radio when a good commercial comes on, listen to it. Read that interesting ad across from the story you’re devouring in Vanity Fair. Don’t answer the phone when a 1-800 number shows up on the readout.

Patronize the advertisers holding up their end of the Contact. And do the honorable thing: hold up your end.

How Much Worse Can Congress Make Unemployment

This article uses the govt employment stats, meaning it only accounts for half the total number of unemployed people, glossing over it, but the point of the article is valid.

On to the Unemployment Crisis

By CRAIG D. ROSE

Okay, health care is done, now a quick deep breath and on to a bigger crisis: how to get millions of Americans back to work.

The gross numbers alone are daunting:

- Nearly 15 million people flat out unemployed.

- Almost 9 million working part-time because they can’t find full-time work

Millions more marginally attached workers or so-called discouraged and not counted as unemployed.

The bottom line is that America needs more than 10 million jobs just to get back to where we were two years ago. That would be difficult enough if we had at least begun adding jobs. But the U.S. economy continues to lose jobs.

The problem is so deep that even those with jobs are affected. That’s because that vast army of the unemployed is depressing incomes for those who do have jobs, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which pegs the decline in income at 1 percent for year ending February.

If unemployment is rightfully deemed a crisis, the future offers little prospect of relief.

This past week the Obama administration’s economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, told Congress it expects the economy to generate about 100,000 per month for the remainder of this year. That’s better than losing jobs but 100,000 jobs monthly is barely what’s needed to keep pace with new workers entering the job market.

In other words, 100,000 jobs monthly would hold things at the status quo.

Further ahead, Geithner and company predict the unemployment rate – now 9.7 percent nationally and 12.5 percent in California – will edge down to 8.9 percent by the close of 2011. I don’t think I’ll hold either my breath or the Champagne for that prospect. (17% is the real number-jp)

What should make this all the more scary is that none of the plans being offered for dealing with unemployment even pretend to deal with the scope of the problem.

That jobs bill Obama signed giving small companies tax breaks for hiring the unemployed this past week?

It might result in about 200,000 hires, according to the W.E. Upjohn Institute. Don’t race for your calculator, I’ve done the math: If the HIRE Act works as advertised, it would generate about 2 percent of jobs we need.

To be sure, neither the Obama nor Congress characterized the jobs bill as anything but a small step. That that would be encouraging, if there were additional measures in the offing that make sense.

There aren’t.

Apply a sharp pencil to the host of job proposals on the table and it’s obvious that none has the breadth, depth or wherewithal to get millions of people back to work.

More credit for small businesses?

Help me out here: Why would small business expand when American incomes are falling and even the employed fear for their future?

The small business people I know are seeing sales fall and have no interest in expanding at this time. The demand for credit, in fact, has fallen in the recession.

Rather than a credit crunch, we have a debt crisis at nearly every level - personal, state, federal and financial. (Oh, that’s right; we took care of the debt problem on Wall Street. What a load off my mind.)

Think American innovation will bail us out?

Well, while the U.S. was inventing synthetic collateralized debt obligations (don’t ask, but as Counterpunch readers now we all own them since taxpayers bailed out AIG), China was blowing past us in the manufacture of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels.

Oh, our engineers can beat their engineers?

Maybe, but will our engineers work for $9,000 annually – that’s going rate for these technical workers in China. With a master’s degree, no less.

Think training will get America? We’ve all heard that one and it’s true that employment in certain technical niches has increased (though not for electrical engineers and computer programmers). But there’s no way these technical occupations can absorb the millions who need work.

And keep this in mind: This past week the top scientist at Advanced Materials, a Silicon Valley company which is the world’s largest supplier of equipment to make semiconductors and photovoltaic, said he was moving to China. According to the New York Times, “companies are concluding their researchers need to be close to factories and consumers.”

Factories – remember those? What we forgot as we watched a third of America’s manufacturing move abroad is that this sector employs more scientists and technical workers than any other.

There’s ample evidence that things would have been much worse without the stimulus package passed last year. Most estimates are that we’d have roughly two million fewer jobs now without that program.

But for those looking for a plausible plan to get back to a reasonable level of employment, there’s little on the table now but despair.

Of course, many with a deep-seated faith in the ability of the US economy to renew itself, to come up with the latest widget, and to generate jobs may believe the absence of serious programs for unemployment is a good thing. Government tinkering will only cause harm, they say. Let the free market reign.

Well, if you believe that one, AIG has got a deal for you: billions of dollars in synthetic collateralized debt obligations. And there are thousands of financial wizards who can tell you how they work.

What they can’t explain is how to get America back to work.

Single-payer by attrition

So, I found an interesting article that alludes to how we might eventually wind up having single payer healthcare reform by way of the Supreme Court. I watched some political talking head show that said if health care reform were passed, the Republicans would challenge the constitutionality of its mandate in the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court.

According to this article from this past January, that would probably backfire on the Republicans, because the court would agree that the mandate was unconstitutional, but they would rule that a single payer form of health care would have to take its place. Read on:

Conservatives should embrace the health-insurance mandate
Jan 15th 2010
by The Economist

I'VE posted before on the perverse results that would be generated by a Supreme Court ruling that a mandate to buy health insurance would be unconstitutional. Yesterday Ezra Klein made the same point. Basically, a lot of Democrats would love to establish a single-payer system for universal health insurance, like Canada's, or a single-payer system for basic insurance with private supplementary insurance, like France's. They've shied away from attempting such a reform because it's agreed that America's private insurance industry is too powerful, and American political culture makes it easy to demagogue any national centralised system (though this rests on a mighty rock of cognitive dissonance—Americans like their Medicare and Social Security just fine).

Hence, Democrats have spent the past two years working out a private-sector universal health-insurance reform plan that's similar to those of Switzerland and the Netherlands: private health insurance with community rating and a buyer mandate. But that kind of system is impossible without a mandate; it would get ripped apart in a vortex of adverse selection. A Supreme Court ruling that the mandate is unconstitutional would mean that the only kind of universal health insurance America can have is the British, Canadian or French kind, where the government runs the whole show (for basic insurance, anyway). It seems perverse that America's constitution would mandate a more socialist approach to universal health care than the Netherlands has. It's also, as Mr Klein says, a disaster for free-market conservatives, in the long run.

But it's also worth thinking about exactly how this would play out. The clearest way to explain it is that right now, what we have already is a system that's getting ripped apart in a vortex of adverse selection. Health spending is rising at 8% per year. PriceWaterhouseCooper says medical costs will grow 9% in 2010; health insurance premiums generally rise even faster than costs. Premiums now amount to 18% of the average household's income, up from 11% in 1999. As insurance costs rise far faster than wages, unsurprisingly, the number of uninsured keeps rising too, to 46.3m in 2008. And those who aren't uninsured are increasingly insured by the government. Medicaid added 3m people to its rolls in 2008. The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) picked up another 1.5m. As this process continues, federal spending on health insurance keeps climbing; it grew 10.4% in 2008. Sick people, poor people, and older people are increasingly unable to afford insurance, and many are winding up on the government's dime. As premiums rise, people at higher and higher income strata find they cannot afford them, drop out of private insurance, and end up being covered by the government or not covered at all.

This is single-payer by attrition. The health reform measure in Congress now proposes to use tax subsidies to get America's working poor into private insurance plans. If it is ruled unconstitutional, the country will face a choice: allow the numbers of uninsured to continue shooting up, or enroll more and more people directly in taxpayer-funded government insurance plans. It's not impossible that America will choose the former, and become an increasingly bimodal two-class society where the working class simply doesn't get adequate health care. But it seems more likely that, after whatever number of years elapses between health-care reform efforts, universal health insurance will be back on the agenda of some future Democratic president. And this time, it will be single-payer, because nothing else will be constitutional.

***

So, is it possible Obama's plan is that he is counting on the current health care reform bill to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, thus setting up a single payer system administered by the govt. because since it is closest to what exists in limited form currently (only for poverty level Americans too poor and/or too sick to afford to provide their own insurance), the court would have to revert back to the current plan and increase its enrollment for all those who could not afford the mandate? Wow, that's ingenious! It is the epitome of the back door plan. I will be impressed if that was the overall plan. It seems very conniving and dishonest, so it must be politics 101. Wow...

Real Time 3-19-10

The Fed to Congress: Don't take away our small banks.

Based on his track record, I'd say "Fuck you, Benny! You idiot!"

Bernanke presses case for Federal Reserve oversight of small banks
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2010

Top Federal Reserve officials are waging a public campaign to convince lawmakers that their long-standing authority to regulate banks around the country -- including small and midsize ones -- is integral to keeping the central bank attuned what is going on across the U.S. economy.

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke articulated that message Saturday morning in a speech to the Independent Community Bankers of America in which he argued that the Fed is better able to monitor the U.S. economy because of its role overseeing 5,000 bank holding companies and 850 state-chartered banks around the country.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) has proposed stripping the central bank of those responsibilities in financial reform legislation that the Senate banking committee will take up Monday. The proposal would leave the Fed as the supervisor of only the three dozen or so largest banks.

Dodd and others in Congress have argued that the Fed should be focusing more narrowly on managing the nation's monetary policy and on ensuring the stability of the financial system overall -- and are particularly eager for the central bank to face consequences for its mistakes earlier in the decade that contributed to the financial crisis.

But Bernanke and other Fed leaders are fighting the attempt to strip them of authority over small banks. Increasingly, they're turning away from the quiet persuasion of lawmakers -- the Fed's typical approach -- and toward making their case openly and vigorously.

The data used by the Fed to analyze economic conditions "often mask the diversity of the U.S. economy" and are backward-looking, Bernanke said in his speech Saturday. "In contrast," he said, "the grass-roots information that we obtain from community bankers and the other community and business leaders who serve as Reserve Bank directors provides a forward-looking perspective on economic developments and concerns, as well as a level of detail and qualitative insight that is often lost in the aggregate numbers."

Indeed, he described the Fed's role as supervisor of all types of institutions as crucial ballast in keeping it from being too focused on the interests of Wall Street firms and the views of officials in Washington. The Fed's supervision of banks is carried out by 12 regional banks around the country whose presidents also have a role setting the nation's monetary policy.

"Why was America's central bank given this unique structure?" Bernanke said. "The reason was to provide legitimacy and a broad geographic presence across the nation for an institution that often has to make difficult decisions. Over time, this structure has provided the Federal Reserve with grass-roots connections, local insights and diverse perspectives that few other federal institutions enjoy."

Besides Bernanke, presidents of some reserve banks are increasingly vocal about the possibility of losing their role overseeing small and midsize banks.

"It seems kind of strange to me that even in this crisis where we have heard complaints that the Fed was too attentive to Wall Street and so on that we are moving toward a system to concentrate the interests of the central bank on Washington and Wall Street," Charles Plosser, Philadelphia Fed president, said in an interview. "That seems like the wrong way to go to me, and would not necessarily be in the best interest of monetary policy, or of responding to crises, or in the spirit of decentralized robust decision making."

The congressional efforts to focus the Fed only on overseeing the largest banks, Plosser said, would be "a dangerous path to go on and would not be good for Main Street or the Fed's ability to be independent enough to make hard decisions when the time comes to raise rates when it may be politically unpopular."

Also articulating the Fed's case for keeping bank supervision this week was Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed.

"Stripping the Federal Reserve of its responsibility for supervising regional and community banks and bank holding companies should be unacceptable to anyone who cares about equity in the nation's banking system, largest to smallest bank, and the nation's regional and local economies," Hoenig said at an American Bankers Association conference.

The Fed has a key ally in the banks themselves; the Independent Community Bankers of America has argued that the Fed should remain the supervisor of large and small banks.

Seven Years In, Iraq’s Future as Uncertain as Ever
By Jason Ditz On March 19, 2010

Another year of war in Iraq has come and gone, and with devastating violence still virtually a daily reality in the nation, the seventh anniversary of the US invasion looks to come and go with considerably less discussion than in years past.

The repeated escalations of the war in Afghanistan have turned Iraq into a comparatively forgotten war. This, coupled with President Obama’s repeated pledges to end the war have led many Americans to conclude that the conflict is, if not entirely so, virtually over.

Yet nearly 100,000 American troops remain on the ground in Iraq, increasingly held hostage by what looks to be a virtual deadlock in this month’s parliamentary election. US officials still insist further cuts are “on the horizon,” but the Obama Administration’s pledge to have all combat troops out by August, which was itself a considerable retreat from his campaign pledges to end the war entirely in 16 months, looks like it will not come to pass.

There is open talk about a “plan B” in Iraq, which is to slow or even entirely stop the withdrawal of troops from the nation. Officials had said last year that the bulk of America’s combat force would not leave until after the election was resolved, but this is now expected to take several months.

In a way, the situation has become even less certain than it was a year ago. At this time last year officials were presenting the then-upcoming parliamentary election as a stabilizing event. With that election dividing the nation’s polity more than ever, there seems to be no hypothetical future event for the administration to hang its hopes on.

Swine flu no danger

Swine flu danger appears to be ebbing
March 19, 2010|By Thomas H. Maugh II

The CDC says a third wave of the H1N1 pandemic is less likely in the U.S. Attention now turns to the Southern Hemisphere, where flu season is just beginning.

The likelihood of a third wave of pandemic H1N1 influenza appears to be declining as all indicators of swine flu activity remain low throughout the bulk of the country, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Nobody can say for sure that we are totally out of the woods, but the further we go into spring and summer, the less likely we are to see another wave," said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner. It would not surprise the agency to see some local activity of the virus "continue to percolate along," he added.

Collage of Nonsense: FOXNews

Infographic! AIG Bailout Charted for Your Displeasure