The A.I.G. Bonuses Were a Good Thing

I mad, your mad, the Congress, the head of the FED Mr. Bernanke and the Secretary of the Treasury are mad, about the AIG bonuses and the AIG bailout in general. Well, it is about damn time!
We need to be angry about this whole mess. It isn't that the bailouts aren't necessary or good for the economy. We are in the worst national and international financial crisis of our lives and extraordinary measures have been required. But the way it has been done has revealed the insulated, arrogant bubble these financial types are living in. These financial eggheads have finally been revealed for what they are, selfish, greedy paper shufflers who add no value to our economy but who think they deserve huge rewards for performing unethical and financially destructive tasks well.
I know the big democrats had their hands in the pie to but this whole thing is sooo republican. Come on lets all get rich in the stock market, where nothing is what it say it is; where lying, cheating and stealing are considered virtues. That is what we need to be angry about. Remember the tenants of the republican religion? No, not the god thing, I'm talking about their real religion, money and power, the "free" market that because of it's amazing abilities was the answer to all of our problems. If the government would just get out of the way of innocent hard working business men and let them do what ever they want to make money!
We sleep walking citizens listened to the promises and were sympathetic to their cause. After all didn't big businesses supply people with jobs, didn't they contribute to charities, weren't they benevolent corporate citizens who believed in truth, justice and the American Way. Actually, no.
Reagan started the ball rolling by advocating the government and all those darn regulations of their's were blocking honest hard working people from making money and stimulating the economy. The government, unions, laborers and OSHA were the problem in our country and Big Corporations and wealthy people were the answer, Let them go and the wealth would trickle down to the undeserving workers and laborers. And for 29 years our politicians have clung to those beliefs as though they were the Holy Grail. Even after Enron ruined thousands and thousands of people's lives and recordings were made of their traders contempt for the rules of fairness, equity and value in business transactions, there was no national anger. Just a few years ago the republicans were saying that 401K's were the logical replacement for the time honored American tradition of well funded pension plans. Those of us who believed that will now be working well into our "retirement years".
Make no mistake about it, we will be paying for the abuses that republicanism believed in for generations to come. Our taxes will go higher, our standard of living will go lower and we the people will pay for the lying, cheating and stealing carried out in the name of Ronald Reagan's philosophy of government and capitalism. We need to be mad!

The Pharmaceutical Giants Merge Into Less and Less

Have you noticed how many of the giant drug companies are merging lately?

Just like their buddies in the financial industry they are driven to merge into larger and larger mega-companies. Remember how the mantra of justification for this conglomeration of competing companies used to be rationalized as achieving 'new efficiencies' with the combined forces of the two different companies. At least that was the marketing talk. And like all marketing slogans this one purposefully covers up the truth. You may also recall that when Bush negotiated for the Medicare Part D plans, that now cover prescriptions for the elderly, that he would not allow the government to negotiate prices with Big Pharma because that would 'discourage' all the money they put into the development of new drugs.

They needed that extra cash that grandma and grandpa had to pay out for the "donut hole" to fund the discovery of ever newer and more amazing drugs produced by the white smock wearing heroes with the nerdy glasses that they show in their most earnest commercials.

Unfortunately, just the opposite has happened: when is the last time you heard of a brand new drug? Maybe Chantix, the stop smoking drug that can make people psychotic or Advair which contains a drug shown to increase the risk of death in it's users. Overall there is a trickle of new drugs that are hitting the market. Mostly we have retreads, like Nexium: a reformulated Prilosec, Clarinex which is Claritin, AmbienCR a remade Ambien etc.

These gigantic drug companies will no longer fund the production of a drug that won't automatically make them multiple billions of dollars a year. In other words, the larger these companies get the less motivation they have to shepherd new drugs into production.

Given the advancements in the sciences of molecular biology and genetics that have been achieved in the past two decades, we now have the knowledge to make drugs that exactly mesh with an individual person's genes, but there is not enough financial motivation for Big Pharma to manufacture them. So when you see those commercials again about how much the drug companies need to make to be able to invent new drugs remember that they are lying. They spend the bulk of their budgets on advertising not new drug development. Many new drugs are discovered and very few of them are produced.

The Failure of Big Pharma The Atlantic Business Channel

The Innovation Gap in Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery Kellogg School of Management

RX R&D Myths: The Case Against the Drug Industries 'R&D Scare Card' Public Citizen

Report: US on short end of health care 'value gap'

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press Writer | March 12, 2009

WASHINGTON --If the global economy were a 100-yard dash, the U.S. would start 23 yards behind its closest competitors because of health care that costs too much and delivers too little, a business group says in a report to be released Thursday.

The report from the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of major companies, says America's health care system has become a liability in a global economy.

Concern about high U.S. costs has existed for years, and business executives -- whose companies provide health coverage for workers -- have long called for getting costs under control. Now President Barack Obama says the costs have become unsustainable and the system must be overhauled.

Americans spend $2.4 trillion a year on health care. The Business Roundtable report says Americans in 2006 spent $1,928 per capita on health care, at least two-and-a-half times more per person than any other advanced country.

In a different twist, the report took those costs and factored benefits into the equation.

It compares statistics on life expectancy, death rates and even cholesterol readings and blood pressures. The health measures are factored together with costs into a 100-point "value" scale. That hasn't been done before, the authors said.

The results are not encouraging.

The United States is 23 points behind five leading economic competitors: Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. The five nations cover all their citizens, and though their systems differ, in each country the government plays a much larger role than in the U.S.

The cost-benefit disparity is even wider -- 46 points -- when the U.S. is compared with emerging competitors: China, Brazil and India.

"What's important is that we measure and compare actual value -- not just how much we spend on health care, but the performance we get back in return," said H. Edward Hanway, CEO of the insurance company Cigna. "That's what this study does, and the results are quite eye-opening."

Higher U.S. spending funnels away resources that could be invested elsewhere in the economy, but fails to deliver a healthier work force, the report said.

"Spending more would not be a problem if our health scores were proportionately higher," Dr. Arnold Milstein, one of the authors of the study, said in an interview. "But what this study shows is that the U.S. is not getting higher levels of health and quality of care."

Other countries spend less on health care and their workers are relatively healthier, the report said.

Single Payer Health Care

As a physician I have always been skeptical about "socialized medicine" of any kind. I assumed that it would lead to long waiting times, scarcity of resources, poor medication availability and lack of choice in health care providers. But I have been studying the health care plans of many developed nations around the world and have come to the conclusion that our current system is simply unsustainable. My reasons are as follows:

We spend more of our national gross domestic product on health care than any other nation in the world.




Our Government Spends Less Per Capita on Health care Than Any Other Nation
(In other words, we each pay more of the bill than citizens in other countries do)



We Have Poorer Health Care Outcomes Than 36 Other Countries



To be Continued....

Thomas Jefferson on Banking Swindlers

"Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:61

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"I sincerely believe... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23

Republicans Ruin Stimulus Bill in the Senate

From THE PROGRESS REPORT:

Dueling Recovery Bills

Last week, the Senate took up the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an economic stimulus package aimed at boosting the tanking economy. The legislation that emerged from the Senate debate, which is up for a procedural vote today, is substantively different from that which passed the House in January. The differences are due to an effort by a group of "centrist" senators -- the 'gang of moderates' -- to rein in what they characterized as unnecessary spending in the House version. Led by Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME), the gang crafted a compromise that cut spending in the bill by about $100 billion, reducing the total cost to about $780 billion. However, that total does not factor in two new tax breaks that the Senate added -- one for new car purchases and another for home-buyers. With these tax breaks added in, the estimated cost stands at about $827 billion. As a result of the "compromise," though, the Senate bill is now inferior to the House's in terms of stimulative effect. More than two-thirds of the cuts are in areas that would provide the most effective stimulus. As the Center for American Progress' Michael Ettlinger wrote, "there are other smaller cuts in the remaining third that make little sense if the goal is, in fact, to weed out the least effective stimulus provisions."

THE DIFFERENCE IS JOBS: The unemployment rate is currently at 7.6 percent, after employers shed 598,000 jobs in a "brutal January." This number jumps to 13.9 percent when the underemployed -- those working part-time who want to be working full-time, or those who have simply given up on finding a job -- are factored in. Over the last three months, 1.8 million jobs have disappeared. As the Center for American Progress' Heather Boushey pointed out, "the United States has not seen job losses of this magnitude over a three month period since 1945." This highlights why job creation in the stimulus package is critical, yet the Senate bill would create between 430,000 and 538,000 fewer jobs than its House counterpart. Of course, as economist Brad Delong noted, "relative to the alternative of no bill we do boost employment in America a year from now by on the order of 3 million." But with potential job losses expected to continue "for another year nationwide" those jobs would mean a lot, and the stimulus should be aimed at those areas in which it can do the most good.

OUT -- STATE AID AND EDUCATION: Of the $83 billion cut by the Nelson-Collins gang, $40 billion of it was for state stabilization funding. This is incredibly important funding meant for "helping states and localities avoid wide-scale cuts in services and layoffs of public employees." There are 46 states facing budget shortfalls this year or next, and at least 41 states anticipate shortfalls for fiscal 2010 and beyond. Economist Mark Zandi calculated that every dollar invested in aid to the states has a return of $1.36. Also, this funding moves into the economy quickly, as "states that receive a check from the federal government will quickly pass on the money to workers, vendors, and program beneficiaries." A second area hard-hit by the gang's compromise is education (which the state funding would also have gone towards); the Senate bill "cuts all $16 billion from the original bill for K-12 school construction, [and] trims more than $1 billion from Head Start programs for youngsters." But as the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities pointed out, "thirty-four states have cut education or proposed such cuts because they face massive, devastating budget deficits in this recession." These cuts come in the form of per-pupil expenditure, school meal programs, and teacher layoffs. As one school board president said, "We are at that point where we have no other place to go (for cuts)." This money would have had immediate effects "in terms of forestalling layoffs and really preventing the symptoms of recession from exacerbating the economic woes that we're currently experiencing," CAP's Raegen Miller noted.

IN -- INEFFECTIVE TAX BREAKS: While state aid and education were cut, added into the bill in the Senate were tax breaks that will do little to jumpstart the economy. The Senate found just $18 billion in tax breaks it was willing to cut, but among these was a scaling back of the Child Tax Credit expansion proposed by the House. The House bill eliminates the income floor for the credit in 2009 and 2010, opening it up to the working poor who are most apt to spend it; the Senate set an income floor of $8,100. The Senate also included patching the Alternative Minimum Tax, which takes place every year and can hardly be called stimulative. Finally, the Senate included a $15,000 home-buyers credit, in an attempt to address the housing crisis. While it is undeniable that a fix for housing must be found, this tax credit is not it. It is not likely to incentivize anyone who was not going to purchase a home anyway, and as Dean Baker noted, the credit will "cost more than promised." Furthermore, it can go to any home-buyer, "the vast majority of whom will be people who already own a home. If a person buys a home, but sells their current home, it has no net effect on the market." In the end, it will amount to little more than a "house-flipping subsidy."

The financial elite in this country just don't get it.

We are on the brink of a financial calamity in this country. This crisis was caused by the religion of Reaganism and it's believers in the "trickle down" economic philosophy of Milton Friedman. Their god was money and their gospel was the "free market", deregulation and a government dedicated to serving the interests of ruthless giant corporations, the greedy speculators and the super wealthy. This year the Republican party put on numerous celebrations of Ronald Reagan's legacy. The Republican senators who are trying their best to gut the Obama stimulus bill keep preaching the same bankrupt gospel.

That is even though that philosophy is responsible for our bankrupt economy littered with failed banks, insurance companies and brokerage houses. In the Savings and Loan failures of the 1980's the bill to taxpayers was in the billions and it kept this country in a recession that lasted for at least two years.

The truth of that not to distant reality has been drowned out since then by the Republican lie machine. They told us it was essential that we deregulate Wall Street and let the free market solve all of our problems. Their candidates preached to us like the converted that the free market was the only way to fix health care, Social Security, unemployment, inflation and even our failing environment.

Because of the tenants of their free market religion over the past decade social programs have been cut to the bone and the minimum wage was not raised for ten years, even as the real value of those wages went down. Privatization of countless federal agency services was an unfortunate result of this belief in the free market. One stark example of the wisdom of this approach is the case of Walter Reid Hospital's outpatient rehabilitation services for wounded veterans. The "Walter Reed Scandal" was nothing of the kind. Instead it was the private company (a Halliburton subsidiary) in charge of outpatient rehabilitation that failed our troops. Privatization of government services was a pillar of the Bush administration's management agenda that was declared in 2002. Given the ubiquity of this policy and the hundreds of government agencies involved we can safely assume that lucrative contracts have been channeled to Bush and Cheney cronies and that they have not been held accountable.

The Bush era drove our country into the ground using Ronald Reagan's spirit to guide as many of our tax dollars into the war machine and other big businesses and draining as many dollars as possible out of the maintenance of our physical and social infrastructure. Because of that perverse management of our wealth as a nation we have come to this point. Not only are businesses going bankrupt by the dozens but the social safety net is in taters. We must restore what has been robbed from our social infrastructure. We must take care of children, the disabled, the elderly, our nations health care system and our educational system. That the Republicans see restoring these basic programs as threatening is just one more piece of evidence that they just don't get it.

The Latest Bailout Fiasco

Masters of the Universe, Do You Need a Dime?

The ruling class is more than a collection of ideologies and bank accounts. There is a cohesiveness to their rule that suggests a cultural and social interconnectivity that transcends mere political parties.

This has been made painfully clear in the collaboration between different political groupings to give billions of dollars away, with little or no control or oversight, to the Wall Street "masters of the universe" who have looted the economy of trillions of dollars with speculative schemes, and just out and out thievery. The latest egregious hit to the U.S. taxpayers for another financial bailout comes with the announcement of a mega-billion bailout to Citigroup.

As F. William Engdahl explains in an article at Global Research:

Citigroup and the government have identified a pool of about $306 billion in troubled assets. Citigroup will absorb the first $29 billion in losses. After that, remaining losses will be split between Citigroup and the government, with the bank absorbing 10% and the government absorbing 90%. The US Treasury Department will use its $700 billion TARP or Troubled Asset Recovery Program bailout fund, to assume up to $5 billion of losses. If necessary, the Government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will bear the next $10 billion of losses. Beyond that, the Federal Reserve will guarantee any additional losses. The measures are without precedent in US financial history.

Yet, no one in the mainstream political discourse argues to hold these criminals to account. Instead, aim has been taken lately against unions, like the UAW, who conservatives argue have made companies like GM non-competitive in the global marketplace, with their demands for humane work rules, a decent, living wage, health care, etc. Even when the liberals criticize the CEOs of the Big Three automakers, and argue that the lack of nationalized health care puts the car companies behind the economic eight-ball, they barely raise a peep when it's argued that everyone, including the workers, will have to sacrifice to "save" Big Auto (which means tearing up the union contracts, fought for by workers over decades).

In the latest sign of complete moral, ethical, and political collapse, Bloomberg now reports the capitalists' bailout will top $7 trillion dollars -- "half the value of everything produced in the nation last year"!!! For once, the use of multiple exclamation points fails to describe the exaggerated circumstances.

But will this near-total failure of the economic system lead any respectable mainstream or blogging analyst to question the bankruptcy of the capitalist system as a whole? Not unless you're waiting for Barack Obama to lay the foundation stone for a new mammoth statue of Joseph Stalin on the D.C mall. (The rot of communism -- really Stalinism -- was declared by sober folk on both the U.S. left and right, based on far less economic failure.)

Mondays news and post-election analysis

It Still Felt Good the Morning After

By FRANK RICH

This is MUST READ for any Democrat. This election was a stunning rebuke to the mainstream media, pundits and the divisive politics of Bush-Cheney-Rove.

Voter registration process is under scrutiny

Election reformers are pushing for a 'universal' approach, in which the government would ensure that all eligible citizens are registered to vote.

By David G. Savage

Gift card holders may be out of luck in retail bankruptcies

They could lose more than $75 million from store and restaurant closings in 2008, an analyst says.

By Jerry Hirsch

The Religious Vote Postmortem  on Street Prophets A Daily Kos Community

The Religious Vote Postmortem

by pastordan

Thu Nov 06, 2008 at 09:03:16 PM PDT

So how did Barack Obama do among the churchy types? The short answer is: He did great, but he did even better with the other folks. And that might turn out to be something of a problem in the long run.

Faith in Public Life points out that Obama made strong gains among religious voters, with his strongest improvements shown:

among voters who attend church more than once per week, narrowing a 29-point GOP advantage (64% - 35%) to a 12-point GOP advantage (55% - 43%). This represents an 8-point increase among a strongly Republican group.

According to the CNN exit poll, John McCain won the Protestant vote. He won pretty handily at that: 54-45, rising to 65-34 among white Protestants and just shy of 75-25 with white Evangelicals, depending on how the question was asked. McCain even won the white born-once constituency by a slimmer 54-44 margin.

But McCain lost everybody else, 67-31. Obama's margins, in declining order, were with Jews (78-21), non-religious voters (75-23), other religions (73-22), and Catholics 54-45.

Washington Post

Hillary Denied Bid to Take Charge of Health Care?

Ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) apparently has rebuffed a bold bid by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) 

to take over health care policy in the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January.

Barack Obama's speech