In a guest post at Naked Capitalism:
The Obama Administration cannot energize their health care reform because the public demands reform in the financial sector, and quite frankly Obama has lost the 'high ground' of the reformer by his inability to free his administration from the growing taint of scandal and conflicts of interest.
And what of the FKDP
?
For a party that spent eight years on the sidelines, the American Democrats have proven themselves to be particularly inept at doing anything to promote their agenda once presented with a solid majority by the voting public. One has to wonder if they ever intended to deliver on their promise of change at all.
As my son always says when I complain about the ineptitude of the Democrats, "Democrats shooting themselves in the foot? Who could ever imagine it?"
Obama and the FKDP do not seem to understand the anger that is widespread in this country at the idea that billions, if not trillions, of our (the taxpayers') money were handed over to the banksters with little to no restriction or regulation. It certainly does not help matters that prominent members of the Administration are reported to be fighting against adequate oversight and reforms to this day.
Or maybe they understand it, but do not think it has to be taken into consideration in formulating policy? Perhaps they think that most Americans do not really follow the details of how the story is still playing out, and after some time will forget about it?
Jesse's full post is about the larger problem that the US is not taking care of reining in its finance sector, "So it remains for the rest of the world to begin to rein in the outrageous behaviour of the US financial institutions that treat the world's bourses as their private casinos." This is something that we need to address, for the sake of the world's financial health as well as our own; and it would go a long way, I believe, to helping restore Americans' confidence that their government will protect their best interests and not only the interests of the banksters (and insurance companies).
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Democrats are not inept, they're corrupt
I think we should bury the myth that Democrats are either incompetent or cowardly. They're doing exactly what they want to do: fucking us to favor their corporate backers.
The two are not mutually exclusive (inept and corrupt)
As descriptions of the party as a whole, both can be true.
And I also refuse to give up on trying to work with the individuals ones who genuinely do want to do good things. Or even, to work with the ones who want to give the appearance of doing good things, if they are useful to me. Or even, to try to convince them that doing what I want them to do will enable them to look good at little cost. Whatever.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
Since we've been posting winger emails
Here's the one I got from my resident work winger
And it actually makes some sense.
Dear Mr. President:
Please find below my suggestion for fixing America's economy.
Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the
following plan.
You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:
There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.
Pay them 1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the
following stipulations:
1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings -
Unemployment fixed.
2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered-
Auto Industry fixed.
3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage -
Housing Crisis fixed.
It can't get any easier than that!
If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes...
It's kind of cooky, considering he's all about freedom from government oppression, that he thinks that much government intervention is acceptable.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
- Sir William Drummond
It's rather entertaining
how far he thinks $1 million would go. (Buy a house? Even now? And have enough left to retire on?) And WTF
would I do with a car?
But this does illustrate the point that people are very angry about the perception (and the reality) that banksters and other parasites are being handed billions of money that ultimately comes out of our pockets and our children's and grandchildren's...
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
houses in my neighborhood
are finally dipping down below $100,000 [where they belong]. a brand new prius is $22,000. $878,000, if i had medicare too, could last me 30 years. surely somewhere in that time frame the economy would pick up enough to let me go back to work at least part time [selling stuff on ebay? walmart greeter?] without displacing any younger workers.
an awful lot of wingers live in areas like i do, rural, semi-rural, or just plain long-term economically depressed.
yeah, but
he's talking about all folks over 50. Like me. And we don't all live in that sort of location. In fact, the majority of Americans (79%) live in urban vs. rural areas.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
It would have to be adjusted
For cost of living.
$1 million here in KY, after buying all that, would be enough to live on for the rest of my life, and I'm not 30 yet.
But that same million in NYC, would not go as far.
Also, this still comes to $40 trillion dollars, which is still more than the bailout, but it would have had the added bonus of actually helping the taxpayers, vs helping the corporations
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
- Sir William Drummond
The point I'm trying to make
(however ineptly), is that while the writer might have a good idea in requiring folks to pay off mortgages (I'm agnostic on that), I don't see "owning a house" as inherently a moral good, so why would he want me to buy a house (or apartment even) rather than to go on renting as I am doing, which I could afford to do on that $1 million?
I'm just not seeing that part of the argument, unless it's that he thinks shoring up (inflated) housing prices is a good thing. Which might be.
And I'm now noticing that I'm assuming the writer is male. (No, I was not using "he" as a generic pronoun. I use "they" that way.)
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
buy, rent
my guess is that the author's point is more about housing security than about ownership, though doing something to fill empty housing isn't all bad.
where i live, renting can be perilous [my rent has gone up about 40% in 5 or 6 years, just because they can], so real security would probably mean owning my own place.
as for the urban/rural mix in your other comment, i'd probably fall into the urban classification actually. it's just that we have plenty of neighborhoods with small, old, shabby, but perfectly liveable houses [and quite a few neighborhoods in very bad shape too, jobs jobs jobs fixing up those houses!].
I doubt he has housing security in mind
If he would force people to buy housing then it's not about housing security.
And I take your point about what's in your neighborhood: I'd just say (to the writer) that generalizing from your own experience to the whole of the citizens of the USA is, um, parochial.
My own neighborhood is very, very different from what you describe.
Edited comment to add for clarity:
His argument seems to be that this money should be handed over to 50+ers, who are then required to retire (to make jobs available), and then they should be required to buy a car (to shore up the American auto industry, presumably) and buy a house or pay off a mortgage - the only way this fits is if it's to shore up the real estate values.
That's how I read him: the letter doesn't make sense any other way to me.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
I do agree
And it's not like this was written by an economist.
This is just someone who says, hey the housing market is bad, let's make these people fix it by buying homes.
It's not an actual solution to anything, it just sounds like a solution.
What was interesting to me, is that the person who forwarded this email to me, is all against government intervention in health care and private industry, but would support this kind of intrusive action.
I don't know what causes the cognitive dissonance that says "Medicare for All"=bad, but enforced retirement of able bodied adults=good.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
- Sir William Drummond
those of us who live out here in the hinterlands
are not your enemy, i promise.
but i haven't got time and energy to deconstruct and translate both politicians' maneuverings on health care and rubes' practical if imperfect wishes for shoring the economy as experienced by many of us.
on to hr 15.
I didn't ask you to deconstruct it
I'm sorry if it came across that way. And I'm not saying you or he are "the enemy". I do understand that things look different from different vantage points in this country.
I was just, originally, expressing incredulity. There are also "many of us" who live in situations like mine.
One of the points Anthony Weiner brought out when he was trying to introduce his motion in committee, is that "affordable" as defined by HR 3200 is not affordable for people living in NYC. That's a problem with one-size-fits-all thinking.
I was just saying that the writer was being very, very parochial. That I did so by coming across as parochial myself is my own fault for not expressing myself better.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
More evidence for "inept"
Mark Thoma points to this report:
There's nothing to fear in what Summers said (and you all know I am no fan of Summers!) - although I think using Medicare savings to shore up SS is the wrong way to go (any Medicare savings should be figured to use in healthcare-related ways if at all) and way too speculative. I would prefer to see the cap on the FICA tax raised. But that's me, and we all know women can't do this stuff. :)
But the real problem here is: why bring up SS right now, when seniors' fears are already being stoked? No matter what the administration says, you know (or I know, anyway) that the wingnuts will glom onto this and tell seniors that now Obama wants to take away your SS check. (Never mind that the wingnuts hate SS anyway. They never worrry about consistency.)
Why hand them another issue?
Really, this failure to predict the very obvious is beginning to make me wonder...
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!