Weekly Audit: It’s a recession, stupid (and what that means)
Filed under: Barack Obama, Economy, MediaWire, NewsLadder The gurus at the National Bureau of Economic Research have finally acknowledged the obvious: the U.S. economy is in a recession, and has been since December 2007. With Wall Street still on life support and unemployment statistics reaching levels unseen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the news was far from shocking, as Truthdig’s Ear to the Ground notes, but still enough to help push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 700 points on Monday.
More frightening than the belated use of the r-word– Kevin Drum of Mother Jones called the December start-date all the way back in February in a piece for the Washington Monthly– is the fact that drastic government action to right the nation’s faltering economic ship does not appear to be working. The current crisis has delivered a blow not just to investors and homeowners, but to the work of economist Milton Friedman, a thinker granted almost sacred status in conservative circles. Over at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard highlights a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman on how Friedman’s monetarist economic theory has taken a hit over the past year. Friedman’s doctrine calls for restricting government relief in times of economic strain to the arena of monetary policy—that is, central banks should increase the supply of money in the economy, but governments should not directly undertake spending initiatives to boost demand.
But while the Federal Reserve has pumped liquidity into the financial sector at every conceivable opportunity over the past year, but the crisis has continued to grind on, spreading from one troubled sector to another. We are clearly out of options that match up with Friedman’s monetarism, indicating that public policy has nowhere left to turn except direct government spending on economic support, as Ezra Klein argues for The American Prospect.
President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to deliver a major fiscal stimulus package as soon as possible after taking up his new job on January 20. Joshua Holland notes for AlterNet that Obama does not have to radically overhaul the economy to implement short-term stimulus that will have long-term economic benefits. Rebuilding our infrastructure with sustainable designs and materials and revitalizing our outdated health care system would both create jobs quickly and prevent other problems looming down the road.
The past week, of course, included the Thanksgiving holiday, and no coverage of the U.S. economy for the period would be complete without a discussion of Black Friday. It appears that the retail sector is about to follow Wall Street and the auto industry into disaster over the next month, as consumer confidence remains at dismally low levels. In a report for The Colorado Independent, Mary Kane explains how the massive loss of housing wealth over the past two years and decades of expensive consumer debt have made people much less eager to pull out the plastic for holiday gifts.
But while one industry after another steadily succumbs to economic reality, some of the people hardest hit by the downturn are not involved in any industry at all. With retirement savings devastated by the financial earthquake, many elderly retired people are now going back to work just to make ends meet, as Leslie Casimir details in a harrowing report for New America Media.
One of the most striking public policy disparities over the past year has been the rabid push from global governments to salvage financial institutions without devoting any serious attention to ordinary people, particularly the poor. The Bush administration has repeatedly argued that allowing major firms to fail would cause significant harm to vulnerable individuals well outside the financial system, but has done almost nothing to directly address the concerns of those people, who do not simply stop being poor once Citigroup gets its groove back. Oneworld.net notes an analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies that reveals the U.S. and Europe have dedicated $4.1 trillion to rescue the financial industry—roughly 40 times what they have spent to fight climate and poverty in the developing world.
The incongruity is reflected not only in the sheer size of the bailout packages compared to the poverty programs, but in the speed of implementation. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been unable to afford to eat for literally decades, but when Bear Stearns hits a liquidity logjam, a solution is in place by the end of the weekend.
Part of this is probably due to the U.S. psychological obsession with both Wall Street and homeownership. Writing for The Nation, Max Fraser discusses the development of pervasive and fundamentally irrational beliefs among bankers and borrowers alike over the past decade, beliefs that have ultimately eroded access to affordable housing despite an explosion in lending between 2004 and 2007. The current crisis proves that we cannot rely on private-sector initiatives or pseudo-public entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to responsibly expand access to homeownership.
Until the government steps in with a meaningful commitment to affordable housing, check out the tips Jane Goetze offers at High Country News on how to survive by living out of your car.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Pro-Choice Cabinet Picks Boon for Health At Home and Abroad
Filed under: Barack Obama, NewsLadder, healthcare By Lindsay Beyerstein, MediaWire blogger.
It’s finally official: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will be Barack Obama’s Secretary of State.
Some observers thought Clinton was a curious pick because she made a point of differentiating her foreign policy views from Obama’s during the Democratic primary.
However, optimism is running high in the reproductive health community that Clinton will use her new office to champion women’s health issues worldwide. They expect that Clinton will push for changes in foreign aid criteria to make it easier to provide comprehensive sex ed and reproductive health services to the world’s neediest girls and women.
Back in the U.S., Clinton and Sen. Patty Murray introduced legislation to block the finalization of the rules changes at Health and Human Services that would have given employees the right to refuse to administer any birth control or abortion-related services that offended their religious beliefs. These changes would have restricted access to reproductive health services nationwide.
Emily Gould of RH Reality notes the deadline for submitting rules changes is 60 days before the inauguration, but the HHS has classified these “conscience clause” changes as “non-major,” thereby giving themselves a 30-day extension. It’s a sneaky procedural move, but the stalling won’t circumvent the Clinton/Murray bill.
Additional presidential appointments are starting to give shape to President-elect Obama’s health care agenda. Melody Barnes has been named Obama’s Senior Domestic Policy Adviser. Barnes is one of the few cabinet appointees so far who can be regarded as an unequivocally progressive choice. Barnes is a former executive policy director for the Center for American Progress and well-known in the progressive community.
“By appointing policy leaders like Barnes who see the connections between health and the economy, Obama appears to have pulled together an economic team that reflects many of the goals he set out during his campaign,” wrote Todd Heywood in RH Reality Check.
Ezra Klein of the American Prospect compares satisfaction ratings across several countries, and between Americans on Medicare vs. private insurance: “Medicare has much higher satisfaction ratings than private insurance. Americans are much less satisfied with their health system than they are in other countries.”
Healthcare reform is gathering momentum in Congress and the White House. The health insurance industry can’t help but take notice and offer a few preemptive reassurances, in the hopes of forestalling more fundamental change.
As part of his ongoing coverage of the health insurance industry: Ezra Klein of the American Prospect phones Robert Zirkelbach, America’s Health Insurance Plans’ director of strategic communications to discuss the trade organization’s recent pledge “[...] too guarantee that health plans provide coverage for preexisting conditions in conjunction with mandate that individuals keep and maintain healthcare coverage.” Zirkelbach admits that the insurance companies have not pledged to make this coverage affordable. He also says that the Association resists competition from public plans as a strategy to drive down costs.
Here’s a fun fact courtesy of Mother Jones to bring up around the Thanksgiving dinner table: Scientists have shown that obesity in mice is linked to the diets of their grandmothers. If pregnant mice were fed a high-fat diet, their offspring were more likely to be obese and insulin insensitive. The surprising result was that the next generation were predisposed to the same problems.
To close this Thanksgiving edition, we offer you a list of 10 things science says will make you happy, courtesy of YES! Magazine. Unaccountably, tryptophan didn’t make the list, but gratitude did.
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.
Arranging Mr. Geithner’s Priorities
Filed under: Barack Obama, Economy, MediaWire, NewsLadder by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
President-elect Barack Obama announced his economic transition team yesterday–and we’ll get to that–but first let’s take a look at the top economic stories from the week that you might not have heard–but need to know.
With so many recent headlines detailing the government’s policy position on some of the nation’s largest corporations, it’s important to remember that economic policy ought to include people living at the other end of the economic spectrum.
Obama was charged with being a “redistributionist” by conservatives within and without the McCain campaign during the final weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election. Funny what happened. It turns out people actually find that drastic inequality thing offensive, particularly when they are losing their homes while the nation’s largest banks are getting billions in speedy federal assistance.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson still refuses to allocate one dime of his financial bailout funds to help struggling homeowners, while giving lip service to the idea that the housing market “correction” is at the heart of our current economic woes. Even the modest anti-foreclosure bill Congress passed in July is slow-going. In addition to about $1.7 billion to help underwater homeowners refinance into affordable mortgages, the bill directed an additional $4 billion local governments to help communities rehabilitate foreclosed homes. That sum will barely make a dent in the deepening foreclosure crisis, as Garland McLaurin of American News Project and Mary Kane of the Washington Independent detail in this video, but many cities and counties are yet to see their share of the $4 billion kitty. By contrast, hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into banks in recent weeks.
At this point in the economic cycle, mortgages are not the only loans causing major problems. Credit card delinquencies are at their highest rate in six years, and many banking industry experts expect them to go higher as laid-off consumers move basic expenses from checkbooks to plastic. What’s worse, credit card companies currently have legal leeway to alter contracts in almost any way they wish, even if borrowers are current on their payments, as Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., details in a blog for The Huffington Post. The Federal Reserve took a step in the right direction earlier this year by addressing some of the most egregious policies in the subprime credit card market, but it is time for Congress to rein in the rest of the predatory consumer lending industry.
Of course, wide swaths of the U.S. population do not worry about debt, but food. Writing for The Progressive, Brian Gilmore makes an impassioned case for swift public action to end poverty, noting that one in eight Americans did not have access to sufficient food in 2007.
When people are going hungry, the Bush administration appears to believe that eight years is an appropriate amount of time to wait for substantive public policy. But when the world’s largest financial institution is up against the wall, it gets what it wants, when it wants it. The Bush team granted Citigroup another $20 billion in bailout funds over the weekend, just days after ponying up $25 billion for company. The best part? The company’s management is still in place, and the government exacted no guarantees concerning how taxpayer money will be used.
Over at the American Prospect, Ezra Klein highlights former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s role in bringing the Wall Street titan to the verge of collapse. During the Clinton administration, Rubin resisted placing government oversight on the credit derivatives market, which after a decade of unregulated growth is wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. But Citi is one of the biggest losers in the credit market fallout, thanks in part to Rubin’s own advice as a member of the company’s board of directors.
Speaking of Rubin, Obama just named one of his protégés at the Clinton Treasury to succeed Paulson at the Department’s the top spot. Timothy Geithner, who has managed some of the most harrowing moments of the meltdown, including the Bear Stearns rescue in March, will move from the Fed’s New York office to the Treasury Department in January. Unlike Rubin, however, Geithner has spent the last few years sounding the alarm on the very risks to the financial system that have taken such a heavy toll of late, as Andrew Leonard notes at Salon.com.
The Citi debacle reveals that Paulson’s gambit to restore investor confidence in the U.S. financial sector has generated mixed results, at best. Citi shares closed at $3.77 on Friday, down from $18.35 on Oct. 3, the day Congress passed the bailout bill. The sad fact is that without some magical, and probably irrational, restoration of that elusive confidence, the $700 billion allocated by the financial rescue package will not be nearly enough to shore up the American banking sector, much less the auto manufacturing companies and retail stores that have been showing signs of extreme strain of late. William Greider details the state of affairs for The Nation, arguing that it is time to shut down the financial giants that are no longer viable and establish a new order based on smaller companies.
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The Secretary and the Czar: Obama Bets Big on Daschle for Healthcare
Filed under: Barack Obama, MediaWire, NewsLadder, healthcare 
It’s official, former Sen. Tom Daschle will be Barack Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Daschle will also serve as Health Czar, which means he will be in charge of developing Obama’s healthcare program in addition to running HHS.
Ezra Klein writes in the Prospect: “This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don’t tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That’s not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress.”
Ezra argues that Obama has learned the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to reform healthcare in 1994. In Ezra’s view, the Clinton plan failed because its architects were so focused on crafting the perfect policy that they neglected to figure out how they were going to sell their plan politically.
The hope is that Daschle has the political skills to actually get a healthcare plan passed.
Greg Sargent agrees that the Daschle pick is a sign that Obama intends to act quickly on healthcare.
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.
Healthcare: Out with the Old, In with the New
Filed under: Barack Obama, MediaWire, NewsLadder, healthcare 
Because if it bleeds, it leads… Sarah van Schagen rates the environmental impact of feminine hygiene products for Grist.
In all seriousness, this has been a very exciting week in healthcare news. The Bush administration is racing to take away as many reproductive rights as it can before leaving office. The Democrats in Congress are taking the lead on healthcare reform by writing up their own proposal before president Obama takes the Oath of Office.
Last week, Sen. Max Baucus unveiled a detailed proposal to provide health insurance for all Americans. Brian Cook has a roundup of reactions.
Note that the Baucus plan is by no means a call for radical change. The blueprint proposes to fix the healthcare system with the same piecemeal strategies that get trotted out every time Americans talk about healthcare reform. The stated goal is to enable more people to buy “affordable” private health insurance while expanding Medicare and Medicaid for the poor and the elderly.
Why such timidity? As Josh Marshall argues at TPM, Obama’s election is a mandate for fundamental structural change in the healthcare system.
The fact is, majority of Americans support single-payer health insurance, even if they’d have to pay higher taxes. Daina Saib reports in YES! that even Republicans are getting on board. Saib introduces us to an unlikely champion of single-payer, Dr. Rocky White, conservative Christian and former Republican who started advocating for single payer when the system made his own practice unmanageable.
As we talk about the dire state of the Big Three automakers, remember that the Canadian auto industry stays competitive because the government takes care of health care, unlike in the ‘States where automakers and unions are struggling to pay for it.
Ezra Klein gives us a crash course two strategic approaches to healthcare reform. He explains that there are two basic schools of thought: delivery system reform and financing reform. Delivery reformers hope to make the system work better by bringing down costs and delivering better value for money. Financing reformers focus on how we’re going to pay for it all. The Baucus blueprint is financing reform. Repealing Medicare Plan D would be delivery reform.
These two approaches are complimentary. Ezra writes: “[T]he two agendas fit neatly in a comprehensive reform package. Coverage expansion isn’t sustainable unless cost growth is slowed. Cost growth can’t be slowed without delivery system reform.” He notes that The Center for American Progress has a new, free, book on healthcare reform, available for download, here.
The Bush administration is weighing an eleventh hour rules change that could prevent women on Medicaid from receiving birth control and deny rape victims emergency contraception and push the country one step closer to theocracy.
The proposed rule would prevent any entity that receives federal funds (e.g., hospitals, universities, etc.) to require employees to “assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity” financed by the Department of Health and Human Services” or participate in abortions or sterilizations if these activities offend their religious or moral convictions.
President-elect Obama has already spoken out against the proposed rules change.
Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones notes that civil rights law already protects employees from discrimination on the basis of religion. In fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that enforces the federal employment discrimination law, is strenuously objecting to the new rules because they would create an absolute right to religious accommodation, as opposed to the balance between employer and employee that exists under current law.
With Sarah Palin back in Wasilla, we thought we’d heard the last about victims paying for their own rape kits. Not so fast. While the Violence Against Women Act forbids victim-pay rape kits for civilians, women in the armed services may not enjoy the same protections.
Penny Coleman, writing in AlterNet, explains: “TRICARE, the United States Department of Defense Military Health System that covers active duty members, will only pay for rape kits if the victim is seen in a military or a VA facility.” However, service women are being seen in a non-VA facility in the USA, they shouldn’t be paying for their rape kits, thanks to VAWA. This shouldn’t be happening.
Another sobering statistic: The US military loses the equivalent of a brigade of veterans to suicide each year–yet more evidence that mental health parity should be a priority in health care reform.
Finally, Stephanie Losee interviews Valerie Frankel, the author of Thin is the New Happy, a memoir about coming to terms with weight and body image in an appearance-obsessed society.
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.
Botching the Bailout
The Bush administration is squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on incompetence again.
In a House Domestic Policy Subcommittee hearing on Friday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, took Interim Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Stability Neel Kashkari (read: bailout chief) to task over the Treasury’s decision to spend every cent of the first $350 billion in bailout funds buying up preferred stock in Wall Street icons and other banks, while allowing troubled borrowers to fend for themselves.
Kashkari did his best to deflect the outrage, but his task would have been easier had the Treasury’s position been defensible. In a Senate Banking Committee hearing the day before, both consumer-protection advocates and banking executives endorsed an anti-foreclosure initiative devised by FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair that would create strong incentives for the private sector to cut borrowers some slack. Despite the plan’s broad appeal, both Paulson and Kashkari refused to devote any Treasury funds to the program, making the bailout chief sound like, well, a chump, when he insisted that Treasury is doing everything in its power to keep people in their homes.
The whole thing is beginning to look a little too much like Iraq. Bush administration officials steamroll both chambers of Congress with warnings of a dire emergency and are rewarded for their efforts with unprecedented authority and funding. Shortly afterwards, it becomes clear that the initiative has been squandered on meaningless giveaways to huge corporations without any corresponding social benefits. Naomi Klein of The Nation details the corruption parallels in an illuminating piece for Rolling Stone.
Laissez-faire lunacy
Most depressing is the bailout’s complete impotence with regard to providing broader economic support. Paulson and Kashkari have succeeded in keeping the U.S. financial sector afloat for the time being, but despite an enormous injection of taxpayer funds, banks are not lending money out into the broader economy. One part of the problem is the fact that President Bush & Co. took years to acknowledge that the country was in fact facing disaster (remember Paulson’s 2007 talking point that the subprime mortgage crisis was “contained”?). Now that the Treasury is finally taking action, it is doing so in an environment where there simply are not many good loans to be made. The other roadblock is Paulson’s refusal to require banks who accept public money to put it to use for the public good, as Joshua Holland explains for Alternet.
That desperate attempt to adhere to some kind of free-market principle—not forcing companies to do anything with billions of dollars allocated to partially nationalize them—was on display Friday at a speech Bush gave in New York. It sounds like a sick joke. After demanding $700 billion to save Wall Street, Bush is still warning against the evils of government intervention, claiming that free-market systems have a monopoly on “social justice and human dignity.”
“The greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market,” he said. “It is too much government involvement in the market.”
Matthew Rothschild skewers this absurdity over at The Progressive.
“You can’t have social justice and human dignity with mass unemployment, rampant foreclosures, high rates of poverty and food insecurity, and a health care system that leaves almost 50 million people uninsured,” Rothschild writes.
Bush did make a few nods to sanity during his speech, arguing that markets need to be “more transparent,” but the claim was a little perplexing amid reports that the Federal Reserve is refusing to disclose who it is granting about $2 trillion in emergency loans.
“Where is the ridicule?” Dean Baker asks in a blog for the American Prospect, arguing that Paulson and Bernanke are looking more like “crony capitalists” every day.
Going green, going global
Bush’s speech was designed to frame the debate surrounding the meeting of leaders from the world’s 20 largest economies to address problems in the global financial architecture. Fortunately, President Bush does not have final authority to sign an agreement for the U.S., that task will be left to Barack Obama in April of next year. Over at oneworld.net, Gary Gardner and Michael Renner note the opportunity not just for a New Deal to refashion the U.S. economy, but to ink a Green Deal that does away with global dependence on fossil fuels and provides for a fairer distribution of wealth across the globe.
At the moment, U.S. economic policy remains dominated by how to handle the bailout. How Democrats seek to proceed with lashing Detroit automakers to that $700 billion debacle will say a great deal about the majority party’s governing intentions heading into the next Congress.
“It’s time to think big,” Andrew Leonard writes for Salon.com. “A Manhattan Project-scale plan to move the U.S. into an energy-sustainable future should start with a complete restructuring of the automotive industry,” according to Leonard.
The sagas of the financial and automobile industries have more in common than meets the eye. Both have lobbied heavily against new regulations for decades, and the lax oversight has left both in dire straits. While conservatives are quick to point to labor union contracts that make workforces at GM, Ford and Chrysler pricier than for foreign manufacturers, the fact is that the Big Three have drastically lost market share in recent years by failing to make cars people actually want to buy. In a video produced for American News Project, Garland McLaurin details how Detroit spent millions lobbying Congress against raising fuel economy standards while failing to develop cars that achieve high gas mileage.
Millions of people could be out of a job if the Big Three go under, but if Democrats hurl money at the companies with no strings attached, they’re no better than the current administration’s set of bailouteers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Envisioning Obama’s Healthcare Agenda
Filed under: Barack Obama, MediaWire, NewsLadder, healthcare By Lindsay Beyerstein
The Media Consortium
Obama’s healthcare agenda has been the subject of much discussion in progressive media circles this week.
We know that healthcare will be one of the top priorities for the Obama administration. The candidate put it third in line after the economy and energy independence.
As Sara Robinson of the Campaign for America’s Future notes in AlterNet, Americans support the idea of a single-payer healthcare system by an astonishing 2-1 margin. So much for the myth that America is a center-right country.
Ezra Klein recalls that even Obama’s designate for White House chief of staff, Rahmn Emmanuel, once laid out a vision for health care reform.
Kay Steiger of RH Reality looks back on the debacle of the Bush administration’s health policies and looks ahead to a new, pro-choice cabinet. Former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, former DNC chair Howard Dean, and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius are all on the shortlist for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Obama’s picks for Secretary of State and Attorney General will also have repercussions for reproductive choice. The shortlists for both offices are a mixed bag when it comes to reproductive health. Steiger cautions that Obama is considering two candidates for State who have very poor records on choice: Senators Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel. As for AG, one of Obama’s favored candidates is Rep. Artur Davis, a socially conservative and anti-choice Southern Democrat.
Racewire’s Samantha Erskine asks what Obama’s base will ask for in terms of reproductive rights. She notes that women of color, mothers, and young women overwhelmingly backed Obama/Biden. Erskine expects a reproductive health policy that reflects the priorities of these critical constituencies.
Emily Douglas of RH Reality sees indications that some anti-choicers ready to focus on preventing unwanted pregnancies. Even the womb cops realize that their political mojo is waning. In the Iowa Independent, Lynda Waddington argues that in 2008 anti-abortion hysteria just didn’t energize Iowa’s conservative base the way it has in previous years. As if to amplify her point, all three major anti-abortion ballot initiatives were defeated on election night.
When the rubber hits the road: Condoms trump abstinence in Obama’s global AIDS prevention strategy, according to Brady Swenson of RH Reality. An Obama health adviser predicts that the new president will reverse Bush-era bans on family planning and disease prevention in the developing world.
Speaking of AIDS, a lucky accident may point the way to a cure: A bone marrow transplant to for leukemia seems to have cleared HIV from the bloodstream of a patient with AIDS. The marrow donor has a mutation that seems to confer immunity to multiple strains of HIV.
Elizabeth Zwerling has a report in Ms. Magazine on the proliferation of so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” on university campuses. CPCs mimic the trappings of reproductive health clinics, but they are propaganda outposts, not healthcare facilities. Zwerling describes the experience of 19-year-old student activist at Santa Monica College who investigated a CPC at her college.
This is certainly an exciting time for anyone with an interest in progressive healthcare issues. It seems as if there may finally be real momentum to move forward on both the nuts and bolts of health insurance and the various social/culture/civil rights issues surrounding access and choice.
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. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and economic issues, 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.
Kicking the Wall Street Habit
As Barack Obama readies himself to lead the United States through what appears to be a scathing recession, he faces a choice between feeding the political sphere’s Wall Street addiction and investing in economic progress. Two key former Clinton cabinet officials could determine which course he takes.
It was more than a little startling to hear a U.S. leader who sounded like (gasp!) an economist at the president-elect’s first press conference last week, after years of Bush speeches that treated economic policy as a realm defined exclusively by tax cuts and bailouts. But without policy specifics, we still do not know which voices of the many men and women flanking Obama at the event will impact the next administration’s economic platform. Mother Jones notes that several of the names included on the list of Obama’s economic advisers represent schools of thought that brought us directly to the current crisis. Two of the alleged experts, former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, signed off on major financial deregulatory moves in the latter half of the Clinton years. The two sided often with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on policies that included a refusal to place government oversight on the credit derivatives market, which eventually ballooned into the $60 trillion quagmire that destroyed AIG in September (who got another $40 billion from taxpayers on Monday).
Summers has successfully sparked controversy on several occasions, and while some of the scandals haven’t received a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, others are of genuine concern. In 2005, Summers said he believed innate inferiorities were more responsible for the under-representation of women in science and engineering fields than either discrimination or socialization. Writing for the Women’s Media Center, Veronica Arreola demonstrates how advancing gender equality would improve the broader U.S. economy, and expresses well-founded doubts about Summers’ commitment to Obama’s campaign pledge to implement equal pay for equal work legislation.
But not all Clinton cabinet officials are of the same stripe, and hopes for serious economic progress under Obama may rest largely on what position he gives former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Reich feuded frequently with Rubin during Clinton’s first term, urging that more energy be spent addressing inequality than balancing the budget. Sadly, Reich lost that battle and left the administration in 1997, but he remains one of the most impressive economic voices of the day. John Nichols writes in The Nation that it was “reassuring” to see Reich and organized labor ally David Bonior on stage with the president-elect last week.
Reich himself penned a piece that ran in Talking Points Memo this weekend, placing emphasis on one side of the economic equation that has all but disappeared from public discourse amid the Wall Street meltdown: demand. Stretched to their limits by decades of deepening inequality, consumers are cutting back on everything except basic necessities amid a mountain of high-interest debt and the increasing likelihood of losing their jobs. With consumers reeling, Reich says the government needs to step in as the spender of last resort.
There are still people who oppose increasing government spending in a recession. They are called Republicans, because one has to turn to backward political ideology to oppose a measure that has been understood as a basic economic fact for more than 70 years. There simply are no serious economists who disagree. Reich notes that even former Reagan advisor Martin Feldstein now favors adopting government infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy.
But a glance at the Friday edition of The Washington Post reveals that the anti-spending mythology remains popular. House Republican Leader John Boehner charged that “Democrats are proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in new government spending masquerading as ‘economic stimulus.’”
There is no masquerading involved. Reich is quite explicit that it will take hundreds of billions of government dollars to fend off a “Mini Depression.” By singling out socially important projects– a health care overhaul, green energy investments and and new child care programs– that spending can help make the economy even stronger once it rebounds. But consumers simply are not capable of shouldering the burden alone.
Dean Baker hammers the point home for The American Prospect. The housing bubble’s aftermath has hampered the supply of credit, Baker argues, but the more severe economic problem is the massive loss of housing wealth for consumers, who now have less money to spend and invest. The U.S. has encouraged homeownership as means of forced saving for decades. Those savings have now evaporated.
Housing woes are far from over. Mary Kane lays out the mortgage landscape for a piece in the Washington Independent, noting that while the economy has paid a price for the subprime debacle, the Alt-A nightmare is just beginning. Alt-A loans are exotic mortgages that do not require borrowers to document their income or employment information. Many Alt-A loans are adjustable-rate mortgages that allow borrowers to pay nothing but the interest on the loan for a few years before the monthly payments “reset” up to 63% higher, Kane writes. Banks pushed the most reckless of these “option-ARM” loans in the years leading right up to the housing market’s implosion, 2006 and 2007, and the lion’s share of unaffordable rate resets are scheduled for 2009. It’s a dire situation—just check out the stock price of option-ARM lenders in hard-hit housing markets like California.
Obama’s fiscal stimulus package should provide a window into his governing philosophy. After eight years of squandered opportunities, let’s hope he gets us moving in the right direction.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Yes We Can (Be Healthy): Obama’s Healthcare Agenda
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger.
Before a cheering crowd in Chicago, Barack Obama thanked his supporters, his campaign staffers, his running mate, and his family for his historic victory.
I hope he also sends a nice note to Sarah Palin. He couldn’t have done it without her.
Palin was chosen for her impeccable culture war credentials in the hopes of galvanizing the Republican base. Ironically, Palin energized the conservative base and the progressive base, in equal but opposite measure.
Palin’s candidacy, as the running mate of a 72-year-old cancer survivor, forced us to imagine a young earth creationist, anti-abortion zealot in the White House. To their great credit, Americans said, “Thanks but no thanks.”
The Obama victory can be seen as a mandate for science and rationality across the board, especially in health care policy. The economic crisis has become an excuse to ignore health care, but nothing could be more shortsighted.
Election night also saw anti-choice ballot initiatives defeated in Colorado, California, and South Dakota.
RH Reality recaps the ballot battles: Colorado voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have given human rights to fertilized eggs, South Dakota’s notorious Measure 11 was defeated, and the latest California parental notification bill stalled out.
Had it passed, Measure 11 would have been the most sweeping abortion ban in the post-Roe era. Measure 11 was billed as a kinder, gentler, saner version of the old South Dakota abortion ban, but the anti-choicers weren’t fooling anyone. The bill’s so-called health exemption only applied to women facing organ failure.
William Smith hopes that the Obama administration will put an end to the boondoggle of abstinence only indoctrination. Obama pledged to take a scalpel to the budget and excise programs that don’t work. Abstinence only education should be the first to go. It doesn’t work. It devalues gays and women while misleads about science. And to top it all off, it’s a $200 million/year wingnut welfare program. It’s time to cut it out.
So, does an Obama victory mean the end of the culture wars? Not likely. Although, according to Mike Madden, the mood at New Life Church, ground zero of American fundamentalism, was uncharacteristically subdued in the week before the election.
Yet, the religious right is nothing if not resilient. After getting trounced 3 to 1 in Colorado, champions of egg personhood reacted by forming a nationwide organization, Personhood USA, to fight for ovo-Americans nationwide.
Lest our own victories make us complacent, we should remember that gay rights are under siege nationwide. Voters in California, Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas approved ballot measures restricting the rights of gay couples to marry. In Mother Jones, Richard Kim discusses California’s notorious Proposition 8, which revokes same sex marriage in California.
The pundits are already wagging their fingers at San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and gay rights activists for overplaying their hand and demanding too much, too fast.
They’re thinking small. The culture warriors have never been afraid to seize the initiative or press their advantage.
Maybe progressives should take a page from the right wing playbook. The Defense of Equal Marriage Act has a nice ring to it. How about it, President Obama?
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. Also check out and vote on the best progressive reporting on the economy and immigration.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Electing the New Economy
Welcome to the Media Consortium’s Economy MediaWire project! Check this space every Tuesday for a discussion of the best economic coverage available on the information superhighway.
This Tuesday, of course, is no ordinary Tuesday, but the day of the most important U.S. election in generations. Poll after poll has shown the economy to be the top concern for voters this year, as an epic financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble have ensured that the next president will have his hands full come January.
But while there is plenty of bad news to go around of late, Ezra Klein notes for the American Prospect that economic downturns can be extraordinary opportunities to overhaul national infrastructure, as the government steps in to fund projects that support what the private sector can no longer afford.
“Right now, there’s something damn close to political consensus for a transformational investment package,” Klein writes, arguing that, “the next president should be thinking hard indeed about how to make the most of the opportunity.”
During Congressional hearings over the last two weeks, two influential economists have urged the government to embark on major infrastructure projects as a means to stimulate the economy. Both Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted nearly every development in the recent Wall Street implosion, argued that the best way to ease economic malaise is to pour money into green energy projects. Preventing a recession appears out of the question, but why not set our sights on something “transformational,” in Klein’s words, that could fend off ecological destruction even more comprehensive than the recent financial hemorrhaging?
David Morris emphasizes the potential for environmentally friendly infrastructure development for Alternet, suggesting that a President Barack Obama may “institute a massive public works program focusing on infrastructure that lends itself to a green orientation.”
Morris notes several frightening parallels between today’s green energy movement and that of the early 1980s, when environmentalist momentum from the Carter administration collapsed under the weight of the most wrenching recession since the Great Depression. We have witnessed a similar drop-off in green interest this fall, according to Morris, as the financial crisis has deepened and gas prices have declined dramatically. But renewable energy industries are a much stronger political force today than they were in the early Reagan years, and Morris believes the sheer efficiency of green projects will give the next president more bang for his outlay bucks than other programs. Environmentally conscious investments can sharply reduce operating costs, while creating armies of new jobs.
Writing for The Nation, James S. Henry and Jim Manzi claim that it is time not only for the government to boost research and development, but to “nurture a national culture that reminds young people of their country’s innovation heritage and encourages them to become engineers, designers and scientists, rather than just lawyers, accountants and bankers.”
Beyond infrastructure, The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild discusses research from Mark Zandi of Moody’sEconomy.com, which reveals that many traditional lefty priorities are also among the most efficient methods for stimulating economic growth. Expanding food stamps programs and unemployment benefits puts money in the hands of people who will actually spend it, instead of making long-term investments that keep the funds out of the general economy, Rothschild writes. Priorities touted by conservatives this election cycle, like slashing the capital gains tax and lowering income tax rates for the wealthiest corporations, are much less effective.
Speaking of throwing money at big corporations, the Treasury Department is currently funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to banks in an effort to boost lending so other firms can borrow money buy supplies, pay workers and fund research. It’s not a terrible concept, except, as Robert Kuttner notes back at the Prospect, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson isn’t actually requiring banks to lend the money out, and the banks would rather use the cash to finance acquisitions and pay dividends.
This is, of course, an outrage, but it is far from inevitable. Kuttner cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “yardstick competition” programs, where a public entity would compete with the private sector and provide products oriented toward the general social good, creating incentives for industries to offer better products.
Under Roosevelt, the government invented the long-term fixed-rate mortgage, which was so effective that it quickly came to dominate the private marketplace. Taxpayers would get better results from their present bailout burden if the government would actually takeover one institution outright and have it make new loans without wasting money on dividends, Kuttner argues. Other banks would have to boost their own lending activities in order to keep from losing market share to the government, and billions of taxpayer dollars wouldn’t be squandered.
Jim Hightower has an excellent breakdown of the five greatest villains of the current financial crisis here.
With President George W. Bush set to host an economic summit with international leaders on the financial meltdown this month, OneWorld.net carries an excellent story by Jim Lobe on a call from almost 600 non-governmental organizations for fundamental economic reforms aimed at protecting the most vulnerable members of the global economy. Bush is widely expected to oppose reforms to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which many NGOs claim have imposed policies that have benefited Western companies at the expense of the international poor.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit economy.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
