Category: Economy

Rough Beasts Slouching Toward Wall Street

Things are veering toward such extreme desperation that the US government might fall under the sway, by extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such, sometime in the near future. I’m not promoting a coup d’etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources.

The ‘corn-pone Hitler’ scenario is still another possibility – Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want ‘to keep gubmint out of Medicare!’ – but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what’s more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within.

Remember, today’s US military elite is battle-hardened after eight years of war in Asia. No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It may pain them to stand by and watch it dissolve like a castle made of sugar in a winter gale.

I raise this possibility because no one else has, and I think we ought to be aware that all kinds of strange outcomes are possible in a society under severe stress. History is a harsh mistress. For all his ‘star quality’ and likable personality, President Obama is increasingly perceived as impotent where the real ongoing disasters of public life are concerned, and he has made the tragic choice to appear to be hostage to the bankers who are systematically draining the life-blood from the middle class.

Whatever we are seeing on the S & P ticker these days does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked for and even believed in. In a leadership vacuum, centers don’t hold, things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.

James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation

Why Mr. Kyl Needs Maternity Coverage

Just before the Senate Finance Committee wrapped up for the long weekend, members debated one of Sen. Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) amendments, which would strike language defining which benefits employers are required to cover.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) argued that insurers must be required to cover basic maternity care. (In several states there are no such requirements.)

“I don’t need maternity care,” Kyl said. “So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive.”

Stabenow interrupted: “I think your mom probably did.”

This little slice of Senate life goes right to the heart of America’s healthcare crisis.

Extensive maternity care for all — from family planning through delivery — is an essential proponent of any sensible healthcare system. Nations with universal coverage typically include generous maternity leave prior to and after birth, providing the new parents with several layers of support.

The benefits to the parents are obvious: they receive all the care they need and they are able to spend time with their new baby, away from work, and without having to worry about money.

The benefits to society are just as important: expectant mothers who do not receive essential care have poorer outcomes, in part because of the missing care, and in part because of the disabling force of financial stress. A society peopled by a significant percentage of “poorer outcomes” suffers a range of ill effects, including unhealthy citizens who need far more medical care/spending than was “saved” by scrimping on maternity care.

Most everywhere but America they’ve figured this out and have better medical outcomes while spending less money.

Mr. Kyl and his buddies call this socialized medicine, a pronouncement that can stop all rational thought and serious discussion in America. They prefer instead the practice of Anti-Social Medicine, where everybody is on their own, where nobody should have to care about anyone beyond their own family, and where sickness profiteers make everything so expensive that only the rich get decent care.

Senator Stabenow’s reply did not go far enough: we shouldn’t insist on full and generous maternity benefits in all coverage plans because our mothers, wives, and daughters might need it, but because when we do not extend equal care to every newborn we violate the principles that inspired America — all are created equal and are equally endowed….

Michael Sky | Thinking Peace

Globalization Goes Bankrupt

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger.

Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.

Chris Hedges | CommonDreams.org

Last Call for Obama

Tomorrow is Obama’s big healthcare speech. This is his last chance to significantly alter the downward spiral of American culture.

We are dying a slow death of poison-by-status-quo. The way America has been doing things — financially, militarily, medically, and environmentally — is not only not working, in each area our actions are so unsustainable that continuing on the same path can only lead to massive chaos and human suffering.

In each of these areas, Obama came with a sense that he definitely got it and was prepared to usher in monumental change. Financially and militarily he has been, at best, a continuation of Bush. Bankers are still getting richer while the rest of us get poorer, and we’re still dropping bombs on Iraqi and Afghani civilians in pursuit of policies that benefit no one but military contractors.

Environmentally, he has been better than Bush, barely. But mostly he’s still defending status quo industries like coal and automobiles when, again, what the planet needs is monumental change.

Healthcare “reform” has been the hardest to watch. When we discount the people’s voice right from the outset — strong majorities of patients and doctors favor a single payer system — it’s a clear sign that the status quo is ruling the day.

The unsustainable status quo in American healthcare is insurance and pharmaceutical industry profits, including shareholder dividends. That is the main reason American healthcare costs too much. It is unconscionable to have a great nation brought to ruin, and for its people to needlessly suffer, so that a small overfed elite can make money.

That’s what Obama needs to say. When they scream “Socialism” he has to say “Yes, when it comes to healthcare, that is the best way.” He has to unequivocally remove the profit motive from American medicine.

If he fails, then the status quo rules, and a once great nation continues its downward spiral.

Michael Sky | Thinking Peace

Obama’s Trust Problem

Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Paul Krugman | NYTimes.com

Industry Rules

This is how things always work.  The industry interests which own and control our government always get their way.  When is the last time they didnt?  The “public option” was something that was designed to excite and placate progressives who gave up from the start on a single-payer approach — and the vast, vast majority of progressives all but the most loyal Obama supporters who are invested in this issue have been emphatic about how central a public option is to their support for health care reform.

But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support.  Isnt that how it always works in Washington?  No matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter which party controls the levers of government, the same set of narrow monied interests and right-wing values dictate outcomes, even if it means running roughshod over the interests of ordinary citizens securing lower costs and expanding coverage and/or what large majorities want.

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

Bring the Crazy…

In 45 years of watching presidents–Dad took me to see Lyndon zip by in a motorcade back in 64 — this is the first time I ever saw anyone anywhere near a presidential appearance who was packing and didnt have a badge. The general equanimity with which this was handled was flatly bizarre. More people got worked up by the faker in Missouri who sustained a vicious slip-and-fall and then an incomprehensible relapse the next day that put him in a wheelchair. Someone was at a presidential appearance with a gun. And he was proudly wearing it outside his pants, for all the honest world to see. RIP, Townes. Forget the president for a minute. What if this cluck decides that he doesnt much like the folks gathered there who are on the other side of the issue from him? This is the cult of the NRA gone completely insane. Why not just let folks bring their Legally Licensed Firearms into the congressional gallery while were at it? Or onto airplanes?

You couldnt get within two miles of the last guy if you had a placard reading, “We Think Your War Ill-Advised, Sir.” People got rousted at rallies for wearing uncomplimentary T-shirts. This happened to credentialed journalists at the Republican convention a year ago. But this guy gets to stand there, visibly strapped, and wave his sign about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots, and people just take it all as business as usual. He even gets a spot on Hardball, during which he appears to want a gold star for not capping anyones ass while sounding like Jim The Cruise . I dont care what New Hampshire law says, this was nuts. And its a godawful precedent.

CHARLES PIERCE | Altercation

Unleashing the Crazy Right

I’m not sure if the insurance industry leaders using lobbyists to stir the pot know what they’ve just hooked into. Do they know that the comparisons of Obama to Hitler, and the call to break up a wholly imaginary “conspiracy” against the elderly may lead the fringe of the fringe to the next step? Is this fear of mine far-fetched? I don’t think so. To most Americans the killing of Dr. Tiller was murder. To many in the pro-life movement it was a courageous act by a patriot.
Whatever one’s opinion about abortion, the fact remains that the abortion debate introduced a political polarization that has never been healed and that has turned violent before. The fact that otherwise sane people now believe that United States government is in a conspiracy with the Obama administration to kill our elderly makes sense only when seen in the context of the hysterical, Armageddon-like expectations of the religious right/pro-life movement. When you understand the link between the hate mongers, the lobbying groups carrying water for the insurance industry and the ideology that came out of the pro-life movement then you can you understand what is happening today in town hall meetings that are being disrupted by screaming people. More importantly you can then also see where this may lead.

I’m not sure if the insurance industry leaders using lobbyists to stir the pot know what they’ve just hooked into. Do they know that the comparisons of Obama to Hitler, and the call to break up a wholly imaginary “conspiracy” against the elderly may lead the fringe of the fringe to the next step? Is this fear of mine far-fetched? I don’t think so. To most Americans the killing of Dr. Tiller was murder. To many in the pro-life movement it was a courageous act by a patriot.

Whatever one’s opinion about abortion, the fact remains that the abortion debate introduced a political polarization that has never been healed and that has turned violent before. The fact that otherwise sane people now believe that United States government is in a conspiracy with the Obama administration to kill our elderly makes sense only when seen in the context of the hysterical, Armageddon-like expectations of the religious right/pro-life movement. When you understand the link between the hate mongers, the lobbying groups carrying water for the insurance industry and the ideology that came out of the pro-life movement then you can you understand what is happening today in town hall meetings that are being disrupted by screaming people. More importantly you can then also see where this may lead.

Frank Schaeffer | Alternet

The Fog of Numbers – Clusterfuck Nation

The week past, some so-called “conservative” political action groups read: brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at “town meetings” around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. Its one thing to yell at a congressman over “single payer” abstractions.  Itll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First  National Bank of Chiggerville.

James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation

Hunky Dory

Whatever else you might think or feel about Mr. Obama’s performance so far, this strategy on the broader question of where we go as a nation pulses with tragedy.  What’s remarkable to me, to go a step further, is the absence of comprehensive vision — not just in the president, but in all the supposedly able and intelligent people around him, and even those leaders not in government but in business and education and science and the professions.

History is clearly presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local, get finer, downscale, and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or nature will whack you upside the head with it not too long from now.  Attempting to maintain anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a losing proposition, whether it is military control of people in Central Asia, or colossal bureaucracies run in the USA, or huge factory farms, or national chain store retail, or hypertrophied state universities, or global energy supply networks.

James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation