Washington City Paper Loose Lips

McClatchy's Sacramento Bee:

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District sued Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and 45 other financial firms Thursday in Sacramento federal court for allegedly rigging bids in bond-derivatives markets and defrauding the utility.

SMUD joined at least six city and county governments in California that already have filed similar lawsuits arising from a federal investigation made public in 2006. Many other public entities around the country have joined in lawsuits seeking class-action status.

Via Avedon Carol, this little item from Caltics:

Now it looks like they're moving to up the Hooverite ante, and two of California's powerful federal politicians are at the center of the debate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is joining 6 other Senators to demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi approve a commission to recommend cuts to Medicare and Social Security - or else they'll refuse to vote to increase the US government's debt ceiling: ...

audio by title hoosiers for a commonsense health plan single payer now

Senator Bernie Sanders:

In my view, the real solution to the problem of how to reform health care in this country is a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. We are going to try to at least give states the option to go forward and move toward a single-payer system. Whether it’s Vermont or somewhere else, if one state pulls it off it will spread around the country.

Look, I'm totally sure that paying to bail out the insurance companies by cutting Medicare won't have any real effects on old people who are going to die soon anyhow. Especially given this great news:

Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn't come along with it.

Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation.

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” [shock doctrine!] said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

Yay!

The only reason the Howler repeats himself is that our famously free press does. As for example:

This morning, the gods rocked with laughter: On Olympus, that is. Reason? On the front page of the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg penned a report about the way current health reform bills would deal with American health care spending. On Olympus, her opening paragraph produced some muffled laughter:

STOLBERG (11/10/09): As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama's promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.

Note that definition again: We’ll accept a rise in health care spending—it just can’t be a runaway rise! As Stolberg continued, the muffled laughter became full-throated—almost a roar:

STOLBERG (continuing directly): Mr. Obama has made cost containment a centerpiece of his health reform agenda, and in May he stood up at the White House with industry groups who pledged voluntary efforts to trim the growth of health care spending by 1.5 percent, or $2 trillion, over the next decade.

Can you see why the gods, and their guests, were now openly laughing? In the face of a “runaway rise in health care spending,” Stolberg almost seemed to suggest that a “trim” in growth, of 1.5 percent, somehow connected to the idea that “cost containment” was “a centerpiece” of Obama’s agenda! And then too, the gods, and their guests, had all seen the OECD figures—the figures which show the baseline of American health care spending. Can you see why the gods, and their guests, were now laughing hard at us mortals?

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007
United States: $7290
France: $3601
Germany: $3588
United Kingdom: $2992
Italy: $2686
Spain: $2671
Japan: $2581 (2006)

There’s the baseline for any future rise. In 2007, the U.S. spent 102 percent more than the French! In Stolberg’s account, it seems that we’re planning to “trim” 1.5 of those 102 points! But then, cost containment is a centerpiece of our health care agenda!

On Olympus, the sides of the gods are starting to split in the face of our culture’s year-long clowning—clowning which is mainly conducted at the very top of our “press corps.” Our advice: Surrender the prejudice of your youth! In a hundred different ways, you were told that “man” is “the rational animal!” As your society flounders and drowns, you—like the gods—can learn to see something quite different.

By contrast, here's how they do it in France:

Krugman:

[T]he G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

If only the same thing would happen with the Democrats!

Via mail:

[T]his legislative battle is not yet over . Our focus can now turn to two remaining efforts for single-payer healthcare in this Congress. Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce S 703 in coming weeks, and we understand that he is considering editing it to be more like HR 676. We will have the opportunity again to see the first ever vote on single-payer healthcare in this Congress. In addition, Rep. Kucinich’s amendment to allow states to more easily implement a single-payer system may be reinserted into the bill during the conference committee between the House and Senate.

All of these efforts are crucial to building the movement for the only solution to our health care crisis--single-payer national healthcare.

Mithras:

Maine voters decisively rejected same-sex marriage yesterday, 53% to 47%. Last November, when California voters overturned gay marriage there, the exit polls indicated that out of the Obama constituencies, overwhelming opposition from African-American (and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic) voters helped tip the balance. This was controversial, to put it mildly. Well, Maine is 97% white, and Obama won it in a landslide, 58%-42%.

What's the common factor?

Via email, Mobilize for Health Care:

Dear Friend,
CALL PELOSI NOW! (415) 556-4862 and (202) 225-0100
There are 8 people sitting in RIGHT NOW in Nancy Pelosi's Office in San Francisco!

They are not leaving until they get an answer to their demands! Their demands are that the Kucinich amendment MUST be in the health care bill that the House votes on, and that the House MUST vote on the Weiner amendment.

Pelosi PROMISED the American people that she would ensure BOTH of the above would happen, and she has betrayed us by renigging on those promises!

Miami Herald:

When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.

The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.

The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn't the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.

I'm guessing No, but perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised:

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) secured a commitment from Pelosi and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) for a vote on a fully government-run, “single-payer” insurance program in July to get liberal support for moving the bill out of committee. Weiner said Thursday that he'd been told “all systems are go,” but leaders have pointedly declined to confirm that.

Odd, that.

ralphbon, blogging at FireDogLake

According to Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America, one avenue of appeal remains regarding these efforts:

Democratic House leaders can insert what is called a “Manager’s Amendment” into legislation, even when it is closed to any other amendments. The managers are the majority and minority members who “manage” debate for the bill on each side.

Today, tomorrow, and beyond, we need to call these “managers” and insist that the Kucinich Amendment is restored into the healthcare bill….

The “gang” that holds our future in their hands includes:

* Speaker Nancy Pelosi: Washington, DC, office (202) 225-4965; San Francisco office (415) 556-4862

Kucinich Wins Five Amendments to Health CareReform Bill

The first amendment created an opening for the single payer health care movement by eliminating a federal barrier to stateschoosing to enact single payer health plans. Although the amendment doesnot create a single payer health care system, it removes a major obstacle forany state that wishes to pursue the single payer option. This amendmentbuilds on the momentum of the national movement for single payer health care.

Single-payer healthcare reform activists target CIGNA

Never let it be said that the scientists who publish in dry, staid medical journals lack a sense of humor. That resurrecting dead patients line is the title of an article that appeared in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] a few years ago, and beyond the fact that it provided me with a snappy headline, gives me the chance to post one of my favorite lolcats [again], and is cited in another article in another journal, it has no further bearing on this post.

The another article in another journal, Looking Forward, Looking Back: Assessing Variations in Hospital Resource Use and Outcomes for Elderly Patients With Heart Failure, is monumentally less gripping than, oh, the last installment of Harry Potter, or even the labels on cat food cans, but it's nonetheless an important data point in the present health care deform reform debate.

To back up for just a moment, the Dartmouth Atlas Project is a massive gathering of data gleaned from Medicare spending records over many years. Mapping the data has produced the realization that Medicare spending varies widely throughout the country. Peter Orszag, President Obama, and Tom Harkin, to name just a few personages, are all quite taken with it, and with the Dartmouth researchers' assertions that the patients in higher-spending regions fare no better than those in lower-spending regions.

If only those spendthrifts in Miami and McAllen could be made to behave more like those prudent paragons living in Minnesota, we could save hundreds of billions of $$$$$ in health care spending every year.

Not so fast, corpus breath. The Dartmouth Atlas only catalogs dead people. The researchers looked back over the patients' lives for the 6 months [and for some purposes, 2 years] before they died. Concluding that since they all died anyway [duh!], the ones who got more care [and therefore cost more money], didn't really need all that extra care [and therefore we don't need to be spending that extra money on them].

It's an attractive notion, but one of the things the Dartmouth researchers didn't do so much of was looking forward.

Rick Ungar reports that Rep. Ross is suggesting opening up Medicare to anyone who wants to buy into it rather than creating a separate public option bureaucracy. Even if you think that this is a diversionary tactic on the part of Ross it is a good sign. It would be MUCH more popular in 2010 than the puny public options that have thus far been proposed. Meanwhile Waxman is quoted as saying:

The idea of a public option was to provide competition, but opening up Medicare would be the precursor to single-payer. This may be an issue of semantics, but it would be very difficult to implement.

Los Angeles Action

My name is Sam Pullen and I will be coordinating the sit-in at the Blue Cross office in downtown Los Angeles on October 15. We are calling upon all local supporters who are fed up with insurance companies that place profits before patients to join us for a rally from 10am - 12noon. We will be targeting the WellPoint Blue Cross office at 801 S. Figueroa Ave, Los Angeles CA 90017.

If you go to this, please take photos and post.

(In case you don't know, that's French for "Lay back and enjoy it.") Baseline Scenario:

On Friday morning, Diana Farrell – a senior White House official – made a significant statement on NPR’s Morning Edition, with regard to whether our largest banks are too big and should be broken up.

 “Ms. DIANA FARRELL (Deputy Assistant for Economy Policy): We understand Simon Johnson’s views on this, and I guess the response is the following….  

 “Ms. FARRELL: We have created them [our biggest banks], and we’re sort of past that point, and I think that in some sense, the genie’s out of the bottle and what we need to do is to manage them and to oversee them, as opposed to hark back to a time that we’re unlikely to ever come back to or want to come back to.” (full transcript)

Ms. Farrell is Larry Summers’s deputy on the National Economic Council ....

Whaddaya mean, "we"?

You won't be surprised to learn of even more change you can't believe in.

Meet the newest addition to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. If you've been reading Mother Jones recently, then you already know quite a bit about Scott O'Malia. Like the fact that he once worked as a top in-house lobbyist for an energy company, Mirant, that manipulated California's market Enron-style. Or that, while on this company's payroll, he lobbied against a bill to expand the CFTC's authority to police derivatives. Or that the Senate Agriculture Committee, which reviewed his nomination, declined to ask him any specific questions about his pro-deregulation lobbying on not one but two occasions.

As usual, Yves has the most interesting links. I like this post mortem the best, because it offers a model of "What the fuck were the Europeans thinking?" Read it all:

This ridiculous thing will be a millstone around the administration's neck for the next three years. Whoever did it cannot have been acting under any sort of instructions.

Cappy McGarr in the Times, today:

Back in the 1990s, I was the founding chairman of Texas’ state-run purchasing alliance — an exchange, essentially — which ultimately failed. There are lessons to be learned from that experience, as well as the similar failures of other states to create useful exchanges.

Cokie Roberts.

But AFAIC, she's right on this one -- or at least a hell of a lot closer to right about what you should do with a guy who drugs, rapes and sodomizes a 13-year-old kid than nearly any other Villager (or media / entertainment / political 'star') voice I've heard on this subject.

Remember, Polanski not only gave the kid liquor and Quaalude, he admitted it.

Luc Besson, director of Léon, refused to sign a Hollywood petition calling for Polanski's immediate release.

"There is one justice, and that should be the same for everyone," Besson said on French radio. "I have a daughter, 13 years old. If she was violated, nothing would be the same, even 30 years later."
Popular support in France for Polanski, who has lived in Paris as a fugitive ever since the episode, has quickly waned - if it was ever there at all. More than 70 per cent of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by Le Figaro believed that Polanski should be extradited to face justice.
Four hundred readers of the French magazine Le Point have written to condemn Polanski and the French celebrities who back him, dismissing them as the "crypto-intelligentsia of our country" who deliver "eloquent phrases that defy common sense".

Remember, Polanski not only pleaded guilty, he underwent a psych eval.
Remember, Polanski spent 42 days in a California lockup -- and 31 years running.

The Swiss say they wouldn't have let him go so long if they'd known. That's a little specious -- he owned a chalet there, and presumably had to show a passport upon visiting. But they did nail him, finally -- and publicly. If it's their idea of tit-for-tat over UBS ... I'm okay with that. Hell, I'd give 'em Phil Gramm in zip-tie handcuffs, if only I could.

RL calls, so maybe somebody else can unpack this detailed article on California's health exchange experiment (via McClatchy, bien sur).

Or, to ask the question in a more sophisticated way, who are the "strategic defaulters"? The LA Times asked that question:

Who is more likely to walk away from a house and a mortgage -- a person with super-prime credit scores or someone with lower scores?

The answer may surprise you -- especially if this was your narrative:

[OBAMA] In the past, if you found yourself in a situation like this, you could have sold your home and bought a smaller one with more affordable payments. Or you could have refinanced your home at a lower rate. But today, home values have fallen so sharply that even if you made a large down payment, the current value of your mortgage may still be higher than the current value of your house. So no bank will return your calls, and no sale will return your investment.

"You can't afford to leave and you can't afford to stay. So you cut back on luxuries. Then you cut back on necessities. You spend down your savings to keep up with your payments. Then you open the retirement fund. Then you use the credit cards. And when you've gone through everything you have, and done everything you can, you have no choice but to default on your loan. And so your home joins the nearly six million others in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure across the country, including roughly 150,000 right here in Arizona.

Except that's not what is happening. At all.