What's Next for Healthcare Reform?

By Lindsay Beyerstein

December 30, 2009

The Senate passed its healthcare bill in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to make major compromises to secure the votes of fence-sitters like senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. Reid sacrificed the public option to keep Lieberman on board and tightened the bill's abortion restrictions to placate Nelson.

Next, representatives from the House and the Senate will merge their respective bills in a conference committee, creating a single piece of legislation that both houses will vote on. If the conference report passes both houses, it will proceed to the president's desk to be signed into law. Conference will start after the winter recess. The whole process could be complete by late January.

Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers

By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 2, 2010; A01

For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.

The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.

It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.

Washington Post lets Pete Peterson write the news on deficit.

By Roger Hickey

Created 01/01/2010 - 7:13pm

On Thursday, December 31, the last day of 2009, The Washington Post published an article, presented as a news story, which could be a signal of the death of the Post as an independent and objective news source. The piece, entitled "Support grows for tackling nation's debt [1]," appeared to be one of those background news pieces common in newspapers like the Post. But article was written not by the newspaper’s reporters – and not by an objective wire service, like the Associated Press – but by a new organization called the Fiscal Times, whose founder and major backer, Peter G. Peterson, has a long term ideological commitment to convincing Americans that “support is growing for tackling the nation’s debt.”

These are indeed hard times for journalism, but the Washington Post is sealing its own fate as a fake news source if, as the press release for the Fiscal Times [2] claims, this new “independent” digital news publication reporting on fiscal, budgetary, health-care and international economics issues has forged its first media partnership, a content sharing agreement with The Washington Post. This deal, the first evidence of which is Thursday’s article, is the equivalent of the Post reviving its old relationship with United Press International to cover religion and politics – without informing their readership that since 2000 the once-proud UPI has been owned by News World Communications, a media company owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church! The only difference is that Peter G. Peterson is starting his own news service instead of buying an old one.

No Pessimists Allowed!

America's economic recovery will be twice as big as experts predict.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, Jan. 2, 2010, at 7:46 AM ET

Since 2007, the consensus of the economic establishment—bankers, policymakers, CEOs, stock analysts, pundits—has been catastrophically wrong. They didn't see the economic storm clouds gathering. When the raindrops began to fall, they failed to forecast the deluge. As a result, throughout 2008, executives, investors, and consumers chased the economy down—cutting back after things unexpectedly got worse; cutting back again when the roof fell in.

Health Care Industry Coordinating Effort To Opt States Out Of Health Care Reform

As Congress prepares to pass the final health care reform legislation early next year, health care lobbyists are mobilizing legislatures in approximately 14 states to ratify constitutional amendments that would repeal all or parts of the new measure. “The states where the amendment has been introduced are also places where the health care industry has spent heavily on political contributions,” the New York Times notes:

Over the last six years, health care interests have spent $394 million on contributions in states around the country; about $73 million of that went to those 14 states. Of that, health insurance companies spent $18.2 million.

Paul Krugman: Chinese New Year

It’s the season when pundits traditionally make predictions about the year ahead. Mine concerns international economics: I predict that 2010 will be the year of China. And not in a good way.

Actually, the biggest problems with China involve climate change. But today I want to focus on currency policy.

China has become a major financial and trade power. But it doesn’t act like other big economies. Instead, it follows a mercantilist policy, keeping its trade surplus artificially high. And in today’s depressed world, that policy is, to put it bluntly, predatory.

Here’s how it works: Unlike the dollar, the euro or the yen, whose values fluctuate freely, China’s currency is pegged by official policy at about 6.8 yuan to the dollar. At this exchange rate, Chinese manufacturing has a large cost advantage over its rivals, leading to huge trade surpluses.

Dems move to sack superdelegates

Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith
December 30, 2009 05:37 PM EST

Democrats are moving to eliminate from the party's national convention the superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders whose role in the presidential nominating process came under intense scrutiny in last year’s closely-contested primary.

Those superdelegates provided, for a time, a lifeline to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton's flagging campaign, and the effective end of their independent role would be a major step toward reshaping the Democratic Party — and its internal politics — in President Barack Obama's image.

FCC Moves Toward Net Neutrality Rules

Grant Gross, IDG News Service
Wed Dec 30, 9:50 am ET

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission, in taking the first step toward creating net neutrality rules earlier this year, has reignited a contentious debate about government regulation of the Internet.

Opponents of new net neutrality rules argue that an FCC proposal released in October would create intrusive new rules for the Internet and would mark a major shift in the U.S. government's generally hands-off approach to Web regulation. The FCC's proposed net neutrality rules would, among other things, require Internet service providers to "treat lawful content, applications, and services in a nondiscriminatory manner."

The Cash Committee: How Wall Street Wins On The Hill

First Posted: 12-29-09 03:00 PM | Updated: 12-29-09 04:31 PM

The question was simple: Should the lending practices of auto dealers be regulated?

It was already October and the 42 Democrats and 29 Republicans on the House Committee on Financial Services had spent the better part of the year hashing out the details of a new federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers from dangerous and deceptive financial products.

Rachel Maddow rips apart Cheney, GOP attack machine

Posted Dec 31, 2009, 7:46 AM PT by Jed Lewison • First broadcast: Dec 31, 2009

Transcript:

MADDOW: After days of essentially unanswered Republican political attacks against the Obama administration, finally, today, we got the big kahuna. The white whale of Republican politics, former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, involved in this.

After five days of Republicans owning the airwaves on this issue, doubling and then tripling down on politicizing this thwarted terrorist attack, with almost no opposition from the Democrats, the maestro of terror politics, Mr. Cheney, gave a statement to Politico.com today. Not decrying the terrorist incident itself, but instead using that attack as an opportunity to bash the president, to accuse the president of not keeping America safe.

Now, as is often the case in politics, when attacks from one side go unanswered for a long time, when one side gets the platform all to themselves, that side can sometimes get over-exuberant. They can overplay their hand. Republicans, left to their own devices, have in this case excitedly launched a series of obviously baseless, factually incorrect, demonstrably untrue and hypocritical attacks.

Lessons Learned From The 1990s

In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration amassed a great deal of experience fighting financial crises around the world.

Some of the U.S. Treasury’s specific advice was controversial – e.g., pressing Korea to open its capital markets to foreign investors at the height of the crisis – but the broad approach made sense: Fix failing financial systems up-front, because this is the best opportunity to address the underlying problems that helped produce the crisis (e.g., banks taking excessive risks). If you delay attempts to reform until economic recovery is underway, the banks and other key players are powerful again, real change is harder, and future difficulties await.

Solution to killer superbug found in Norway

By MARTHA MENDOZA and MARGIE MASON, Associated Press Writers
Thu Dec 31, 12:01 am ET

OSLO, Norway – Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner.

Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked.

The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.

Is This Really an Intelligence Failure? Real Talk on Abdulmutallab

By Spencer Ackerman 12/31/09 9:09 AM

In an appearance on “Democracy Now!” yesterday morning to discuss Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, I made the point that Abdulmutallab’s ability to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 demonstrates a policy failure more than an intelligence failure. By that I meant that the threat information acquired on Abdulmutallab was insufficient to ground him, based on the bureaucracy’s process for placing someone on the no-fly list. And for seemingly good reason: the input on him leading to the conclusion that he was dangerous was his father’s Nov. 19 appeal to officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja.

Investors could only lose in Goldman's Caymans deals

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

When Goldman Sachs joined some of its Wall Street rivals in late 2005 in secretly packaging a new breed of offshore securities, it gave prospective investors little hint that the deals were so risky that they could end up losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only were investors buying shaky securities backed by mortgages, but they also were agreeing to pay Goldman if the risky home loans nose-dived in value — as Goldman was betting they would.

The Year's Best Book on Our Great Divide

By Sam Pizzigati

Created 12/30/2009 - 2:21pm

Home Feature Box:

By every measure that matters, The Spirit Level helps us understand, relatively equal nations far outperform nations where income and wealth concentrate at the top.

By every measure that matters, The Spirit Level helps us understand, relatively equal nations far outperform nations where income and wealth concentrate at the top.

Many of us have read, over the past 12 months, a variety of books that address America's vast economic gap between our rich and everyone else. Books that trace the roots — in inequality — of our current crisis. Books that explore the political and economic evolution of the inequality that plagues us. Even one book that imagines what will become of us if we let inequality continue to fester.

Monopoly Capitalism Is the Root of All of America's Problems

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet
Posted on December 31, 2009, Printed on December 31, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144787/

Something is rotten in the state of American capitalism, and if you agree with Barry C. Lynn, almost all stinky paths lead to the monopolization of our economy. The rise of behemoths like Wal-Mart and Viacom are not only lowering the quality and safety of the products you use, but also undermining our so-called democracy.

I had a chance to speak to Lynn about just how bad things are -- and what we might be able to do about it. Lynn's new book, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, from Wiley Press, will be out in January.

Q: In the book you say we have no choice but to reverse the process of monopolization in our economy. How can we practically achieve that, at this stage of the game?

Barry C. Lynn: We can achieve it and there’s proof we can because we’ve done it in the past. In the late 19th century there was a really incredible process of monopolization. In the Guilded Age, you ended up with really tight concentration of control over finance in Wall Street. Think of Standard Oil, of U.S. Steel. There was some effort to break up those companies in the early 20th century but the real change took place after what people call the Second New Deal. The Roosevelt administration ended up breaking up a number of companies. What they did most successfully is stop the growth of massive companies and created space for new companies to grow.

Move Your Money: A New Year's Resolution

Posted: December 29, 2009 06:02 PM

Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson

Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.

Glowing Walls Could Kill Off the Light Bulb

by Ben Webster

Light-emitting wallpaper may begin to replace light bulbs from 2012, according to a government body that supports low-carbon technology.

A chemical coating on the walls will illuminate all parts of the room with an even glow, which mimics sunlight and avoids the shadows and glare of conventional bulbs.

No, We're Not a Broken People

By David Swanson
For OpEdNews: David Swanson - Writer

In 2004 I began speaking at rallies and forums around the country on issues of peace and justice, something I've done off-and-on ever since. Up through 2008, it was extremely unusual for questions from the audience to consist of pure defeatism. In 2009, it was rare to get through a Q&A session without being asked what the point was of trying.

And the defeatism is so contagious that it will be hard for me to make it through 2010 if people don't shut up about how doomed we are. If current trends continue, by 2011 the only people showing up at forums on peace and justice will all be old enough to tell my grandparents they're too young to understand how pointless it is to try. And my grandparents are dead.

Solar Could Generate 15% of Power by 2020, If US Ends Fossil Fuel Subsidies

The Result: 882,000 New Jobs, 10% Drop in Emissions

by Stacy Feldman - Dec 29th, 2009

Solar power technologies could generate 15 percent of America's power in 10 years, but only if Washington levels the playing field on subsidies, a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) says.

That means either rolling back fossil fuel subsidies, as President Obama proposed earlier this year, or increasing subsidies for clean energy, the association says.

Sen. Hatch admits GOP ’standard practice’ was to run up deficit

By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 -- 10:36 am

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow believes she has found the smoking gun proving Republicans' hypocrisy on health care and the budget deficit: an admission by Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch that, during the Bush administration, "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

"Every single Republican opposed the health reform bill when it was voted on on Christmas Eve, and that includes the 24 Republicans who voted for George Bush's Medicare prescription-drug expansion in 2003," Maddow said on her show Monday night. "Now that expansion in 2003, unlike the reform bill that's being currently debated, added tens of billions of dollars to the deficit. And this makes for some awkward politics, because many Republicans are citing worries about the deficit as their reason for voting against health reform now."

The Toilet That Can Help Solve Our Water and Energy Problems

By Gar Smith, Earth Island Journal
Posted on December 28, 2009, Printed on December 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144826/

Upwards of 3 million people die annually from diarrhea, dysentery, and parasitic diseases -- all for the want of clean water. Meanwhile, each year in the water-rich United States, 2.1 billion gallons of the world's most precious liquid are used, not to water thirsty crops or slake parched throats, but to flush human waste from home toilets to municipal sewers. While harvesting rainwater and recycling graywater are fine strategies, it's time to get to the seat of the problem. We need a Toilet Revolution.

As frequently happens, the solution to this modern problem can be found in the recent past -- and the Third World present. Jeff Conant, author of The Community Guide to Environmental Health, has traveled the world in search of the perfect "waterless toilet." He found it in the Mexican town of Tepotzlan, which boasts hundreds of "non-traditional waterless" eco-loos. In the 1980s, Tepotzlan's innovators got a boost when former UNICEF worker Ron Sawyer settled in to help the locals design a new generation of "eco-san" toilets.

Inventing a New Economy

What patent applications can tell us about America's economic prospects.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, Dec. 28, 2009, at 4:09 PM ET

---

As the economic cataclysm of the past two years has unfolded, there has been no shortage of data to help us understand what has already happened and what might happen next. GDP growth, unemployment rates, trade and federal deficit levels, inflation rates, foreclosure rates, capital and leverage ratios—all have been paramount in our conversation.

As we continue to parse the economy and try to understand what the future holds, I want to focus occasionally on some numbers that do not typically generate headlines the way that, say, the monthly unemployment numbers do. Yet over the long run, these statistics may be a more important part of the larger economic story line. I call them "other numbers that matter."

Cause and Effect in the 'Terror War'

by Glenn Greenwald

"In all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims" -- Supreme Tough Guy Warrior Mark Steyn, National Review, yesterday.

"The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan" -- New York Times, December 4, 2009.

"In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen" -- New York Times, yesterday.

_______

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue to use every element of our national power"). Add to those five fronts the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher" than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim countries we're not attacking or threatning than to count the ones we are. Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy to the concept of war."

The GOP's Ugly 2010 Campaign: Pushing the Obacalypse

Posted: 12/29/09

An e-mail I received today reminded me of an obvious fact: 2010 is going to be an election year of ugly politics. The note came from Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee. That's the outfit in charge of electing GOPers to the House.

Wall Street's 10 Greatest Lies of 2009

By Nomi Prins, AlterNet
Posted on December 28, 2009, Printed on December 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144776/

On December 13, President Obama declared that he was not elected to help the “fat cats." But the cats got another version of that memo. A day later, 10 of them were supposed to partake in some White House face-time to talk about their responsibilities to the rest of the country, but only seven could make it. No-shows for the "very serious discussion" -- due to inclement New York weather or being too busy with internal bonus discussions to bother with the President -- were Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons.

Yes, Obama inherited a big financial mess from the Bush administration – which inherited its set-up from the Clinton administration (financial recklessness, it turns out, is non-partisan) -- but he and his appointees have spent the year talking about fighting risk and excess on Wall Street, while both have grown.

Christmas presents for bankers

The US financial sector drove the economy into a ditch, and the White House is still throwing piles of cash at the problem

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 December 2009 18.30 GMT

On Christmas night in 1776, George Washington led a surprise attack on a group of Hessian mercenaries employed by the British to suppress the American revolution. This was one of the biggest military victories of the Revolutionary War.

In the same spirit of surprise, the Obama administration announced on Christmas eve that it was removing the $400bn cap on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's access to the US Treasury. The new draw is limitless. It also announced that the chief executives of the two government-controlled mortgage giants would be getting compensation packages worth $6m a year. This was another big blow for the financial sector in its effort to sap every last cent from the productive economy.

There may be a 'party' in your genes

Research published in Political Research Quarterly

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (Dec 28, 2010) Genetics play a pivotal role in shaping how individual's identify with political parties , according to an article in a recent issue of Political Research Quarterly, the official journal of the Western Political Science Association (published by SAGE).

Political party identification (PID) is among the most studied concepts in modern political science. Scholars have long held that PID was the result of socialization factors, including parental socialization. The possibility that partisan identification could be transmitted genetically rather than socially was not considered and largely left untested.

The Secret Political Reach Of 'The Family'

You may recognize these names from recent headlines: Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Bart Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts. Stupak and Pitts have become familiar names through the media's health care overhaul coverage; their abortion funding amendment introduced an 11th-hour twist as the House of Representatives approached a vote on a landmark health care bill.

Ensign was the focus of media attention over his affair with a campaign staffer. Just last night, a Nevada man disclosed that he found out about his wife's affair with the state's junior senator — his best friend — via a text message.

Republicans Who Opposed The Stimulus Continue To Pan It As A ‘Failure,’ While Also Taking Credit For Its Success

Every Republican in the House and nearly every Republican Senator voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the stimulus). Although the Congressional Budget Office has credited the stimulus with creating up to 1.6 million jobs, the same GOP politicians who opposed the stimulus have attempted to justify their opposition to the policy by smearing it as a failure. But as ThinkProgress has documented, the same politicians are returning to their districts to take credit for the economic success of the stimulus.

The words on the 'Street'

By Simon Johnson
Sunday, December 27, 2009; B01

At 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, U.S. forces began their assault on Omaha Beach as part of the Normandy landings. Casualties among the first wave were horrendous as infantry struggled out of their landing crafts, known as Higgins boats, under intense fire. Incredible acts of individual heroism and great leadership on the spur of the moment eventually saved the day, but not before chaos and death swept the sand. Combat historian S.L.A Marshall described Omaha Beach as "an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster."

At 11 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, Lloyd Blankfein pulled up in front of a Manhattan office building to continue working on a way to save his firm, Goldman Sachs. "I don't think I can take another day of this," one of his employees remarked. Blankfein shot back, "You're getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve. You're not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha Beach."

Copenhagen Has Given Us the Chance to Face Climate Change With Honesty

by James Hansen

Last weekend's minimalist Copenhagen global climate accord provides a great opportunity. The old deceitful, ineffectual approach is severely wounded and must die. Now there is a chance for the world to get on to an honest, effective path to an agreement.

The centrepiece of the old approach was a "cap-and-trade" scheme, festooned with offsets and bribes – bribes that purportedly, but hardly, reduced carbon emissions. It was analogous to the indulgences scheme of the Middle Ages, whereby sinners paid the Church for forgiveness.