Archive for March 2009
Weekly Audit: Workers will build the recovery, not Wall Street
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With new bailout plans for Wall Street being unveiled almost every week, it’s easy to forget that nearly all of the work that fuels our economy takes place outside of Manhattan. While reviving the financial sector is an important part of recovery, any lasting economic solution must also empower American workers and protect them from corporate abuses.
Workers’ rights are a core issue for our democracy, as progressive icon Noam Chomsky argues in an interview with Paul Jay of The Real News. The discussion covers the current economic crisis and its implications for the democratization of the U.S. economy. It’s a fascinating exchange. In the video below, Chomsky advocates for a much broader palette of reform than a simple clean-up the financial sector.
Chomsky notes that while the recent bank bailouts have brought a great deal of attention to the disconnect between public investment and private profit, it has become routine for the taxpaying public to foot the bill for important research that eventually creates big corporate profits. To ensure that we all reap the benefits of our investments, it is essential to make institutions accountable to their communities, rather than exclusively dedicated to maximizing shareholder returns.
The first step in democratizing the U.S. economy, according to Chomsky, is promoting unionization by enacting the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier for workers to organize.
“The Employee Free Choice Act is always misrepresented,” Chomsky says. “It’s described as an effort to avoid secret elections. It’s not that. It’s an effort to allow workers to decide whether there should be secret elections, instead of leaving the decisions entirely in the hands of employers.”
EFCA would give workers more control over their circumstances, leading to improved wages and living standards for laborers. In a column for The American Prospect, Terence Samuel points out that even if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to bailout Wall Street succeeds in stabilizing the banking sector, banks can do little to bring about recovery if U.S. citizens are all broke. If we want to get out of the bubble-and-bust cycle, we must establish a middle class that has money to spend. Fundamentally, that means raising wages.
Robert Eshelman puts the plight of today’s workers into focus in a devastating piece for Salon. Even where clear, straightforward laws to protect laborers from predatory employers exist, major corporations have been able to use the fear of being fired to push employees into “voluntarily” working under illegal conditions (Wal-Mart just agreed to pay out $640 million to settle charges that it intimidated its own employees into skipping mandatory breaks and accepting pay rates below the minimum wage).
“If corporations were able to exert such coercive power when the unemployment rate was around 5 percent, what can they do in a job market in which 14.8 percent of the population can’t find adequate work?” Eshelman asks.
Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Labor systematically ignored its duty to enforce labor laws. Writing for Colorlines, Michelle Chen highlights a report from the Government Accountability Office that takes the Department to task for failing to even return phone calls from workers who complained about employer abuses.
Millions of jobs are hanging in the balance as President Barack Obama formulates his rescue plan for the U.S. auto industry. But while the administration has insisted that factory workers at GM and Chrysler have to accept wage cuts, they’ve almost bent over backwards to funnel bonus money to executives at failed insurance giant AIG. General Motors’ CEO Rick Wagoner has stepped down at the Obama administration’s request, and while it’s hard to feel sorry for an executive who lobbied aggressively against the environment and ran his company into the ground, his ousting reflects Wall Street’s privileged status in Washington. As Josh Marshall highlights in Talking Points Memo, it is astonishing that executives at Bank of America and Citigroup, who have put taxpayers on the hook for far greater sums of bailout money than GM and Chrysler, have not been subjected to the same treatment as Wagoner.
We’ve all seen the grim statistics indicating how severe the current economic crisis really is, but the proliferation of roving tent, shack and lean-to communities along U.S. railways underscores the true costs of the recession more grimly than any consumer spending metric or gross domestic product projection. All over the United States, people who cannot afford even rental housing are living in makeshift structures without access to basic amenities. It’s much like the rise of Hoovervilles in the late 1920s and 1930s, where out-of-work laborers took up residence anywhere they could.
While these squatter communities are growing as the crisis deepens, the worst part of the whole phenomenon is that they were common before the current downturn, as Scott Bransford notes for High Country News.
Whatever happens on Wall Street, fixing the economy will mean making sure ordinary people have access to basic amenities, and guaranteeing that workers have the power to prevent abuses from corporate America’s executive class.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Obama’s Hard Line on Immigration
by Nezua
TMC MediaWire Blogger
Last week, President Obama announced his intention to address immigration reform in the next few months in a meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The statement came as a relief to many, especially with recent reports of human rights abuses within the U.S. detention system. But, as most of the President’s statements seem crafted to appeal to warring political constituencies, his actual intentions are still elusive.
Jorge Rivas of RaceWire, for one, wasn’t wholly won over by the President’s speech during a town hall meeting in California, and noted that Obama got “a little nasty.” Stressing ethnocentric arguments such as “You will learn English” while pointedly avoiding any comment on the suffering tied to the detention process makes for a poor juxtaposition:
You’ve got to..say to the undocumented workers, you have to say, look, you’ve broken the law; you didn’t come here the way you were supposed to. So this is not going to be a free ride. It’s not going to be some instant amnesty.
What’s going to happen is you are going to pay a significant fine. You are going to learn English. You are going to — you are going to go to the back of the line so that you don’t get ahead of somebody who was in Mexico City applying legally.
—March 18, President Barack Obama, Orange County, California
Perhaps his strategy is to soften opposition to migrant rights, but lines about language fuel the anti-immigration culture war. Do all immigrants have a problem with English? Or is he talking specifically about the demographic that Sheriff Joe Arpaio targets? If so, why?
President Obama is no Joe Arpaio. But, in this climate, anti-immigrant sentiment does not need to be fed. Our President is a smart and oratorically gifted man. In light of the current economic crisis, he could speak about how the current immigration crisis is tied directly to our trade practices.
Obama also spoke about joining militarily with Mexican President Calderón in efforts to stamp out the violence flaring up since his attacks against the deeply entrenched Cartel families. Democracy Now! has a roundtable discussion on the implications of further militarizing the border.
But the implications aren’t fully drawn out for the American public. In the modern world, borders do not separate families, nor commerce, nor soldiers, nor bank accounts and their owners. We need to begin addressing cross-border issues. For example, if NAFTA is supposed to help Mexico’s economy, why are Mexican farmers on tractors in the streets protesting the policy, as Michelle Chen reports. NAFTA has allowed Mexico’s corn crop to be so devalued that Mexico—the land where the plant was born roughly 5,000 years ago—now imports corn. Streams of campesinos have migrated north…where we lock them up.
Just as the economic crisis is very real to the people losing jobs, the Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raids are very real for a large faction of America. New America Media reports on the President’s second town hall meeting in California, where immigration reform activists showed up to “remind him we’re still here,” according to Nativo Lopez, state and national president of the Mexican-American Political Association. The President did not address immigration issues at this event, however.
President Obama speaks of beefing up security on our border, but avoids the growing immigrant detention industry and the problems that accompany it. At the same time, Mexico is flooding the country and its border cities with troops. But what does all the enforcement get us?
Mother Jones, in a collaboration with the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, profiled the resurrection and subsequent destruction of one town’s economy due to ICE raids in A Year Without A Mexican:
The 389 arrests [in Postville, IA] eliminated more than one-third of the meatpacker’s workforce and nearly one-fifth of the town’s population. It also prompted an exodus of hundreds more Hispanic residents who were either afraid of being targeted or simply opted to escape the town’s inevitable tailspin. Postville’s businesses began to suffer almost immediately.
The article paints a grim picture of a warm, thriving community that is decimated. Postville is now a strange, “open-air prison,” with various residents wearing visible electronic shackles. Rowdy citizens have been bused in to fill the place of the deported workers.
The Nation highlights a documentary on detention called “The Least of These.” The video explores the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility, “a for-profit prison”, where Latin American families live in a converted prison environment. They don’t get enough sun, they don’t get enough exercse, and the children draw crayon pictures of the American flag, with tiny, fragile letters spelling out Please help us. How long should they wait?
In Up Against The Wall, RaceWire reports on the growing indications that the Obama Administration may not break with Bush policies regarding immigration. In fact, it may increase enforcement measures while siphoning money away from worker protections in the U.S.
And all this “just days after huddling with Latino members of Congress on immigration issues.” If Obama isn’t careful, he will give the Republican party a foothold to regain trust with Latino voters. I suspect that in any approach to Immigration, compromise is inevitable. But, if the Latino community feels used or betrayed by unkept promises, it could be disastrous for Democrats.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Flipping the Byrd on Healthcare Reform
This week, the healthcare reform debate churned on behind the scenes as the economic crisis and treasury secretary Geithner’s latest bank rescue plan dominated the news cycle. Meanwhile Democrats weighed various strategies to advance healthcare reform even without a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. Drug policy made headlines this week. Attorney General Eric Holder expanded upon the administration’s new found tolerance towards states that permit medical marijuana. The morning after pill will soon be available over-the-counter, thanks to a ruling by a New York Federal judge.
“Could an obscure Senate rule free Barack Obama from the filibuster and enable health-care reform?” asks Ezra Klein in the American Prospect. Democrats are eager to maintain momentum for their ambitious healthcare reform agenda, but the potential of a filibuster could derail the plan. It all comes down to numbers: If a healthcare reform bill were introduced in the Senate, the Democrats would not have the 60 votes they need to block a Republican filibuster.
However, as Klein explains, it’s possible to pass a healthcare bill with a simple majority in the Senate:
Imagine you want to run health reform through the reconciliation process. Here’s how it works: Congress includes reconciliation instructions in the budget. Those instructions direct certain committees — say, the Finance Committee and the Health, Energy, Labor, and Pensions Committee — to produce health-reform legislation hitting certain spending targets by a certain deadline. Once finished, the legislation is tossed back to the Budget Committee, which staples it together into an omnibus bill and sends it to the floor of the Senate for 20 hours of debate followed by an up-or-down vote.
There’s always a catch. In this case, Klein explains, the catch is a provision known as the Byrd Rule, which states that only provisions directly related to spending or deficit reduction can be inserted during budget reconciliation. Everyone seems to agree that healthcare reform will have a profound impact, for good or ill, on the nation’s bottom line–but would healthcare legislation “count” under the Byrd test? Klein says that nobody knows because the final decision would rest with the inscrutable Senate parliamentarian, Alan Frumin . George W. Bush used the reconciliation process to pass everything from oil drilling to trade policy, but there’s simply no way to know whether the parliamentarian would indulge the Democrats on healthcare. Klein writes, “It’s the legislative equivalent of deciding a bill on penalty kicks.”
Even so, the Republicans aren’t taking any chances. The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen recently chided Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) for saying that using the reconciliation process to pass healthcare reform would be a step towards “mob rule”.
Public interest lawyer Roy Ulrich argues in AlterNet that we may not see healthcare reform until we see campaign finance reform. Ulrich notes that most liberals, President Obama included, want healthcare reform to included a publicly-financed health insurance option. However, even some of the Democrats in the Senate are hostile to that idea, notably Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who has received more than $413,000 over the past four years from drug companies and health insurance carriers.
Drug policy continues to make headlines this week. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly follows up on Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that he will no longer raid medical marijuana facilities in California, where the drug is legal with a doctor’s prescription: Holder stated that on his watch, federal authorities would only target traffickers posing as legitimate dispensaries, bona fide purveyors of medical marijuana.
Benen notes that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is giving an unpredictable justification for his entirely predictable outrage: “This Attorney General is not doing healthcare reform any good,” said Grassley. “The first rule of medicine — ‘do no harm’ — is being violated by the Attorney General with this decision.”
Yes, that’s the same Chuck Grassley who cheers on Rush Limbaugh for telling lies about comparative efficacy research (CER) and healthcare reform. I’m not making this up. Chris Hayes of the Nation has the details. Limbaugh, Fox News and other right wing media outlets have been deliberately circulating misinformation about the president’s comparative effectiveness research program. In reality, CER is a tool for doctors to make better treatment deisions. Limbaugh and his cronies are claiming that it has something to do with healthcare rationing and Grassley is cheering them on.
Despite some deescalation on the medical marijuana front, President Obama has shown a troubling willingness to further militarize other aspects of the drug war, Democracy Now reports.
And finally, a big step forward for birth control, thanks to a federal judge in New York. Thanks to the judge’s ruling, Plan B, also known as the morning after pill, will be available over-the-counter to women over the age of 17 within the next 30 days, Dana Goldstein notes in the American Prospect. The judge found the FDA erred in restricting access to Plan B during the Bush era.
Weekly Audit: Stop Subsidizing Wall Street
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rolled out his new Wall Street bailout plan on Monday and the progressive verdict is already in: This bailout doesn’t look much better than the last one. In fact, Geithner’s latest plan isn’t much different from several other flawed proposals policymakers have floated over the past year. At its core, Geithner’s program is just another attempt buy up “toxic assets” from banks at inflated prices.
If most major U.S. banks accepted current market prices for the bad, mortgage-related assets on their books, they would be insolvent. Geithner is trying to convince Wall Street that the assets are worth a lot more than everyone thinks they are, rather than deal with the fundamental problems of the assets and their owners. The plan unveiled on Monday involves a smorgasbord of guarantees for Wall Street investors, all part of an effort to sweeten the pot and convince them to buy toxic mortgage-related assets from troubled banks. Unfortunately, Geithner’s revisions create new problems without solving key previous dilemmas inherent in the plan.
In a post for Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall highlights a clip of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz rejecting a very similar plan in early February. Marshall asks “Why are we still at this?”
Under older formulations of the toxic asset purchase model, the government would have purchased the assets directly from banks. Since the assets are hard to value, this approach would have carried the risk that the Treasury would pay too much and provide banks with what amounts to a bailout (inflated price = free money + no strings attached). Geithner’s new plan offers incentives that encourage hedge funds and private equity companies to buy toxic assets from banks. But the incentives do nothing to make sure the funds do not pay too much for those assets. Indeed, Geithner’s plan actually encourages the private sector to pay too much. The troubled banks are still likely to be bailed out, thanks to a strong possibility that investors will pony up artificially high prices for their assets. The result is a set of economically irrational subsidies for both banks and Wall Street investment houses.
As Ezra Klein puts it for The American Prospect: “Imagine an art auction. Now imagine an art auction where Sotheby’s loans money to the participants and promises to pay the losses if the paintings fall in value. Think the pricing will be the same? And who would you say is being protected: Sotheby’s or the private investors?”
Still worse, all of those subsidies and guarantees for hedge funds mean that taxpayers are on the hook for much more than our private sector “partners,” since buying up assets that nobody wants to buy is an intrinsically risky plan. In a sane investment world, taxpayers would benefit from a greater share of any gains from the investment. But the Geithner plan actually works the opposite way, as David Corn writes for Mother Jones: “The feds are shouldering much more of the risk burden than the private firms. Yet the feds would not get any greater split of the profits—if they ever materialize.”
The government has intentionally created a gamble in which taxpayers bear the brunt of the blow for any losses, but allows Wall Street investors to enjoy a disproportionately large share of any gains. Subsidizing hedge funds and private equity firms serves no real economic function– they do not make loans that help small businesses or consumers. If we are going to bail out troubled banks, we might as well control how our funds are spent and ensure that the mistakes that created this problem are not repeated: wipe out the shareholders who made bad bets on poorly run companies and kick out the management teams who drove those companies into the ground.
Everyone, of course, is still angry about those AIG bonuses. But excessive executive compensation is not only a problem for companies that have been bailed out, as David Moberg explains for In These Times. Outrageous CEO paychecks distort timelines for executives, encouraging them to take short-term risks at the expense of long-term profitability. This is bad not only for individual companies, but for the entire economy. The current financial crisis is a direct result of executives binging on risky securities to score big paydays without worrying about future damages to their companies’ balance sheets.
It’s also easy to forget that corporations are not merely wealth machines for their top executives—they are supposed to serve a useful economic function and fulfill actual social needs. Moberg argues persuasively that we need new rules for corporate accountability that align the interests of companies with the well-being of our society.
Over at Yes!, David Korten emphasizes the risk that important reforms on Wall Street will fall by the wayside if the government continues to focus on short-term emergency bailout plans instead of serious regulatory changes. It’s past time for regulators to impose new rules on the game. The current financial crisis hit in the summer of 2007. Bear Stearns collapsed over a year ago. If the government had devoted more time to restructuring a broken financial system and less time orchestrating short-term bailouts, policymakers would have a much more effective set of tools to combat the crisis with. The most important lesson we have learned so far is that when a bank is considered too big to fail, it has become too big to exist. If lawmakers do not force over-sized financial behemoths to downsize, the entire economy will be jeopardized again when Wall Street’s next speculative bubble bursts.
At present, however, Geithner seems content to simply blow another bubble with a new set of windfalls for Wall Street. If that sounds like a raw deal for taxpayers, that’s because it is.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: ‘Systematic Failures’ in U.S. Detention Healthcare
by Nezua
TMC MediaWire Blogger
This week, two comprehensive reports on the health of immigrant detainees were released by Human Rights Watch and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. As Public News Service reports, “Immigrants are, literally, dying for decent care.”
There have been many cases of inadequate medical treatment or neglect leading to death in U.S. detention centers. The cases are horrific—ranging from an ignored broken spine to deadly metastasized genital cancer—and must stop immediately. But, a thorough accounting of the realities of detention is needed if the United States can engage in an honest dialogue about immigration policy.
RaceWire doesn’t shrink from offering an incisive analysis in Health in Detention. Michelle Chen writes that “Part of the problem is that the mission of ICE’s Division of Immigration Health Services isn’t really to ensure that all detainees receive the care they need, but rather, to keep people essentially well enough to be kicked out of the country before they die.” Chen adds that in some cases, that low bar isn’t met.
There are many causes. After 9/11, the U.S. stopped aiming for a “more perfect union” of its diverse population. The Bush administration responded (starting in Florida) to the immigrant community with suspicion and force. And so it has continued, ultimately leading to the conditions outlined in this week’s reports. The poor treatment of immigrants in U.S. custody reveals a very ugly side of the country, but it’s hardly a new side. AlterNet’s Lynn Tramonte offers a scathing indictment of how dangerous Agreement 287(g), which recruits local police to enforce immigration law, has become to communities.
The stalemate on immigration reform is sometimes portrayed as a disagreement over “safety” and “security” and “jobs.” But, in many cases, it’s a disguised resistance to the always-changing face of America. It’s an old game of Tug-of-War. Wiretap reminds us how long this culture battle has been going on in the below video. It recalls eerily familiar past attitudes:
We don’t know why the human race has such a short memory when it comes to cyclical xenophobia. It’s confounding, especially in the U.S.: How can we be so proud of our own families’ immigrant roots, but not wish that happiness for others? If a mother, daughter, or sister is called “immigrant”—in the U.S. or the Middle East—she’s suddenly worth less.
Going back to the aforementioned Public News Service article: According to Human Rights Watch researcher Meghan Rhoad, “the detention system routinely subjects women to suffering and humiliation. It is a system that needlessly shackles pregnant women with no criminal background, that ignores requests for care, and does all of this with impunity.”
But confront ICE officials, even their spokesperson, with the many documented cases of medical neglect or human rights abuses, and reporters will be given the standard statement that the agency is “committed to humane and safe treatment of detainees.” The inadequacy of the answer mirrors their effectiveness.
Speaking of inadequate approaches, we now turn to the investigation into Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). On March 12, RaceWire reported on the positive reaction to the investigation from local activists and community groups in Arizona. Click through to see photos of Members of Maricopa Citizen for Safety and Accountability (MCSA) delivering the Sheriff numerous “pink slips” or see letters the DOJ delivered to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on March 10.
In other immigration news, The Texas Observer reports on non-profit consumer advocate group Public Citizen’s suit against DHS on behalf of Denise Gilman. Their efforts are helping shed some light on the construction of a border fence.
It also appears that Speaker Pelosi was actually forecasting a change in immigration policy last week. Yesterday President Obama met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and announced his intention to move forward “possibly within the next two months” with the unveiling of a legislative package that will address immigration reform. Hours later, at a town hall meeting in California, he repeated his conviction to do so.
Some have expressed concern that President Obama is taking on too much at once. But all of these things, the economy and immigration and healthcare, are intertwined. For example, the growing detention center industry will continue to take the place of productive workers and damage a healthy economy.
It is in our nation’s best interest to veer sharply away from the path that George W. Bush set us upon. Obama’s announcement yesterday is exciting news, considering how long the nation’s immigration laws have languished and how many humans have suffered because of them. The change that President Obama promised the nation seems to be coming for one and all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Drugs, Sex, and the Single Payer
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
This week, we bring you news of drugs, sex, and single-payer health insurance, including a fun video clip on Obama’s new drug czar from the Rachel Maddow show. Now that Obama has chosen his top healthcare advisers, the administration is beginning to chart a course for healthcare reform. Not surprisingly, there is vigorous debate about what our a new healthcare system would look like, and how to pay for it.
Single-payer health insurance was a hot topic for independent media this week. The private health insurance industry has failed to contain costs and cover the majority of Americans. The strain of the employer-funded health insurance system is crippling American competitiveness and leaving consumers unsatisfied. Universal, publicly-funded health insurance would be a better and cheaper alternative, explains Ramón Castellblanch in the Progressive. Castellblanch, an associate professor of health education at California State University, says that single-payer is simply a government-administered insurance program for everyone, not government-administered healthcare.
There’s also broad consensus that fixing the healthcare system must involve more than providing health insurance. Insurance is a tool for spreading risk and sharing cost, but it won’t fix the deeper problems that made healthcare unaffordable in the first place. In Salon, Rahul K. Parikh, M.D. describes the carrots and sticks built into Obama’s plan to motivate doctors to practice evidence-based medicine more efficiently. Evidence-based medicine means treatment supported by the best scientific research. It has been estimated that up to one third of medical treatment is unnecessary and ineffective. Some reformers believe, therefore, that making medicine more evidence-based will improve quality and cut costs.
Maggie Maher argues in AlterNet that such cost-saving reforms are well and good, but we will still need to raise taxes in order to pay for healthcare reform.
Opponents of healthcare reform often try to frighten consumers with claims that government intervention will remove their ability to make choices about treatment. As political scientist Scott Lemieux explains at TAPPED, Obama’s healthcare plan would increase choice:
First of all, many people who have insurance are seriously restricted in their choice of physicians. There’s nothing about private insurance that guarantees that patients will have wide discretion in choosing who will perform their medical care. For example, Canada’s single-payer system would even provide more patient discretion. And then, of course, people without insurance effectively have no choice at all. Obama’s plan will at least give many of them more options than they have now. People who can afford to pay out of pocket for the doctor of their choice can still do so.
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is doing his best to convince the public that reforms like comparative effectiveness research would amount to “rationing” of healthcare. As Scott Lemieux argued in his TAPPED post, linked above, rationing is the status quo, as the main rationing criteria is the patient’s ability to pay.
Delivering care based on what works, as opposed to who can pay, would be change we can believe in.
If there’s one thing we love to write about at the Weekly Pulse, it’s czars. All kinds of czars. This week, president Obama picked a shiny new drug czar: Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske. In the following clip, Rachel Maddow discusses the implications of the pick with Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Institute. Some activists are concerned that choosing a cop to run the Office of National Drug Control Policy is a mistake, but Mirken argues that Kerlikowske’s record as a pragmatic urban police chief is cause for cautious optimism:
In legal drug-related news, Martha Rosenberg of AlterNet explains why the multi-billion dollar merger between pharmaceutical giants Merck and Schering-Plough is a marriage made in hell, though the two firms do have many common interests: Scientifically dubious research designed to “prove” the efficacy of their latest blockbuster drugs, and questionable “awareness” campaigns to promote their products, to name a few. “Many are saying the drug companies need a new business model, having dealt themselves out of the game with their crash-and-burn blockbusters and with third party and Medicaid benefits managers saying “You’ve got to be kidding” about extravagant patent drugs,” Rosenberg writes.
At TAPPED, Beth Schwartzapfel weighs the pros and cons of making birth control pills available over the counter. Some reproductive health activists believe that making the pill more readily available would help more women manage their fertility with few risks, but some medical professionals caution against the change because they worry that women will miss out on other kinds of care, like pap smears, if they can just buy pills at the pharmacy.
Finally, Kimberly Whipkey of RH Reality Check writes that the FDA has approved the next generation of female condom, and not a moment too soon: Air America reports on an alarming new study that shows the rate of HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. is on par with those of West Africa. Speaking of AIDS, what medical school did Pope Benedict go to? The pontiff made his first unequivocal pronouncement against condoms this week, sparking pointed criticism from various outlets, including Marissa Valeri of RH Reality and Miriam Perez of Feministing.
Americans are finally realizing that our corporate, profit-driven healthcare system isn’t working. (Democracy Now! reports on the formation of the new activist group, Single Payer Action, an organization dedicated to advocating direct action to demand a single-payer health insurance system.) There is widespread political will for sweeping change, even if questions remain as to how to supply high quality healthcare for everyone at an affordable price.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Progressive Pressure is Repairing the Economy
Progressive media is sounding the alarm on the AIG bonus scandal, demanding that policymakers stop repeating Bush administration mistakes and offering concrete solutions to the dire economic situation those missteps have created.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich describes the bonus insanity in a blog distributed by AlterNet. “Had AIG gone into chapter 11 bankruptcy or been liquidated, as it would have without government aid, no bonuses would ever be paid,” Reich writes, noting that institutions like AIG “are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market.” If AIG is not accountable to the Treasury Secretary of the country that owns an 80% stake in AIG, then the company has unlimited access to taxpayer coffers without being accountable to anyone at all.
The government’s first set of actions after it took control of its AIG stake back in September should have been to identify and renegotiate every important contract the company was tied up in. Whether those contracts were guaranteed bonuses with current employees or complex credit default swap transactions with Goldman Sachs, the extraordinary assistance the government had agreed to provide would have been a perfectly legitimate legal justification to demand new contractual terms. In short, the government should have exercised the benefits of ownership—exactly what progressive economists, columnists and bloggers have been demanding since the bailout debate began.
But while the uproar over AIG’s bonuses vindicates progressive calls for more stringent action to rein in the financial predators, President Barack Obama inherited an economy in very real danger of collapse, with the banking crisis is the epicenter of the economic earthquake.
While most economists are warning of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Robert Kuttner reveals for The American Prospect why this one might actually be worse. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the U.S. financial system was still generally healthy. It took another three years for unemployment and general economic malaise to overwhelm the banking world. Today, the banking system is already broken and could get even worse without swift and dramatic action from the Obama administration. The U.S. is not a major international creditor as it was in 1929, but rather the world’s largest debtor, and today far more Americans have their life savings tied up in the value of their home and in the stock market than in the early years of the Depression. Millions of Americans have already seen their nest eggs decimated in the current recession, a process which took years during the Herbert Hoover administration.
Kuttner emphasizes that the situation is not hopeless—it will simply require a bigger set of policy tools than the Bush administration was willing to wield. “All of these economic calamities have solutions, but each is more radical that what’s currently on offer,” Kuttner writes. Temporarily nationalizing big banks has become inevitable if recovery is going to be taken seriously. We’ll also have to get used to very large federal deficits—World War II deficits were nearly triple the deficit we will see this year. If foreign creditors decide to stop footing the bill, the U.S. may need to finance its economic salvation by selling recovery bonds to our own citizens just as we sold war bonds in the 1940s war bonds.
The key is to keep the progressive pressure on high. In an interview with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, Barbara Ehrenreich emphasizes the importance of the current economic situation for the future of progressive ideals. Ehrenreich identifies as a socialist and is most famous for her book Nickel and Dimed about living on poverty-level wages. The fact that we have allowed Wall Street to drain hundreds of billions of dollars in public sector resources should be terrifying, according to Ehrenreich, and even those who do not share her ideological affiliations can see that the current loot-and-let-die arrangement is not only unfair, but not working.
“[Obama] needs a left on the economic issue,” Ehrenreich argues. “We’ve got to make the pressure real.”
The AIG debacle proves her point. Writing for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen highlights Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s “I feel your pain” moment during Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview in which he voiced outrage over AIG’s destructive behavior. “If Bernanke thinks that’s going to dissipate the public anger, he’s likely to be disappointed,” according to Benen.
And indeed, a handful of commentators including Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo laid into the government’s bailout engineers over the past couple of weeks for refusing to disclose AIG’s counterparties. The Treasury finally caved on Monday, so despite Geithner’s protests, we now know exactly who AIG paid with its bailout money from 2008, mostly European banks. But as TruthDig’s Ear to the Ground blog notes, even this victory is just a step in the right direction—Treasury is yet to explain how AIG bailout funds have been spent in 2009. Better still, the administration might also stop bestowing taxpayer largesse on Wall Street incorrigibles who, let’s not forget, created the economic problem in the first place.
Political discourse is not the only forum for progressive pressure. To that end, the NAACP has filed class-action lawsuits against subprime behemoths Wells Fargo and HSBC seeking some for discriminatory mortgage lending. As Michelle Chen explains for Colorlines, black Americans routinely pay more for their mortgages than white borrowers with identical qualifications, and are often denied loans entirely based on nothing but the color of their skin.
If you want social justice, this is the economic moment to demand it.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Congress Signals Change for Immigration Policies
by Nezua
TMC MediaWire Blogger
Since the Obama administration came into power, the absence of movement on immigration issues has made activists on both sides of the debate anxious. Most reasoned that there was so much on the new President’s agenda, critical issues would have to wait for their turn.
But when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) went forward with the raids that were born under the Bush administration (much to the apparent surprise of the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security), tension mounted. Over 8,000 people in Arizona gathered last weekend to protest the way agreement 287(g)) has played out in the hands of local law “enforcers” like Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio,who is well known for stunts like marching immigrants in chains through town. (287(g) hands civil immigration enforcing powers to local criminal law forces.) Racewire reports in Immigration Advocates Want Action From Obama.
But the protesters didn’t pin all the blame on Arpaio. They issued a call to President Obama and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, echoed by a powerful op-ed published in the Times, to step up and take responsibility for ending the inhumane policies and terror practices that have become all too commonplace in this country.
Image courtesy of The Center for Community Change. Taken on February 28, 2009
Is this call being answered? Public News Service reported that Arizona Congressmen Rep. Raul Grijalva and Ed Pastor joined with Illinois Representative Luis Guiterrez at an immigration reform rally on Sunday night at an immigrant rights rally. ”The leadership has made public commitments; President Obama has made public commitments. With the enforcement part and other things, it’s become an issue in which more and more people want Congress to react. And I think we need to, and as a consequence of that, I think we have a much better chance this year than we’ve had the last four or five.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also has signaled a strong stance against the ICE raids and subsequent “tearing families apart.” On March 8, Pelosi’s noted her position is that “Taking parents from their children” is “un-American.”
In an exciting move, on March 10th, the US Department of Justice announced its “first civil-rights probe related to immigration enforcement,” referring to an investigation into Sheriff Arpaio and Maricopa County’s policing. In response, Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox admits, “I think they’re going to find racial profiling, which is a civil-rights abuse.”
News items like these, considered collectively, may lead one to feel confident that positive change is coming in the area of immigration reform. More importantly, that reason can begin to reclaim its place in the conversation, not to mention a sense of decency and humanity. These can be important imperatives in a time of economic downfall. But it is precisely at these times that minority and immigrant communities become vulnerable to scapegoating and potentially worse.
On AlterNet, Kevin Tillman addresses a popular example of the tendency to target the immigrant community in Stimulus Spin: Unauthorized Immigrants Will Get Construction Jobs. Tillman reminds us that even if undocumented workers benefit along with the rest of the nation, this is on cause to reject the stimulus package nor to visit hostility upon the immigrant community.
Here’s the thing: I don’t care, and neither should you. Because the whole argument obscures the larger issue. …[T]here is no doubt that if we create a bunch of new jobs — especially in construction — unauthorized workers will get some of them. After all, they make up about 4-5 percent of the American workforce. And that’s fine, because stimulus spending is not just about creating jobs.
At the same time, the administration’s moves toward approaching immigration from a different angle are muddied by other interconnected realities. On March 10th, Air America posted a clip of Rachel Maddow’s interview with DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano , with the theme “Mexico bad and getting worse” to which the solution offered was the Mérida Initiative, or what many opponents call “Plan México.”
Mérida is dubbed Plan México after Plan Colombia, in which the US (under President Bill Clinton) enacted legislation targeting the drug commerce in Colombia, specifically the coca crops. (The legislation was funded and further expanded under President Bush.) Plan Colombia has been soundly criticized because of paramilitary and police abuses by the Colombian armed forces, as well as the abject failure to reduce cocaine production, which instead has greatly increased.
The Mérida Inititiative is a plan that could only be enacted by a government that has learned nothing from Plan Colombia’s miserable failure. The Mérida Initiative is a program crafted by the minds of the Bush administration, and like so much legislation of that era attempts to introduce oppressive and authoritarian measures in response to predictable phenomena, and all without examining the true causes. Suggesting that Plan México is “change” from the policies of the Past is ridiculous. As Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy (CIP) wrote:
“…[T]he militarized approach to fighting organized crime, couched in terms of the counterterrorism model of the Bush administration, presents serious threats to civil liberties and human rights. In Mexico, this has already been clear particularly among four vulnerable groups: members of political opposition, women, indigenous peoples, and migrants. … Because Mexico cannot receive any cash under Plan Mexico, the entire appropriations package translates into juicy contracts for arms manufacturers, mercenary firms, and U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Perhaps Plan México will bring about more border cities being taken over by the military. Such as on March 4th, when Truthdig.com reported that the Mexican government sent over 2,000 troops into the border city of Ciudad Juarez to “try and regain control” as “more than 2,000 people have been murdered over the past year.” This violence was, of course, instigated by Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s unprecedented attack on the Cartels. So these conflicts intensify and the proposed answer—in the form of Mérida—is more funding, more weapons, more surveillance.
There are no voices telling us, yet, how using greater weaponry and surveillance and increased military powers are going to quell the national appetite for drugs that makes this conflict possible. Nor how even a government or two can hope to match that source of funding. Nor is anyone yet advising us on why we should be content in 2009 to watch complex issues of society be reduced to issues of force and more and more of our society handed over to military control. Especially when we surely have learned that this is not beneficial to the People.
One hopes that the current confluence of crises will inspire bold thought and a momentum capable of breaking away from the fearful and violent mindset that seems to have dogged so much national policy for almost the last decade. We need to make a different world for ourselves. And for others.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Why the Stem Cell Reversal Is Not a Total Victory
This week, President Obama made headlines by reversing George W. Bush’s executive order barring researchers who receive federal funds from researching all but a handful of stem cell lines created before 2001.
“Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama wrote. “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”
In The Nation, John Nichols applauds Obama’s restoration of science to its proper place in policy-making. And Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly points out that, right on cue, the conservative Family Research Council has started disingenuously claiming that Obama’s reversal opens the door for human cloning.
However, as Emily Douglas of RH Reality explains, the full implications of the reversal are more complicated than you might suppose: Obama lifted Bush-era restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell (ESC) researchers. However, researchers are still barred from using federal funds to create or modify human embryos, due to a legislative provision known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, enacted by Congress in 1996.
In 2001, Bush extended the funding ban to apply to human embryonic stem cells, which are are not themselves embryos. These stem cells are the descendants of cells that were harvested from embryos. Under the Bush rules, all but 21 lines of stem cells created before 2001 were off-limits to researchers receiving federal funds. The ban meant that if a lab stepped outside the stem cell rules, it would render itself ineligible for federal biomedical research money for any research it did, not just stem cell-related program activities. Being disqualified for federal grant money is effectively a death sentence for university labs.
Thanks to the Bush’s order, the advancement of ESC science has been sharply limited by the fact that only a handful of cell lines could be studied. Frequently, the first step in a new research program is to custom engineer a new line of cells to test the key hypothesis.
Now that Obama has reversed Bush’s executive order, scientists will be allowed to study stem cells from any lineage, including newly created lines, without jeopardizing their federal funding. But where will these new lines of stem cells come from? Unless Congress repeals Dickey-Wicker, labs that accept government funding will still be barred from making their own new stem cell lines because human embryonic stem cells are made from embryos.
The president does not have the authority to singlehandedly overturn Dickey-Wicker, only Congress can do that. However, Obama’s move may have emboldened pro-science Democrats to write Dickey-Wicker out of the next HHS appropriations bill.
In other healthcare news, Ezra Klein at the American Prospect notes with some amusement that increasing numbers of Republicans are embracing “universal coverage” as a buzzword. To Republicans, it means the goal of private insurance for everyone vs. the Obama administration’s vision of a public insurance option coexisting with private insurance. Klein reports that the top Senate Republicans with jurisdiction over health reform sent a letter to President Obama this week warning him not to try to sneak healthcare reform through the budget reconciliation process and warning him against a public insurance alternative. As we’ve discussed in previous editions of the Weekly Pulse, Republicans and their allies in the insurance industry like the idea of providing health insurance for everyone, even mandatory insurance for everyone, just as long as the insurance industry is empowered to sell it all.
In a similar vein, economist Dean Baker asks in AlterNet whether the government is more committed to protecting healthcare or health insurance industry profits.
This week, Ezra Klein also scored an exclusive interview with Andy Stern, the president of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU). Check the Prospect to find out what the head of America’s largest union thinks about healthcare reform.
As your healthcare blogger, I’m very pleased to announce that the Media Consortium now boasts not one but two outstanding progressive sex advice columnists, Prof. Foxy of feministing.com and Heather Corinna of RH Reality Check (via Scarletteen).
New feministing contributor “Professor Foxy” debuted her first column, which could have been titled “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” but was actually called, “Working things out in Florida.” Therein, Prof. Foxy counselled a newly married woman who dutifully practiced abstinence until marriage, only to find that married sex wasn’t as magically blissful as the abstinence-only crowd had led her to believe. Foxy had some practical tips to help the couple shed their inhibitions and build a mutually satisfying physical relationship. This week, Prof. Foxy advises a feminist who is trying to cope with the sudden revelation that her boyfriend of five years enjoys dressing in women’s clothing.
Weekly Audit: How Predators are Profiting from the Economic Collapse
While the economy sinks into the abyss, some of the financial industry’s most egregious scam artists are already back on the prowl looking to take advantage of troubled borrowers.
In a sickening turn of events, financial professionals who profited from the predatory Wall Street mortgage regime are now remodeling themselves as specialists to help consumers avoid foreclosure. The Nation Institute helped fund a devastating expose written by Alyssa Katz on the mortgage broker makeover. published in Salon.com. Katz details how an industry that once pushed people into unaffordable loans with deceptive marketing and misleading documentation is now raking it in by helping people who are behind on their mortgages obtain modified loan contracts.
“The problem is that the majority of loan mods are lousy deals for homeowners,” Katz writes. “Federal banking regulators recently determined that more than half of all mortgages that were modified by lenders in early 2008 ended up heading into foreclosure again in less than six months. Most loan modifications, in fact, dig borrowers deeper into debt.”
These predators cash in on setting borrowers up for a fall, and instead of being barred from the banking world or prosecuted, end up raking in again to help them renegotiate their mortgages. Loan modifications almost never reduce how much borrowers actually owe on their mortgages. Often, whatever amount a borrower is behind by is added to the overall debt burden, giving banks a bigger pool to collect interest on. Nearly half of all loans modified in the fall of 2008 did not even result in a lower monthly payment for borrowers.
Over at Colorlines, Dom Apollon highlights the rise of a new mortgage company called PennyMac run by former Countrywide executives—the same Countrywide that is being sued by local governments for destroying communities with abusive subprime loans. PennyMac plans to buy delinquent mortgages on the cheap, alter the terms of the loans to keep borrowers in their homes, and pocket the difference between the new mortgage payments and what it paid for the loans as profit. If you think that is going to end well for the homeowners, then I’ve got a few condos in south Florida to sell you.
People who cause massive problems are not usually the best people to solve them. That’s why when the U.S. government agreed to bail out the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, policymakers kicked out CEO Martin Sullivan. But even after being nationalized, AIG has continued to drain taxpayer coffers, coming back to the bailout trough twice for a total of over $160 billion. To put that number in context, it’s about what the entire savings and loan crisis cost taxpayers back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Josh Marshall has a series of excellent posts on the AIG drama for Talking Points Memo. When the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department refused to let AIG fail back in September, it was supposedly because letting AIG default on its enormous credit default swap business would be a disaster for the financial system. Credit default swaps were originally designed as insurance for loans. If a Goldman Sachs made a loan to Bank of America, Goldman could get AIG to insure the loan against default. Goldman would pay AIG a few dollars a month in insurance premiums, but if Bank of America failed to pay up, AIG would reimburse Goldman for the entire value of the loan. Eventually, however, the process got crazy. Companies started taking out “insurance” on transactions they had no involvement with. JPMorgan could go to AIG and agree to pay a few dollars a month in case Bank of America defaulted on its loan from Goldman Sachs– essentially betting with AIG on whether Bank of America would pay Goldman back. The same contracts could be used to insure mortgage-backed securities against default. Wall Street eventually put more money in credit default swaps than an entire year’s worth of global economic output.
By keeping AIG running on taxpayer support, Marshall notes, the government is essentially using the company as a conduit to funnel tax dollars to other major financial firms who made credit default swap bets with AIG. Who is getting the AIG bailout money? Neither the Treasury or the Fed will say, and Marshall points out, the government refuses to even explain why it will not tell us who is getting money. Maybe the government is worried that investors will pull their funds out of companies who are scoring big paydays from the AIG bailout, deeming them nonviable without government support.
That may very well happen. But indefinitely pouring federal money into Wall Street companies through AIG is not a solution, and taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent.
But at least one system for fleecing taxpayers seems to be on its last legs if President Barack Obama has his way. About four-fifths of student loans are made by private lenders who are subsidized by the government, while the remaining 20% are made directly to students by the Department of Education. The problem with the private-sector partnership plan is its inefficiency: a lot of that subsidy money goes to paying student loan company executives, while some of it simply ends up as profits for the bank. How much? According to Aaron Tang of Wiretap Magazine, Obama’s budget proposal would kill the subsidy program and instead invest that money in the direct loan program, freeing up $4 billion a year, enough to help millions of students pay for a college education.
The Obama administration’s willingness to end irrational financial policies should not end with the student loan program. Predatory lenders who created the mortgage meltdown should be barred from the banking industry, and the Treasury needs to be honest with taxpayers about who it is paying off.
One Last Note
The unemployment numbers keep getting worse: after losing almost 600,000 jobs in January, the U.S. economy shed another 651,000 in February, sending the unemployment rate all the way to 8.1%. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the accelerating job losses may not be surprising at this point, but they are painful nevertheless. The only good news for the labor market over the last week was the roll-out of CanMyBossDoThat.com, a site dedicated to informing workers on their legal rights on everything from COBRA health insurance benefits to getting employers to actually deliver final paychecks workers have already earned. The site, which is funded and managed by Interfaith Worker Justice, comes at an important moment, according to Wendy Norris of The Colorado Independent, who highlights that the unemployment rate would be a massive 14.8% if it included people who have been looking for a job for more than a year and people who want full-time work but are can only get a part-time position.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.