Arob's View

RIP Jose Saramago

2010-06-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

The great Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago passed away this week. I've only read his book "The Cave," but damn what a good book. Check out the NY Times retrospective on him here. It's a pretty good review of his career, outside of the unsupported exaggeration that Saramago"was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction." Not an exaggeration of his political views, but that they threatened to overshadow his literary production. She sums up his style, at least from what I read in "The Cave," quite aptly, a combination of "surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism." I hope to delve into his work more in wake of his death. "Blindness" sounds particularly interesting.

Great On Point w/ Douglas Brinkley and Naomi Klein Plus Good Resources on Spill

2010-06-16T17:20:00.001-07:00

On Point w/ Tom Ashbrook on NPR put out an excellent program today on the Gulf oil spill that I highly recommend. Tom talks with Douglas Brinkley, Naomi Klein, and Julia Reed about the spill in wake of the President's Oval Office speech yesterday. So much of the coverage of the politics of the oil spill has focused on perceptions and political consequences, such as whether the President is showing sufficient anger or what the electoral implications of the spill might be. It's incredibly refreshing to hear a program that presents analysis of this administration's actual response, not just his words.

It's also nice to hear an avowed leftist like Naomi Klein on NPR, which normally elects panelists with safe, predictable views from the powerful DC think tanks, like Heritage or AEI on the right and Brookings on the center-left. Ashbrook does seem to have the most unique show widely broadcasted on NPR stations, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

Like most of us who think the Democratic party is too tight with monied interests and too militaristic in its foreign policy choices, she has criticized Obama from the beginning for his lack of action on global warming and his rather accommodating treatment of financial capital. As expected, she continued to critique him in this vein. What's really interesting is to see historian Douglas Brinkley, more of a liberal than a leftist and a pretty mainstream guy, agreeing with her and lambasting the President without mincing words.

The consensus from these three is that, while talking tough for the cameras, the President in practice has deferred to BP and even protected the company rather than taking charge of the cleanup. To some degree we are at the mercy of BP and its engineers when it comes to stopping the gusher, but the President could have taken control of the broader cleanup and coastal protection from Day 1. Formerly Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed that the President put BP under temporary receivership, something quite within his powers (if you can do it with AIG, you can do it with BP) (see this post on his site here). Yet the President would rather let BP take all the heat and protect his approval numbers, which despite public anger might be better for BP's shareholders than serious action like receivership and putting all our resources to bear on protecting the coastline.

In a side note, Brinkley wrote an interesting article in the Financial Times today (if you register, you can get a daily email update and 8 articles a month, it's worth the minute it takes) calling on the President to allow the Mississippi River to revert to its natural, undiverted state to rebuild the wetlands. The canals and levies on the river, constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers to prevent flooding in the Mississippi Delta, have caused a gigantic amount of wetlands to disappear as the river's sediment settles out deeper in the Gulf, where it cannot accumulate and create wetlands. This is a pretty radical idea that I haven't heard even a lot of environmentalists propose, but the situation demands its implementation. The oil will likely speed up the already rapid rate at which the wetlands are lost. We need our wetlands as a crucial home for wildlife (including fisheries crucial to the area's economy) and component of the broader Gulf ecosystem, which is already suffering from oxygen-poor dead zones due to agricultural pollution running down the Mississippi as well as this massive, massive spill. On top of the ecological benefits, more wetlands would provide the natural protection from storm surge the New Orleans once enjoyed. And, as Brinkley notes, why not make BP pay?

Finally, check out the Center for Biological Diversity's excellent page on the spill. It includes breaking news as well as a constantly updated history of the spill. The Center brought to the media's attention the Salazar/Obama administration's continued granting "categorical exclusions" from doing environmental review since the spill, 27 times in fact. If you peruse my blog, you will see that I have been no fan of oil- and rancher-friendly Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and we need to keep up the heat on him as well as the President.

The Great Jeremy Scahill Destroys Ed Koch

2010-06-03T11:31:00.002-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you haven't heard of Jeremy Scahill, he's an excellent investigative journalist that works to expose the injustice of American militarism and imperialism. He began his career as a correspondent for Catholic Worker and Democracy Now!. Scahill wrote the excellent expose of private security contractors, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Currently he writes for The Nation magazine (as well as a blog on the magazine's site).

What I enjoy about Scahill's work is that, much like Bill Moyers, he combines a journalist's attention to fact with the aim of working for a more just society. It's rare in these times of talk-format "news" shows and regurgitated talking points to see real journalism, especially when it professes a political goal. Political journalism lately has devolved into blogosphere hysterics on all sides (I'm going to hurl if I hear another reporter say both sides, as if our Democrat-Republican dichotomy encapsulates all possibilities of political opinion).

Not surprisingly he's been all over Israel's violent assault of the Mavi Marmara in international waters. He posted on his blog the video (I posted it above) of his appearance on MSNBC debating Ed Koch about the incident. His rigor for facts partially explains why he destroys the hell out of Koch.

I'll mostly let Scahill's words speak for themselves (he adds to them in this post on his blog). I just want to highlight two things. First, the list of goods banned from Gaza is really ridiculous, both in length and the inclusion of certain individual items (it includes goats and common culinary spices like cumin). It's clear the blockade is intended to do much more than prevent rocket attacks, as Scahill drives home when he asks Koch how goats could be used to launch a rocket.

Secondly, links to the US are crucial here. Israel gets away with human rights violations and violent aggression because the US unconditionally backs it at the UN and provides generous military aid, no matter what party is in power here. Even now the Obama administration is working to thwart an independent international investigation of the massacre. Until we condition our support for Israel upon respect for international law and human rights, these injustices will continue and the matter of Palestinian statehood will remain unresolved.

I hope to have more later on the legal aspect of the assault, so stay tuned.

Errol Morris--Gates of Heaven

2010-05-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine tipped me off about filmmaker Errol Morris back in school, and I really loved The Thin Blue Line, his documentary exploring the (wrongful as it turns out) conviction of a man for killing a Texas police officer. I was curious about what other movies he has made, and thus I came across his amazing first movie Gates of Heaven. It investigates the phenomenon of pet cemeteries in California in the late 1970's.

On the surface it can be entertaining to see how obsessed these people are with their pets, one of those damn-those-people-are-strange documentaries, yet this movie is much more than that. It shows how and why pets create meaning in people's lives, and also how the process of production, business management, and consumerism coincides with that creation of meaning.

There's a cool Werner Herzog connection to the movie. He was an acquaintance of Errol Morris, and made a bet that he would cook and eat his shoe if Morris actually completed Gates of Heaven. When he finished it, he followed through on his obligation and ate his shoe.

Check out the movie, it's a great one. Here's a video of some clips from the movie, and a clip from a documentary about Herzog eating his shoe.

Methane Release from East Siberian Arctic Shelf

2010-05-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

Global warming creates a number of positive feedback cycles in which warming creates the conditions for accelerated warming. An example would be higher temperatures reducing the extent of Arctic sea ice, which allows the Arctic Ocean to absorb more sunlight and warm faster. There is one feedback in particular we should be scared shitless about: methane feedbacks.

Methane (CH4, same as that natural gas you might use to cook) is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than CO2. Not only do humans emit methane in a variety of ways, but feedback cycles from warming caused primarily by our CO2 emissions drive further methane release. Higher temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctic (and remember that higher latitudes experience a greater level of warming) cause the frozen tundra soils, or permafrost, to melt. The melting triggers anaerobic decomposition of organic material in the soil, which creates methane as a byproduct. Joe Romm has been raising the visibility of this issue for a long time because the feedback cycle is not incorporated into climate models. That suggests that we need to cut emissions faster and deeper than the models say to stabilize global temperature at the same level.

Via Romm's blog Climate Progress, I came across a study that found a potentially more dangerous source of methane: submerged permafrost in shallow seas off the eastern coast of Siberia. In colder times, the area was tundra above sea level but in this warmer epoch it lies under water. The submerged permafrost contains massive amounts of methane that, if released, could cause the rate of global warming to increase hugely. Check out Romm's summary in its entirety as it condenses the findings quite well and contextualizes them with regard to overall climate and emissions trends.

The study found that already the area is emitting more methane into the atmosphere than the rest of the ocean does. The permafrost/methane formations show signs of instability as warming has created 100 hotspots of methane release. The really scary part is how the release of even a small amount of the methane stored in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf would destabilize the atmosphere:

“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova said. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

Yikes. Given that the climate models used to make climate policy don't incorporate major feedbacks, we knew earlier that we had to make greater emissions cuts than the models say to stabilize at the same temperatures and in doing so avoid the worst impacts of global warming. This study suggests that we have to make those cuts not just to avoid a greater increment of warming, but to avoid a drastic jump in greenhouse gas levels from methane release that would greatly multiply the effect of human emissions and push our climate into a dramatically warmer era (we're talking like 10 degrees F warmer with commensurate consequences for people and ecosystems). I leave with you with the climate blogging master Romm himself:

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm
....
In short, the would-be point of atmospheric stabilization, 550 ppm isn’t stable at all — it is past the point of no return. We must stay well below 450 ppm to save the tundra and hence the climate. The new research underscores that conclusion, especially since the planet will keep warming (slowly) for decades even once we slash emissions to near zero.

Krugman's Clear Primer on Greece

2010-04-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman's column from yesterday nicely explains the Greek crisis in a manner comprehensible even for someone who studied environmental policy and geography. The key is that being in the Eurozone, Greece cannot devalue its currency, which would make its products cheaper in other countries and other countries' products more expensive in Greece, thus improving its trade balance.

But that’s a much harder thing to do now than it was when each European nation had its own currency. Back then, costs could be brought in line by adjusting exchange rates — e.g., Greece could cut its wages relative to German wages simply by reducing the value of the drachma in terms of Deutsche marks. Now that Greece and Germany share the same currency, however, the only way to reduce Greek relative costs is through some combination of German inflation and Greek deflation. And since Germany won’t accept inflation, deflation it is.

He also had some interesting things to say about how the crisis hit them. Entering the Eurozone had opened the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) to lots of investment because of confidence in the euro, but the financial crisis caused it to "dry up" as he puts it. This is what drove these countries' government into such dire fiscal straits. Spain was even experiencing a budget surplus prior to the crisis. Perhaps for countries who don't have a lot of financial capital themselves it's not the best idea to completely liberalize investment in addition to trade.

The Greek Debt Crisis (Part 1): Moral Hazard For Nation-States But Not Banks

2010-04-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to follow this Greek debt crisis closely. Not only is it clearly affecting global financial markets, but it says a lot about big issues of political economy and social relations. Who is paying for this recession in terms of class and geography? What is the appropriate fiscal policy response to deep recession to pull us out of it? Is a double-dip recession around the corner? I'm going to leave these big issues aside for now, and juxtapose the EU's response to this crisis and its response to the earlier financial crisis.

First off, this Greek crisis has laid bare the gross hypocrisy of neo-liberal elites in Europe (and here) with regard to moral hazard. So many commentators have stated that Greece (and so many of them conflate this with the Greek working class) must be punished with severe budget austerity as a condition of a EU or IMF bailout, or otherwise other countries will not be sufficiently deterred from running into debt trouble themselves. This is a basic principle of capitalism. To achieve market efficiency, people who make bad decisions must pay the price or else they will continue to make bad ones. And to be absolutely clear, the Greek government is responsible for much of this crisis. It used interest rate swaps with the help of the wonderful people at Goldman Sachs to conceal its actual debt levels before the recession, after which greatly reduced tax revenues pushed its budget much, much deeper in the red. (How much is our fault as the collapse of our housing bubble set off a global recession? Ah, but I digress.)

Yet big European and American banks made similar if not worse mistakes. They over-leveraged i.e. ran up too much debt, made poor investments, and hid liabilities through shadow institutions and tricky devices like the Repo 105 method of Lehman Brothers. According to classical capitalist thinking, they should have been allowed to fail, or at the very least punished severely in exchange for being rescued. Instead, the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank (ECB), and the Bank of England offered extremely low interest loans to these banks, bought toxic assets off their books, and guaranteed loans. Governments similarly provided great amounts of cheap capital for these inept banks, except they used taxpayer funds rather than "printing money." Of course, some response was necessary to stave off a worse collapse, but they did practically nothing to punish the banks. So much for moral hazard!

What does it say morally about the structure of the EU's political economy when a nation-state is punished for running into solvency issues while banks are coddled? Sure there are people that work for banks, but saving banks is mostly about preserving the value of money and assets, mostly held by the rich. Last I checked governments are responsible for entire populations. Call me crazy, but I think people are more important than banks.

There's a very interesting link between these two crises, and not just in how they expose the hypocrisy of neo-liberalism. Why are interest rates on Greek bonds going so high? The media refers to the market causing this as some sort of mystical force that dispassionately calculates the risk of Greek default. In the real world, it's bond traders that determine that rate by their interest in purchasing the bonds. Given the immense concentration of huge wealth in transnational financial institutions, this gives them a lot of power to mess around with rates. In other words, speculation and even bullying plays a role in addition to calculated analysis. The great Marshall Auerback of the Roosevelt Institute calls these folks, the very same ones we bailed out I might add, "big dick swinging bond traders." Is it rational to allow these jerks to push our governments and by extension us around? I encourage you to check out an excellent article by him on this subject at the New American Perspectives blog here.

The other important players are the rating agencies that assess the risk of different bonds. The lowered rating of Greece and other smaller European countries by Moody's is what drove their bond rates so high and set off this crisis. Hmm, Moody's, sounds familiar. Oh yeah, they're those incompetent bastards who gave AAA ratings to securities consisting of bundled sub-prime mortgages that would later bring down global financial markets!

So not only is the EU punishing Greece after it propped up the financial sector, but it's letting that very same bailed-out financial sector run its smaller member states into the ground. Remember that the next time you hear an American commentator bemoan Greek "profligacy" and "excess."

Great Earth Day Edition of The Nation

2010-04-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

The posts have been slow lately because I got married recently and figured out where I'm going to law school in the fall (George Washington, so to DC the wife and I and the kitty go), so I've had a lot going on to say the least.

I'm an avid reader of the The Nation magazine. It's a wonderful old institution of the American left. A lot of people of a more leftist than liberal persuasion have been disappointed in the magazine of late for the unwillingness of the editorial leadership to challenge some of the far-from-progressive policies of President Obama, particularly on health reform (adios public option!). Being of that persuasion, I understand their disappointment, but outside of the editors' editorial at the beginning of each issue, the articles continue to present an uncompromised critique, particularly of the escalation in Afghanistan and Obama's bellicose moves in Latin America. The magazine also funds some of the best investigative journalism out there, which we need more than ever as talking point talk shows replace factual investigation.

I always thought The Nation could use some more environmental coverage, but recently they've been really stepping it up on this front. Its coverage of the abysmal Copenhagen climate conference in December, online and in print, was fantastic, especially capturing the voices of climate scientists and climate justice activists locked out. More recently the magazine ran a brilliant cover story by Johann Hari savaging the big, corporate environmental NGO's for close ties to polluters and politicians that undercut their purpose and effect. This trend has culminated in an excellent Earth Day edition devoted entirely to the environment.

As I've written a couple times, our politicians as well as the public don't get how bad the climate crisis is. The notoriously conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that developed countries needed to cut their emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels (we're well above that now) by 2020 to avoid a temperature rise of 2 degrees C, the level at which scientists believe the worst impacts will come to fruition. The climate bill passed out of the House last summer would cut emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, which is only 3% below 1990 levels. Hmm doesn't match up, does it?

As it has done on the matter of Afghanistan, with this issue The Nation presents an excellent environmentalist and left critique of inaction thus far by our Congress and the President as well as critique of the weak actions they are considering. You can read the most of the article in the issue online without a subscription here, and here's a summary of the best:

-Excellent piece by Christian Parenti on what the President could do using the Clean Air Act without any action by Congress. This is a big issue to watch come Monday when the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill comes out: will EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases be stripped?

-Mark Hertsgaard and Johann Hari ridicule this invented Climategate scandal and describe how our news media gives credence to deniers who have no scientific credibility

-A surprisingly good and unmuddled editorial summarizing the worst aspects of disturbingly weak climate bills proposed from a progressive as well as environmental perspective: wasteful corporate giveaways to coal and nuclear, way too low emissions reductions, offsets (allowing companies to purchase dubious emissions reductions in poor countries instead of cutting their own), and pre-emption of states already regulating greenhouse gases i.e. rendering any state-level climate bills moot

-Robert Eshelman reviewing the huge successes of local grassroots activists and the more progressive NGO's (Sierra Club, RAN, Center for Biological Diversity) in defeating proposed new coal plants. As the lead editorial states, this grassroots and independent approach provides a good model to progressive environmentalists for fighting the broader climate justice battle.

So check out these articles, and don't be satisfied with a climate action incommensurate to the scope of the climate problem. Whatever ends up on the President's desk will be a piece of shit, and you can bet the Democrats will praise themselves for saving the planet no matter how weak it is. In working to make the bill less of a piece of shit we lay the groundwork for stronger climate action as this struggle continues over the next decade.

3 Good Policies on The Environment This Week (That Outweigh But Do Not Diminish This Drilling Foolishness)

2010-04-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

It's unfortunate that the President's drilling plan overshadowed some quite excellent and even transformative environmental/energy policies he implemented this week. They demonstrate the rather large impact a President can have on domestic policy through the broad regulatory powers allocated to the executive branch. Of course these decisions do not legitimate offshore drilling in some sort of quid pro quo (it would be more acceptable if drilling won votes for a desperately needed climate bill, but that seems pretty doubtful to me).

It's important to note that all of these 3 good policies came from the EPA headed by Lisa Jackson. In contrast to the Ken Salazar's Interior Department, the EPA has taken a somewhat progressive post-Bush tack. A President's choice for cabinet appointments reflects the President's own pedagogy and beliefs, but those appointments can also in turn shape the President's policy opinions. In this way, Lisa Jackson has been a mildly positive force while Ken Salazar has pushed the President towards a more corporate and developer-friendly approach to our public lands and environment. Salazar's effect is quite analogous to that of Summers and Geithner in economic policy.

1) Clean Water Limits on Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

If you haven't heard, mountaintop removal coal mining is the most destructive form of fossil fuel extraction humans have devised. This method, performed primarily if not exclusively in the Appalachian mountains from West Virginia down into Tennessee, involves blowing the top off a mountain the get at a coal seam below. The debris is dumped in valleys, which destroys forests, completely fills in miles of streams, and pollutes the remaining streams with heavy metals. Left behind are huge waste pools of toxic coal slurry. Not only is this is so terrible for the natural environment, but it pollutes drinking water supplies and toxic waste pools frequently spill near communities. The Appalachian Voices website has more info on these severe impacts.

As this Grist article recounts, the Jackson EPA has given the green light to some new MTR permits and rejected others, a decidedly mixed record. That was disappointing considering how obvious damaging this practice is, and how little benefit it brings to the local area (WV remains among the poorest states in the nation. Scholars of the "resource curse" persuasion have suggested that this is in part because of coal, not despite it as the coal companies say.)

This new rule restrains MTR projects by placing new limitations on valley fills. In announcing the rule, Jackson said very few mines if any will meet the new standard, meaning that it may become a de facto ban on this abysmal practice because the blown-up mountain tops have to go somewhere.

The excellent mining watchdog group Earthworks reminds us that the rule doesn't go as far it could have i.e. explicitly banning valley fills and/or MTR. Nor does it apply to other regions or the mining of other substances, which also employs valley fills at times. That said, more or less stopping this terrible practice is a major advance for the people and environment of Appalachia. A lot of hard-hit communities there have been fighting MTR for years, and my congratulations go to them. I only wish this happened sooner.

MTR in Appalachia accounts for almost 10% of our coal supply with disproportionately enormous environmental impact, so this decision is a big step forward. Allowing the destruction of Appalachia through MTR has been a subsidy to coal against much less carbon-intensive natural gas, nuclear, and renewables, so this is helpful in moving to curtail greenhouse gas emissions as well.

2) New Auto Fuel Efficiency Standards

In the first time the Clean Air Act has been used to limit carbon dioxide pollution, the EPA issued new rules ramping up the gas mileage new cars must get between 2012 and 2016. Average fuel economy for cars will go from its current 27.5 miles/gallon to 39, and for light trucks from 24 mpg to 30 mpg, basically an increase in efficiency of 5% each year.

This is pretty freakin awesome. Transportation accounts for a big chunk of our carbon emissions, and autos account for a big chunk of that. A carbon price through a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax would make change more slowly in the transportation sector because oil is less carbon-intensive than coal and because the consumer of gas does not have direct control over the technology through which he is burning the gas (unlike say a utility company running a power plant).

Plus this is great for all Americans who need to drive to get around. It will definitely reduce the pain at the pump as oil prices will almost certainly go up over the next decade.

It also makes one wonder, besides all the other objections to offshore drilling, why bother when we can cut our oil consumption much more rapidly and deeply by ramping up fuel efficiency, electric cars, and high speed rail? Also from a public relations move, why hype up drilling and not hype something so good for Americans and the environment that is even supported by auto companies? Drilling won't win over Republicans while it discourages progressive voters, especially the young people who had a large part in putting Obama where he is, whereas increasing fuel efficiency standards would be quite popular. Seems like bad politics in addition to the bad policy of drilling.

3) New Water Heater Standards

Not the sexiest issue, but the EPA's more stringent efficiency regulations for new water heaters are another excellent policy. Water heaters comprise a large amount of home energy usage. These new rules will save families money while cutting carbon pollution. It also frees up natural gas to lower prices and make it more competitive with coal in electricity generation.

The huge benefits of these policies are way greater than the negative impacts of offshore drilling, especially more or less ending MTR and putting a dent in new vehicle pollution. We need to keep up the heat on the president to protect Alaska and our coasts, but we also need to publicize these positive steps so as to encourage more.

Team Obama-Salazar Disappoints Again

2010-04-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just as I wrote a post lambasting Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on endangered species, he and President Obama teamed up to unveil yet another terrible policy regarding the environment. They intend to lift the ban on offshore drilling off the mid-Atlantic coast, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the Arctic coast of Alaska. The plan threatens important ocean and coastal habitats and will do practically nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Obama himself admitted in his speech announcing the plan that the US has less than 2% of the world's oil reserves, yet accounts for 20% of oil consumption. Clearly drilling will not erase our oil trade deficit or even put a significant dent in it. Joe Romm found in the President's own Energy Information Administration's 2009 report that drilling in our continental shelf (assuming that rosy estimates of reserves turn out to be true, T. Boone Pickens doubts that) would reduce gas prices 0 cents by 2020 and 3 cents by 2030. Considering that that greenhouse gas reduction goals likely will have impelled our economy towards much more efficient automobiles, electric cars, and better public transportation (such as a high speed rail network) by 2030, 3 cents will mean even less to consumers than it does today.

The President's assertion that drilling will be done in an "environmentally sensitive" way is a load of bullshit. Defenders of Wildlife has an excellent fact sheet outlining the deleterious impacts of oil and gas drilling on the outer continental shelf, including routine smaller spills (oil rigs already spill 880,000 gallons of oil off American coasts annually), air pollution, invasive species, bird kills, and damage to marine mammals from seismic surveying. The mid-Atlantic drilling area would present a major threat to the already imperiled North Atlantic Right Whale. Then there's the risk of a large spill. If a large spill occurred occurred offshore in the Arctic, we have no feasible technology to clean it up. That would be a huge ecological disaster for an area already feeling the worst impacts of climate change. A similar big spill in the Gulf or on the Atlantic coast would be incredibly damaging to tourist economies in those areas as well as an ecological disaster.

In the above DN! clip, Center for Biological Diversity lawyer Brendan Cummings discerns who benefits rather than consumers and our national security: oil companies and right-wing politicians hoping to bully Obama to the right. Some will argue that this plan will push some undecided senators to vote for the climate bill that will be voted on this spring. First of all, much of the concern with the bill comes from coal states, not coastal states. Secondly, the critical Republican response to the announcement that it does not open up enough areas to drilling suggests it will fail to bring recalcitrant Republicans around. This is strikingly reminiscent of the health care battle, in which the Democratic leadership discarded good policy ideas (like the public option or negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies) as much to placate corporate interests as to win votes.

In his speech, Obama stated that it is time to get past the old arguments between left and right and between environmentalists and corporations. Our "pragmatic" President has moved past these arguments by clearly siding with oil companies and their right-wing boosters.

The good news, as Cummings notes, is that smart organizing at the local and national level can stave off drilling, as it has in California and Bristol Bay in Alaska (the exemption for which is the sole bright spot in this shitty plan). Also, several environmental groups defeated Bush's offshore drilling plan in court, so they may be able to do the same for Obama's plan or at least individual leases. But still, this plan will likely allow for at least some additional offshore drilling. It also continues a troubling trend of the President rolling back or failing to enforce very basic environmental protections (like declaring new endangered species) contrary to campaign pledges and basic expectations for a supposedly center-left political leader. Fortunately, I don't think the environmental community outside of the more corporate groups will take this one lying down.

P.S. I posted my piece about the desert nesting bald eagle on Firedoglake as I do occasionally. It received quite a bit of response and was placed on the site's main page. I had a fruitful discussion with one commenter on the EPA's mixed signals in terms of mountaintop removal coal mining. Check it out here. A past post on Afghanistan made it to their main site as well. In the future, I'll insert a link when I post there.

Nice little instrumental beat from Pete Rock--Glowing

2010-03-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

Science Still Suppressed in Obama-Salazar Interior Department

2010-03-25T13:17:00.001-07:00

So far the Obama administration has a poor record on endangered species protection, better than that of Bush but not by much. The Obama administration listed just two new endangered species in its first year, the fewest in the first year of any administration since Reagan. Furthermore, it followed in the footsteps of the Bush administration by removing the Northern Rockies gray wolf from Endangered Species Act protection despite scientists' assertions that its recovery still had a long way to go (see my post on this subject here).

The Fish and Wildlife Service continued this trend on February 25 when it removed ESA protection for the desert nesting bald eagle. The desert nesting bald eagle is a distinct population of bald eagle, uniquely adapted to its hot and dry environment. Less than 160 survive, and their numbers are declining due to water removal from rivers i.e. dams, agriculture, etc. and habitat loss. According to the Center for Biological Diversity and the Maricopa Audobon, their demise would result in "a significant gap in the overall bald eagle range," meaning that the survival of the sub-species is important to preserving the overall species and demands protection under law.

As was the case with the gray wolf, this decision followed on the heels of attempts by the Bush administration to remove protections for the desert nesting bald eagle. Those Bush-era attempts were rebuffed in court, and hopefully these terrible decisions will be as will. Still, it's remarkable how little change there has been in the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Interior at large.

If it sounds to you like this decision was not based on science, you're right. CBD and the Maricopa Audobon unearthed FWS memos demonstrating that top Service officials suppressed science in their drive to remove protection for the population. The FWS's own scientists found that the population is "discrete and significant" i.e. should be protected under the ESA, but FWS Assistant Director Gary Frazer told them to change their findings.

Newly obtained documents reveal that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bald eagle experts have again been overruled by their political superiors in order to remove Endangered Species Act protection for Arizona's desert nesting bald eagles. An August 24, 2009,memo from Regional Fish and Wildlife Director Benjamin Tuggle to Assistant Fish and Wildlife Director Gary Frazer states that the Arizona population "is discrete and significant" to the bald eagle population as a whole "based on its persistence in an unusual or unique [desert] ecological setting." Tuggle's memo summarizes more than 30 years of biological studies and the consensus of every recognized bald eagle expert.

In a response dated December 4, 2009, Frazer dismisses the experts' opinion, advising that his "…staff will work with you on development of the revised version of the finding. Obviously, the finding should not simply cite my conclusion…"

Like under the Bush administration, top officials shaped the science to fit pre-determined policy, which is the opposite of how a regulatory agency should function.

Adding imperiled species to the ESA list and providing them with sufficient "critical habitat" protection to survive should be a no-brainer for any administration that considers itself remotely in favor of environmental protection, such as the Obama administration and Democratic leadership. Preserving biodiversity is important for its own sake as we are in the midst of the planet's sixth mass extinction, but protecting one species's habitat can protect an entire threatened eco-system, which is so crucial as global warming progresses and species need space to adapt. Unlike say significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this doesn't involve new legislation, just enforcing existing law. Is that too much to ask for from a supposedly pro-environment administration?

The environmental BiNGO's need to exit the veal pen and start raising hell about the bad decisions of Secretary Ken Salazar's Interior Department. As I wrote in my post on the de-listing of the gray wolf, it's clear that Salazar, a rancher who while in the Senate voted frequently for oil drilling and ranching on public lands and for weakened wildlife protections, was a disappointing choice for Interior. This is especially true considering how much environmental groups contributed to the President's ground game in the campaign in terms of dollars and volunteers. He has certainly implemented more environmental protections than Bush-era predecessors, but has also presided over the de-listing of the gray wolf, allowing oil drilling off the Arctic coast of Alaska, and done nothing about egregiously destructive mountaintop removal coal mining.

Organized labor has been criticized by many as weak for continuing to support the Democrats as they fail to pass its primary legislative goal, the Employee Free Choice Act. But at least the unions got Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor, who is ramping up regulatory action against rule-breaking corporations (see this article in the current edition of The Nation). Lisa Jackson was a good pick for the EPA in my opinion, but Secretary of Interior is just as important in terms of environmental policy, and the environmental groups should have leveraged their crucial campaign work to get a favorable pick at Interior. Instead, most of them went out of their way to praise the weak choice of Salazar. The only dissenting voice that questioned the pick was, not surprisingly, the Center for Biological Diversity.

Johann Hari had a great piece in The Nation on the failure of the environmental BiNGO's to push for significant climate action, thanks to shamefully close ties to polluting corporations as well as politicians. I think Hari under-emphasized the problem of domestic groups who don't take much corporate money, if any, like the Sierra Club (outside of their stupid Clorox program they don't take any), that cultivate a close relationship with the Democratic party. During the Bush era too many environmentalists became convinced that kicking the Republicans out of power was the end-game of environmental politics. Now it is clear that their support for Democrats doesn't necessarily translate into progressive environmental policy.

The Center is a wonderful and highly effective organization, especially in the courtroom, but it can only do so much on its own. Unless more environmental groups, especially more visible ones like the Sierra Club or NRDC, assert their independence and directly call out Salazar and, by extension, Obama for these decisions, we will be stuck with 3-7 years of slightly less corporate- and developer-friendly policy at Interior than that of the Bush administration. Considering how bad the Bush-era Interior Department was, that is not acceptable.

EPMD--It's My Thing

2010-03-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Must-Read Firedoglake Fact Sheet on Health Care Bill

2010-03-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

The blog firedoglake.com has been one of the best outlets for following the ins and outs of the health care debate. Their writers and the site's founder Jane Hamsher almost single-handedly raised a shitstorm over the Democrats' dropping a public option and drug price negotiation, which were key elements of President Obama's campaign platform on health care. Their combination of journalism and activism has been one of the few galvanizing forces for progressives disappointed at the watered-down, corporate friendly policies that the Democratic leadership tries to pass for progressivism. Please read their incisive fact sheet on the final health care bill here that exposes how this bill is a piece of junk.

There are good things in there. Expanding Medicaid to cover 12-14 million more people is a positive development. Medicaid is a public program with low administrative costs (no exorbitant shareholder profits and executive salaries) that will keep costs down and guarantee coverage for those people. Moreover, thanks to the work of independent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the bill also increases funding for primary care health centers that serve under-resourced areas. These two provisions amount to a real expansion of the social safety net in our country. Contrary to the sanctimonious proclamations of the Democratic leadership, the rest of the bill does not.

The FDL analysis outlines the major structural problem with the bill: it requires individuals that don't qualify for Medicaid to purchase health insurance from private insurance companies or pay a penalty. The very same private companies that have been exposed for so callously putting profit above health. The very same companies that skim off the top so many of your premium dollars to pay for marketing, underwriting, lobbying, executive salaries, and huge profits for Wall Street. Yes, the very same companies the Democratic leadership has been railing against.

The mandate does come with subsidies for lower middle class families and some regulations, but they are inadequate, as the FDL analysis explains. A public option or a Medicare buy-in (a better public option in my opinion) would have protected some of those people from the profit-seeking chicanery of the insurance companies and held them partly in check through competition (I wrote on this here). Yet that public option was watered down and then finally flushed down the toilet to satisfy corporate Democrats. Indeed, the meek protest of the Obama administration, despite a strong public option being a part of his campaign platform, suggest that he was satisfied with the loss of the PO.

The result, in addition to forcing working families to pay too much for insurance, is that the bill doesn't get us even close to universal coverage. According to Congress's own budget office, the CBO, the legislation will only cover 56% of the uninsured by 2019. Remember that the next time someone compares this bill to the passage of Social Security and Medicare.

Until our leaders understand that expanding public health insurance programs is the way to go, Americans will continue to go bankrupt and even die from uninsurance and underinsurance and already exorbitant health care costs will continue to rise. As William Hsiao, architect of Taiwan's extremely successful health care reform, puts it:

You can have universal coverage and good quality health care while still managing to control costs. But you have to have a single-payer system to do it.

The "Jobs Bill": Democrats Continue to Fail the Unemployed

2010-03-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

President Obama signed a bi-partisan "jobs bill" this week, the centerpiece of which is a tax credit to businesses who hire unemployed workers. The $13 billion credit will allow businesses to avoid the 6.2% payroll tax that goes to the Social Security trust fund as long as they retain the worker for at least one year. The Democrats are patting themselves on the back for turning their attention to jobs and the economy. They are claiming this as a policy victory and a political victory. It is neither.

Businesses hire workers all the time. The net gain or loss of jobs each month doesn't reflect the much higher numbers of gross hires and gross fires. Many companies will hire workers regardless of the tax credit, yet they will receive the tax credit all the same. The idea behind tax credit is that it makes the cost of hiring workers temporarily lower (by 6.2%), inducing businesses to hire more workers than they would otherwise. According to its proponents, this should make up for the cost of paying the tax credit to employers who would have hired workers anyways, such as for seasonal positions. Theoretically this makes sense. However, the problem is, as my favorite economist Dean Baker aptly notes, that in the real world businesses' employment practices don't always change in response to the cost of labor as theory anticipates.

Baker cites several studies, ironically by several economists now in the Obama administration, showing that raising the minimum wage does not reduce the number of workers hired as classical economic theory predicts. He connects those studies to the effect of reducing the cost of labor as opposed to raising it:

If raising the minimum wage by 15-20 percent doesn't cause employers to hire fewer workers, then there is no reason to believe that cutting the cost of labor by 6.2 percent will lead them to hire more workers. There may be some substitution with longer term unemployed being hired instead of new entrants as a result of this tax credit, since it would only apply to people who have been out of work for at least six months, but it is just silly to imagine that it can have any noticeable impact on employment.

Furthermore, the hiring tax credit does not require a company to increase its payroll on the whole. So a company could drop one worker and hire a new one at a lower cost. Likewise companies can game the credit by hiring as employees people that were formerly contractors, which doesn't add to aggregate employment at all.

If it increased employment as advertised, this tax credit could be viewed as Keynesian public investment to stimulate still-lackluster aggregate demand and create growth. However, Baker's criticisms suggest that it might be more of a supply-side tax cut for capital. Without strong consumer demand, simply bolstering companies' balance-sheets with taxpayer money won't create the investment we need for sustained growth, and diverts public funds from potential projects that are much more effective such as infrastructure building and repair and direct job creation like in the New Deal.

The Democrats' next proposal for jobs demonstrates that they might be fine with that. The NYT article on the "jobs bill" says that up next is a proposal to extend corporate tax breaks. Wait, what party is in power again? It can't be the party of FDR, can it? I can't wait to hear them try to spin corporate tax breaks as a "jobs bill."

I suspect the public will remain skeptical that their government is doing its upmost to improve the employment and overall economic picture. If the hiring tax credit fails, it will come off as just another government intervention to benefit capital i.e. the wealthy, e.g. bank bailouts.

A better alternative would be major public investments. The "jobs bill" does transfer $20 billion to highway projects, but the NYT article suggests that those funds have just been transferred from elsewhere, meaning there will be reductions in spending elsewhere. We need NEW job-creating investments, and as long as we can fund our deficit at such low interest rates we might as well borrow to do so. Also there are much better alternatives than road building, such as investments in a modern high speed rail network, home retrofits, and wind and solar energy capacity. Not only would smart public investment be better for the economy than business tax breaks, but it would create real, tangible jobs plus public benefits that the Democrats could point to as evidence of good policymaking.

INI--Fakin' Jax (produced by Pete Rock)

2010-03-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

INI is a group produced by the incomparable Pete Rock, who is known for being part of the Pete Rock & CL Smooth duo. Their album wasn't released when except for this single when it was made in 1995, but it was finally released on a Pete Rock compilation in 2003. This some classic early to mid-90's New York funky jazz-influenced hip-hop, enjoy!

March 4th Solidarity with Students!

2010-03-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today across the country and the world, students and members of the public higher education community walked out of class to protest the privatization of our state universities and colleges that is occurring . This writer for one stands with them and I hope the protests were successful in getting a lot of media attention.

The economic recession has hit public colleges hard. States faced with declining tax revenues have made massive spending cuts over the last two years to balance their budgets. Unlike the federal government, states for the most part have to balance their budgets each year, and thus face difficult decisions when a recession occurs. Given the choice of spending cuts or tax increases, most legislatures and governors opt for spending cuts, not surprising considering the unfortunate dominance of neo-liberal economic ideology in our country.

States often target public higher education first in spending cuts. These cuts attack higher ed in terms of accessibility and quality. Direct budget cuts forces schools to lay off professors, which leads to higher class sizes and less classes. It also forces schools to raise tuition and student fees, putting the expense of college out of reach for many working class students the schools were created to service. Most states have financial aid grant programs in addition to federal Pell grants that could help students deal with higher tuition, but typically these programs are cut as well, as the Cal Grant program has in California.

These protests are exciting because they are challenging the broader notion of privatization, not just the current cuts, as UC Berkeley student organizer Ricardo Gomez elaborates in today's DN! interview above. They remind us that public colleges were created to make quality higher education accessible to the broader public. Many are demanding not only the end to cuts but a move towards making higher education a free service to all. Quality higher education should indeed be a right, and hopefully these protests will coalesce into statewide and national movements to make higher education a right. Gomez and Professor Ananya Roy also criticize the privatization of dining services and student housing and union-busting oriented towards college support staff. Not only should college be a public service, but it should lead the way towards a more just society by treating its workers fairly and refusing to allow private corporations unfettered access to public coffers.

This broader social democratic vision allows us to make the connection between cuts to education and the recession. These students and university employees are paying for the recklessness of financial capital and terrible policy-making at the Federal Reserve, which allowed the housing bubble to go on unabated. This isn't just a battle over public higher education--it's a battle over the unjust structure of our economy. The students must connect with community groups and labor unions who are fighting neo-liberalism in other sectors.

As UMASS economist James Heintz notes here, state governments face a cumulative budget shortfall of $260 billion for 2011 and 2012. So far they have been propped up by funds from the federal stimulus package, but those funds expire at the end of this year. The cuts are only going to get worse, so this fight will certainly go on. Heintz also points out that the resulting job losses and reduction in aggregate demand may suppress our already slow recovery, or even cause a double-dip recession.

If we're to avoid these cuts that are devastating to working families in terms of unemployment and loss of public services, we must find the revenues to fill the gaps. Another UMASS economist Rick Wolff has called for states to follow the example of Oregon. In January Oregon voters passed two referendums to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to ensure continued funding for education, health care, and public safety. Not only does this protect working class and poor families who rely on public services disproportionately, but it generates growth by keeping public employees working and thus spending on goods and services. (Wolff is a Marxian economist, so he has a lot of interesting ideas for dealing with the crisis that you wouldn't normally hear, check his article out).

The federal government can help out as well. In addition to having broader power to raise money through taxes, the government has the flexibility to borrow money on the bond market. It should continue sharing these revenues with states as their budget crises continue, eithed through deficit spending or by taxes on the wealthy (a financial transactions tax would be an excellent idea, more on that later).

There's something else the federal government can do, although I highly doubt it will. During the financial crisis, the Fed propped up the financial sector by buying their junk securities, making loan guarantees, and providing loans at ridiculously low interest rates. How did it do this? By creating money out of thin air, also known as quantitative easing, which central banks do to pump money into an economy when it has dropped interest rates down to zero effectively. Marshall Auerback, brilliant economist at the Roosevelt Institute (their New Deal 2.0 blog is awesome by the way, best outpost for Keynesian capitalist ideas to deal with this crisis), suggested that the European Central Bank do the same for Greece and other EU countries, just as it did for the banks. Of course increasing the money supply in that way could cause inflation (ie. rising prices) eventually, especially because way less of the money would be hoarded as the banks currently hoard it. Still inflation is the last thing we need to worry about now, as Mike Whitney writes in Counterpunch.

Okay I went from discussing exciting movements to more wonky ideas to fix the state budget and broader economic crises. The point is that this movement for accessible and quality public higher education can lead to a broader vision that backs the creative ideas we need to a) get out of this crisis and b) move towards a fairer economy simultaneously. Keep organizing and agitating my student brothers and sisters!

Something related: Richard Estes's American Leftist blog has been discussing the tactics of California students driving this movement. Apparently liberal, center-left professors have sought to quell the more leftist students who are open to aggressive tactics like 60's-style building occupations in addition to advocacy and public protest. The occupations at Berkeley raised a lot of visibility for the student cause, so I think they were highly successful. There's nothing immoral about a non-violent occupation (illegal does not inherently equal immoral), and it's stupid not to do it when it can be successful. Definitely reminiscent of monied centrist Democratic Party loyalists trying to suppress sectors of the progressive movement moving towards opposing not only conservatives but the neo-liberal, free market-fetishizing ideology that both parties embrace (and that got us in this crisis).

I highly recommend the American Leftist blog. Estes is a more libertarian socialist/anarchist type. As someone who leans more towards the tradition of social democracy and democratic socialism, I don't always agree with him, but he digs up some great stuff on the economy and our foreign policy.

We must regulate black carbon in addition to CO2, and the EPA has the tools to do it now!

2010-02-25T13:29:00.001-08:00

On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the EPA to regulate the pollutant called black carbon, also known as soot under the Clean Water Act. The Center's lawyers are experts at utilizing existing environmental laws to push regulatory agencies into action. I hope they succeed, because reducing black carbon pollution is crucial in the fight against global warming, which gets more important every day the US Senate dicks around failing to pass a carbon cap.

For the basic science of black carbon, Wikipedia has a pretty good primer. Black carbon warms the atmosphere directly by absorbing infrared radiation in the atmosphere. However, it mostly effects global warming through changing the Earth's albedo, or ability to reflect incoming radiation rather than absorb it. It does so by settling on snow or ice and making those surface absorb more incoming radiation. In the long run, black carbon reduces the extent of snow and ice coverage by warming those surfaces, which further decreases albedo by exposing either ocean water or land. A study by Ramanathan and Carmichael in 2008 found that black carbon is currently causing 60% of the global warming that CO2 is, making it the second highest contributor to warming by greenhouse gases after CO2.

One study recently found that aerosols settling on snow are causing 90% of the melting of Himalayan glaciers as opposed to study 10% from global warming. Under the heading of aerosols, black carbon causes 30% of the melting. In addition to lowering the Earth's albedo, the melting of Himalayan glaciers threatens the water supply for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia.

Thanks to the fact that we don't burn a lot of wood relative to fossil fuels and air pollution regulations for coal plants and diesel engines, the US contributes just 6.1% of global black carbon emissions. That's not much more than our share of the global population, unlike our disproportionately huge share of CO2 emissions.

However, there are several reasons that increase the urgency of the US cutting its black carbon pollution. First, as Wikipedia notes, black carbon from North America disproportionately impacts the Arctic sea ice, which is so crucial for maintaining the Earth's albedo. Second, the US is one of the foci of international shipping by sea. Ocean-going vessels often are fueled by dirty diesel engines, and they often pass closer to the Arctic. Finally, the US would set a powerful example for other countries, particularly India and China.

Reducing black carbon is easier than the shrinking fossil fuel consumption from CO2 because reducing black carbon often involves technology fixes like particulate filters. If we take aggressive steps to reduce it now, we can help avoid climate tipping points, especially in light of the failure of the global community to commit to serious enough CO2 reductions.

Will President Obama's EPA listen? Our bedrock environmental laws like the CWA, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act give the agency wide latitude to regulate pollution. It has taken initial steps to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act, but might be reluctant to regulate air pollution under the Clean Water Act, not for legal reasons but for fear of stepping on toes. As I've written earlier, Obama and the Democrats may realize that global warming exists and that we must cut CO2 pollution, but they definitely do not understand how gigantic the problem is and the scale of response it requires. Fortunately EPA head Lisa Jackson is more progressive than most in the administration, so we'll have to see. Whatever they decide, the outcome will be as much a political determination as a legal one.

PS. The IPCC seriously underestimated the effect of black carbon in its 2007 report, as the Wikipedia article notes. Yet another reason why emissions cuts need to be more severe than what the IPCC report dictates because the report is so conservative. This drives in the absurdity of the mainstream media's recent criticisms of the IPCC for minor mistakes. The IPCC hasn't created the idea of global warming out of its imagination, but rather has significantly under-estimated the extent and effect of this very real and pernicious phenomenon!

Marjah and the Bigger Picture in Afghanistan

2010-02-18T08:56:00.001-08:00

Last week NATO forces in Afghanistan commenced a highly publicized assault on the town of Marjah in Helmand Province in the south of the country, a Taliban stronghold. It is supposed to be the paragon of the new "clear and hold" strategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, based on the ideas developed by Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. Our government is clearly hyping this operation to the media, so let's take a look at why they are doing so and the real implications of the Marjah assault.

Marjah isn't a particularly important town. Here's Anand Gopal (the excellent journalist who wrote the story about secret US prisons in Afghanistan for The Nation) describing the significance of Marjah on Democracy Now!:

Well, you know, it’s interesting, because Marjah isn’t a particularly strategic place or even a place that holds any really strategic value. It’s a very tiny town in the Helmand province. The official estimate is around 80,000, but I think a lot of Afghans and I also think that’s a huge overestimate.

The Taliban did not respond to the offensive by digging in for a face-to-face battle. Instead, they have elected a guerrilla strategy, as Juan Cole writes. Many of them skipped town, and those that remained have been pestering NATO forces with sniper attacks, mines, and IEDs. Cole believes that they could be hurt by the loss of heroin income from the area, but the poppy industry is so widespread I would imagine that drug lords could move operations elsewhere. Overall, the operation seems unlikely to put a significant dent in the Taliban's operational capacity.

In an interview on Real News Network, Gareth Porter notes the absurdity of putting 15,000 NATO troops, a big chunk of their limited forces, into an assault on an agricultural town with a population of 80,000. The population of Marjah is a tiny, tiny percentage not only of the population of Afghanistan but also just the areas under Taliban control. When you consider that, according to Petraeus counter-insurgency doctrine, NATO forces don't have sufficient troops for the size of the country, the Marjah approach cannot be scaled up to significant portions of the Pashtun areas in which the Taliban dominates. In fact, it might allow Taliban forces free reign in other regions of the country, even in Helmand Province, while limited NATO forces are so concentrated in a small area.

Then, you might ask, what's the point? Gopal and Porter conclude that this operation is oriented toward the audience back home in the US. The Obama administration is likely attempting to utilize the Marjah operation to vindicate the strategy of the escalation and gain points at home. Porter takes that hypothesis one step further, and posits that convincing the home audience that our forces are gaining the upper hand is intended to gain the political breathing room necessary to negotiate with the Taliban, probably after a couple Marjahs more than a year down the road.

Robert Naiman astutely compares this potential political-military strategy with the Iraq escalation. Bush only negotiated with Sunni militias i.e. paid them off in wake of the show of force that the 2006 surge presented. In both cases, the US escalates violence to make its population think that it is winning before negotiating the same result that could have been achieved years earlier without the massive human and economic cost. As Naiman writes, "It's a grim world in which the most powerful country kills people to look tough."

I fervently hope that Gareth Porter is right and that Obama eventually uses negotiation to end the war, both between US and Taliban forces and between the various parties in civil war, after a period of acting tough through escalation (perhaps after the 2012 election?). Absent a strong antiwar movement in the US, that would be the best case scenario. However, thus far his administration has been adamantly opposed to negotiating with Taliban leaders. At the recent Afghanistan conference in London, the US reacted negatively to Hamid Karzai's stated intention of negotiating with the highest Taliban leadership.

Recently the CIA and the Pakistani ISI captured Taliban leader Mullah Omar's right hand man, Abdul Ghani Baradar. The NYT article on his arrest quotes a US official critical of the arrest, saying that the US had been involved in incipient negotiations with Baradar. The article describes Baradar as representing the moderate faction of the Taliban.

"He was the only person intent on or willing for peace negotiations," said Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the government-led reconciliation process in the city of Kandahar, who has dealt with members of the Taliban leadership council for several years.

Here's what the anonymous US official believes the consequences of this arrest will be:

"So it doesn't make sense why we bite the hand that is feeding us," the official added. "And now the Taliban will have no reason to negotiate with us; they will not believe anything we will offer or say."

This suggests that the arrest has dealt a serious blow to negotiations, by removing the link between Karzai and/or the US and Omar, and by discouraging growing support for negotiation and more moderate politics among the Taliban leadership. It also raises two other important questions. First, who will take Baradar's place? There's the possibility of someone more hardline stepping up to fill the vacuum. Secondly, will this further fragment the Taliban and give local commanders more autonomy? If so, does that actually improve prospects for a military victory by NATO? Will it handicap potential negotiations down the road? How the US handles the arrest and its eventual consequences will be illustrative of how the Obama administration intends to move forward on the negotiation front.

During his presidential campaign, President Obama made the decision to escalate US involvement in Afghanistan and implement a counter-insurgency campaign targeted at the domestically-oriented Taliban, not just the less than 100 al-Qaeda fighters remaining in the country. In the face of a bloody stalemate lasting for years that seems quite likely to occur, he faces another decision. On the one hand, he can continue the current strategy of pursuing total victory against the Taliban on the battlefield. In that case, he would likely have to push back the 2011 date withdrawal date. On the other, he can support Karzai's effort to negotiate a peace with an eye towards withdrawal.

Obama has an irksome propensity for taking the middle path for its own sake rather than sound reasoning, and it seems likely he will do so in Afghanistan. Even if Porter's theory is correct, the result will be at least two more years of civilian and military casualties, as well as thousands of innocent Afghans becoming refugees in their own country. In the end, no matter how reprehensible they are, some of the Taliban will probably be part of the post-war political process or even a coalition government. In the midst of what Marshall Auerbach dubs "deficit terrorism," crucial domestic programs (and possibly the so-called entitlements) will be cut while military spending continues to grow, in no small part because of the war in Afghanistan. Unless our military contingent there overcomes the limitations of its size and strategy and conclusively defeats the Taliban, which seems unlikely, even Porter's best case scenario will have a poor result.

In conclusion, we must challenge not only the unjust nature of American militarism that President Obama has embraced, but also his failure to acknowledge the limits of US military power that this over-hyped battle for Marjah demonstrates. Political strategies can achieve results that are the same or better than military strategies in terms of the national interest as well as justice. President Obama has acknowledged the importance of political strategies, but thus far has subordinated them to use of the military. Until that ends, we will be stuck in the Long War with sad consequences for the American as well as Afghan people. Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University hits the nail on the head in his illuminating article entitled "Obama's Post-Modern War of Attrition":

The revival of counterinsurgency doctrine, celebrated as evidence of enlightened military practice, commits America to a postmodern version of attrition. Rather than wearing the enemy down, we'll build contested countries up, while expending hundreds of billions of dollars (borrowed from abroad) and hundreds of soldiers' lives (sent from home).
How does this end? The verdict is already written: The Long War ends not in victory but in exhaustion and insolvency, when the United States runs out of troops and out of money.

Wayne Shorter--Deluge from Juju

2010-02-06T10:27:00.001-08:00

Health Care in Taiwan

2010-02-05T11:48:00.000-08:00

In the US we mostly hear news about Taiwan only in terms of their historical dispute with China, as in recent coverage of our proposed arms sales to Taiwan angering the Chinese. I'd like to look at a different aspect of Taiwan, one that ironically makes Taiwan more socialist in one respect than China when their dispute is typically characterized as capitalist Taiwan v. communist China.

I recently stumbled across an interview that the NY Times health care blog did with Harvard professor William Hsiao who led the panel devising health care reform for Taiwan in 1995, which was implemented with great success. The process is almost as impressive as the outcome.

At that time, 45% of Taiwanese had no health insurance. The country's first democratically elected president Lee Teng-hui created a panel to create a plan to cover them. After the initial panel had difficulty getting to a consensus, they invited Hsaio to head the panel and get things under control.

They proceeded to do a study of the health care systems of the US (insurance through employer or individually except government covers poor and elderly), UK (national health care system w/ government running insurance and care), Germany (universal coverage, mixed public and private ie. multi-payer), France (universal coverage, multi-payer), Canada (single-payer w/ private and public care), and Japan (universal coverage, multi-payer) to determine which system they would emulate.

In the end, they chose to emulate the Canadian system, single-payer with, unlike in the UK, both private and public health care delivery. Here's why:

Canada has a single-payer system with universal insurance coverage. It offers people free choice of doctors and hospitals, and it has competition on the delivery side between public and private hospitals. The quality of health services is very high, and people were very satisfied with the system from the 1980s through the mid-1990s.

President Teng-hui pushed the plan through, and it was implemented within 6 months of its passage. Remember how the Democrats' preferred health reform bills wouldn't really take effect until 2013 or 2014 because they said it would take time to set up the exchanges? Bullshit, especially when you add the Taiwan example to the fact that we implemented Medicare (another single-payer system) in 1966 just after it was passed in 1965.

Thus Taiwan's national health insurance plan became the sole payer for health care in the country with an excellent result. The country made the utmost effort to sign up everyone, even sending out people to sign up the homeless! Employers pay 60% of their workers' premiums, and workers pay the other 40% through a payroll tax, currently at 4.6%. Hsiao compares this to the 12-20% of wages that American workers pay for employer-based insurance, a hidden appropriation of which many Americans are not cognizant. The government covers the premiums completely for the poor and partially for veterans, the self-employed, and farmers.

Every citizen gets a "SmartCard" that contains their health care information and history. This, combined with the fact that in a single-payer system patients have total freedom to choose their provider (unlike in the US where insurance companies restrict patient choice of doctor and hospital), gives them flexibility to see whatever doctor they wish to. In addition, it cuts costs because it allows the claims system to be paperless.

The benefits are comprehensive. The national insurance system covers prevention, primary care, hospitalization, home care for the chronically ill (cheaper than hospitals), mental health, dental, eye care, and even traditional medicine like acupuncture and Chinese massage. Not only is this comprehensiveness totally awesome, but it practically guarantees better health care outcomes, and not just by traditional measures like life expectancy, which, as Hsaio notes, is on the rise.

It's important to note that this is socialized insurance. As I've written before, socialized health insurance lowers administrative costs while allowing for true universal coverage (as opposed to the 97% "universal" coverage that mandate-and-subsidies approach with a public option charging Medicare rates was projected to achieve here). It lowers costs by eliminating the costs of investor profit, exorbitant executive compensation, marketing, underwriting, and denying claims. Their administrative cost for insurance is 2.3% of premiums while ours fluctuates between 12-14%. Single-payer also lowers the cost for hospitals and doctors in dealing with claims from different payers. Currently Taiwan has universal coverage with health care costs at 6% of its GDP, while we have about 85% of our population covered and health care costs at 16% of our GDP (they actually jumped up to 17% last year, yikes).

The Taiwan case shows that is possible to implement single-payer and achieve universal coverage at a reasonable cost in a short time. The claim of those like President Obama that switching to single-payer would be too disruptive is total bullshit intended to avoid explaining why they don't support single-payer when it makes so much sense. Considering our problem with health care costs (the worst in the world I might add), we need structural change in our insurance system. Hsaio concludes that this is true for just about any country:

You can have universal coverage and good quality health care while still managing to control costs. But you have to have a single-payer system to do it.

So next time a liberal or leftist friend of yours threatens to move to Europe out of frustration with our government, tell them to consider Taiwan!

PS. There's much more to be gleaned from this brief interview, so watch out for a Part 2 and maybe 3.

Media Distortion of New Jobs Numbers

2010-02-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

Here's the headline in today's NY Times: "Labor Market Shows Signs of Reawakening in New Data". True, the Labor Department's report for January says that the rate of unemployment dropped from 10% to 9.7%.

Yet in the second paragraph: "The economy shed another 20,000 net jobs during the course of month." That's a lot better than losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month like we were at the peak of recession, but it's still a net loss of jobs. Not exactly a "reawakening."

You might ask, how did the unemployment rate drop if the economy lost jobs on the whole? Well, it turns out that the Labor Department changed how they estimate the overall population.

The report also featured a new way in which the government estimates the population, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate. That prompted some economists to dismiss the drop in joblessness as a statistical quirk.
“The message is, you can’t believe what they tell you,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc. in New York. “Everyone goes crazy over today’s number, but history has been rewritten. Things are not comparable from month to month.”

So we'll see when next month's numbers out, but it's clear that the labor market isn't exactly reawakening if we're still losing jobs.

Meanwhile, my daily Financial Times email summary of the day's global news remarked that "the number of US workers claiming jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week." Didn't see that in the Times article. Obviously a monthly time scale is a better indicator of overall trends than a weekly one, but it is another strike against the supposed reawakening. That weekly data combined with fears of sovereign debt default in Greece and elsewhere in Europe "rocked global markets" according to the FT, suggesting that investors take that data more seriously than the monthly report.

The NYT article concludes oddly enough with a quote from the great liberal economist (actually probably more of a leftist than a liberal, pretty cool that he's getting such coverage, probably has to do with the fact that he called the housing bubble), Dean Baker, that is at odds with their optimistic headline.

Things are getting bad less rapidly,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “We’re sort of hitting bottom, but there is no evidence of a robust turnaround.”

If the media and politicians continue to trumpet about a recovery in the labor market when it's clearly not there, it lessens the chance of a serious jobs program to deal with the millions of people left semi-permanently unemployed (as the article notes, 6.3 million out of work for 6 months or more), financed through debt or taxes on the wealthy and financial sector. We need to be on the alert for a jobless recovery that will benefit capital much more than working families. Plus, given that so much of our economy is reliant on consumer spending, a jobless recovery might not end up being a recovery at all.

RIP Howard Zinn

2010-01-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

Frankly I haven't read much by Zinn outside of a few articles and book excerpts, but he is certainly a luminary of the American left. He taught thousands of Americans our history from the perspective of the working classes and oppressed elements of our society. I hope to be one of them soon (once I finish my simultaneous projects of Marx's Capital and Dante's Divine Comedy and the next 10 books in my queue, ha).

Normally I wouldn't post about a person who I know little about, but I read a moving eulogy to Zinn by the leftist sports writer Dave Zirin on The Nation's website here that I think people will enjoy. To the end, Zinn promoted independent organizing to move our country in a more progressive direction regardless of who currently holds the reins of power. Here's Zinn on the Age of Obama:

At our event in Madison, Wisconsin, Howard issued a challenge to the audience. He said, "Our job as citizens is to honestly assess what Obama is doing. Not measured just against Bush, because against Bush, everybody looks good. But look honestly at what Obama's doing and act as engaged and vigorous citizens."

Finally, here's a Zinn quote from the article on what he sees as the need to revive the concept of democratic socialism in our country, of which, as he would know more than almost anyone, we have a beautiful tradition:

"Let's talk about socialism. … I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country… Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism."

PS. Dave Zirin writes some great stuff on the intersection of sports and politics. If you are a left sports fan like myself, look for his stuff in The Nation and The Progressive among other publications.

Amy Goodman from Haiti

2010-01-20T16:51:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, I go on streaks where I love one journalist. But Amy is at it again, on the ground in Haiti going where the mainstream media will not and raising issues that they deliberately do not.

Here's the thing about the Haiti crisis. Every mainstream media outlet talks about "instability" and potential for violence, which is supposed to justify the massive presence of more than 10,000 US soldiers. This is eerily reminiscent of the media's racist description of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath in New Orleans. The MSM always concludes that people of color who go through a natural disaster resort to looting and violence. Even so-called liberal commentators like Keith Olbermann have expressed fear that aid workers will be at risk in Haiti.

In Haiti, this racist misperception has convinced the US and the UN that soldiers must precede aid workers to ensure their "security." Of course this delays the arrival and scaling up of aid to 3 million people who desperately need it.

Pretty much everybody that Amy speaks with, from a doctor with Partners in Health, to a journalist who's worked in the country for years, to Haitians themselves, describes a rather non-violent scene. In fact, there's some fears there among Haitians and aid workers that the soldiers will provoke violence rather than quell it. All the effort that went into building up a military presence was basically unnecessary.

Meanwhile, the American military, so intent on building up its presence to create the "protection" supposedly required for aid delivery, is turning away aid coming in through the Port-au-Prince airport that it controls. Doctors Without Borders reported having a plane diverted to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, from which it will take a very long time to get to Port-au-Prince over land. A representative of one Haitian aid group has stated that the US military is directly "blocking aid."

The result of militarization of the aid process in Haiti has been delays in the arrival of aid. It has directly cost Haitian lives. Unfortunately it's too late to scale back the military's presence there. Still, at this late hour our military can stop sending away aid planes in favor of continually building up the security presence.

For Haitians, the militarization of aid is even more ominous than the thousands of lives it is costing. They remember the long history of US imperialism in their country and the disastrous consequences. This includes a Marine occupation from 1915 to 1934, support for brutal rightist military dictatorships from the 1950's to the 1980's, CIA-backed coup against elected President Aristide in 1991, the re-installation of Aristide by President Clinton with the condition that he liberalize Haiti's economy, and the CIA-backed coup #2 against Aristide in 2004. These interventions have crushed resurgent democracy and impoverished the country while shunting wealth to the upper classes. Amy interview with journalist Kim Ives excellently delves into this history here, particularly the privatization of the crucial flour, cement, and telecom industries. I also highly suggest the interview with Robert Fatton that I linked to in my last post on Haiti.

My Picks for the NFL Divisional Round

2010-01-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

I didn't have any portentous dreams last night regarding football, perhaps fortunately so. I'm left with mere logic and intuition.

Cardinals v. Saints: Cardinals

My sole upset pick. This is going to be a shootout with two of the best offenses in the league and two mediocre defenses. The Saints were so lackluster the last couple games, and I think that will carry over to this one, while old man Kurt Warner and the Cards are flying high after last week's thrilling win over the Packers (that I got wrong).

Ravens v. Colts: Colts

I'm rooting for the Ravens, but Peyton Manning is so good.

Cowboys v. Vikings: Vikings

Everybody's loving the Cowboys now, but I'm betting on the genius of Brett Favre and Jared Allen getting in Tony Romo's face a few times.

Jets v. Chargers: Chargers

The Jets have the potential to go far with their excellent running game and defense, but they've been pretty inconsistent over the season while the Chargers have been rocksteady running up to the playoffs.

Janet Napolitano Reads Arob's View

2010-01-16T10:23:00.001-08:00

Actually probably not, but she did grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian immigrants yesterday as I called for a few days ago. Now we'll have to see how long that lasts. As I wrote earlier this week, they should've been granted TPS after the 4 hurricanes the country suffered last year but both Bush and Obama rejected the pleas of the Haitian government. It will take years for Haiti to recover from this earthquake much less to recover to its still-desperate situation prior to the hurricanes and food crisis of 2008. In addition, the remittances that Haitian immigrants send home account for more than 25% of the country's GDP and will be crucial for recovery. The deportation of any Haitian would be injurious to the future of that country. TPS must not be rescinded for Haitian immigrants for at least several years. We who support immigrant rights and just Global South development need to be vigilant and watch out for the anti-immigrant Department of Homeland Security rescinding TPS status for Haitians too soon.

So Haitian immigrants are secure from deportation, but there's another hitch. TransAfrica Forum has called out DHS for requiring Haitians to pay $340 for a work permit, which will hamper the ability of immigrants to get a permit and start working to send money back him. Join their call to President Obama to waive that stiff fee here as well as to thank him for granting TPS.

In other Haiti news, the International Monetary Fund has offered a loan of $100 million to Haiti, a move decried by development justice groups like Jubilee USA. How the hell does the IMF expect a country as poor as Haiti to pay that money back when 30-40% of its budget is comprised of foreign aid? Any disaster aid should come in the form of grants not loans. The IMF doesn't do grants, but, fresh from its resurrection in wake of the global financial crisis, it would love to stick its ugly head in every crisis.

Haiti still has $641 million in outstanding debt to foreign nations and international financial institutions like the IMF. Every dollar that goes to servicing the debt is a dollar that could go to education, police, health care, infrastructure, etc. Instead of adding to that debt, these institutions should be canceling it so that the Haitian government can get back on its feet. Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy has noted that President Obama can push for that through his prestige as well as the US's voting seats on the IMF's Board of Directors. As he writes, the IMF mostly defers to the US Treasury, so Obama can manhandle them into canceling Haiti's debt if he so chooses.

Naomi Klein has been warning that the Haiti earthquake crisis is going to be an example of "disaster capitalism" a la the title of her recent book. I think this is somewhat overblown. True, much of the disaster aid will benefit non-profit and for-profit entities even as it goes to help the Haitian people. But that's unavoidable because Haiti's government is so weak and privatized already. Scant basic services were already performed mostly by aid groups before the disaster, so there is very little left to privatize. Professor Robert Fatton, an expert on Haiti at the University of Virginia, characterized Haiti back in 2004 as "probably the most open economy in the world" after US intervention and austerity programs forced by the IMF (check out the whole interview with him, great recent history of Haiti, including events running up to the CIA removing President Aristide in 2004). So even if the IMF convinces Haiti to take its loan, there's not many economic changes it can force on Haiti. I think the biggest thing to worry about is more debt getting in the way of Haiti re-building its government institutions and economy.

There are a couple things we need to watch out for in the coming months. Aid needs to take the form of grants and direct help and not loans. Initially these grants need to go to basics like food, shelter, emergency medical care, etc. Over time the focus must shift to building up the Haitian government. Also aid needs to go to agriculture or the country will persist in a permanent food crisis. As Haiti's markets were forcibly opened up by US and IMF mandate, subsidized US rice put most of Haiti's ag sector out of business. For the past two decades, US policy towards Haiti has been aimed at making it a home for multinational corporation export factories and little else. This is an opportunity to change that policy and help Haiti work for a more balanced and sustainable economy that benefits the broader populace instead of just the elite factory owners and landholders.

The Haitian Tragedy and US Immigration Policy

2010-01-14T13:20:00.000-08:00

The disaster in Haiti is having a big impact in our country as well as Haiti, as we are home to a large population of Haitian immigrants with friends and family back home. Many have been pushed here by other natural disasters, including 4 devastating hurricanes last year, a food security crisis, extreme poverty, and political instability (brought about in part by the US and European countries) in addition to the pull factor of better economic opportunities here and the well-entrenched and supportive Haitian communities in NYC and Florida. My heart goes out to them as they desperately seek word from loved ones in Haiti.

A large number of Haitians have been caught up in the inhumanely aggressive Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeps of undocumented immigrants (Just Foreign Policy says 30,000, not sure where they got that number). These immigrants deserved to remain here even before the earthquake because of the dire situation in their country after the hurricanes. In addition, as the NY Times noted this past May, remittances from Haitian immigrants in the US sent to families back home are crucial to recovery from the hurricanes, providing $1.87 billion in support.

In 2008, Haiti asked the Bush administration to grant what's known as Temporary Protected Status to Haitian immigrants after the hurricanes. This status allows immigrants who can't return to their country because of instability or natural disasters to remain in the US however they arrived here and work legally. In December of 2008, Bush rejected Haiti's request, and the Obama administration continued the Bush policy of deporting undocumented Haitians, despite the fact that the country was still reeling from natural disaster and ensuing food shortage (see above NY Times article).

Thankfully the Obama administration just decided to halt deportations in wake of the earthquake disaster. However, the Miami Herald article on the decision states that in such cases "deportations usually resume as soon as the emergencies end." The emergency in Haiti might end after several months, but it will be years before the country even recovers to the perilous situation it was in before the earthquake. No Haitian-American should be deported for several years until the situation truly improves to pre-hurricane status. Granting TPS to Haitian immigrants must be a component of our response to the tragedy if it is to be thorough and just.

The Haitian-American community and its allies in Congress are putting a ton of pressure on the Obama administration to grant TPS, as the Herald article documents. The NY Times piece from last May suggests that they were pretty close to getting TPS last spring, so there is some hope.

Just Foreign Policy is acting in solidarity with the Haitian-American and immigrant rights communities through an email action alert to President Obama and Congresspeople demanding that they grant TPS to Haitian immigrants. Please add your voice of solidarity here.

Note: I'm working on a longer piece on how US policies towards Haiti have helped cause the instability and poverty there that make the tragedy both more poignant and more difficult to recover from, so stay tuned.

Good Thing I Don't Gamble on Football

2010-01-11T15:07:00.001-08:00

Okay so I was 2-2 for the wild card round, could've been better. The Packers were so close, what a game! Was I not right about Rodgers having poise? The guy is going to go far in the playoffs someday. I'll be back next weekend with more picks, don't you worry.

1) Misinterpreting Dream

Clearly I should have realized that the dream meant that the Bengals would win only if Chris Henry was still alive and switched his jersey number to #80 and Cedric Benson was out with an injury.

Actually don't pick games based on dreams. What I said about the Jets' defense and running game being just was a good playoff team needs, that was right.

2) Underestimating old and young QBs

Mark Sanchez proved himself as the real deal. Kurt Warner showed he's still the real deal.

3) Picking the wrong longhairs to win

I forgot that Larry Fitzgerald of the Cardinals also has long hair, which would've forced me to decide the Packers-Cardinals game on more rational factors.

Dreams of Playoff Outcomes

2010-01-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt that I was watching the Bengals-Jets game from a position floating above the field. My dream predicted a Bengals victory. Although it did predict that an injured Cedric Benson wouldn't be able to play for the Bengals, and he's not injured anymore in reality. I also saw Chris Henry on the field, which is clearly impossible because he died last month (and he was wearing #80, when he actually wore #15). Perhaps my dream is saying that the memory of Henry will be a presence on the field for them and help goad them to victory.

Here's my picks for the wild card games this weekend:

Jets v. Bengals: Bengals

My dream predicted it, enough said.

Actually I don't trust my dream that much, but my rational mind agrees. The Jets do have the ingredients for playoff success: a great running game and a great defense. And they did destroy the Bengals last week in the last game of the regular season, but the Bengals had nothing to play for as they had already won their division. The Jets barely squeaked into the playoffs. They lost to the Bills for God's sake. As a devoted Bills fan, I can honestly say that it took a lot to lose to them this year. Mark Sanchez could be a great quarterback someday, but right now he isn't making big plays and turns over the ball alot. The Bengals on the other hand won a lot of tough games this season and showed a lot of grit in a tough division with the Ravens and defending champion Steelers. If they can put points on the board early, the Jets are toast.

Eagles v. Cowboys: Cowboys

My dad and I have rooted for the Eagles since Donovan McNabb left Syracuse University to play for them. But I can't see them getting past the Cowboys, who beat the Eagles in both of their intra-division matchups this season. I just saw on ESPN that, in playoff games where the opponents faced off twice in the regular season and one team won both, the team that won both is 12-7 historically. The Cowboys beat up the Eagles pretty bad in the last game of the season, in which the Eagles were playing for homefield advantage and a first-round bye in the playoffs. McNabb and his favorite receiver DeSean Jackson had a great season, but the Eagles' running game is weak and their defense looks suspect. The Cowboys on the other hand built up a lot of momentum with a great December run, and they seem to be peaking on both sides of the ball.

Ravens v. Patriots: Ravens

I'm going to buck the odds and take the Ravens here, and not just because, as a Bills fan, I detest the Patriots with a vengeance. Tom Brady's favorite target, Wes Welker, is out with a knee injury sustained in the final game of the season, which will makes things difficult for him in 3rd and 5-7 yard situations where Welker was so key. The Patriots' defense has been vulnerable all year with the loss of key veterans from the Super Bowl teams. I think the dual Ray Rice/Willis McGahee Ravens ground attack will run roughshod all over them.

Green Bay v. Arizona: Green Bay

This one is a toughie, a matchup between two great teams with 2 out of the 3 NFC Pro Bowl quarterbacks between them. Kurt Warner is clutch in the playoffs, plain and simple. But the Packers' Pro Bowl QB Aaron Rodgers was really impressive this season. I caught both of their battles with the Vikings and former Packers' QB Brett Favre, and Rodgers played with such poise even though they lost both. The Packers' defense led by long-haired rookie LB Clay Matthews and veteran CB Charles Woodson is tough as hell. In the end, I have to side with the longhairs.

Eugene Mirman from Copenhagen

2009-12-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

"Would you commit murder?": Copenhagen Time

2009-12-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

Note for the 1(hi baby!)-1000 readers of Arob's View: My posts have been few and far between lately. I just became gainfully employed as a semi-permanent teacher's assistant sub in 6th grade special ed class (might lead to some interesting posts on the state of public education in poor urban areas, we'll see) and I'm applying to law school at the same time. Once the application process is over, hopefully by Christmas pending one more letter of recommendation, regular blogging will resume, probably more than normal. Between Copenhagen obstruction and the Afghanistan escalation I have a lot to comment on (and obviously critique)!

It's Copenhagen time, folks. What goes down in the next couple days or so will go a long way toward deciding how devastating global warming will be, and how much rich countries will help out the poor ones (especially in Africa and the small island states) that will bear the worst impacts.

It's ridiculous how little the American media is covering Copenhagen. Only the fate of millions of people and the capability of our planet to support life is at risk! Even the liberal blogosphere has been pretty mum on the subject.

Fortunately a few outlets have stepped up. The Nation magazine (a fine magazine by the way) has a couple journalists there posting updates on their Copenhagen blog here, including the great Naomi Klein. The Nation is cooperating with the Grist online environmental magazine, Mother Jones, and several other outlets in the Copenhagen News Feed, which you can see on the right side of The Nation's page.

Also the left-oriented Democracy Now! radio and TV show is broadcasting live from Copenhagen this week and last week. It's a great show hosted by Amy Goodman that runs on public television and radio across the country. She's getting some exclusive scoops from inside the conference, particularly from the climate justice perspective. So far I've enjoyed interviews with: Nmimo Bassey, the legendary head of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria (affiliated with Friends of the Earth International), the new leader of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo (known for anti-apartheid activism in his home country of South Africa), Gw'ichin representative Sarah James from Alaska, and even Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. It's clear how the climate fights is more and more about JUSTICE for the Global South, and I think the presence of so many anti-apartheid activists fighting in Copenhagen like Naidoo, the Archbishop, and even Nelson Mandela is illustrative of that phenomenon.

However awesome those interviews were, I most enjoyed Amy's interview of the 15 year-old youth representative from the Maldives (a Pacific island state), Mohamed Axam Maumoon, which I included at the top of this post. It's easy to be pessimistic about the climate talks. Especially coming from the Maldives, which will probably be under water before we realize how bad we've fucked with the global climate. He points out, as I quote in the title of this post, that allowing the climate tragedy to happen with at least partial knowledge amounts to murder of the people and cultures that will die as a result. Still, this young lad's spirits are high. He's so pumped about the youth summit and pleading his case to even the PM of Denmark. We in the US need to duplicate his resolve and match it with his realistic view of how drastically we need to change our energy productions systems to stave off disaster.

Let me give you the Cliff's Notes of Copenhagen from a US perspective for those who haven't been following: despite a new president, the US is still obstructing the talks. Not only are our emissions reductions goals for 2020 pathetically low, but our offer for climate aid to the Global South is ridiculously scanty. Let me be clear: the Obama administration does not get climate. They don't get how huge a problem is and they still won't acknowledge the massive climate debt we owe to the most impacted countries. 2008 Obama supporters need to wake up and realize that better than Bush is not sufficient on climate! (It's not sufficient on a plethora of issues, but I'll save that for another day).

Fortunately, the poor countries are fighting back as an organized bloc. We in the developed world, especially in our country, need to support them. I encourage you to get on the list of 350.org, Friends of the Earth US, and Friends of the Earth International and pepper the hell out of the administration with emails and calls on the climate talks. The message is clear: less emissions, more aid for developing countries!

The Freedom To Know That Charles Is Not In Charge

2009-11-29T14:11:00.001-08:00

If you've ever seen the Chapelle Show, you probably know who Paul Mooney is, but you might not know his background. A brilliant standup comic on his own, he also wrote material for Richard Pryor and a number of tv shows, as well as shepherding several other standup comedians to fame. He is notorious for pulling no punches.

As I was driving back from New York last weekend I caught Paul Mooney's appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show (yeah public radio!) discussing his life and his new book, Black Is The New White, which according to Paul "white people are going to buy to burn in their fireplace." He touches on Pryor, Cosby, deciding to become a comedian, being notorious, race, and what it means to be free. Tavis includes great clips from both Pryor and Mooney. Check out the segment here. Let me give you some choice quotes to entice you to listen.

Paul on white appropriation of black entertainers:

"They caught on because our race caught on...If we go to like something, they study us. That's why they bring things into the ghetto to find what's going on. Cause we're the most cleverest people in the world. We survived slavery. We're still here."

Mooney on freedom:

"The freedom to not be afraid. The freedom to know that Charles is not in charge. The freedom to know that as a black male that I come from the land of kings and queens. And the freedom to know that Queen Elizabeth is not all that."

Near the end, he makes a great note about slavery. He reminds us, as Marx does, that capital owned by white people today is built on capital accumulated in the past, including in the time of slavery in our nation.

So whattt?!: Quick but great interview with Rick James

2009-11-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Bagram=Obama's Gitmo

2009-11-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

"If I deserve imprisonment, then imprison me. If not, let me go free." -Abdul Raqeeb in above video

This is a great interview. Note not only the extreme abuse of their human rights, but also the impact it has on the perception of the occupation. No wonder so many Afghans want us out!

Theoretically speaking, could the occupation take a more benevolent form without unjustified home invasions and indefinite detention without habeas corpus? Yes but you'd have to be naive as hell to think that would happen (remember when Rummy talked about winning hearts and minds?). This attitude toward the occupied people is part-and-parcel of American counterinsurgency efforts there. Given Obama's record so far on war and civil liberties, I think we can expect more of the same.

Glenn Greenwald notes in yet another great post that Bagram is also home to rendered terror suspects from other countries. It is clear now that the closing of Guantanamo is a big deal symbolically, but doesn't represent a huge change in policy. Bagram performs the same function that Gitmo did except with less scrutiny because it's way off in Afghanistan and exists under a president who is supposed to be a big civil liberties supporter.

Here's Glenn's summary of recent events:

"So, to recap: we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus. These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own."

We're closing in on a year of Obama's presidency. He is now responsible for these assaults on the rule of law, transparency, and human rights as much as Bush was. We need to join Glenn and others in criticizing these policies with the same vehemence we excorciated Bush's.

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Show Trial

2009-11-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

If you thought the Obama administration deserves credit for trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 5 other terrorist in a NYC civilian court, think again. Glenn Greenwald savages Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama for the hypocrisy of trying 5 people in civilian court while deciding to try others in military commissions and detain others indefinitely (75 of them to be exact) (read the whole piece). He also points out that their refusal to put all the detainees into the civilian justice system handicaps their argument against conservatives who want KSM tried before a military comission (which of course would be a kangaroo court).

Once you endorse the notion that the Government has the right to imprison people not captured on any battlefield without giving them trials -- as the Obama administration is doing explicitly and implicitly -- what convincing rationale can anyone offer to justify giving Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants a real trial in New York? If you're taking the position that military commissions and even indefinite detention are perfectly legitimate tools to imprison people -- as Holder has done -- then what is the answer to the Right's objections that Mohammed himself belongs in a military commission? If the administration believes Omar Khadr belongs in a military commission, and if they believe others can be held indefinitely without any charges, why isn't that true of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? By denying jury trials to a large number of detainees, Obama officials have completely gutted their own case for why they did the right thing in giving Mohammed a trial in New York.

Basically the system is rigged so that the Justice Department can choose the venue in which to try terrorism suspects by where they're most likely to win.

Does that remotely sound like a "justice system"? If you're accused of being a Terrorist, there's not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based on ensuring that it will win.

That's not fair, nor will it convince anyone in other Western countries or the Muslim world that we're really respecting human rights and civil liberties. (Glenn has another great recent post on how respecting civil liberties pulls the rug out from under terrorist recruitment in the Middle East.)

On top of that inconsistency, Holder told Congress that even if the terrorists are acquitted, the government reserves the right to continue to detain them indefinitely. That sounds like a show trial to me.

Here's Glenn's conclusion that I agree wholeheartedly with:

It's just another case of the administration wanting to bask in the rhetorical glory of "the rule of law" while simultaneously trampling on it for petty political convenience.

The President has outlawed torture and begun closing Guantanamo Bay, but rendition, restricted habeas corpus, indefinite detention, and military commissions go on. Even the staunchest defenders of Obama would have to agree that this former constitutional lawyer has fallen well short of expectations as well as campaign promises in this arena. Outside of torture, which granted is a big deal, what his treatment of terrorism suspects isn't that different from Bush's.

Footnote: Check out Glenn's blog every couple days, always something good there. He, Jeremy Scahill (rebelreports.com and The Nation), and my man Bill Moyers are the cream of the crop in independent journalism on the Left right now. Glenn is one of the foremost civil liberties defenders out there. He also does great work on drug reform, working for a less imperialistic American foreign policy, and criticizing the mainstream media. Unlike some liberals, he's holding Obama to the fire for doing the same things that Bush did.

Conn Hallinan: "Why the Afghan Surge Will Fail"

2009-11-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

Lately we've been hearing a lot in the news about the war in Afghanistan, but very little about how that war is fought on the ground. Oh yes, we've seen the reports of the "surge" troops "clearing and holding" towns, "protecting the population," and other bullshit catchphrases that the media takes directly from the military PR staff without commentary. Up until now, I haven't read or seen much about how the American military is specifically taking on the Taliban as it "clears and holds." Conn Hallinan paints that picture in a great article for Foreign Policy in Focus, and it ain't pretty.

He describes a Marine unit's incursion in the 2,000-person town of Zananeh in the southern Helmand province. They enter the town and are soon attacked by the Taliban, who were tipped off by the villagers. The opposing forces battle for a few days after which the Taliban sneaks back out of town. The Marines end up with a "cleared" and shot-up village with 12 dead insurgents, who as Hallinan points out probably weren't all insurgents.

What's really striking is our military's detachment from reality. To begin with, they think the town is crucial even though it's one of thousands of similar sized villages across the countryside. They think they've interfered with Taliban operations, when in fact the Taliban are very comfortable retreating to the countryside, which has been their modus operandi since the Soviet invasion and even farther back.

In short, the insurgency is adjusting. "To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army's Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments," writesKaren DeYoung in The Washington Post.
Actually, the Afghans have been doing that for some time, as Greeks, Mongols, British, and Russians discovered.
One Pentagon officer told the Post that the Taliban has been using the Korengal Valley that borders Pakistan as a training ground. It's "a perfect lab to vet fighters and study U.S. tactics," he said, and to learn how to gauge the response time for U.S. artillery, air strikes, and helicopter assaults. "They know exactly how long it takes before...they have to break contact and pull back."

I usually argue against the war on 1) the strategic basis that it won't protect us from terrorism and could likely cause more terrorism 2) the economic basis that we desperately need the funds for job programs at home and c) moral basis that we're killing and maiming tens of thousands of innocent Afghans as well as our own men and women. But I think the argument that the war is unlikely to be won is a powerful one, especially for those who don't agree with the above 3 points.

Here's some questions the Obama administration (who has already added 20,000 troops plus replaced 13,000 supply soldiers with combat soldiers through outsourcing) and the pro-escalation crowd should answer but likely won't except with catchprases from "counterinsurgency doctrine" and references to the 2007 surge in Iraq:

1) Callinan writes that the military's counterinsurgency manual advises a ratio of 20 troops for every 1,000 civilians. By their own logic, we would need 600,000 soldiers. How do they intend to win without enough troops? (see the part of Callinan's article on problems with building up Afghan forces)

2) How does protecting the cities make sense when only 10% of Afghans live in cities? How does it make sense when the Taliban seems to prefer the countryside to urban battlefields?

3) What does "protecting the populace" mean when that populace often informs the Taliban about our troop movements and the intended act of protection leads to ambush?

4) How can we rout the Taliban when they can slip easily into the forests and mountains where our troops rarely go?

5) What does it mean to defeat the Taliban? What quantitative and qualitative benchmarks are there to show that we are gaining the upper hand with them? What does gaining the upper hand even mean in asymmetrical warfare?

6) Finally can our military wage counterinsurgency war when it seems so ill-suited for it? This runs the gamut from vehicles to personal equipment to soldier training to the strategic abilities of our generals.

I urge you to read Hallinan's article in its entirety; he breaks things down very well. Our politicians who are for the escalation and even those who think keeping current troop levels is a good idea need to think critically: can we defeat the Taliban in some meaningful way? If so, how? Whether yay or nay, the burden is on them to do so.

Autechre: Nine

2009-11-13T15:03:00.000-08:00

China Getting Serious About Carbon While US Dithers

2009-11-13T07:48:00.000-08:00

In a Financial Times piece yesterday, Gordon Conway summarizes the findings of the task force working on the energy-related aspects of China's next 5 year plan:

The report is to be presented to CCICED in Beijing on Thursday and to Premier Wen Jiabao on Friday. The proposals are partly based on a set of energy demand scenarios produced by the Chinese Energy Research Institute. One adopts a continuation of current trends that will result in the production of nearly 13bn tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050. A second, produced as a “low-carbon scenario”, reduces emissions to nearly 9bn tonnes. A third, more radical “enhanced low-carbon” scenario would produce peak emissions around 2025, reducing to 5bn tonnes by 2050.

It looks like China is moving toward a very serious approach of "decoupling" economic growth from carbon emissions, led by the public rather than the private sector. It has broader carbon goals, like reducing carbon emissions per unit GDP 20-23% over 2010-2015, but also the specific goals of how to go there through energy efficiency and low-carbon energy sources:

The Chinese plan is to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 75-85 per cent by 2050. It will be achieved through industrial restructuring and efficiency gains in every economic sector, including new low-carbon cities that avoid suburban sprawl and prioritise public transport.

and

The energy mix will progressively change. In the medium term there will be an increase in renewable energy and nuclear power, with 50 per cent of generating capacity coming from low-carbon sources by 2030. By 2050 all new power sources will be low carbon.

Of course it's still not clear which approach Premier Jiabao will take, and there's a big difference between 13 billion tons, almost twice their current emissions, and 5 billion tons, significantly below current US and Chinese emissions. Still, some snippets in the article from Conway, who worked on the report, suggest that they are leaning towards more ambitious approaches because they understand the economic value of decarbonization.

He says that China worries about being locked into outmoded industrial structures in a low-carbon world (perhaps also about being hit by carbon tariffs from developed countries). Furthermore, they recognize that clean energy technologies will drive growth in the first half of the 21st century, as Tom Friedman writes over and over and over albeit correctly. China's government is obsessed with growth because that's what maintains stability under their authoritarian regime, and they may favor a crash investment in decarbonization as a means of creating growth.

What significance does this have for the US? It bodes very well for international climate negotiations, yet it puts pressure on us to stop holding back. We can't point the finger at the growing developing nations any more, as the Obama administration continues to do. Even though China is not responsible for the historical emissions causing current warming, they're taking aggressive steps to slow their emissions growth because they are worried about climate change and understand the economic potential of clean energy. The burden is on the US to speed up our emissions reductions and get more ambitious as the EU has. If Copenhagen fails, it will now be because of the US, not China.

Secondly, it shows that a government-planned and government-led program on carbon emissions may be the best approach to tackle such an urgent problem as climate change. We'll have to wait and see if their plan works. But, as our mobilization for World War II demonstrated, a Keynesian and/or socialist approach of public investment and public ownership of parts of the energy sector can create the leverage to exert fast transformations in an economy.

That's not to say that market approaches to pollution don't work. Cap-and-trade worked in the 90's in reducing acid rain-causing SO2 emissions. The ETS, or European Trading System, has helped the EU be on track to hit its Kyoto targets (see Joe Romm's Climate Progress post here). However, market approaches can easily be filled with loopholes that limit their effect, as the Waxman-Markey bill that passed out of the House this summer shows. A direct investment approach such as China's seems better suited to rapid transformation.

The planet needs a more aggressive approach from the United States government, and so does our moribund economy.

The Berlin Wall and the Palestine Wall

2009-11-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall divided a nation. It was a tangible manifestation of the global split between capitalism and communism that nearly led to a nuclear war. We should celebrate its fall along with the Germans, and be thankful that our foolishness as well as that of the Soviet Union didn't kill us all.

Francis Fukuyama said the fall of Communism marked the "end of history." He was wrong. Violent symbols of conflict like the Berlin Wall still exist, in tangible as well as symbolic form.

Israel has built a similar wall through the West Bank. Along with settlements, it is part of Israel's colonial project to annex parts of the West Bank. As Robert Naiman notes in a great post on the Just Foreign Policy blog, 85% of the wall lies within the West Bank and outside the internationally accepted borders of Israel. It cuts off 9.5% of the West Bank and 35,000 Palestinians from the rest of their territory. The wall has been condemned by the World Court and even Israel's High Court.

Friends of Freedom and Justice Binin, a Palestinian activist group in the town of Bilin along the wall, excellently documents the confiscation and repression that the wall engenders on their website. Yesterday a number of Biliners marked the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by protesting at the Israeli wall and actually ripping down a part of it as Berliners did to theirs. Check out the video below. As you can see near the end, the Israelis respond rather violently.

Definitely read the whole of Naiman's post. He notes that the US and EU have done nothing to stop the wall as we provide massive foreign aid to Israel. Commendable calls on Israel to stop building new settlements on Palestinian territory have not been backed up with action. Naiman notes:

We've reached this point in large measure because of the unwillingness of the Obama Administration to put real pressure on the Israeli government to implement past agreements - in particular, to implement a freeze on the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. When the first President Bush demanded a settlement freeze, he backed up his demand with real pressure - holding up loan guarantees to Israel. The Obama Administration never indicated that there was any "or else" associated with its demand for a settlement freeze, leading the Netanyahu government to conclude that it could just wait the Obama Administration out - a conclusion that appears to have been borne out by events.

In other news on Obama's failure to back up rhetoric with real change in our foreign policy: the New York Times reports that the Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to resign as head of the Palestinian Authority. He believes, I think correctly, that the peace process is completely untenable in the wake of the Obama administration "backpedaling" on its call on Israel to halt new settlement construction in Palestinian territory. Doesn't sound like change to me, Mr. Obama.

Note: Just Foreign Policy does some great work on pushing our government for a more peaceful foreign policy that is fairer to the people of the Global South. Check out their website and sign up for their action list. For subscribers they send out a daily compilation of pertinent news stories on American foreign policy; it's a great way to stay in the loop.

Obama and the Mayoral Race in NYC

2009-11-05T13:39:00.000-08:00

If you haven't heard, the mayoral race in NYC ended up being extremely close with independent incumbent Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire, defeating Democrat William C. Thompson Jr. by just 51-46. The mainstream media reported widely on how this was a surprise, because Bloomberg had a good approval rating and spent $90 million on the campaign. Most reported on how that absurdly high level of campaign spending and his repeal of the term limits law to stay in power pushed a lot of voters over to Thompson. Very few, however, reported on how the national Democratic party failed to get behind Thompson. That refusal to get their hands dirty in the NYC race demonstrates a lot about the centrist and even right economic beliefs of Obama and the national Democratic leadership.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a great post on his blog (btw, great blog if you're into civil liberties, antiwar, and media issues) the other day on the tiff between Rep. Anthony Weiner and the administration on this matter. Weiner publicly criticized the President for spending resources to support Gov. Corzine in NJ but not doing the same for Thompson. The Politico reporter allowed a White House aide to respond anonymously, childishly taunting Weiner for deciding not to run for mayor himself.

Glenn focused on so many mainstream media outlets allow Obama aides to comment anonymously. Frequently they use that anonymity to bash those on the left in his own party who criticize him for being such a centrist. He also notes the irony of American media criticizing left-wing leaders in Latin America who change term limits laws to extend their terms and failing to do so in the case of right-winger Uribe in Colombia and Bloomberg.

I think it also says a lot about the Obama administration's stance on political economy. The refusal to campaign for Thompson suggests some level of comfort with Bloomberg on the part of Obama. Bloomberg is a social liberal and is great on environmental issues. However, on economic issues, which a mayor has much more control over than social issues, he is quite conservative. As this Nation article states, Bloomberg opposes a living wage ordinance, favors regressive taxes like the sales tax instead over the progressive income tax, and consistenly favors big developers and big finance. He presides over a higher than average unemployment level while manufacturing has sunk to just 2% of the city's economy. The Nation article predicted a Thompson loss because of his failure to present an alternative economic vision for the city, which I think is right.

The Working Families party, which does have that vision, endorsed Thompson, which suggests that he would be far better on these issues, even if he didn't make them the centerpiece of his campaign. What if Obama had come to NYC and campaigned briefly for Thompson every time he was in the area to do so for Corzine? New Yorkers love Obama; he might have allowed Thompson to close the gap.

The fact that he didn't suggests that Bloomberg's economic policies are just fine with him. It reinforces that Obama is a centrist, not a progressive. He espouses a mostly Keynesian view of debt-funded public investment during recessions with some programs to protect the poor and middle classes and the environment (typically weak ones), but has no intention of reducing the massive socio-economic gap in our country between the super-rich and everyone else.

Bloomberg is a symbol of American finance, as that's where he made his fortune. The Democrats' comfort with him is a symptom of their closeness to Wall Street. Let's not forget that the mildly liberal Corzine, whom Obama backed strongly, is a Goldman Sachs alum. Those of us who want a fair economy need to stop supporting the Democrats without strings attached, because it's not getting us very far.

LTJ Bukem

2009-11-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

I've never blogged about music before, but I love music, ergo I will henceforth. Recently I've been really getting into drum'n'bass music. If you haven't heard of it, it's a form of electronic music with super fast and heavy beats and pretty spare bass and keyboards. I love dem BPMs! Ha my girlfriend hates when I play it because it makes her anxious, but I love the energy in this music.

LTJ Bukem is a great producer from the UK who's huge in d'n'b. To the speedy beats and heavy bass he adds some great 70's jazz fusionish electric keyboards. Lots of BPMs, but really spacey at the same time. Check the song out below, it's one of his early tunes from the early 90's.

Krugman: We need more stimulus!

2009-11-02T17:02:00.001-08:00

In the 3rd quarter of this year, our economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.5%. Good news?: yes. Is everything all better?: definitely not. A lot of economists are predicting a so-called "jobless recovery." On top of that, it's entirely possible that reduced demand from unemployment and a continuing credit crunch might drag our economy back down. Our government has a lot more work to do to fix the economy.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has been calling for more and more effective (ie. less tax cuts, more direct spending) stimulus in his NY Times column for a long time. His column today continues that motif and lays out an excellent case for more economic stimulus.

He writes that the growth numbers show that the stimulus is working. That spending will continue to go out over the next year and a half. However, the rate at which it is going out, and thus its effect on growth, is currently peaking, meaning that the stimulus won't continue to increase growth. If that rate of growth is going to continue, private spending will need to increase as the stimulus tapers off by the end of 2010. Krugman doesn't see that happening.

On top of that, even if growth continues, it will take an unacceptably long time to put a dent in unemployment. Krugman points out that our 3.5% annualized GDP growth rate in the 3rd quarter is roughly the same as annual growth during the Clinton administration, very interesting. If job creation proceeds as it did at that growth rate in the 90's, it would take a decade to get to "something like full employment."

So it's clear that we need more stimulus, despite the huge deficit resulting from Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, the creation of Medicare Part D, and immoral and unnecessary wars. The deficit hawks on the right and left worry that our debt-fueled stimulus will present a big debt burden in the form of higher taxes to the next generation of Americans. As Krugman writes, that generation, my generation, is feeling unemployment the most (yes I am one of them). Krugman's colleague Bob Herbert at the Times had a great column on that subject on Saturday. High unemployment will be a huge drag on our generation for an extended period of time, not just directly through unemployment but also through unemployment hampering growth.

That argument alone trumps the deficit hawks' weak arguments. However, he adds something I hadn't thought of:

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

It almost echoes the supply-side argument of the Reganites except in reverse. And except that it actually makes sense.

So will the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress push for more deficit spending to fuel stronger re-growth in our economy? Right now they're patting themselves on the back for how the stimulus worked, and they should. However, they need to move forward on job creation, and currently it doesn't look they will.

In the meantime, they seem perfectly willing to borrow money to continue a war in Afghanistan. Sounds like they got their priorities straight, huh?

Paying for health care reform: Why it matters big time

2009-10-02T13:07:00.001-07:00

As Bill Moyers said, health care reform is a means to social justice. Getting almost universal coverage and bringing down costs for working families is crucial not just because health care is a human right, but also because the middle class livelihood is becoming untenable for more and more families in America. The gap between the wealthy and everyone else has grown by leaps and bounds since the Reagan years. Reducing what working families pay for health care makes the middle class accessible to more people and makes it more secure for those already there.

Back in August, I laid out the three fundamental goals of health care reform that we need to keep our eye on. But there's also principles for going about health care reform that are important as well. Unlike the goals, these are more subjective and vary a lot from person to person. An example of a health reform principle: a lot of pundits from the center-left and the right have been crowing about increasing competition, a panacea for these free marketeers. Competition doesn't necessarily reduce costs or expand coverage (it actually expands them, but that's not my point here), so it doesn't have anything to do with the goals of reform, but it's how these people want to go about reform. The principles of reform are different from the goals in that they mostly deal with how to reach those goals.

One important principle for those of us who see health care as a means to social justice is paying for expanding health care coverage in a progressive way. This means that the funding for health care reform ensures that reform overall transfers wealth downward. Expanding coverage and lowering cost will benefit working families, but if we pay for that by taxing working families then it might not benefit them overall economically.

The mandate-and-subsidies approach that the Congressional Democrats have taken to health care reform won't reduce health costs very much as I've written earlier. Nothing will change for workers who get coverage from their employers, and the un-insured will have to pay more than they did before because of the individual mandate. As such, if Congress chooses to pay for the subsidies by taxing the middle class, it may actually increase overall costs for working class families. Given that the idea behind goal #2 of reform is to make health care less of a cost burden on working families, the principle of paying for reform progressively becomes elevated to a goal and a must under the mandate-and-subsidies approach.

House Democrats proposed to pay for their bill, HR 3200, by creating a surtax on the wealthy. This is the preferred approach. The wealthy have benefited so much from the Bush tax cut and our general economic policy of the last 30 years, so it's only just that they pay to cover the un-insured. The House has also discussed taxing sugary drinks as well. Although this is a regressive tax, I would find it acceptable if paired with a surtax on the wealthy because it would improve our nation's health and lower health care costs overall.

President Obama proposed to pay for reform by limiting tax deductions for the wealthy. This would also be a satisfactory approach because it would rely on funding coming from the rich, although it seems unlikely to be included in the final health care bill.

In the Senate only the Finance Committee has the jurisdiction over taxes. The bill currently in that committee, proposed by its chairman Max Baucus, would fund the subsidies by taxing so-called "Cadillac" health care benefits over a certain amount at 35%. The NY Times ran a great article today that this tax would hit middle class union workers who negotiated for better health benefits instead of higher wages, small businesses that typically have more expensive plans, and people who live in areas with high health care costs like California and Massachusetts, despite being designed to tax the benefits of the wealthy. The threshold is indexed to inflation, so over time most employer-based coverage would be hit by the tax. The Baucus bill would also place $88 billion in taxes on insurance companies, drug companies, labs, and device makers. As Maggie Mahar writes on her excellent blog, most people think these taxes will simply be passed on to consumers in higher premiums. On top of those taxes on working families, the bill would limit tax deductions for medical expenses. The committee amended that approach because it would hit the elderly very hard, but it still remains in the bill for everyone else, and it will mostly hit the middle class as well.

Unfortunately the Baucus bill seems to be the most likely to win over the conservative and moderate Democrats needed to pass any bill. So there's a decent chance that health care reform will be funded in large part on the backs of the working families that it's supposed to help.

Because Congress's approach does little to reduce overall health care costs, it has to be funded by taxes on the wealthy to truly benefit most Americans. Our progressive members of Congress need to stand firm against the Baucus bill and any other plan that would tax the middle class to pay for itself, especially if like the Baucus bill it does not contain a public option to hold down costs. It would be better to put off reform than make the middle class pay even more.

Note: How to pay for reform would be important in a single-payer bill as well, but it would be a principle instead of a goal. That's because single-payer would save so much in health care costs that even if we taxed everybody at a flat rate to pay for it, all working class families would be better off than they are now. Obviously those of us who want a more just society would want the tax to fund single-payer to be progressive, but it wouldn't be as necessary as with the mandate-and-subsidies approach.

HR 676 would pay for itself partially through flat payroll taxes on employees, but also a payroll tax on employers, a 1/3 of 1% stock transaction tax, a surtax on the wealthy, and closing corporate tax loopholes. It satisfies my principle and all 3 health reform goals, which is why Congressional leaders should push it instead any mandate-and-subsidies bill.

Sekoff v. Simmons on the Ed Show last night

2009-09-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

The fight over the public option has forced the Democrats to show their true colors. It has become easy to distinguish principled progressives fighting for a fairer economy from corporate Democrats eager for more campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy. This has been true not only for Democrats in Congress and the President (we know where he and Rahm stand), but also for liberal advocacy groups and media figures. The Ed Show last night demonstrated this difference so clearly in a transition between two segments.

In the first, Ed spoke with Roy Sekoff from Huffington Post. Sekoff criticized the President for caving on the public option and favoring the Baucus bill. He urged Obama to forget about the Republicans and "bring out the brass knuckles" on conservatives in his own party, pointing out that the President sure wasn't afraid to tell Gov. Paterson to go. Finally he raised the excellent point that if we pass weak reform that is ineffectual and costly it will only make more people think that government can't solve problems. As I wrote here, a bill that takes the mandates-and-subsidies approach without a public option won't cover everyone, won't bring down costs, and thus won't be sustainable long-term, leading to Sekoff's scenario.

The segment that followed was a discussion by 3 media figures on a couple issues (see transcript here). One of the figures was Jamal Simmons, a "Democratic consultant." Ed asks Simmons if a public option trigger would be acceptable, and Simmons gives an unequivocal yes. Simmons says, "It's competition. It's affordability." Isn't that what the public option brings? Simmons thinks we should "give the private market a chance." Wait, this guy is a Democratic consultant? Last I heard the private insurance market led to health care costs twice as high as other industrialized countries and left tens of millions without coverage. It's enough of a compromise that the Democrats are allowing the insurance companies to continue to exist.

Simmons is deeply concerned about Democratic seats in red states. He thinks a failure to pass health care reform will cause those Dems, many of them Blue Dogs, to lose their seats. However, polls in a couple of these states show that a plurality of swing staters favor the public option, as a plurality of Americans do. The right-wingers are going to call health care reform a government take-over, public option or no, so they'll lambast conservative Dems who vote for legislation either way. Why not push the Blue Dogs to play ball and get a decent bill instead of a shite one that is a handout to insurance industry?

Simmons is one of these tepid liberals who thinks that the Democrats need to pass something, anything to avoid the debacle of 1994 in which the Republicans gained a stranglehold on Congress after the failure of health care reform. Phoenix Woman points out at Firedoglake that the losses of 1994 had as much to do with the demoralization of the Democratic base after NAFTA as failure on health care reform. Progressives aren't excited to get out and vote for Democrats if the Democrats fail to pass meaningful reforms. If Democrats can't pass health care reform this time because conservative Democrats oppose the public option, they can blame it on the Republicans and do just fine in 2010 because their base will still be with them. I wouldn't be too concerned if some of the Blue Dogs lost their primaries along the way.

It's become clear that the 1994 argument is code-speak for concern that progressive reforms will stem the flow of corporate campaign contributions to Democratic coffers. The reason why Blue Dogs and members of the Democratic Leadership Council are so coveted by Democratic party leaders is because they are the most successful at raking in contributions from the insurance companies, coal companies, and the like. But the problem is more than the Blue Dogs. It pervades the party's power structure. We continue to have these DLCers and moderates running the show: Clinton, Obama, Reid, Hoyer, Emanuel, etc. etc. The face of the Democratic party is consultants like Simmons instead of the middle class Americans that supply most of the votes.

I look at the differences between Democrats and Republicans, and wish that the Democrats' base acted more like the Republicans' base. The right wing demands that Republicans pay homage to them and be uncompromising with the left. Obviously this has hurt their party lately as the Republicans associate themselves more and more with the birthers, bigots, and anti-science crowd. However, I don't think the same would happen for the Democrats because progressives aren't so nutty. If the Democrats had a strong base that forced the Democrats to the left, what would the opposition say? That the Democrats are moving us to socialism. Only the Republicans' base will buy that crap, especially as the country's demographics change. In addition, a more progressive Democratic party would pass stronger reform legislation that could show more Americans that government can do things well, and that it should.

I'm tired of listening to "consultants" say why the Democrats should cave to monied interest again and again. I'm tired of liberal advocacy groups saying that we need to "support the President." What's the point in electing Democrats if they never pass real reform? Down with the consultants, up with the base!

Public Option or Bust!!!!!

2009-09-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

I outlined HR 3200 the other day. The bill has some serious deficiencies in several different areas, but it has turned out to be far better than the Sen. Baucus's bill that the Senate Finance Committee is poised to take up. The biggest difference between the two bills is that HR 3200 has a public option and the Baucus bill does not. Let's take a look at why the public option is so important, and is an absolute necessity for this approach to health reform.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that single-payer is the most efficient approach to universal coverage. HR 3200's biggest deficiency is simply that isn't single-payer: it doesn't get rid of the private insurance companies that take a piece of the action for their Wall Street investors on every transaction. Instead it uses mandates, an expansion of a Medicaid, and subsidies to get us to universal coverage.

The bill will only leave 3% of Americans without insurance, which wouldn't happen under single-payer, but it's way better than 20%. So it does pretty well in terms of goal 1 and thus goal 3 of health care reform. However, it doesn't do too well in goal 2. Outside of important reforms in Medicare, the bill does very little to drive down costs except with the public option. With private insurance companies still covering most Americans, the plan doesn't get rid of their incentives that drive up costs so much, profits and competition.

The consumer reforms in the bill to prevent under-insurance are great. They would put a big dent in the incidence of medical bankruptcy. But they probably won't save money overall. They will force insurers to pay for their sick clients' coverage, but those costs could easily be passed on to everyone in higher premiums.

Expanding insurance coverage increases health care costs simply because more people are getting health care. Proponents of the mandates-and-subsidies approach claim that prevention of illness by expanding coverage will bring down costs because people will be healthier. However, most studies indicate that preventive care, although it is crucial for having a healthier society, does not reduce costs and probably increases them (see this PNHP blog post).

The bill uses an "exchange" where individual and small businesses can go to shop for insurance plans. This actually does bring down costs a bit because insurance companies don't have to spend as much on marketing, but the savings are small compared to the cost of expanding coverage. Giving people subsidies to buy insurance on the exchange is great in terms of affordability for low and middle-income families, but it encourages private insurance companies to keep premiums high with the bill going to taxpayers. Not very efficient, except one provision in the bill that reins in these bad incentives.

The public option! It's another plan consumers can buy on the exchange, run by the government as a non-profit entity, but otherwise similar to any other insurance plan. With lower administrative costs and the ability to charge Medicare rates to providers, it will be able to offer low premiums. The CBO estimates that the bill will cover 10 to 11 million Americans, so it will bring down costs in that way alone. On top of that, it will force private plans on the exchange to offer lower premiums if they want to compete.

A public plan with 10 million Americans is disappointingly small, but it could still save a lot of money. The Commonwealth Fund found that having a public plan paying at Medicare rates on the exchange would save $265 billion in administrative costs over ten years, whereas expanding coverage with just an exchange would increase costs by $32 billion. While $265 billion over ten years is less than the $400 billion in administrative costs single-payer would save in one year, it's not chump change.

Requiring individuals to buy insurance without a public option is a big handout to insurance companies: it gives them tens of millions more customers with consumers and taxpayers together paying $297 billion more over 10 years than they would otherwise! If the subsidies aren't high enough, people won't be able to afford coverage. It would be highly unsustainable over time and lead policymakers to a difficult choice: pay ever-higher subsidies that would pad the profits of insurance companies, or force working families to pay more and leave some unable to afford insurance. The mandate-and-subsidize approach is inherently inefficient, and it needs a public option for it to work for consumers and taxpayers in the long run.

If the Democrats drop the public option because moderates don't like it, progressives should vote against the bill because it would be so inefficient that it would basically amount to corporate welfare for the insurance companies. Conservative Democrats have been threatening to vote against health care reform because they don't like the public option and the cost of the bill (HA I guess they don't see the inconsistency there!). If progressives stand strong for the public option, it forces the Congressional leadership and the White House to play hardball with the centrists if they want the votes for health care reform.

According to polls, 77% of Americans support the public option, so the Democrats don't have any excuse as the majority party in both chambers of Congress, whether they come from a blue state or a red state. Last I heard this was a democracy. Is it too much to ask for Democrats to do what 77% of Americans want?!!!!!

Ppm, shmeepm: clearer language in global warming advocacy

2009-09-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

During the August recess, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth organized a coalition of more than 300 groups that signed on to a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer and the US Senate as a whole. The letter urges the Senate to pass global warming legislation stronger than the American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed out of the House this summer. The effort has garnered a respectable amount of press coverage, and fills a crucial vacuum. ACES was a terribly compromised bill that won't reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by very much and is riddled with loopholes and corporate giveaways. A lot of the mainstream environmental groups either let the compromising happen without a peep or actively encouraged it. It's nice to see some groups with a back bone!

I think what CBD and FOE are doing is excellent, from an organizing perspective. Their coalition is big, and it comprises more than just environmentally focused groups. Through their press attention, they are starting to create the notion that environmentalists are disappointed in the efforts of Congressional Democrats and to a lesser extent President Obama on global warming. We need to push back hard against moderate Dems who are in the pocket of the coal and oil industries! However, I think the vague manner in which they refer to climate science makes their efforts less effective than they could be, specifically in how they invoke the 350 ppm target of Dr. James Hansen.

The most important thing to improve in climate legislation is emissions targets, and the letter rightly starts there. It says, "The Senate bill must set an economy wide cap on greenhouse emissions that is consistent with the best available science." The problem is that the letter doesn't define what that means except in terms of the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere globally. Instead of providing a specific minimum acceptable target for emissions reductions by 2020 or 2050, it launches into a discussion of whether we should aim for 350 ppm or 450 ppm (if you're confused, don't worry, your Senator probably is too). Although conceding that ACES won't get us even to 450 ppm, it concludes that 350 ppm should be the goal without saying how we should get there. Not very clear, and thus probably not very effective.

Okay let's take a step back for a moment. You may be asking, what the hell does 350 or 450 ppm mean? ppm means parts per million, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate scientists have used models to find the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere past which the effects of global warming would be dangerous. Of course dangerous is a pretty subjective term. But still, the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed that anything more than a 2 degree C rise in average global temperature would be dangerous, and to prevent that from happening we would have to keep CO2 below 450 ppm in the atmosphere. We're currently getting close to 390 ppm, after we started before the Industrial Revolution at 275 ppm, so we don't have a lot of room to maneuver. (See this paper by Joe Romm of Climate Progress)

So what's the deal with 350? 350.org, as the name would suggest, has an excellent summary of why 350 is an important number. Dr. James Hansen of NASA, a climate hero who has been sounding the alarm since the 80's, wrote a paper recently stating that we must reduce the level of CO2 below 350 ppm "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." Pretty scary stuff considering we're well past 350. The paper found that the planet is warming faster than scientists previously believed and that the impacts will be worse, making the 450 ppm target too conservative. So this coalition has told the Senate to shoot for 350 ppm. Clearly Congress can't decree our way to 350 ppm, especially because we're not the only polluter (though we are by far the biggest per capita). They would have to figure out how much we need to cut our pollution to do our part. Does the letter provide any specifics on that? No. For their call to have any concrete meaning, these groups need to provide a target for emissions cuts and they don't.

To figure out how to push the envelope on global warming legislation, we need to keep in mind where things are now. ACES would cut our emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Where does that compare with what the IPCC said we need to do? The IPCC found that developed countries need to cut their emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Considering that as of 2007 our emissions were 16% higher than in 1990, ACES falls well short of what we need to do to get to 450 ppm. Furthermore, as Joe Romm notes in the paper cited above, the IPCC didn't include carbon-cycle feedback in its predictions. These are effects of global warming that release more carbon and make warming worse, such as the methane and CO2 release from the melting of the Arctic permafrost. So even 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 might not hack it.

Unless the EU beefs up its efforts and China makes big changes in the next couple years, ACES won't stop us from surpassing 450 ppm. If that's the case, would clamoring for 350 ppm to be the target have much of an impact? I highly doubt it, especially considering that nobody has determined how much developed countries would have to cut their emissions to get to 350 ppm as far as I know (let me know if I'm wrong). It currently is not part of our discourse on climate policy so it can't have a lot of relevance around legislation. It should be a part of that discourse, and these groups should work on that, but not in a letter to the Senate about the nitty gritty of climate legislation.

Instead they should demand that Congress hit a target for emissions reductions that is specific and practically meaningful. 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 is the minimum acceptable according to the IPCC for 450 ppm, and that would equate to a bit more than 35% below today's levels. So if we doubled the emissions reductions in ACES we would get there. It's very meaningful and easy to grasp that ACES fails in that it reduces our emissions only half as much as it should.

Now I doubt the Senate would get all the way to a 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 reduction, especially considering the filibuster and the disproportionate representation from coal states there. But a specific campaign to double the reductions of ACES might get them to make at least slightly deeper cuts. The recent science suggests that even if the developed world cut its emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 we might not avoid disastrous impacts. But activists around the world need to work for as much cuts as we can within our various political systems to minimize the effects of global warming (that we're already seeing now!), and we have to think pragmatically about how to do it. As such, bringing 350 ppm into the discussion around details of climate legislation doesn't make a lot of sense.

So write your Senator. We must do better than the American Clean Energy and Security Act! Double those emissions reductions! (Tell them to get rid of the offsets too, but I don't have time to write about that now). This would be a more effective approach to climate advocacy then talking about 350 ppm in a vague way.

PS That's not to say 350.org, Bill McKibben, and Dr. Hansen should stop talking about 350. They're doing a tremendous job of getting the word out about what dire straits we're in and describing the huge gap between our miniscule efforts on global warming and the gravity of the problem. I just think bringing 350 into the discussion around the specifics of climate legislation isn't very effective.

Take the Fight to Glenn Beck!

2009-09-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard, Glenn Beck sucks. He successfully carried out a false smear campaign against Van Jones that forced Van to resign (the President helped by not standing up for Van). That campaign was based on racist attitudes towards African-Americans. He attacked Jones's past as a community organizer in California, equating black people organizing themselves with extremism and hating America (!). In a scary reversion to the days of McCarthy, Beck used red-baiting strategies, accusing Van and by extension Obama of being a communist (although anyone on the left will tell you that Obama is, if anything, a centrist). Anyone that has read about the persecution and witch trials of the 1950's should be concerned by this development.

We live in a free society. Glenn has the right to say what he will. However, from his position at Fox News he has a privileged position to have his speech heard. As a member of our news media, he has a responsibility to all of us to remain within a civilized discourse, refraining from racism and fear-mongering. His rhetoric damages our democracy by reducing the ability of people to speak across ideology. As consumers of the news, we have the right to assert our free speech rights and challenge his position of privilege.

Let's take the fight to Glenn! Click here and sign a Color of Change petition to companies to stop advertising during his show. More than 200,000 people have signed, and in response 62 companies have stopped advertising during the Glenn Beck show. Haha, let's get him to shed some tears, as the above picture demonstrates he is wont to do.

What's really in these health care reform bills?

2009-09-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Radical Right is fond of saying that the Democrats favor a "government takeover" of health care. Even if the Democrats were proposing a single-payer system, the Radical Right would be full of shit. A single-payer insurance system isn't a takeover of the health care system as a whole, just the insurance part of it. As far as I know, no one is proposing a British-style system where the government runs health care delivery as well as insuring all its citizens.

But the biggest inaccuracy in that statement is that the Democrats' main reform proposals do not come close to a single-payer system. These plans won't get rid of useless insurance companies that just take a piece of the action for their Wall Street investors on every health care transaction. Instead they would preserve the structure of the insurance system mostly as it is. Let's take a critical look at what is really in the Democrats' health care plans.

I'm going to base this mostly on the House bill, but the Senate bill that passed out of the HELP committee (that's Sen. Kennedy's committee) is pretty similar. These bills are huge and bring a lot of different changes in health care policy under one umbrella. Open Congress has a summary of HR 3200 here, the New York Times has a graphic comparing the various proposals here in regards to expanding insurance coverage here, and Ezra Klein has a good summary of the House bill here.

Note: The House bill has passed out of three committees in slightly varied form, but the basic outline is the same. The Senate will have another bill from the Finance Committee, headed by Sen. Max Baucus, that will be different than the HELP bill, and probably way less progressive because Baucus is negotiating with Republicans who probably won't vote for the final bill anyways. More on the Baucus bill later.

1) Covering the Un-Insured with Subsidies and Mandates

The plan uses mandates to get close to universal coverage. Under the employer mandate, also called the "pay or play" provision, employers must offer a group plan to their workers and pay the majority of its cost or else pay a tax, either on their payroll or per employee. Under the individual mandate, everyone who doesn't have employer-based coverage has to buy an insurance plan or else pay a penalty.

Another way the bill seeks to cover the un-insured is by expanding Medicaid. Medicaid pays for health care for families below the poverty line. It would increase the maximum income to qualify up to 133% of the poverty level, which would help a lot of the poor un-insured.

For the un-insured and small businesses that don't qualify for Medicaid or can't afford insurance, the plan creates a national "exchange" where they can shop for plans. All the plans have to offer a minimum of benefits, and can only make consumers pay a certain amount in deductibles and co-payments, preventing people from being under-insured in the exchange. The idea is that it forces insurance companies to compete and should lower their administrative costs because they don't need to market the plans as much. Even then people wouldn't be able to afford the plans (that's why most of the un-insured don't have coverage!), so subsidies are available for people with incomes up to 400% of the poverty level to buy insurance.

The House bill currently includes the "public option." This would be a government-run, non-profit insurance plan that people would pay their premiums to just like any other insurance plan. It should have lower premiums because of lower administrative costs and power to bargain with hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.

Anyone who gets coverage through their employer cannot leave that plan and buy insurance on the exchange. So a very limited amount of people could buy into the public option. Also, the public option wouldn't get special taxpayer subsidies. People buying insurance on the exchange would get the same subsidy whether they buy one of the private plans or the public plan.

2) Consumer Protections: Reduce Under-Insurance

The bill has consumer protections, mostly aimed at reducing under-insurance, which occurs when people have insurance but still get stuck with a large chunk of the bill (a majority of those who experience medical bankruptcy actually had insurance). It bans the insurance company practice of dropping people when they get sick because of a pre-existing condition that those people didn't inform them about. It also bans companies from not covering someone to begin with because they have a pre-existing condition. The bill prevents companies from discriminating in its premiums based on anything except age, geography, or family enrollment. Finally, it caps what families and individuals have to pay out-of-pocket under an insurance plan, which will greatly help reduce medical bankruptcy.

3) Medicare Reforms

This part of the bill could be another bill on its own (I wrote about how conservatives like David Brooks are falsely characterizing this section here). It expands coverage for most seniors in that it makes preventive care free and provides greater assistance for buying prescription drugs by closing the so-called "donut hole." It also staves off a reduction in payments to doctors that was planned earlier so that doctors won't stop taking Medicare patients.

Despite those increased benefits, the bill still extends the projected solvency of the Medicare trust fund from 2017 to 2022. The best things that it does is cut overpayments to private plans that cover elderly people through Medicare Part C, the Medicare Advantage plans. It also cuts the growth in payments to hospitals, and creates incentives for hospitals to ensure when they discharge a patient, the patient doesn't have to return soon thereafter, which costs Medicare a lot more.

4) Other

The bill funds the creation of an institute to do "comparative effectiveness" research. Basically it would seek to find which treatments for a given condition get the best outcomes for the least cost. These findings could be used eventually to cut costs in Medicare (or when we move to a single-payer system some day!).

Like with Medicare, it increases coverage for preventive care under Medicaid.

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So let's recap what's in the bill: consumer protections; mandates, an exchange, subsidies, and (hopefully) a public option to expand coverage; and Medicare reforms with some smaller items as well. The big question is: does it meet the goals of health care reform?

Does it get us to universal coverage? Pretty darn close but not quite. The Congressional Budget Office found that 3% of Americans will still go without coverage. 3% of Americans is still a lot of people. The consumer protections should do a lot to combat the problem of under-insurance, and the high rate of medical bankruptcy that it causes.

Does it cut costs? If so, not by much. The cost savings in Medicare are great, because treatment for the elderly is a big chunk of our health care system. But does it do anything to cut the costs that a private insurance market creates for us all? I'll get into that later, but the short answer is, nope. Near-universal coverage ideally should cut insurance premiums for everyone. Hospitals won't have to charge insurance companies as much to compensate for treating the un-insured. However given the profit motive, it's likely that insurance companies and perhaps hospitals will simply pocket the savings. The employer mandate and subsidies should bring down premiums for working families, but won't really cut overall costs, just transfer them to businesses and/or taxpayers.

Does it improve care? Yes, by expanding insurance coverage and improving coverage for preventive care under private plans, Medicare, and Medicaid, the lack of which was formerly a big reason why our health care outcomes are not as good as those of other countries.

One last question: Does it come anywhere close to reform on the level of single-payer? Not even close!

In the coming days, I'm going to keep blogging on parts of the plan that need to be improved and/or retained for it to be worth supporting, as well as on what parts single-payer advocates should be concerned about.

Why Single-Payer Insurance Is the Best Solution for Our Health Care Woes

2009-09-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

As I've documented earlier, the US has by far the most expensive health care system in the world, and we're basically the only developed country that does not guarantee access to health care. A big part of that is because of our terrible insurance system. Most Americans buy health insurance, either individually or as part of their employer's plan, from a number of private insurance companies. Although we are not the only developed country with a partially private health insurance sector, we have the system with the least public sector involvement and the least regulation, and the result is high economic and human costs.

The idea for years has been that competition forces companies to offer their products at lower prices. That's often true in some areas of our economy. Health insurance, however, is one sector in which the "invisible hand" of competition actually drives up costs. You don't have to be a socialist to see that, and to understand that we have to replace private insurance companies with a government-run "single-payer" plan to cut costs.

Under our current system, we pay premiums to health insurance companies, and in return they pay when we have to go to the doctor or to a hospital. In a single-payer system, the government acts as the sole payer for treatment, as the name implies. In return for citizens paying their taxes, the government guarantees health care access for everyone. It's way more efficient than a fragmented system of private insurers, and no one has to forego treatment because they don't have insurance.

Here's a couple reasons why single-payer insurance system would accomplish the three goals of health care reform I outlined back in August: universal coverage, lower health care costs, and improved health care outcomes.

1) Overhead and Profits

Private insurance companies have far higher administrative costs than single-payer systems, basically higher overhead. They need sales departments to add to their customer base, and huge marketing departments to bolster their image and attract more customers. Whereas single-payer systems get their premiums automatically through taxes, private plans have to have a billing department to make sure people pay. Because of the profit motive, they spend money to deny claims so they have to pay for less treatment, and they spend money to deny coverage to people who might cost them more to begin with ie. people with "pre-existing conditions." Finally, they pay massive salaries to their executives, which obviously doesn't happen in government agencies.

On average, overhead in the private industry ranges from 12-14%. In the small group market it's 25-27% and higher than 40% on the individual market (see here)! Meanwhile, the overhead for Medicare is somewhere below 3%, and the Canadian system has attained overhead below 1.5%.

Studies of insurance industry overhead generally don't include profits that go to shareholders, and they don't always include their spending on political contributions and lobbying. Jacob Hacker cites a study of profits of Medicare Advantage plans, a privatized portion of Medicare in which Medicare pays a private insurance company to cover a person. Those private plans spent 6.6% of premiums on profits! On the Bill Moyers Journal, former industry executive Wendell Potter explains how companies compete for Wall Street investment by paying the least amount of premium dollars on actual treatment that they can (here).

So between the motivation of profits and competition, private plans are far more inefficient than government-administered insurance plans. As Congressman Anthony Weiner is fond of saying, insurance companies basically take a piece of the action on every health care transaction, so who needs them? I'm sick and tired of liberals as well as conservatives defending the need to have a private health insurance industry. If the government can provide the same service for far less cost, than it should do so.

2) Administrative Costs Outside of the Insurance Industry

Overhead and profits aren't the only part of the story. A key study by Dr. Steffi Woolhander and Dr. David Himmelstein from Physicians for a National Health Care Plan found that 31% of our health care expenditures in total go to administrative costs, about twice that in Canada. They document how a private insurance system not only creates costs in overhead and profits, but creates costs on the health care delivery side as well because of its fragmented nature.

Because they have to handle payments from a number of different entities, hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and doctors have to hire more clerical staff to deal with all the paperwork. On top of that, they spend a significant amount of time dealing with that paperwork themselves, time better spent treating patients. Furthermore, large employers have to hire clerical staff to deal with their insurance plans as well. Dr. Himmelstein finds that hospitals would save $120 billion in overhead and doctors would save $95 billion under a single-payer plan, which is well more than the $131 billion that would be saved from less overhead (see his testimony to Congress this spring here).

Dr. Himmelstein finds that a single-payer plan would save nearly $400 billion per year over our current system in lower administrative costs alone! Keep in mind that the mainstream Dems are looking for ways to cut the $1 trillion price tag of their reform plan over ten years. A single-payer plan would save our economy more than the entire cost of that 10 year plan in 3 years!

3) Negotiating Lower Prices

Because they take a piece of the action on each transaction, insurance companies don't have the incentive to negotiate lower prices with health care providers and pharmaceutical companies, nor do they have enough customers to have a lot of bargaining leverage. A single-payer plan obviously has the incentive because taxpayer dollars are at stake. Because a single-plan would cover so many people, it would have way more bargaining power. As a result, we would reduce overpayments to hospitals, doctors, and drug companies.

Here's a case in point. The Veterans Health Administration negotiates drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, and Medicare Part D does not. Consequently, the VA pays 49% less for the same drugs!

These savings can't be calculated in as straightforward a fashion as administrative savings, but they would certainly be huge.

4) Guaranteeing Health Care for All!

These savings would allow the government to pay for everyone's health care without co-payments and deductibles, according to Dr. Himmelstein and others. Because the government is accountable to the people, unlike insurance companies, nobody would be denied care or stuck with huge medical bills. Thus a single-payer plan would eliminate the problem of the un-insured and under-insured in one fell swoop.

Although single-payer is the only way to dramatically cut costs from our private insurance sector, it's not the only way to cover the un-insured and end under-insurance. For example, the Democrat's plan would cap what insurance companies can make consumers can pay out-of-pocket and require plans to have basic benefits to end under-insurance. It would ban denial based on pre-existing conditions and create subsidies to cover the un-insured.

However, the Congressional Budget Office found that 3% of Americans would still go without insurance under their best bill, HR 3200. 3% of Americans is no paltry sum. Single-payer is the only way to guarantee coverage for all. With universal coverage, we can save the lives of 18,000 Americans every year who otherwise would have died without insurance coverage.

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So there you have it folks. As I said earlier, we have to keep in mind the basic goals of reform: universal coverage, lowering costs for families and businesses, and improving our health. Single-payer is the way to go because it achieves all three goals. Any "reform" plan that maintains a mostly private insurance system will not be able to cut costs nearly as much, and probably won't truly guarantee coverage for all.

A nice thing about single-payer is that you can still have a private health care delivery system. Doctors and hospitals would still be private entities (private hospitals, some hospitals are already public). The only difference would be that government would be the sole payer for your treatment. So single-payer is far from socialized medicine, it's just socialized health insurance.

Another thing to note is that we already have government-run insurance programs: Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and several others. Primarily because older people need more health care and they're covered by Medicare, our government already pays for 47% of health care in the US! And as some of the examples I cite above demonstrate, it does so far more efficiently than private insurance companies. Some critics say that moving to single-payer would be too much of a disruption because it would be starting a system from scratch. But it would actually consist of building on government-run programs we already have. That's why a lot of single-payer advocates refer to the system as "Medicare-For-All."

I'll talk more about the politics of single-payer later on. For now let me say that currently single-payer doesn't have the votes to pass in Congress. John Conyers' single-payer bill in the House, HR 676, has 85 co-sponsors, which is great, but not enough to pass because of opposition from Democrats that favor the regulate-and-subsidize approach. No matter what passes or doesn't pass this fall, single-payer has to be the long-term goal of American progressives. It's the only way we can insure everyone and hold down costs that threaten to swamp our middle class and restrain our economy as a whole.

The Resignation of Van Jones and the Obama Administration's Failure to Stand Up for Him

2009-09-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

If you're not familiar with Van Jones, he's one of the leaders in the green jobs movement, and until Sunday briefly an official in the Obama administration. He is largely responsible for making "green jobs" and "clean energy jobs" part of our lexicon, and for demonstrating the positive economic effect of de-carbonizing our economy (in fact, investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency yields significantly more jobs than the same investment in fossil fuels). His influence on the environmental movement and the Democrats' climate policies has been enormous, to a large degree because he's a fantastic orator. As an African-American, he's brought a lot of black and Latino people into a previously mostly white movement, and consequently provided the movement with a broader perspective. He's been an advocate for low-income people and minorities, not only in terms of protecting them from the pollution they disproportionately face, but in ensuring that green jobs can be a means to economic justice for them.

On Sunday, he resigned from his post in the Obama White House in the face of a campaign by Glenn Beck at Fox News and other far right-wingers who questioned some aspects of his past (see NY Times article here). The campaign was disgustingly based in falsehood and extreme distortion of fact.

I was going to write a long piece on how mad I am that Glenn Beck's crazed far-right campaign against him succeeded. The campaign had many racist aspects to it, which Carl Pope of the Sierra Club summarizes on his blog here. What really pisses me off, though, is that the Obama administration refused to stand up for Van Jones. Why should they heed the calls of an extreme right-winger like Beck who has a large but narrow following of people who wouldn't ever vote for a Democrat anyways? John Nichols of The Nation puts it best here.

Although this controversy may have been a distraction from the health care and clean energy debates, it wasn't a big one. It would have been easy for administration officials to simply rebut Beck's falsehoods and move on. The effects of caving to Beck's crowd is far worse. First of all, it will only embolden the racist reactionaries to continue smearing progressives in the administration and Congress for that matter. Secondly, it shows major weakness on Obama's part. Do you ever remember any liberal media blocking an appointment in the Bush administration that didn't require Senate approval? This makes them look REALLY weak going into these huge legislative battles, primarily within their own party. If anything letting Jones resign without a fight makes victory on health care and climate legislation less likely.

Great American of the Week--Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY)

2009-09-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

Rep. Anthony Weiner from New York has been the most visible and effective advocate for truly progressive health care reform over the past months. He's been all over TV talk shows advocating for a single-payer system. Given his preference for single-payer, it would be easy for him to sit back and just criticize the more incremental plans that the President and centrist Dems support. But, like good legislators do, he's fighting in the media and in the trenches to make sure that that plan does all it can to move towards the three basic goals I listed in my first blog post: universal coverage, cutting costs, and improving care. For that reason, he's been one of the leading progressive threatening to hold up reform if it does not include the public option. He's also convinced Speaker Pelosi to allow a floor vote on his amendment to replace the current health care bill, HR 3200, with Rep. Conyers's HR 676, which would create a single-payer system (see summary here).

He's so effective in his TV appearances because he makes health care policy clear. Even someone concerned about government's role in the economy can listen to his clear argument and see that single-payer is the best system for our economy. In my post below, I agreed with Bill Moyers that we have to frame health care reform as a moral issue. It might seem contradictory to laud Rep. Weiner for how he describes cutting costs, a less visceral theme. But Weiner succeeds where Obama fails in describing the importance of cutting health care costs because he frames it in a moral way. It's us versus the insurance companies. They take money from us on each transaction between us and the doctor.

Finally, he's so quick on his feet and quite aggressive. Unlike most Democrats, he's afraid to challenge right-wingers directly and put them on the defensive.

Check him out destroying the Fox and Friends conservative crowd.

The man is quick on his feet. Check him out on the show of Joe Scarborough, another prominent conservative host. He makes Scarborough speechless. I love his explanation for how Medicare-for-All or a large public option can not only cut costs through low overhead and not having to pay shareholders, but through negotiating with drug companies and care providers as a large pool of people. How does Wal-Mart offer such low prescription drug prices? Brilliant.

For being such a champion of single-payer, and standing up for the public option as the only acceptable compromise to take on the insurance companies, Rep. Weiner earns the title of Great American of the Week from yours truly. Haha, like he gives a shit, but whatever.

Bill Moyers on the Bill Maher Show

2009-09-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

Bill Moyers appeared on the Bill Maher Show on August 28. As you can see from my post on a documentary that appeared on his show, I'm a big fan of Bill Moyers, and I think he's one of the clearest and most principled thinkers in the American left (my girlfriend thinks I have a man crush on him, haha). This appearance shows Moyers at his best, touching on health care, government and social justice, money in politics, and his past in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. You should go ahead and watch all 3 parts of the interview on Youtube, but I'd like to list some of his best points.

Moyers believes that true reform in health care and other areas is limited by the pervasive influence of corporations in both parties. He traces this back to the Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision in 1976, which ruled that spending money is a form of free speech. As a result, both parties, not just the Republicans, answer to corporate influence more than to average citizens. Moyers thinks that the problem is the Democrats even more than Republicans. The Republicans have stood for monied interests for some time, but Democrats used to stand for working people and the middle class. In 2006 and 2008 they were elected on promises of progressive reforms, but because they are influenced by corporate interests, they deliver only tepid reforms that pose little threat to the status quo. Bill identifies White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the paragon of that particular type of Democrat. He and several other commentators have suggested that Rahm actually wants to water down health care reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulation to ensure that affected corporate interests continue to donate to Democrats for the 2010 election cycle.

In the interview Moyers frames health care in a most excellent way. He states that our country is the only one that doesn't view universal health care as a means of social justice. I couldn't agree with him more that access to health care is a moral issue, and needs to be portrayed that way to achieve universal coverage. Maher asks him what he thinks would be a metaphor for our society than "a rising tide lifts all boats." Moyers responds, "we're all in the same boat." I've never heard anyone summarize progressive values that succinctly. The fact that 18,000 Americans die each from lack of health insurance is a moral failing of our society at large.

The last theme of this interview that really blew me away was his discussion of presidential leadership styles. He praises the tenacity of the Democrats in their battle to enact Medicare. President Truman first proposed the idea in the early 50's, and was shot down, but because he was so framed the policy it such a principled way, he set up LBJ to finally pass it in the 60's. He wants Obama to be a Teddy Roosevelt, who railed against corporate influence in politics, rather than a Grover Cleveland, a President elected to bring the robber barons under control and instead acceded to them. Unlike those who say the Democrats should take what they can get on health care, Moyers would rather see Obama go down fighting that pass a half-assed bill that doesn't bring health care industry under control. In that sense he could be a Truman to a later President's LBJ (ideally pushing Medicare-For-All!).

He unifies all these concepts in calling for a movement of progressives to not just push for reforms but directly challenge the President. I agree. Progressives need to stop seeing their work as "supporting President Obama's agenda" and start seeing it as "pushing Obama and the Democrats to stand up for ordinary Americans and confront monied interests."

Side note: The Progressive Change Campaign is starting to do just that. They are one of the few groups directly challenge Obama to stick to his campaign promise to include a government-run public option to compete with insurance companies (because requiring people to get insurance without a public option will be expensive for consumers and the government and basically constitute corporate welfare for the insurance industry). Sign their petition to the President here, and let's start demanding that the President be more progressive!

US Contractors Paying off Taliban!

2009-09-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

Over the past decade our military has increasingly employed civilian contractors to carry out duties once performed exclusively by the military in combat zones. As the history of privatized military operations in Iraq demonstrates, this often results in shoddily constructed buildings, inadequate and unsafe services to soldiers, and egregious waste of taxpayer dollars. On top of that, the actions of unaccountable contractors can hurt the efforts of US soldiers. Remember when Iraqis were in an uproar after Blackwater mercenaries slaughtered 17 innocent civilians? Obviously not good for the mission there.

So far the worst effects of contracting out to private companies have occurred in Iraq, and their presence in Afghanistan so far hasn't been as big of a story. Because President Obama promised to crack down on the abuses of contractors, I think a lot of people assumed they wouldn't be used as much and would be less of a problem. Wrong. The Wall Street Journal of all places reported that the number of contractors in Afghanistan has been rising recently. Contractors now outnumber our soldiers there, despite the surge in troop numbers implemented by Obama.

Recent Pentagon plans will continue this phenomenon. The LA Times wrote a few days ago that the military will likely swap out 14,000 troops in Afghanistan involved in support duties for 14,000 combat troops, and will hire contractors to replace the support troops. This is intended to increase the amount of combat soldiers in Afghanistan without an overall troop increase that would be highly controversial back at home. Based on previous contractor experience, we can expect the cost of the war to rise as a result, with a lower quality of services to our troops. Also, we can expect more of the worst kind of contractor--mercenaries like those of Blackwater, because those support troops include "guards" according to the article.

Considering Obama's campaign rhetoric with respect to military contracting, these decisions are highly disappointing. They will flush taxpayer money down the toilet and hurt the war effort through providing poor services to our troops and through their lack of discipline and accountability. A recent story shows the depth to which they can do such damage.

CBS News picked up a story 2 days ago from the GlobalPost (CBS story here, GlobalPost story here) about reconstruction contractors hired by the US paying as much as 20% of their revenue to the Taliban to not attack their projects. Yes, you read that correctly, US taxpayer dollars have been funneled to our enemy through contractors. Granted, these are reconstruction contractors and not military contractors, but it demonstrates the same problem of employing a private company in a war zone that does not answer directly to the US government. And, who knows, maybe companies guarding our diplomats and bases or providing services to our troops have done the same.

It seems increasingly unlikely that President Obama will crack down on war contractors. Congress must fill his void of leadership and either reduce the usage of contractors, or, at minimum, create regulations to make them fully accountable for their actions and the quality of their work. It might make for an interesting coalition of anti-war progressives from the left, deficit hawks in the center, and libertarians on the right.

Addendum: The best source for information on war contractors is the great investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. He wrote Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, an excellent book and devastating critique of military contracting and American foreign policy. You can check out everything he writes on his blog/news site http://rebelreports.com/. He appears frequently on Bill Maher, Democracy Now!, and some of the MSNBC shows pretty frequently, and usually posts the videos there.

Obama, Salazar, and the wolves

2009-08-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

Last year, the Bush administration decided to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Fortunately, they decided too late and that rule was not codified before a new President Obama halted all rules issued by the Bush administration but not finalized. Environmentalists were elated because they, and a number of scientists, believed that it was premature to delist the gray wolf. This celebration, as it turned out, was premature, as the Obama administration has gone forward with the Bush administration plan.

Between hunting, predator control, and habitat loss, the gray wolf was mostly extinct in the lower 48 states by the 1970's, except in northern Minnesota and Isle Royale in Michigan. This was a tragedy not only in that a species was nearly lost, but in the terrible effect it had on the ecosystems that wolves inhabited. The loss of wolves allowed populations of prey such as elk to skyrocket, threatening some plant species and other animal species that depend on those plants, like beavers. These effects rippled far--losing wolves can even cause greater stream bed erosion, hurting fish species! Coyote populations also skyrocket in the absence of the wolf, causing another ripple through the ecosystem (see more on the effects here, here, and especially here).

Fortunately the gray wolf went on the endangered species list way back in 1974, right after the Endangered Species Act passed (signed by Richard Nixon!).

In many ways the wolf is a success story of the ESA. Wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies in 1995, and now are once again an important part of the Northern Rockies ecosystem. There are now 1645 wolves between Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.

In 1974, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists set the goal for the Northern Rockies gray wolf recovery to be 300 wolves, so they've well surpassed that goal. Now interest groups such as hunters, ranchers, and developers are calling not only for the wolf to be delisted, but that it be hunted and reduced.

President Obama's Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, did their bidding and delisted the wolf this March. Because Wyoming didn't have an acceptable wolf management plan, the wolf remains endangered in that state, but is now unprotected in Idaho and Montana. As a result, Idaho has issued 70,000 wolf hunting permits and will allow 255 wolves to be killed, and Montana will allow 75 more to be killed.

Although the wolf population is sustainable according to the 1974 goal, more recent science suggests that the goal should be far higher--probably somewhere between 2000 and 2500 to prevent genetic loss. 225 scientists wrote a letter to Secretary Salazar protesting his decision.

Why did he do it? It's pretty straightforward--mostly the influence of special interest groups. Hunters just want to hunt the wolf, and they don't want the wolf to reduce the game populations that they hunt, even if that benefits the ecosystem as a whole. Some ranchers are still vehemently opposed to wolf recovery, despite the fact that wolves account for less than 1% of livestock deaths. (Coyotes are a far bigger problem than wolves, and as mentioned earlier, wolf recovery keeps coyote populations in check.). Developers want to be able to build homes in wolf habitat areas of the Northern Rockies wilderness.

In addition to the influence of special interests, fear and hostility toward wolves is part of our myth about the American West, as Verlyn Klinkenborg's NY Times op-ed describes here.

As Klinkenborg writes, the Interior department isn't as beholden to special interests as it was under Bush. Yet in the case of the wolves, we get the same bad decisions not based on the latest science. Is this what environmentalists expected when we part of the progressive coalition that did the grunt work to get Obama elected?

Environmental groups should have been far more critical of the choice of Salazar to be Secretary to begin with. The Center for Biological Diversity, one of the most effective and principled groups out there, were among the minority that did (here), and they proved to be prescient. As they document, Salazar consistently voted in the Senate in favor of drilling, in favor of livestock grazing on public lands, and against endangered species and wilderness protections, just not quite as often as the Republicans. In fact, he's a rancher himself with a vested interest in how we manage public lands.

It's time to take the kid gloves off with Salazar, and Obama for that matter. They may be better than Bush and his drilling, mining, and logging-loving Interior department, but that's not good enough. With the planet under siege by global warming and many other anthropogenic threats, we need more wilderness protection, less logging, mining, and drilling on public lands, and better endangered species protections, not just a return to slightly better Clinton-era standards.

You can help start to hold them accountable by joining in this Defenders of Wildlife (another aggressive and effective group) action alert here urging President Obama to reverse Salazar's decision to delist the wolf. And if you have the money (I unfortunately do not), contribute to their and the Center's efforts to fight this decision and court and stop the hunts, which unfortunately began yesterday. As I wrote earlier, the science tells us that not only is the wolf at risk, but the health of the entire Northern Rockies ecosystem.

Tell Grandma: Health care reform won't cut your benefits!

2009-08-25T12:34:00.000-07:00

This past Friday I was watching the Jim Lehrer NewsHour with my girlfriend before we went to sleep (pretty thrilling Friday, eh?). As usual he had NY Times columnist David Brooks (pictured above), as well as Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post, on to discuss the news of the week. Not surprisingly they talked about all the furor around health care reform, and not surprisingly they spread some falsehoods about reform, in the process demonstrating some of the major flaws of the mainstream media.

Check out the transcript and streaming video here. Right as they begin discussing health care, both Brooks and Marcus cite proposed changes to Medicare under current legislation as motivation for the opposition to reform. Both of them explicitly say that the Democrats' bills will cut seniors' benefits under Medicare. Brooks mentions "Medicare cuts and taking benefits away from people." Marcus asserts, probably correctly, that seniors are the demographic most concerned with health care reform, but follows that up saying that "there are some serious changes in Medicare, needed changes in Medicare, but they will affect seniors, some of them, in terms of seniors' benefits.

Brooks and Marcus are incorrect. Although the House and Senate bills do reduce Medicare spending, these changes do not cut benefits for seniors. Rather, the Medicare savings in the bill are created mostly by achieving greater efficiency and cutting costs in the system.

The Medicare Rights Center, a non-profit consumer group that helps the elderly negotiate Medicare issues and advocates around Medicare policy issues, issued a fact sheet on the effects on Medicare of HR 3200, the bill that passed out of committee in the House. It's important to note that the Center is primarily concerned about the effects of legislation on the elderly and that reforming the entire health care system isn't part of their agenda, so they aren't inherently biased in favor of overall health care reform.

They write in bold letters: "There are no cuts to Medicare benefits in HR 3200." Well David Brooks, it seems that you're wrong.

The bill achieves a large amount of savings by cutting overpayments to private insurance plans that operate under Medicare Part C, the Medicare Advantage program (wikipedia explains). This Physicians for a National Health Plan blog post explains the nefarious history of Medicare Advantage. Under the MA program, Medicare pays insurance companies to provide coverage to people who enroll, and pays them significantly more than what it pays for traditional Medicare coverage.

Conservatives claimed that private company involvement would make Medicare more efficient, but the opposite turned out to be true. While traditional Medicare coverage has administrative costs of just 2%, MA plans have administrative costs of more than 11%, and one government study found those costs to be 16.7% when you include insurance company profits (see here). So basically our taxes are paying for these companies to be inefficient and reap big profits. As the PNHP blog post states, conservatives really wanted to drive up Medicare costs as an excuse to shrink or destroy Medicare, and enrich their insurance company cronies at the same time.

By cutting overpayments to MA plans, HR 3200 might cause insurance companies to stop their involvement in the program, meaning some people covered under their plans would switch to Original Medicare coverage. Some MA plans did formerly offer more benefits than Original Medicare, but HR 3200 expands benefits under Original Medicare to compensate. It eliminates copays and deductibles for preventive care under Original Medicare, which formerly was advantage of MA plans.

Between cutting overpayments to MA plans and cutting the growth in payments to hospitals and nursing homes, HR 3200 would make Medicare solvent until 2022 instead of just 2017 as it would be otherwise.

Overall the Center finds that HR 3200 not only improves the fiscal outlook for Medicare but improves affordability and quality of care for seniors. In addition to eliminating fees for preventive services, it expands assistance for low-income seniors to buy prescription drugs. It gives incentives to hospitals to give better care so that patients don't have to make return trips to the hospital. Finally, it makes sure that payments to doctors don't get cut as planned so that doctors don't stop treating seniors (aforementioned PNHP blog post has a lot on this and history of planned Medicare pay cut to doctors).

So tell your grandma and grandpa, the Democrats' reform plan is actually good for you! It will make preventative health care and prescription drugs more affordable, ensure that your doctor doesn't drop you, and make sure Medicare doesn't run out of money for at least 12 years.

It's ironic that Marcus mentions the "mischaracterizations" of legislation by opponents of health care reform just before she falsely claims that that legislation will cut benefits for seniors. Hey Ruth: seniors aren't magically concerned about health care reform--they're concerned because people like you are falsely telling them that their Medicare benefits will be cut.

These journalists have no self-awareness of their effect on the public discourse. To begin with, it's the fault of newspapers and television news channels that the worst mischaracterizations of reform are out there because they don't do their own research to contest those mischaracterizations. On top of that they assume that they report impartially without projecting their opinions, or that they project their opinions based on only the facts Brooks and Marcus are excellent testaments to the mainstream media's failure to report basic facts and figures of public policy, resulting in an uninformed American public.

The Journal--That of Bill Moyers, not Wall Street

2009-08-23T17:42:00.001-07:00

Check out this week's Bill Moyers Journal on PBS here. Normally the show is comprised of Bill Moyers interviewing a group or two of people along with the classic opinion essays scribed by him and Michael Winship. However, this week's episode is mostly a documentary film called Critical Condition by filmmaker Roger Weisberg. This touching film is a must-see for those who care about health care reform.

Weisberg follows three people who don't have health insurance and require crucial and expensive treatment for their ailments. All three either are currently working or worked up until recently, and those who no longer work have spouses who do. All three make too much money to qualify for Medicaid (the government program that pays for health care for the poor, funded half by states and half by the federal government). They can't afford insurance premiums and/or would be denied for a pre-existing condition. The health of all three suffers as a result.

This film succeeds in how moving it is, how it captures the emotions of these victims of our health care systems and their families. It conveys the basic fact that people get sicker and die when they don't have health insurance. Conservatives like to warn of the terrible specter of "rationing" that is assumed to accompany health care reform as if our current system doesn't ration care. They couldn't be more out of touch with reality. As one doctor puts it in the film, our system rations care based on ability to pay, and as a result people die (today's NY Times editorial on the uninsured cites a study finding that 18,000 Americans die each year from not having insurance).

For progressives, it's a great reminder of why we fight to cover the uninsured and reform health care. For moderates and even conservatives who are on the fence on health care reform, this movie can only tip them in favor of reform by their heartstrings. Don't just read this, watch it! Email it to your moderate and conservative friends as well!

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Besides so movingly making the ethical case for covering the uninsured, the film touches on some interesting policy points. At the start of the film, none of the victims qualify for Medicaid because their incomes are too high. One qualifies for Medicaid two days before he dies, way too late. This suggest that despite having Medicaid as a safety net, many recently unemployed people fall through the cracks in our current system. They have to wait until their annual income is demonstrably lower as a result of unemployment.

The health care legislation in the House, HR 3200, would raise the income to be eligible for Medicaid, so perhaps some of the working families in the film would qualify after health care reform without losing their job. For those that wouldn't, they would qualify for subsidies to help purchase either regulated private insurance plans or a government-managed plan under the proposed insurance exchanges. Make no mistake, the House bill will reduce the uninsured and make things better for families like those in the film, improving health and reducing medically incurred debt.

However, the Congressional Budget Office found that HR 3200 would not cover every American, leaving 3% uninsured. Although HR 3200 will make things better for working class families, a better choice would be to create a single-payer health care system, like that of Canada. If only the Democratic leadership had moved forward with Rep. John Conyers's HR 676 (for more info, see here), which would create a single-payer health care system in which every American citizen is insured, like in Canada. It's the only way to guarantee that nobody goes without health care.

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As always, Bill Moyers puts it best. Here's how he concludes this week's Journal:

And on the ground, those congressional town hall meetings have been hijacked by yelling, jeering, and belligerent shock troops of protest who have turned the media spotlight on themselves, away from the issue of how to get health care to the people who need but can't afford it.

When all the flash and fury have turned to ash, here's what remains: our present system treats medicine as a profit center instead of a human need and public service.

Side note on Bill Moyers: Bill Moyers is a great American progressive hero. Unlike most journalists, he actually investigates the issues instead of just reporting what the government, think tanks, and big corporations have to say. Over more than 30 years, he's been one of luminaries of the left in this country, making the case for a fairer economy and a stronger progressive people's movement. He is one of the most prominent supporters of the single payer health care solution.

His show appears weekly on PBS. Watch it! Next week's episode is another documentary, this time about the problems associated with our health care system being driven by profits. Every episode is posted online and available permanently in the archive. In particular, I recommend the May 22nd episode with an interview of single-payer advocates Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, and the July 10th episode with Wendell Potter, a former health insurance company executive turned supporter of health care reform.

Clarity in Health Care Debate: What are we aiming for?

2009-08-16T15:41:00.001-07:00

As I'm currently unemployed (hopefully not for long), I have been following politics closely, particularly the debates over health care reform and global warming legislation. Much has been made of the inaccuracies of both politicians and the mainstream media when it comes to these issues. The corporate entities that benefit from the status quo and politicians who are either in their pocket or are ideological allies use their power to spread falsehoods about efforts at reform. They say, falsely, that clean energy legislation will destroy our economy and that health care reform will lead to socialism, or even, fascism! And they convince a lot of people that they're right.

But I think the problem goes deeper than distortions and falsehoods, and the health care debate is a great example. There is a terrible lack of clarity in our public discourse on the purpose of health care reform. Policies like exchanges, the public option, and cost-cutting measure have little meaning to people when they don't even know why we need reform! If we forget why we need to reform health care, then people can only become confused and stay out of the debate. I believe that is partly why ratings for the President's health care reform proposals are way below his personal approval ratings. Most people have been confused out of the debate, leaving only far right-wingers who will believe what they want to, dedicated progressive activists, and the Beltway crowd, dominated by corporate lobbyists.

It was clear well before 2009 that our mainstream media, especially on the television, is failing us in terms of getting the facts out to the people and focusing on what really matters. However, pro-reform politicians and to a lesser degree progressive organizations are also responsible for failing to ground their arguments in the flaws of our health care system.

Here's the goals of health care reform as I see it and as I think most people in favor of reform see it (correct me if I'm wrong). This isn't anything new, but I want to get it out to drive everything else that I write about health care. The deeper we dig into why we need reform, the clearer the policy details will be. Also, these goals aren't mutually exclusive (as the Blue Dogs and others seem to think).

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1) Universal health care coverage

Basically this means making sure everyone has adequate health insurance. In 2007, 46 million Americans (15.3% of us) went part of the year without health insurance. An additional 25 million are under-insured, meaning that despite having insurance they paid more than 10% of their income in out-of-pocket health costs. With the proliferation of high-deductible and high co-pay insurance plans, the problem is growing, as the number of the under-insured increased by 60% between 2003 and 2007 (see above link). Health insurance companies are allowed to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and even drop coverage to people that get sick. The Center for American Progress finds that in this recession 14,000 Americans are losing their insurance every day!

First of all, lack of health care coverage threatens basic physical well-being, and can be a matter of life and death if it means foregoing important treatment. Ethically speaking, I agree with those like Amnesty International that regard health care as a human right that societies must provide. Functionally speaking, we rank a disappointing 37th globally in terms of health care performance according to WHO, and that probably has a lot to do with the huge amount of people who don't go get treatment.

Secondly, uninsurance and underinsurance puts low and middle-income American families at tremendous risk. If they get sick and have to pay out-of-pocket, they have a lot less money to pay for the mortgage, college loans, credit card bills, utility bills, and even food. One study found that over 60% of bankruptcies are related to medical costs. Lack of good insurance forces a lot of American families out of the middle class.

Our health system is inherently discriminatory. Working class people in this country cannot afford health care unless they are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or they are covered by their employer. Sick people can't get health insurance because insurance companies are allowed to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

2) Lowering health care costs

The US has the most expensive health care system in the world. We spend 16% of our GDP on health care, $7290 per person. France spends the next highest percentage of GDP, and they merely spend 10.6% of GDP. Meanwhile the OECD average for health care spending is $2964 per capita, and only 8.9% of GDP. That's bad enough, but our health care costs are projected to grow by 6.2% per year over the coming years, much higher than inflation.

These costs come not only from the delivery of care but also the overhead cost of insurance administration and the cost to doctors and hospitals of managing insurance claims.

American families experience higher health care costs in higher insurance premiums. Those who get insurance on the individual market tend to have plans with higher deductibles and co-pays. These folks see not only rising premiums, but much higher payments when they get sick and have to get care, putting them at even greater risk of medical bankruptcy.

The majority of American get health care through their employer. As health care costs more, employers have to spend more money to pay their share of their employees' insurance premiums. That robs them of capital to improve and expand their operations, and discourages them from hiring more workers. Obviously this means less jobs and thus less demand in our economy. Furthermore, it puts us at a comparative disadvantage to countries who have less health care costs, encouraging companies to go elsewhere.

Workers with employer insurance feel the pain as well. More and more employers are dropping coverage completely. For workers who retain coverage, many find their employers paying a lesser share of their premiums, which reduces their paychecks. Because buying health insurance on the individual market is so risky and expensive, unions find themselves having to fight for benefits instead of getting their workers better wages.

Ultimately health care is an economic issue. The result of rising costs has been more outsourced jobs, stagnant wages, and reduced consumer demand in a time when our economy is struggling enough.

One more thing to note: the cost of health care to our economy is related to, but not synonymous with, the cost to our government. A lot of people are concerned about the effect of health care costs on our federal budget deficit. They are right to do so, but many of them oppose any additional role in health care by the government on account that it might increase the deficit. If bringing more of health care spending under the aegis of the government can reduce the overall cost to our economy, then it makes sense. Deficits can be cut through efficiency and taxes instead of just cutting spending, as deficit hawks rarely concede. The important thing is the total cost to our economy, not how much health care spending is done by the government.

3) Better Health Care Outcomes

I must admit, I'm not a doctor. But it's clear that we need to get better health out of our health care system that we spend so much on. As you can see here, we have lower life expectancy and a higher rate of infant mortality than those of other developed countries.

To some degree this is partially a matter outside of reforming insurance and health care delivery. A lot of our health problems have to do with our personal habits, such as smoking, dietary choices, etc. (not judging, I have some bad habits myself). I think some people have a point that there's only so much government policy can do to change those habits. Still, making America healthier has a lot to do with how our health care system works, and to the other two principles I elaborate upon above.

Increasing insurance coverage simply gives people access to the care that they need. They wouldn't have to wait until their conditions worsens so much they have to go to the emergency room. Also, some studies of Medicare have found that some hospitals and clinics with lower costs have just as good or even better outcomes as Atul Gawande writes in The New Yorker. Perhaps a focus on efficiency can also produce better care.

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As I see it these are the fundamental goals of health care reform. These are the goals by which we should evaluate proposed efforts at reform (and the problems to demonstrate why those who favor the status quo are so wrong). The Obama administration and the Democratic leadership need to do a better job of conveying these goals to the American people because right now the American people are confused as all hell. I also think that if they if the Democrats remained grounded in these goals, they would have come up with better reform proposals, as I'll discuss later. The media needs to cover these problems more. Every minute they fail to cover why we need health care reform provides cover for the special interests that benefit from the status quo.

I mentioned earlier that these goals are not mutually exclusive. A policy aimed at reducing costs would free up more money to cover the uninsured, or it might even improve quality of care. If you read this blog later on, you'll come to see that I'm a proponent of single-payer health care, in which the government acts as the insurer for all people while health care delivery remains in the private sector, precisely because it meets all three goals.

I'll leave a detailed discussion of single-payer for another time. For now, check out the great website of Physicians for a National Health Plan. Stay tuned, and drop me a comment if you're so inclined.