A day with a lot of news. Let's start with swine flu. If you want official information about the spreading influenza virus, go to the CDC web site, and watch this video:
http://www.cdc.gov/cdctv/
Here is an article from the Washington Post about the government's handling of information:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042904439.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
And one on Egypt killing all its pigs, even though that doesn't appear to be the way the virus spreads
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090429/ap_on_he_me/ml_egypt_swine_flu
Obama's $3.4B budget was approved:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042901033.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
And here we are with Chrysler in bankruptcy because a few smaller hedge funds refused the government's offer to repay only 1/3 of the debts the company had outstanding with them. They hope they'll do better from the sale of some of the company's assets. The UAW (55%) and FIAT (up to 35%) will be the major shareholders of the company after it has emerged from bankruptcy procedure:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043001639.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/business/30uaw.html?_r=1&hp
After 100 days in office, Obama emphasizes the differences from Bush policies:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042900305.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
and expresses concern about events in Pakistan, where the Taliban are gaining ground, 60 miles away from Islamabad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html?hp
Today, the New York Times devotes a special business section to green technology, perhaps the only promising news of the day, even though one article informs us that investment in alternative energy sources has been plummeting since the beginning of the economic crisis:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/businessspecial2/
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Policy Irony and Turning Lead into Gold
The latest in the incremental creep toward an expanded medicare system outlines the difficulty of pushing more money at parts of the problem without dealing with it holistically. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/health/policy/27care.html
The irony is that now that there is willingness to fund more universal care, they can't find anyone to take the funds. Perhaps a solution lies in part in forgiveness of med school loans to doctors who accept Medicare. They do that with other professional school loans. Why isn't this a problem in Europe? In any event, I'll take incremental creep if it goes in the right direction.
On a related note the swine flu story has revived some very valid conspiracy stories (I mean that in a good way) about the connection between such medical crises and profiteering. Although dated, the facts about Donald Rumsfeld's continuing to profit from fresh demand for Tamiflu are still valid. He is no longer an officer at Gilead, which reaps 10% of revenues from Roche, who actually produce the drug. However, he maintains literally millions of dollars in stock, the value of which tripled during the 2005 bird flu "crisis". At last count 68 Americans were sickened by swine flu, none of them fatally, I think that amounts to .0000002% of the population! It's a crisis! Perhaps Rumsfeld's friends in the media--the same ones who continue to give him a pass on the war crimes--are helping him and big Pharma out as usual. Here's a link:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/
Kinda reminds me of old Halliburton. When Dick Cheney took over as CEO, he okayed the merger with Johns-Manville, the insulation company. OOPS! Asbestos lawsuit liability was high enough to drag Halliburton down into insolvency unless they came up with a major new revenue stream. Perhaps if they could land some big ol' defense contract. Sorry, we weren't at war in 2001. If only something were to happen which would energize the country and get them behind attacking Iraq (doing which had other appeals as well)...hmmm. Not that Cheney had any conflict of interest. He had resigned as CEO when he became Vice-roy to the Boy Emperor. But about that "deferred compensation" arrangement he had with Halliburton. Might it cause him to look ahead a little to when he was no longer in government? It is unknown how much blood money Cheney got creating the Iraq war, but I suspect you could cover Wyoming with it. In hundred dollar bills.
The irony is that now that there is willingness to fund more universal care, they can't find anyone to take the funds. Perhaps a solution lies in part in forgiveness of med school loans to doctors who accept Medicare. They do that with other professional school loans. Why isn't this a problem in Europe? In any event, I'll take incremental creep if it goes in the right direction.
On a related note the swine flu story has revived some very valid conspiracy stories (I mean that in a good way) about the connection between such medical crises and profiteering. Although dated, the facts about Donald Rumsfeld's continuing to profit from fresh demand for Tamiflu are still valid. He is no longer an officer at Gilead, which reaps 10% of revenues from Roche, who actually produce the drug. However, he maintains literally millions of dollars in stock, the value of which tripled during the 2005 bird flu "crisis". At last count 68 Americans were sickened by swine flu, none of them fatally, I think that amounts to .0000002% of the population! It's a crisis! Perhaps Rumsfeld's friends in the media--the same ones who continue to give him a pass on the war crimes--are helping him and big Pharma out as usual. Here's a link:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/
Kinda reminds me of old Halliburton. When Dick Cheney took over as CEO, he okayed the merger with Johns-Manville, the insulation company. OOPS! Asbestos lawsuit liability was high enough to drag Halliburton down into insolvency unless they came up with a major new revenue stream. Perhaps if they could land some big ol' defense contract. Sorry, we weren't at war in 2001. If only something were to happen which would energize the country and get them behind attacking Iraq (doing which had other appeals as well)...hmmm. Not that Cheney had any conflict of interest. He had resigned as CEO when he became Vice-roy to the Boy Emperor. But about that "deferred compensation" arrangement he had with Halliburton. Might it cause him to look ahead a little to when he was no longer in government? It is unknown how much blood money Cheney got creating the Iraq war, but I suspect you could cover Wyoming with it. In hundred dollar bills.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
U.S. Energy Czar Cautions Planet is Entering a Danger Zone
Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, warns that most of California's snowpack may vanish and the Midwest could become desert. He sees a frightening connection between rising levels of CO2, the warming of our oceans, the increasing ferocity of hurricanes and tropical storms, and an impending water crisis.
To view a 3 minute video commentary by Chu click on the following link:
http://fora.tv/2007/09/13/Steve_Chu_A_New_Energy_Program#Steven_Chu_on_Climate_Change_and_Its_Dangers
To view a 3 minute video commentary by Chu click on the following link:
http://fora.tv/2007/09/13/Steve_Chu_A_New_Energy_Program#Steven_Chu_on_Climate_Change_and_Its_Dangers
The Health Care Industry and their Capitol Hill Protectors Are Sabotaging Our Chance for True Reform
So far we have "reformed" the health insurance system by reinforcing precisely what's wrong with it.
Every so often, I remember Ronald Reagan fondly -- not for his policies but for his skill at the art of persuasion. Right now, for example, I'd like to call the Gipper back to cock his head, give us that quizzical look and say "There you go again."
Yes, there they go again. They are the defenders of the health care status quo -- that is, the insurance industry and its protectors in both parties on Capitol Hill. And they have been frantically arguing these past few weeks that any coming reform of the health insurance system cannot, should not -- and will not, if they have their way -- include a public insurance plan that uninsured individuals can turn to if they find themselves without affordable insurance, or any coverage at all.
Maintaining what amounts to a monopoly on insurance for the working-age population has become a central goal of the insurance industry, which rightly fears that the government will provide more comprehensive coverage at a lower cost. This is, of course, the whole point of overhauling the insurance system. But never mind.
The industry worries that Americans will find out not only that government-supported health insurance isn't a socialist catastrophe (see, for example, Medicare) but a fairer, lower-cost and more efficient system than the expensive, inefficient -- and failing -- market-based system we have now.
(To read the rest of this article - see Comments below:)
Delaying nomination of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) as Secretary of Health and Human Services
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) objected to a motion to begin debate on the nominations of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) as Secretary of Health and Human Services, David Hayes for deputy secretary of the Interior Department, and Thomas Strickland for assistant secretary for fish and wildlife at Interior. Regarding Sebelius, McConnell said he objected because members of his caucus had not yet had time to consider her candidacy properly. However, the real reason is that a select few in the Republican caucus are attempting to delay her appointment -- at the insistence of right-wing social conservative groups -- because of her commitment to pro-choice women's health policies. The delay is reminiscent of what transpired after Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill's nomination, when a small group of Republican senators -- including John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), and Sam Brownback (KS) -- announced their opposition, claiming Hill "lacks experience in the Middle East." As the National Security Network's Max Bergmann pointed out, they really took issue with his desire to avoid bombing North Korea. Further, the only substantive result of delaying Hill was to hinder the Obama administration's ability to effectively and efficiently make progress in Iraq. Indeed, Gen. David Petraeus was reportedly "frustrated by the delay." A similar chain of events is likely to play out with Sebelius, Dawn Johnsen, Harold Koh, and many other key nominees. The goal in holding up Obama nominees, it should be clear by now, is not to find better qualified nominees or answer substantive concerns. Rather, it appears to be part of an attempt on the part of Republicans in Congress to "obstruct and delay" the implementation of the legislative agenda the American people voted for last November.
NEW REPORT DETAILS HOW TO CREATE A PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE OPTION AS PART OF NATION’S HEALTH REFORMS
Health Care Expert Jacob Hacker First to Detail How to Structure “Healthy Competition” Between Public Health Insurance Plan and Private Plans
WASHINGTON – With Congress preparing a sweeping overhaul to the nation’s health care system, Jacob Hacker was the first today to outline details on how the nation can structure and implement a public health insurance option as part of the overall reforms.
Hacker, who is the faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security at the UC Berkeley School of Law, joined Institute for America’s Future co-director Roger Hickey at a news conference today to release a new report called “Healthy Competition.” The report, co-sponsored by the Institute and Berkeley CHEFS, provides a comprehensive roadmap to create a public health insurance plan within the nation’s health care system.
The plan gives people without workplace coverage access to an “exchange” with private and public plan options. The public plan mirrors Medicare’s administrative infrastructure, but would be run separately from Medicare. The plan has its own risk pool and offers the same benefits and coverage terms nationwide.
At today’s news conference, Hacker said that offering a public health care plan option is the only feasible way to design a sustainable health care system and ensure everyone has access to the care they need.
(To view remainder of article see Comments below:)
Health Care Hypocrisy
Republicans are shocked (shocked!) at the idea that a tool they used when they were in control to pass huge tax cuts for the rich in 2001 and 2003 might now be used for Obama’s agenda.
Sometimes my computer’s thesaurus is useful, but today it’s downright essential. Without it, how could I describe the way Republican senators have reacted to the idea of using the budget reconciliation process to enact crucial health care reform legislation. I mean, how many times can I repeat the most accurate description—“whiners”?
Sometimes my computer’s thesaurus is useful, but today it’s downright essential. Without it, how could I describe the way Republican senators have reacted to the idea of using the budget reconciliation process to enact crucial health care reform legislation. I mean, how many times can I repeat the most accurate description—“whiners”?
Let’s review the situation. The House version of the congressional Budget Resolution includes language that would—if necessary—allow health care reform to be adopted by the Senate without requiring 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. The Senate version of the budget does not include that language. In order to enact effective health care reform in 2009, progressives must insist that the conference committee adopt the House reconciliation language.
There are 41 Senate Republicans, barely enough to kill any bill by filibuster—except for a reconciliation bill that requires only 51 votes to pass. So, naturally, they’re whining loudly about the reconciliation process.'
(To view the remainder of this article see Comments below:)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
THE GLOBAL CRISIS AND FIGHTING FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM
1. Here are a few data about the world economy. They are not very reassuring.
From RGE Monitor
IMF Boosts Global Loss Estimate To $4.1 Trillion: $2.7T in U.S.; $1.2T in EU; $150bn in Japan
April 21: IMF--> toxic debts racked up by banks and insurers around the world could spiral to $4.1 trillion by the end of 2010, up from its $2.2 trillion January estimate.
The IMF has raised losses on U.S. originated assets to $2.7 trillion. In addition, it boosted its total by $900 billion for toxic assets originated in Europe and Asia. Banks and insurers have so far owned up to $1.29 trillion in writedowns (about $800bn in U.S., $400bn in Europe, remainder in Asia). RGE calculates that U.S. banks/brokers will take a $1.8T writedown, EU banks $1.4-1.8T, and the remainder in Asia.
2. And here is an article from the New York Times about Democrats in Congress moving toward by-passing the Republican filibuster to pass health care reform. Let's get ready for a fight... and let's win it!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/us/politics/23health.html
From RGE Monitor
IMF Boosts Global Loss Estimate To $4.1 Trillion: $2.7T in U.S.; $1.2T in EU; $150bn in Japan
April 21: IMF--> toxic debts racked up by banks and insurers around the world could spiral to $4.1 trillion by the end of 2010, up from its $2.2 trillion January estimate.
The IMF has raised losses on U.S. originated assets to $2.7 trillion. In addition, it boosted its total by $900 billion for toxic assets originated in Europe and Asia. Banks and insurers have so far owned up to $1.29 trillion in writedowns (about $800bn in U.S., $400bn in Europe, remainder in Asia). RGE calculates that U.S. banks/brokers will take a $1.8T writedown, EU banks $1.4-1.8T, and the remainder in Asia.
2. And here is an article from the New York Times about Democrats in Congress moving toward by-passing the Republican filibuster to pass health care reform. Let's get ready for a fight... and let's win it!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/us/politics/23health.html
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Is there a non-violent equivalent of a guillotine?
A nice little analysis of the growing wealth inequality and how it isn't even being accounted for properly because the super-rich aren't being truthful about how much they have. Article can be found here:
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/137540/solving_the_mystery_of_the_richest_americans%27_missing_wealth/?page=2
I am renewing my call for a "Jubilee Year", where there would be a massive redistribution from top to bottom of all the wealth accumulated under the lax tax policies of the last thirty years. The Hiltons, Waltons, et al could fork it over or go into exile. Beats having their height reduced French-style.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/137540/solving_the_mystery_of_the_richest_americans%27_missing_wealth/?page=2
I am renewing my call for a "Jubilee Year", where there would be a massive redistribution from top to bottom of all the wealth accumulated under the lax tax policies of the last thirty years. The Hiltons, Waltons, et al could fork it over or go into exile. Beats having their height reduced French-style.
Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama
WASHINGTON — The task of keeping a president in touch with his public is daunting, as Mike Kelleher well knows.
(To view the remainder of this article - see Comments below:)
Tens of thousands of letters, e-mail messages and faxes arrive at the White House every day. A few hundred are culled and end up each weekday afternoon on a round wooden table in the office of Mr. Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence.
He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence. Designed to offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking, the letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand, in black ink on azure paper.
“We pick messages that are compelling, things people say that, when you read it, you get a chill,” said Mr. Kelleher, 47. “I send him letters that are uncomfortable messages.”(To view the remainder of this article - see Comments below:)
CAUTIOUS OBAMA?
Today's news. The picture that has been emerging in the last few weeks is of an increasingly cautious Obama. Do we have to start worrying?
1. The Washington Post on rumors about Obama's willingness to jettison the public plan option in health care reform.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042003702.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
2. The Associated Press and the New York Times on the toxic assets rescue plan and its being too favorable to banks and financial institutions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_meltdown_bailout
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/04/21/us/politics/politics-us-financial-bailout-report.html
3. The NYT on the CIA torture practices, and increasing discontent with Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21intel.html?_r=1&hp
4. And not so good news from Spain: deflationary signs in the Spanish economy. Is deflation going to spread?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/business/global/21deflate.html?ref=business
1. The Washington Post on rumors about Obama's willingness to jettison the public plan option in health care reform.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042003702.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
2. The Associated Press and the New York Times on the toxic assets rescue plan and its being too favorable to banks and financial institutions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_meltdown_bailout
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/04/21/us/politics/politics-us-financial-bailout-report.html
3. The NYT on the CIA torture practices, and increasing discontent with Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21intel.html?_r=1&hp
4. And not so good news from Spain: deflationary signs in the Spanish economy. Is deflation going to spread?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/business/global/21deflate.html?ref=business
Monday, April 20, 2009
Progressive Caucus to Insist on Public Health Insurance Option
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 2, 2009
Contacts: Bill Goold (202-226-4055)
Gloria Montano (202-225-2435)
Chris Shields (202-225-5161)
Washington, D.C. - U.S. Representatives Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Co-Chairs of the 77-Member Congressional Progressive Caucus, have delivered a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, on behalf of CPC Members, advising them that progressives want all Americans to have a choice of securing health insurance coverage under a public plan or through private insurance carriers as part of any comprehensive health care reform legislation. (See accompanying copy of official CPC letter.).
“Virtually the entire 77-Member Congressional Progressive Caucus prefers a single-payer approach to health care reform,” Grijalva and Woolsey emphasized, “so it should come as no surprise to our congressional leaders that we believe very strongly in the inclusion of a public plan option, at a minimum, in the final legislation if they want to count on progressive support. We have polled CPC Members very carefully in recent weeks and a strong majority will only support comprehensive health care reform legislation which includes a public plan option on a level playing field with private health insurance plans.”
###
April 2, 2009
Contacts: Bill Goold (202-226-4055)
Gloria Montano (202-225-2435)
Chris Shields (202-225-5161)
PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS TO INSIST ON PUBLIC PLAN OPTION AS PART OF COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL
Washington, D.C. - U.S. Representatives Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Co-Chairs of the 77-Member Congressional Progressive Caucus, have delivered a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, on behalf of CPC Members, advising them that progressives want all Americans to have a choice of securing health insurance coverage under a public plan or through private insurance carriers as part of any comprehensive health care reform legislation. (See accompanying copy of official CPC letter.).
“Virtually the entire 77-Member Congressional Progressive Caucus prefers a single-payer approach to health care reform,” Grijalva and Woolsey emphasized, “so it should come as no surprise to our congressional leaders that we believe very strongly in the inclusion of a public plan option, at a minimum, in the final legislation if they want to count on progressive support. We have polled CPC Members very carefully in recent weeks and a strong majority will only support comprehensive health care reform legislation which includes a public plan option on a level playing field with private health insurance plans.”
###
Adversaries team up but leave out the public health insurance option
Two of the nation’s most influential health care adversaries are uniting to promote key portions of health care reform but leave unaddressed the debate’s most controversial element: the creation of a public insurance plan.
The consumer group Families USA and the trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America are launching a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to push the package of reforms, which includes expanding Medicaid. The partnership could significantly reshape the debate over health care reform.
Complete article.
The consumer group Families USA and the trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America are launching a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to push the package of reforms, which includes expanding Medicaid. The partnership could significantly reshape the debate over health care reform.
Complete article.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Obama dismayed by Iran sentence
The US has expressed dismay after a court in Iran jailed an Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi, for eight years on spying charges.
Ms Saberi, 31, was sentenced after a secret one-day trial in Tehran.
President Barack Obama "is deeply disappointed at this news," his spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Correspondents say the case will have serious implications for US-Iranian relations at a time when Mr Obama has reached out to the Tehran.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier expressed her disappointment at the sentence.
She said the US would vigorously raise its concerns about the case with Tehran.
Washington, which has no diplomatic ties with Iran, was working with Swiss diplomats in Tehran to obtain details about the court's decision and ensure Ms Saberi's well-being, she said.
Diplomatic setback
The verdict came despite calls by the Obama administration for Ms Saberi's release and diplomatic overtures to Iran after three decades of severed ties.
To view the rest of the article click on the following link:
Obama needs a new car czar
Why did the Obama administration name investment banker Steven Rattner as the head of auto task force knowing that New York prosecutors were investigating whether he had a role in a kickback scheme at New York state’s pension fund?
To be sure, Rattner, co-founder of the Quadrangle Group, and the firm have not been charged with a crime. The pay-to-play scam was allegedly done through intermediaries. Nonetheless, the investment banker took some actions that, as the Wall Street Journal notes, raise some troubling questions. “A Securities and Exchange Commission complaint says a `senior executive’ of Mr. Rattner’s investment firm met in 2004 with a politically connected consultant about a finder’s fee,” the paper said. “Later, the complaint says, the firm received an investment from the state pension fund and paid $1.1 million in fees. The `senior executive,’ not named in the complaint, is Mr. Rattner, according to the person familiar with the matter.” An SEC complaint alleges that a meeting was arranged between the “senior Quadrangle executive” and a brother of New York’s then -deputy comptroller to discuss acquiring the DVD distribution rights to “Chooch”, a film he produced with his brothers. Three weeks later, Quadrangle acquired the rights to the flick, and in a startling coincidence, the deputy comptroller told the senior Quadrangle executive that Quadrangle would get a $100 million investment from the pension fund, the Journal quotes the complaint as saying. I guess they call it “pay-to-play” for a reason.
The fact that the Obama administration knew about the investigation but chose to ignore it anyway is pretty disturbing. Rattner was given an important job to save the auto industry at a critical time for the economy. The last thing the American people need is a distraction like this one. For the good of everybody, Rattner should give up his fledgling career in government service. He certainly does not need the money.
To be sure, Rattner, co-founder of the Quadrangle Group, and the firm have not been charged with a crime. The pay-to-play scam was allegedly done through intermediaries. Nonetheless, the investment banker took some actions that, as the Wall Street Journal notes, raise some troubling questions. “A Securities and Exchange Commission complaint says a `senior executive’ of Mr. Rattner’s investment firm met in 2004 with a politically connected consultant about a finder’s fee,” the paper said. “Later, the complaint says, the firm received an investment from the state pension fund and paid $1.1 million in fees. The `senior executive,’ not named in the complaint, is Mr. Rattner, according to the person familiar with the matter.” An SEC complaint alleges that a meeting was arranged between the “senior Quadrangle executive” and a brother of New York’s then -deputy comptroller to discuss acquiring the DVD distribution rights to “Chooch”, a film he produced with his brothers. Three weeks later, Quadrangle acquired the rights to the flick, and in a startling coincidence, the deputy comptroller told the senior Quadrangle executive that Quadrangle would get a $100 million investment from the pension fund, the Journal quotes the complaint as saying. I guess they call it “pay-to-play” for a reason.
The fact that the Obama administration knew about the investigation but chose to ignore it anyway is pretty disturbing. Rattner was given an important job to save the auto industry at a critical time for the economy. The last thing the American people need is a distraction like this one. For the good of everybody, Rattner should give up his fledgling career in government service. He certainly does not need the money.
Obama To Ask Agency Heads For Budget Cuts
WASHINGTON — Families are making tough decisions about their money and so too will their government, President Barack Obama said Saturday, promising that spending cuts are coming _ and soon.
At a Cabinet meeting Monday, the president will ask department and agency heads for specific proposals for trimming their budgets.
"If we're going to rebuild our economy on a solid foundation, we need to change the way we do business in Washington. We need to restore the American people's confidence in their government _ that it is on their side, spending their money wisely, to meet their families' needs," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address, released while he attended the Summit of the Americans in Trinidad.
To help achieve his goal of an efficient government, Obama announced the appointment of Jeffrey Zients, a founder and managing partner of the investment firm Portfolio Logic, as chief performance officer. Zients, who also will serve as deputy director for management of the Office of Management and Budget, will work to streamline processes and cut costs.
On that front, Obama gave notice he wants to act quickly.
"In the coming weeks, I will be announcing the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective," he said. "In this effort, there will be no sacred cows and no pet projects. All across America, families are making hard choices, and it's time their government did the same."
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is ending consulting contracts to create new seals and logos that, Obama said, have cost the department $3 million since 2003. Obama also cited Defense Secretary Robert Gates' plan to overhaul contracting procedures and eliminate billions in wasteful spending and cost overruns.
The president praised Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., who are leading the effort in Congress.
Republicans have kept up a steady stream of criticism of Obama's spending, both of his $787 billion stimulus plan and his $3.6 trillion budget proposal.
"Earlier this week, President Obama said that we need to get serious about fiscal discipline by trimming waste in the federal budget," Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in the GOP address. "Republicans couldn't agree more. We want to work with the president to get our financial house back in order."
"It's irresponsible to borrow more than all previous American presidents combined. And it must stop if we want to get our economy moving again," McCarthy said. "When will all this spending and borrowing end?"
Republicans say that budget cuts are a worthwhile effort, but emphasize the size of the Democratic spending bills.
McCarthy singled out "the trillion-dollar 'stimulus' bill the $410 billion dollar 'omnibus' spending bill and the massive, fiscally irresponsible Democratic budget that doubles the debt in just over five years, and triples the debt in just over ten years."
Obama said he's determined to try to cut costs.
"That is why I have assembled a team of management, technology and budget experts to guide us in this work," he said, "leaders who will help us revamp government operations from top to bottom and ensure that the federal government is truly working for the American people."
Along with Zients at chief performance officer, Obama named Aneesh Chopra, currently the technology secretary for Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia, as the country's chief technology officer.
On Feb. 3, Nancy Killefer withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government, saying she didn't want her mishandling of payroll taxes on her household help to become a distraction for the administration. Killefer was one of several Obama choices for top positions who have dealt with tax problemsGM would require quick bankruptcy: judge
VILLANOVA, Penn. (Reuters) - A bankrupt General Motors Corp (GM.N) could be reorganized in as little as a month, a top bankruptcy attorney said on Thursday, and if the case lingered then a "tremendous sinkhole" could open in the U.S. economy, a Delaware bankruptcy judge said.
GM would have to reach agreement with most parties prior to filing and then move its healthy operations quickly to a new entity that is free of pre-bankruptcy liabilities, said Mark D. Collins, director of Richards, Layton & Finger in Wilmington, Delaware.
"The key is speed," he said, speaking at a panel discussion hosted by the ABF Journal and the New York Institute of Credit. Broad consensus prior to a filing would allow GM to use the courts to force holdouts to any deal.
"The last one not on board with a deal will get run over," he said.
The judge who handles the case, should GM file, would be under pressure to accelerate the proceedings, said Kevin Gross, a judge for Delaware's bankruptcy court.
"It has to be out in 30 to 60 days," he said. "It would open a tremendous sinkhole (in the economy) not to make it happen."
(Remainder of article can be found in comments below:)
Obama's Top Economic Adviser Is Greedy and Highly Compromised
Among the payoffs Larry Summers received: $45K from Merrill Lynch days before he joined Obama's team. And it gets worse.
"But Summers, a leading architect of the administration's economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form." -- Washingtonpost.com
To view the rest of this extensive article click on the following link:
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/136008/obama%27s_top_economic_adviser_is_greedy_and_highly_compromised/
"But Summers, a leading architect of the administration's economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form." -- Washingtonpost.com
To view the rest of this extensive article click on the following link:
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/136008/obama%27s_top_economic_adviser_is_greedy_and_highly_compromised/
Panetta's Defense of CIA Interrogators Undercut by New DoJ Disclosures
CIA Director Leon Panetta has consistently stated over the past several months that agency interrogators who participated in the Bush administration's sadistic torture practices should not be subject to "any investigation, let alone prosecution," because they were following legal advice provided by the Justice Department.
In March, Panetta said he agreed to cooperate with a Senate Intelligence Committee "review" and "study" on CIA interrogation methods on the condition that he received assurances from committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Republican Co-Chair Kit Bond (R-Missouri) that they would not attempt to "punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice."
(To view the restof the article go to:
http://www.truthout.org/041409R )
Thursday, April 16, 2009
WALL STREET'S UPS AND DOWNS, THE BANKS' STRESS TEST AND TEA PARTIES
Despite the recent rally on Wall Street, and Obama's and Bernanke's attempts to cheer us up >
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a595960c-29e6-11de-9e56-00144feabdc0.html
news from the "real economy" are not very encouraging. Foreclosures are revving up again dramatically:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aRDQUt6RM.FE&refer=home
The administration is caught between Scylla and Charybdis when it comes to the results of the banks' stress test. If they don' tell us which banks are at risk, we'll continue to lose faith in the financial system as a whole. If they tell us which are and that there are some big ones among them, is that going to signal that their policy is not working?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0f79e86-2aa7-11de-8415-00144feabdc0.html
In the meantime, latter day's Boston tea-party emulators protested against increased government spending.
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/04/16/tea-party-protests-could-they-rally-change-in-government/
We need to keep on working to pass the Obama's agenda, health care especially, before the radical fringes on the right push everyone else on the defensive.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a595960c-29e6-11de-9e56-00144feabdc0.html
news from the "real economy" are not very encouraging. Foreclosures are revving up again dramatically:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aRDQUt6RM.FE&refer=home
The administration is caught between Scylla and Charybdis when it comes to the results of the banks' stress test. If they don' tell us which banks are at risk, we'll continue to lose faith in the financial system as a whole. If they tell us which are and that there are some big ones among them, is that going to signal that their policy is not working?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0f79e86-2aa7-11de-8415-00144feabdc0.html
In the meantime, latter day's Boston tea-party emulators protested against increased government spending.
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/04/16/tea-party-protests-could-they-rally-change-in-government/
We need to keep on working to pass the Obama's agenda, health care especially, before the radical fringes on the right push everyone else on the defensive.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Rich: Awake and Sing!
April 12, 2009
By FRANK RICH
“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree.
Given Cramer’s track record on those tips, there’s no reason to believe he’s right this time. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he is. (And let’s hope he is.) The question then arises: What, if anything, have we learned from this decade’s man-made economic disaster? It wasn’t just trillions of dollars of wealth that went poof in the bubble. Certain American values also crumbled and vanished. Making quick killings by reckless gambling in the markets — rather than by investing long-term in new products, innovations, technologies or services that might grow and benefit America and the world — became the holy grail in the upper echelons of finance.
This was not an exact replay of the preceding dot-com bubble. As a veteran of the tech gold rush recently observed to me, in Silicon Valley “the money comes later” and “the thing you make comes first, however whimsical, silly, microscopic, recondite it may be.” On Wall Street over the past decade, the money usually came first, last and in between. There was no “thing” being made at all unless you count the slicing and dicing of debt into financial “products,” the incomprehensible derivatives that helped bring down the economy, costing some five million Americans their jobs (so far) and countless more their 401(k)’s.
On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble’s culture permeated this administration.
We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies.
In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors. The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries. The figures were similar everywhere, from Duke to the University of Pennsylvania. Dan Rather, on his HDNet television program in December, reported that at Penn this was even true of “over half the students who graduated with engineering degrees — not a field commonly associated with Wall Street.”
Clearly the last person to serve as an inspiring role model for alternative values would have been Summers. But in her first baccalaureate address last June, his successor as Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stepped into that moral vacuum, zeroing in on the huge number of students heading into finance, consulting and investment banking. “Find work you love,” she implored the class of 2008. The “most remunerative” job choice “may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying.”
This same note was hit a month earlier by the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama. “The big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy,” he said, amount to “a poverty of ambition.” He wasn’t speaking idly. As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.
But it’s hardly a given that the entrenched money culture has evaporated along with the paper profits it generated. One skeptic is Howard Gardner, the Harvard education professor who has created seminars at several elite colleges to counsel students in the notion of pursuing meaningful, ethical and effective work — “Good Work,” as he has titled it. He believes that many students may still be operating on the assumption that the world of finance will just pick up where it left off in a few years. “But we’re not going to be back there,” Gardner told me last week, “and we shouldn’t be back there.”
He notes that while the New Deal was built from ideas developed in the Progressive Era and that the Reagan counterrevolution was the culmination of the conservative movement of the 1950s and ’60s, there is as yet “no counternarrative to replace ‘money is king.’ ” The post-crash influx of graduates into Teach for America, while laudable, may be transitory unless there’s the political vision and leadership to make altruistic values stick after our crisis has passed. “It’s completely up in the air what’s going to happen,” Gardner said.
No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counternarrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can’t recognize that the world has changed or should change. Even at the cratered Citigroup, a technical analyst was moved to write a report last month urging his peers to stop living in “denial” and recognize that we are witnessing the end of “25 to 30 years worth of excess.” The “new normal” in lifestyle, wealth creation and profitability of companies, he wrote, “may be a shadow of the past.”
There was a poignant quality to this Citi report, which cited as its mantra the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” Its tone somehow reminded me of the stirring speech written by the American playwright Clifford Odets in his classic drama of the Great Depression, “Awake and Sing!” (1935). “Boychick, wake up!” the grandfather Jacob tells his grandson, Ralph, as the battered Berger family disintegrates in the Bronx. “Be something! Make your life something good ... Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.”
When Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard, he famously delighted students by signing his autograph on dollar bills that already bore his signature from his Treasury secretary days. How we leave that bankrupt culture behind and get to “something good” will be as much a factor in our recovery from this Depression as the fate of the unemployment rate and the Dow.
By FRANK RICH
“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree.
Given Cramer’s track record on those tips, there’s no reason to believe he’s right this time. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he is. (And let’s hope he is.) The question then arises: What, if anything, have we learned from this decade’s man-made economic disaster? It wasn’t just trillions of dollars of wealth that went poof in the bubble. Certain American values also crumbled and vanished. Making quick killings by reckless gambling in the markets — rather than by investing long-term in new products, innovations, technologies or services that might grow and benefit America and the world — became the holy grail in the upper echelons of finance.
This was not an exact replay of the preceding dot-com bubble. As a veteran of the tech gold rush recently observed to me, in Silicon Valley “the money comes later” and “the thing you make comes first, however whimsical, silly, microscopic, recondite it may be.” On Wall Street over the past decade, the money usually came first, last and in between. There was no “thing” being made at all unless you count the slicing and dicing of debt into financial “products,” the incomprehensible derivatives that helped bring down the economy, costing some five million Americans their jobs (so far) and countless more their 401(k)’s.
On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble’s culture permeated this administration.
We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies.
In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors. The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries. The figures were similar everywhere, from Duke to the University of Pennsylvania. Dan Rather, on his HDNet television program in December, reported that at Penn this was even true of “over half the students who graduated with engineering degrees — not a field commonly associated with Wall Street.”
Clearly the last person to serve as an inspiring role model for alternative values would have been Summers. But in her first baccalaureate address last June, his successor as Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stepped into that moral vacuum, zeroing in on the huge number of students heading into finance, consulting and investment banking. “Find work you love,” she implored the class of 2008. The “most remunerative” job choice “may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying.”
This same note was hit a month earlier by the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama. “The big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy,” he said, amount to “a poverty of ambition.” He wasn’t speaking idly. As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.
But it’s hardly a given that the entrenched money culture has evaporated along with the paper profits it generated. One skeptic is Howard Gardner, the Harvard education professor who has created seminars at several elite colleges to counsel students in the notion of pursuing meaningful, ethical and effective work — “Good Work,” as he has titled it. He believes that many students may still be operating on the assumption that the world of finance will just pick up where it left off in a few years. “But we’re not going to be back there,” Gardner told me last week, “and we shouldn’t be back there.”
He notes that while the New Deal was built from ideas developed in the Progressive Era and that the Reagan counterrevolution was the culmination of the conservative movement of the 1950s and ’60s, there is as yet “no counternarrative to replace ‘money is king.’ ” The post-crash influx of graduates into Teach for America, while laudable, may be transitory unless there’s the political vision and leadership to make altruistic values stick after our crisis has passed. “It’s completely up in the air what’s going to happen,” Gardner said.
No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counternarrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can’t recognize that the world has changed or should change. Even at the cratered Citigroup, a technical analyst was moved to write a report last month urging his peers to stop living in “denial” and recognize that we are witnessing the end of “25 to 30 years worth of excess.” The “new normal” in lifestyle, wealth creation and profitability of companies, he wrote, “may be a shadow of the past.”
There was a poignant quality to this Citi report, which cited as its mantra the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” Its tone somehow reminded me of the stirring speech written by the American playwright Clifford Odets in his classic drama of the Great Depression, “Awake and Sing!” (1935). “Boychick, wake up!” the grandfather Jacob tells his grandson, Ralph, as the battered Berger family disintegrates in the Bronx. “Be something! Make your life something good ... Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.”
When Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard, he famously delighted students by signing his autograph on dollar bills that already bore his signature from his Treasury secretary days. How we leave that bankrupt culture behind and get to “something good” will be as much a factor in our recovery from this Depression as the fate of the unemployment rate and the Dow.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Obama and habeas corpus -- then and now
Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com
It was once the case under the Bush administration that the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them. That due-process-denying framework was legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Many Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- claimed they were vehemently opposed to this denial of due process for detainees, and on June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees was unconstitutional and that all Guantanamo detainees have the right to a full hearing in which they can contest the accusations against them.
(To view the remainder of this unsettling article see comments below:)
It was once the case under the Bush administration that the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them. That due-process-denying framework was legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Many Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- claimed they were vehemently opposed to this denial of due process for detainees, and on June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees was unconstitutional and that all Guantanamo detainees have the right to a full hearing in which they can contest the accusations against them.
(To view the remainder of this unsettling article see comments below:)
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Obama Administration Quietly Expands Bush's Legal Defense of Warrantless Wiretapping
In a stunning defense of President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, President Barack Obama has broadened the government's legal argument for immunizing his Administration and government agencies from lawsuits surrounding the National Security Agency's eavesdropping efforts.
In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.
(To view the rest of this article go to:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/135605/obama_administration_quietly_expands_bush%27s_legal_defense_of_warrantless_wiretapping/
In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.
(To view the rest of this article go to:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/135605/obama_administration_quietly_expands_bush%27s_legal_defense_of_warrantless_wiretapping/
UPDATE: Still no Ambassador in Iraq - Republicans still blocking
THE NEED FOR AN AMBASSADOR: The United States has not had an ambassador to Iraq since Ryan Crocker retired from his post on Feb. 13. The Obama administration has nominated well-respected diplomat Chris Hill -- who negotiated the six-party talks in North Korea -- in Crocker's place, but Hill's nomination has been blocked by Senate Republicans. Initially, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) vocally opposed Hill. Now, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) has been holding up the nomination at the behest of the right wing. Secretary of State Robert Gates recently issued a rare statement on a diplomatic appointment, saying that it is "vital that we get an ambassador in Baghdad as soon as possible." Although a "highly regarded" deputy, Robert Ford, is leading the American embassy at the moment, "only an American ambassador can bring sufficient swagger to the Green Zone's local politico circuit," observed former State Department political officer John Kael Weston. As Obama ramps up diplomatic efforts in Iraq, Hill's presence will be increasingly necessary. Press reports indicate that there is a cloture vote for Hill's nomination on the Senate calendar for April 20.
U.S puts in a $285-million order for Detroit-made vehicles
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama expects to spend about $285 million by June 1, buying cars that get better gas mileage for the huge federal fleet and helping Detroit’s automakers sell vehicles at a time when any assistance is greatly needed.
He’d already promised to do so – the stimulus bill passed by Congress included $300 million for this purpose and Obama reiterated late last month that he wanted the General Services Administration to hurry up plans to start buying as way to assist struggling domestic carmakers.
(To view remainder of article see:
http://www.freep.com/article/20090409/BUSINESS01/90409089/1285/NEWS15/U.S+puts+in+a+$285-million+order+for+Detroit-made+vehicles
He’d already promised to do so – the stimulus bill passed by Congress included $300 million for this purpose and Obama reiterated late last month that he wanted the General Services Administration to hurry up plans to start buying as way to assist struggling domestic carmakers.
Today, his White House put the details in writing, saying the GSA plans to buy about 17,600 new vehicles under existing contracts with General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, swapping out older vehicles that get fewer miles per gallon for more fuel efficient automobiles.
(To view remainder of article see:
http://www.freep.com/article/20090409/BUSINESS01/90409089/1285/NEWS15/U.S+puts+in+a+$285-million+order+for+Detroit-made+vehicles
Noted researcher tapped for No. 2 drug czar
PHILADELPHIA — In another clear break from past policy, President Obama announced Friday that he intended to nominate as the nation’s No. 2 drug czar a scientist often considered the No. 1 researcher on addiction and treatment.
A. Thomas McLellan, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, will be charged with reducing demand for drugs, a part of the foreign-supply-and-domestic-demand equation that many policy experts say has been underemphasized for years.
A. Thomas McLellan, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, will be charged with reducing demand for drugs, a part of the foreign-supply-and-domestic-demand equation that many policy experts say has been underemphasized for years.
“We’re blown away. He understands” that addiction “is a parent, a family, a child issue,” said Stephen J. Pasierb, president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
If confirmed by the Senate, McLellan will be deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which advises the president and coordinates anti-drug efforts. Obama last month nominated Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to head the office.
Kerlikowske’s reputation for innovative approaches to law enforcement and McLellan’s stature as a treatment scientist make them “a perfect match,” Pasierb said.
Although hardly known outside his field, McLellan is regarded as a leading researcher on a range of addiction-related issues.
As a scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Philadelphia in the 1980s, he led development of two measures, known as the addiction severity index and treatment services review, that characterized multiple dimensions of substance abuse. The tools, used worldwide, help determine the type and duration of treatment.
In 2000, he was lead author of a groundbreaking paper that compared drug addiction with chronic medical conditions.
Obama urges cooperation on threats
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama invoked Christian and Jewish holidays today to urge nations to confront together the challenges he saw firsthand during last week’s marathon trip to Europe.
Obama said no single nation can solve the problems stemming from the financial meltdown, climate change and nuclear weapons. Fresh from his first trip overseas as president, Obama asked Americans — and a global audience — to focus on areas of common interest instead of differences.
Obama said no single nation can solve the problems stemming from the financial meltdown, climate change and nuclear weapons. Fresh from his first trip overseas as president, Obama asked Americans — and a global audience — to focus on areas of common interest instead of differences.
“These are challenges that no single nation, no matter how powerful, can confront alone,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. “The United States must lead the way. But our best chance to solve these unprecedented problems comes from acting in concert with other nations.”
Obama pointed to his London meeting with leaders of the G20 nations — a gathering that represented 85% of the global economy — where he pressed for increased regulation and economic stimulus. He also noted his attendance at the NATO summit in France to discuss strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as his speeches against nuclear weapons in the Czech Republic and about faith divisions in Turkey.
(See remainder of article in Comments below:)
Obama sees signs of economic progess
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Friday the recession-hit U.S. economy was showing "glimmers of hope" despite remaining under strain and promised further steps in coming weeks to tackle the financial crisis.
"We've still got a lot of work to do," Obama told reporters after a meeting with economic and regulatory teams plus Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke. But he added, "We're starting to see progress."
Obama spoke a day after encouraging trade and jobless figures pushed stocks higher, and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers predicted the economy would emerge from a sense of "freefall" by the middle of the year.
Less than three months into his presidency, Obama stopped short of declaring that the recession he inherited from predecessor George W. Bush was bottoming out.
(To view remainder of article see:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUKWBT01103020090411Obama still has hundreds of important jobs to fill.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama doesn't have time for a victory lap now that his Cabinet is finally largely in place.
One level down, he faces gaping holes in the ranks he needs to fill if there is to be any hope of turning his ambitious agenda into action on health care, the environment and much more.
After a spurt of recent activity that followed a problem-plagued start, Obama is outpacing George W. Bush and Bill Clinton on appointments. But Obama, like his two immediate predecessors, is bogged down in a system that has grown increasingly cumbersome over the years. And he's added tougher-than-ever background checks and ethics rules.
"Obama will be faster than Clinton and Bush when all is said and done, but it's still a slow process," said New York University professor Paul Light, an expert on the federal government. "A turtle is a turtle is a turtle. The Obama administration is a pretty fast turtle, but it's no hare.(To view the remainder of the article see:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090411/obama-empty-seats/
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Isn't It Ironic: Communists going back to socialized medicine!
After trashing their successful system of universal benefits during the "reforms" of the 1980s, China is now trying to re-establish a system of public hospitals and clinics at a cost of billions in the hope that better-off farmers will spend more instead of saving for medical emergencies. Full story is here
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6056121.ece
This development underscores the undemocratic nature of China's politics when it is compared to all the other nations that adopted government-funded health care. As the rest of them are democracies to greater or lesser extents, it is political suicide in Britain, New Zealand, France, et al, to propose taking away that public benefit. If Deng Xiaoping had had to answer to voters during the 1980s, he could never have gotten away with dismantling the social safety net.
So on the continuum between China and the most people-reponsive developed nation (Sweden? The Netherlands?) where does the U.S. fit in? From Reagan to the present (including Clinton) we have been saddled with "reforms" that have undermined the economic security and well-being of the majority, and the electoral system has been little help. Our current Prez has proposed a publicly-funded option that would serve as an opening salvo in the campaign to drive private insurance out of the system. Let's hope he uses his political capital and the bully pulpit to make it happen.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6056121.ece
This development underscores the undemocratic nature of China's politics when it is compared to all the other nations that adopted government-funded health care. As the rest of them are democracies to greater or lesser extents, it is political suicide in Britain, New Zealand, France, et al, to propose taking away that public benefit. If Deng Xiaoping had had to answer to voters during the 1980s, he could never have gotten away with dismantling the social safety net.
So on the continuum between China and the most people-reponsive developed nation (Sweden? The Netherlands?) where does the U.S. fit in? From Reagan to the present (including Clinton) we have been saddled with "reforms" that have undermined the economic security and well-being of the majority, and the electoral system has been little help. Our current Prez has proposed a publicly-funded option that would serve as an opening salvo in the campaign to drive private insurance out of the system. Let's hope he uses his political capital and the bully pulpit to make it happen.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Who prefers the public health insurance option?
The public health insurance plan being discussed as part of national health reform would work more like Medicare, in which the government runs the insurance coverage, but the doctors, hospitals and other health care providers people go to are the same private, independent providers that currently care for them.
In fact, people with Medicare currently have the choice of public health insurance or private plans that contract with Medicare. About eighty percent of the 44.8 million older and disabled Americans who have Medicare coverage—about 35.4 million people—choose the government-run public plan over the private Medicare plans.
It is the choice 73 percent of voters want, including Democrats (77 percent), Independents (79 percent), and Republicans (63 percent). They want this choice because:
- 61 percent think a public health insurance plan will be better able to control health care costs by using its purchasing power to drive competition. Only 25 percent believe a public health insurance plan will shift higher costs onto the privately insured.
- 61 percent agree that millions of people are already losing their coverage every year, and a choice of private or public health insurance plans will make sure that Americans always have quality, affordable care. Only 27 percent believe the claim that a public health insurance plan will cause millions of people to be dumped from their private coverage.
- 66 percent agree that a public health insurance plan will provide a choice with a standard, comprehensive package of benefits and a wide choice of doctors. Only 26 percent believe a public health insurance plan will force people into lower quality care including rationing and long waits.
It's time we all had the choice of public health insurance!
Here's the full article.Monday, April 6, 2009
Universal Health Care Action Network
Folks:
Here is a link to the Universal Health Care Action Network. Their focus is Connections, Support and Resources on the local and national front.
http://www.uhcan.org
Here is a link to the Universal Health Care Action Network. Their focus is Connections, Support and Resources on the local and national front.
http://www.uhcan.org
| Mission, Goals & Principles |
UHCAN supports the
- Health care coverage should be universal.
- Health care coverage should be continuous.
- Health care coverage should be affordable to individuals and families.
- The health insurance strategy should be affordable and sustainable for society.
- Health insurance should enhance health and well-being by promoting access to high-quality care that is effective, efficient, safe, timely, patient-centered, and equitable
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Even Rick Wagoner’s Firing Got Lousy Mileage
EVEN among pitchfork-bearing populists, there was scant satisfaction when the White House sent the C.E.O. of General Motors to the guillotine.
Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution from devolving into a government charity case. He embraced the Hummer. G.M.’s share price fell from above $70 to under $3 on his watch. Yet few disputed the judgment of the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, that Wagoner was a “sacrificial lamb,” a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.
On this point even the left and the right could agree. The union leader Andy Stern publicly wondered why the administration didn’t also dethrone Ken Lewis of Bank of America. Thaddeus McCotter, a conservative Republican congressman from suburban Detroit, asked, “When will the Wall Street C.E.O.’s receiving TARP funds summon the honor to resign? Will this White House ever bother to raise the issue?”
When reporters did raise the issue of a double standard to the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, they got double talk: “I don’t have anything specific on Bank of America.”
But even as that unanswered question hangs in the air, a more revealing inquiry might be this: Why is there any sympathy whatsoever for a Detroit C.E.O. who helped wreck his company, ruined investors and cost thousands of hard-working underlings their jobs, when there is no mercy for those who did the same on Wall Street? Might we, too, have a double standard? Could we still be in denial of the reality that greed and irresponsibility were not an exclusive Wall Street franchise during our national bender?
Perhaps we’re tempted to give Detroit a pass because it still summons nostalgic memories of “American Graffiti,” “Little Deuce Coupe” and certain things we used to do in the back seat of a Chevy. Wall Street and bankers are the un-aphrodisiac: “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Old Man Potter of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and, of course, Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.”
Though Gekko’s most famous line is “Greed is good,” even more emblematic is his defiant summation of his brand of capitalism: “I create nothing. I own.” At least Wagoner, unlike the sultans of finance, created cars, clunkers though they often were. The politically conservative Nashville star John Rich draws this moral distinction in his powerful new hit single “Shuttin’ Detroit Down.” Motor City is “the real world,” he sings, unlike those big shots “living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town.”
But this romantic view of the auto industry is a sentimental illusion. Some of Wall Street’s exact failings also capsized G.M.: the hard sell of alluring but junky products, crony capitalism, reckless gambling, unregulated accounting sleights of hand. Only if we accept the full extent to which the bubble virus spread beyond that New York City town can we grasp the radical treatment President Obama must administer to restore the nation to health.
The parallels between G.M. and the likes of Citigroup are uncanny. Much as bloated financial institutions gorged on mortgage-backed derivatives even when the underlying fundamentals made no rational sense, so G.M. doubled down on sure-to-be obsolete S.U.V.’s and trucks to serve a market transitorily enthralled by them. Much as the housing boom’s collapse left the get-rich-quick holders of AAA-rated mortgage derivatives with worthless paper, so the oil price spike left consumers trapped with self-indulgent, wealth-depleting gas guzzlers. In both instances, the customers were not entirely innocent.
As the banks peddled their risky financial products in countries like Iceland when the American market was saturated, so Wagoner looked to South America and Russia to gobble up the deficient vehicles Americans increasingly rejected. G.M. further emulated Wall Street by creatively finessing its balance sheets, moving its health care liabilities for retirees off its books (into a trust) to cosmetically enhance its appearance of fiscal health. It’s no surprise that members of G.M.’s often-compliant board — also now slated for overhaul by the White House — served as well on boards at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and SunTrust Banks (another recipient of a multibillion-dollar government bailout).
Perhaps the most illuminating Detroit/Wall Street parallel of all is GMAC, the G.M. financial affiliate whose phantom profits were used to help hedge the parent company’s losses when its share of the car market plummeted. GMAC was yet another outfit that placed risky bets on the housing bubble until it burst, taking G.M.’s bottom line down with it.
As if to confirm that much of our so-called legitimate financial world has been six degrees of separation from Bernie Madoff, GMAC’s chairman was none other than J. Ezra Merkin. In addition to presiding over losses of nearly $8 billion at GMAC, Merkin had a separate investment management business that threw away another $2 billion by feeding other people’s money (including the endowments at N.Y.U. and Yeshiva University) into Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Nice as it might be to believe that Wagoner was done in only by his unreconstructed retro faith in antiquated cars and his lethargic management of the various G.M. restructurings, he was part of this larger financial culture. And like bailed-out Wall Street executives, he walked away with a sizable reward for his failure: $23 million. It may not match the takes accrued by non-Detroit tycoons who pocketed profits from the illusory bubble before shareholders and employees were wiped out — Charles Prince and Robert Rubin of Citi, Joseph Cassano of A.I.G., Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch — but only by that measure is he less culpable than they are.
Those on Wall Street who took the money and ran are beyond the reach of the guillotine. Most of their successors are too new to their jobs to merit beheading; executives like Edward Liddy of A.I.G. and Vikram Pandit of Citi, whatever their previous performance, have been in their current positions only since disaster struck. (This does not apply to Lewis of Bank of America, whose eight-year tenure nearly matches Wagoner’s nine years at the top of G.M.)
But facts matter little when set against the public anger at corporate America in general and banks in particular. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 80 percent of the country blames banks for the financial crisis — a percentage even larger than that blaming George W. Bush (70 percent). To be less popular than our departed president is a Herculean feat heretofore achieved only by Dick Cheney.
The cheering news in this poll is that Barack Obama remains hugely popular, with a 66 percent approval rating that has surely gone up since, boosted last week by his and Michelle Obama’s beguiling representation of America abroad. It doesn’t hurt that the president’s political opponents back home are laughable. Last month Republicans in Congress offered a budget plan with no numbers. Then they belatedly fleshed it out by calling for a nonsensical spending freeze at a time when desperate Americans need every last federal safety net they can grab.
The only group more out of touch remains bailed-out Wall Streeters. “The era of this high living, this is over now,” said Ben Bernanke on “60 Minutes” last month. For whom? Witness the former A.I.G. executive who recently complained on the Times Op-Ed page about being unfairly tarred for corporate outrages he didn’t commit. He didn’t seem to understand that his (to his mind) unfairly maligned bonus — $742,006.40 (net) — would have amounted to $0 had American taxpayers not ponied up more than $170 billion to keep A.I.G. from dying.
Such tone-deaf antics by entitled Wall Streeters will keep coming. As we hope Obama learned from his narrow escape from the A.I.G. bonus firestorm, it’s imperative he stays clear of these conflagrations. Timothy Geithner’s latest bank-rescue plan has not remotely addressed fears that the fix is in for the same well-connected banking crowd that created the mess. The plan’s transparency — let alone its effectiveness — will be essential to deflecting those suspicions.
But in the unsatisfying aftermath of Rick Wagoner’s demise, we must rid ourselves of the illusion that there’s a rigid separation between Wall Street and what John Rich calls “the real world.” Any citizen or business that overspent or overborrowed in the bubble subscribed to its reckless culture. That culture has crumbled everywhere now, and a new economic order will have to rise from its ruins.
This is what Obama is talking about when he insists on pushing for change simultaneously on so many fronts — green jobs, health care, education, new financial regulation, infrastructure spending and all the rest. As has been true since he promised “a new foundation for growth” at his inauguration, the most important question is not whether he will try to do too much at once but whether he will and can do enough. Change is hard. Change is traumatic. Sending a juicy C.E.O. — or six — to the gallows is at most a crowd-pleasing opening act to the heavy lifting of reform and rebuilding we still await.
9 Reasons Obama's Fiscal Plan Fails Both Markets and Taxpayers
By Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate
http://www.alternet.org/story/133450/
Let's be clear: President Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall and could not possibly have turned things around in the short time since his election. Unfortunately, what he is doing is not enough.
The real failings in the Obama recovery program lie not in the stimulus package -- though it is too heavily weighted toward tax cuts, and much of it merely offsets cutbacks by states -- but in its efforts to revive financial markets. America's failures provide important lessons to countries around the world that are or will be facing increasing problems with their banks:
1. Delaying bank restructuring is costly, in terms of both the eventual bailout costs and the damage to the overall economy in the interim.
(The rest of the article is in the first comment.)Saturday, April 4, 2009
Friday Recap I: More Bad Financial News
So as expected, the job loss figures for March are even worse than they were for February; approximately 663,000 jobs were lost. As bad as this figure is, it's still significantly lower than the drop in PAYROLL counted by ADP during the month, so clearly there are some adjustments in the official No sign yet that the losses have bottomed out, therefore, and hence the declaration by Robert Reich: "It's a depression." Now, Reich did not supply the official definition for a depression, but here in Michigan it seems pretty darn close. The safety net we still have in place may not be good enough.
I have felt quite frustrated lately by the extent of cooperation and backing offered to the financial sector, so perhaps I am getting more out of this than I ought. At a recent banking summit (all business, no photo ops), Obama apparently declared to the CEOs that his administration was the only thing between them and the pitchforks. Although I don't have direct exposure to the loss of value most people are experiencing, I definitely don't support the continuing transfer of wealth to these reprehensible characters. How about you?
I have felt quite frustrated lately by the extent of cooperation and backing offered to the financial sector, so perhaps I am getting more out of this than I ought. At a recent banking summit (all business, no photo ops), Obama apparently declared to the CEOs that his administration was the only thing between them and the pitchforks. Although I don't have direct exposure to the loss of value most people are experiencing, I definitely don't support the continuing transfer of wealth to these reprehensible characters. How about you?
Guest Post:- Baseline Scenario: Obama’s Plan for the Auto Industry
My Yale Law School colleague Ilya Podolyako comments on the Obama administration’s plan for the auto industry and the tension between public goals - preserving jobs, increasing fuel efficiency, etc. - and private goals - profitability.
By now, the dust seems to have settled around Obama’s rescue plan for two-thirds of the long-ago “Big 3” (in 2007, Chrysler ranked 12th in the world in total auto sales; GM has ranked 2nd; Ford, which is not receiving government assistance, was 4th). The policy itself seems prudent enough. The President’s Task Force on the Auto Industry recognized that due to its small scale, reliance on light trucks, and objectively low product quality, Chrysler is not viable as a stand-alone company. On the other hand, General Motors has large economies of scale and makes certain well-received products (the report mentions the Chevy Malibu and Cadillac CTS by name, though one could add the Cavalier, Corvette, and Escalade to those lists), but faces exorbitant legacy costs for its nearly one million retirees and low margins on its fuel-efficient vehicles. Given this fact pattern, the plan does as good of a job as anyone could in offering a helping hand to iconic American manufacturers while preserving some incentives for efficient private-sector operation.
My problem with the restructuring proposal comes not from any one of its details, nor even its general spirit. At this point, I feel fairly neutral about heavy-handed government involvement in US industrial policy. Admittedly, I am from Michigan and really like cars (despite consistent problems, I keep driving Fords, though I am not sure why), so I have some emotional connection to the industry to balance against the gross, obvious inefficiency of pouring money into enterprises that, by their own admission, will at best break even by 2014. I also do believe that a GM bankruptcy would lead to the net loss of a significant number of jobs that would permanently cripple Michigan’s already desperate economy.
I am concerned, however, with the absence of any apparent long-term vision for the “American” automobile industry within Obama’s proposal. A New York Times story provides a nice contrast to our own state of affairs when it explains that “Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.”
Mechanically, the Chinese policy does not seem to be that different than that of the United States. If anything, it is facially less intrusive into the affairs of the automakers, though the fact that the government continues to own a controlling stake in most such entities makes this difference illusory. The national government will provide research funds for the development of alternative-fuel vehicles, coupled with direct subsidies for consumer purchases of such products. The PRC’s policy motivations look similar to those present on our shores too: cut down on pollution, preserve national stability in the face of shrinking foreign oil supplies, and foster industrial excellence.
(To View remainder of this article see:
http://baselinescenario.com/2009/04/04/guest-post-obamas-plan-for-the-auto-industry/In Louisiana, a Test Case in Using Huge Federal Aid
NEW ORLEANS — Years before Washington spent $787 billion on a national stimulus bill, it staged an unintended trial run in Louisiana, a huge injection of some $51 billion for which historians find few, if any, precedents in a single state.
The experiment is still playing out, but some indicators suggest that what occurred in Louisiana — dumping a large amount of reconstruction money into a confined space in the three and a half years since Hurricane Katrina — has had a positive outcome. The state’s unemployment rate of 5.7 percent in February was considerably below the national average of 8.1 percent, and it was the only state to see a drop in unemployment from December to January. It was also the only state with an increase in non-farm employment in February.
State economists specifically mention what one called “the ongoing building boom” from federal dollars as a main reason for the numbers. Largely a result of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, construction projects have not dried up as they have elsewhere, and a few can even be seen in downtown New Orleans.To view remainder of article go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/us/05louisiana.html?_r=1&hp
Signs of green shoots raise hopes
Scattered signs of green shoots in the global economy are raising hopes that the recession could bottom out later this year, paving the way for economic recovery in 2010.
However, the signs remain tentative. Economists warn that recessions rarely proceed in straight lines and false dawns are common before recovery finally takes hold.
With the world economy in uncharted territory – in a synchronised downturn, with a badly damaged financial sector and need for large balance sheet adjustments at overstretched households – few experts have any confidence in their forecasts.
Friday’s news that the US economy lost 663,000 jobs in March is a reminder that the global economy remains in dire straits with considerable downward momentum.
However, it does appear that the rate of deterioration has slowed from the precipitous pace in late 2008, when the global economy looked to be diving off a cliff.
Surveys of business sentiment round the world, particularly in the manufacturing sector, suggest conditions are less bad than they were a few months ago although still bad by historical standards.
(To view remainder of article go to:
Obama Must Heed Alarm Bells on Global Warming
Last weekend, thousands of volunteers from surrounding states braved freezing temperatures to help people of North Dakota and Minnesota stuff sand bags for levee enhancements in a mostly successful attempt to contain the historic rise of the Red River. Twisters ripped through Mississippi, injuring scores of people, while a blizzard blasted Colorado and the Gulf coast endured yet another beating from severe storms.
Simultaneously, alarm bells rang in the Arctic. Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska said in New Science. "The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them."
Methane is about 20 times more powerful than the original catalyst for global warming, carbon dioxide. We have entered the dreaded period where secondary effects of global warming could take the climate challenge completely out of our control.
As the world prepares to meet at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to set standards for cutting greenhouse gases, President Barack Obama's historic opportunity to set policy to reverse climate change is fleeting. The United States may be unfashionably late to the meeting unless we have our own, meaningful climate policy in place before December.
In the economic stimulus package, President Obama dedicated billions for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Obama promises 5 million new, green jobs that cannot be outsourced, boosting our economy. We recently got word that mountain-top removal coal mining has been put on hold, at least temporarily.
These colossal changes would have been unimaginable even a few months ago. So what's the problem?
1. Carbon Cap and Trade: Cap Yes, Trade No (see comments in article)
2. Fossil Fuel vs. Renewable Energy Economy (see comments in article)(View remainder of article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/03-6
G20: Why support the IMF?
The IMF failed to warn of the dangers posed by the US housing bubble. The G20 is wrong to give it more money and power
The G20 countries have come to agreement on a number of important steps to foster a recovery from the recession. However, since we always knew that they would come to "agreement", the substance of the deal is not entirely clear at this point.
There are two areas where the nature of the agreement seems clearest: clamping down on tax havens and increased funding for the IMF.The clampdown on tax havens is a restoration of an agenda that had been gaining momentum in the 1990s but was then derailed by the Bush administration. While outwardly committed to preventing tax fraud, the Bush administration worked to undermine any substantive measures intended to accomplish this goal.
The G20 seem to be in agreement that tax havens must be closed, with the first step being the public identification of the rogue states. This naming will be followed by sanctions if these states continue to support tax evasion.
(To view remainder of article go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/apr/02/g20-agreement-imf-tax-havens
The G20 countries have come to agreement on a number of important steps to foster a recovery from the recession. However, since we always knew that they would come to "agreement", the substance of the deal is not entirely clear at this point.
There are two areas where the nature of the agreement seems clearest: clamping down on tax havens and increased funding for the IMF.The clampdown on tax havens is a restoration of an agenda that had been gaining momentum in the 1990s but was then derailed by the Bush administration. While outwardly committed to preventing tax fraud, the Bush administration worked to undermine any substantive measures intended to accomplish this goal.
The G20 seem to be in agreement that tax havens must be closed, with the first step being the public identification of the rogue states. This naming will be followed by sanctions if these states continue to support tax evasion.
(To view remainder of article go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/apr/02/g20-agreement-imf-tax-havens
Administration Seeks an Out On Bailout Rules for Firms: Officials Worry Constraints Set by Congress Deter Participation
The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.
Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.
The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.
(To view remainder of article go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/AR2009040303910.html
Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.
The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.
(To view remainder of article go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/AR2009040303910.html
Gates Planning Major Changes In Programs, Defense Budget
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration's bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate U.S. conflicts in coming decades.
Gates's aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.
(To view remainder of this article go to:
Thursday, April 2, 2009
DECISIONS AT THE G 20, HEALTH CARE, ETC.
We will know more about the final communiqué at the end of the G20 meeting after 3:30 p.m. today. For the time being, here is info about what's happening...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5c541a18-1eec-11de-a748-00144feabdc0.html
Despite the rise of markets all over the world, prospects for the financial sector and the economy remain bleak, according to Wolfgang Munchau
"In other words, you have to do quite a bit more than you think you need to do, rather than quite a bit less. This is the main reason why the Geithner plan is not an optimal policy response. It is a very smart plan in terms of the way it is constructed. It provides no-brainer incentives for private investors to buy toxic assets. But it will not produce sufficient recapitalisation, let alone sort out the problem to such an extent that banks start lending again. For all its technical ingenuity, this plan is at best insufficient – and more likely an expensive distraction that delays the inevitable policy response of a government-led recapitalisation programme. "
Here is the entire article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5d1b1bc-1c93-11de-977c-00144feabdc0.html
From the FT series on the future of capitalism, an article on financial regulations:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/723612ce-1d42-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=ae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html
Flash news from Reuters: U.S. jobless claims highest in more than 26 years
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE53138C20090402
And an article in the New York Times about a campaign against health care reform. I think that if we do canvassing we should inform people about Richard Scott, his record, his past, and what he's trying to do to derail Obama's reform.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/us/politics/02scott.html?ref=us
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5c541a18-1eec-11de-a748-00144feabdc0.html
Despite the rise of markets all over the world, prospects for the financial sector and the economy remain bleak, according to Wolfgang Munchau
"In other words, you have to do quite a bit more than you think you need to do, rather than quite a bit less. This is the main reason why the Geithner plan is not an optimal policy response. It is a very smart plan in terms of the way it is constructed. It provides no-brainer incentives for private investors to buy toxic assets. But it will not produce sufficient recapitalisation, let alone sort out the problem to such an extent that banks start lending again. For all its technical ingenuity, this plan is at best insufficient – and more likely an expensive distraction that delays the inevitable policy response of a government-led recapitalisation programme. "
Here is the entire article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5d1b1bc-1c93-11de-977c-00144feabdc0.html
From the FT series on the future of capitalism, an article on financial regulations:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/723612ce-1d42-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=ae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html
Flash news from Reuters: U.S. jobless claims highest in more than 26 years
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE53138C20090402
And an article in the New York Times about a campaign against health care reform. I think that if we do canvassing we should inform people about Richard Scott, his record, his past, and what he's trying to do to derail Obama's reform.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/us/politics/02scott.html?ref=us
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