Screw bipartisanship

July 9, 2009 at 11:42 pm (health insurance)
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It is way over-rated.  It is something that the corporate media tries to impose on the Democrats to stiffle truly progressive legislation that the American people want, not the power brokers that represent monied (corporate)interests.

As this Washington Post editorial demonstrates, their desire for bipartisanship is at the expense of the only reform that matters, the public option.

Second, Democrats continued their insistence on a public option — a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers — as essential to effective health reform. Mr. Obama issued what amounted to a public rebuke of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, for the apparently heretical act of suggesting openness to an alternative: having a “trigger” mechanism under which a public plan would be established if the private insurance market fails to provide enough competition. The president, from Moscow, restated his support for a public plan, though, thankfully, he continued to avoid drawing a line in the sand. As we have said before, it would be tragic if this issue were to drag down health reform or make it impossible to secure Republican votes. Restructuring the health-care system is risky enough that Democrats would be wise not to try to accomplish it entirely on their own.

So they are saying that including a public option will drive away every Republican vote.  If they want to subvert the will of the people and vote against, then they are going to cement their role as a minority party.  After all this CBS/NY Times poll shows:

A clear majority of Americans — 72 percent — support a government-sponsored health care plan to compete with private insurers, a new CBS News/New York Times poll finds. Most also think the government would do a better job than private industry at keeping down costs and believe that the government should guarantee health care for all Americans.

CBS deserves a little bit of smackdown on this, a clear majority?  55 percent is a clear majority, 72% is almost 3 in 4 people.  You know they call the 60 votes need for cloture in the Senate (which is 60%)?  A super majority.  To get an amendment out of Congress it needs 2/3 thirds votes in each chamber, that is only 67%, this is higher.  Okay back on topic!

From the actual poll (pdf) this gem comes out about the public option that 72% of Americans support.

Even 50% of Republicans favor that.

So I say include the plan that Americans want, that includes a public option.  Remember corporations do not vote, oh we know they give money in the form of campaign contributions that our politicians are constantly chasing after.  But they can give all the money they want, we can vote them out.  And if I were a Republican, I would be wary of putting off that 50% of my party voters, because most current Repbulicans in Congress have little chance of picking up the Reagan Democrats.  Especially Senators Snowe and Collins, you vote against cloture on public option, and I hope that you are voting yourself out of office.

Has the Washington Post ever called on Republicans to be bipartisan on legislation when they were in power?  If you find an example, I would welcome it, but I am not going to search for it because I doubt exists.

So back on track again, in theory the members of Congress are our representatives, and we want a public health option.  I disagree with the editorial that it should be not be line in the sand as away to try and sway Republican votes.  They ruled the country and left a mess, it is time to try some good old fashioned progressive policies to get the country on the right (not poltically) course.

Public option is the line in the sand.  The Democrats in the Senate started this process with a handicap when Senator Baucus wouldn’t even discuss Single Payer in his committee when talking about health care reform.  That is the ideal, but I am willing to settle for public option, but when public option is the far left position on the table (and would be the center-left position if single payer were still on the table) and makes for a weaker negotiating position. 

But here is the beauty part, if Harry Reid could find his spine, and get his Senators to vote for cloture, we have the 60 votes, we don’t need any Republicans in the Senate for this vote.  

And if the Republicans require a cloture vote, don’t just do the vote, and don’t run (as he has in the past) if you are not sure you have 60 votes.   Spend days of debate on the topic.  Put your most progressive Senators out there making the case for the public option.  Make the Obstructionist Republican Party defend their position of opposing a public option.  Get the news cameras in, get in on the record, and get footage of their corporate arguments that can be used in ads against them in the next election.  And if any of the Democrats are waffling, we will get the calls into their offices to swamp, to make them think twice about their chances of re-election if they go against the will of the people.

The time to leave policy in the hands of members of Congress and the talking heads in the corporate media is over.  It is time for Americans to take back our politicians, to make them serve our interests.  So screw the bipartisanship that the editors at the Washington Post think is critical!  Americans don’t need bipartisanship, Americans need an affordable health care system that serves the needs of the people, of the patients!

-Josh

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A whole different world

July 9, 2009 at 6:26 pm (Equality, Labor)
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As more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet, or if they are doing okay, saving money in case their situation worsens, they are looking at the cost of items.

Some are looking at cutting back on costs, maybe renting movies, or using Netflix, then going to a movie theater.  Maybe looking at store brands versus name brands.  Those are small, but significant savings over time that many Americans are looking at these days.

That is average Americans, what about those with a little more wealth available to them?  Well it looks like the Ensign clan has paid $96,000 to Cynthia Hampton’s family.  You may remember that she had an affair with Senator John Ensign.

In April 2008, Senator John Ensign’s parents each made gifts to Doug Hampton, Cindy Hampton, and two of their children in the form of a check totaling $96,000. Each gift was limited to $12,000. The payments were made as gifts, accepted as gifts and complied with tax rules governing gifts.

The first thing that struck me was that his parent’s paid his mistress, but then I realized that they probably paid the gifts to shield Senator Ensign from scrutiny.

So back to the cost of things, well in Nevada a family of four is consider to be at the federal poverty level if they make $22,050 a year.  Yet this family of four received gifts that totalled $96,000 or 435% of the poverty level, not bad for a gift.  That isn’t counting any work that either parent did during the year, that was just a gift!

This brings me back to American families of more average means, you know the ones that can’t afford to throw almost 6 figures to a family who you committed adultery with, so I am going to look at autoworkers.  Why, well Senator Ensign thinks the UAW (unions=bad) workers made too much.

As Ensign sees it, the root of the problem with the Big Three lies in the labor contracts that prevent the companies from being competitive with the foreign companies that build cars in the United States with nonunion labor.

Ensign repeatedly points to the $70 hourly labor costs at the Big Three, compared with $30 paid by companies that do not use unionized labor.

According to CBS it isn’t really $70/hour, but  $28/hour or about $60,000 for working on a line for a year.

Let’s start with the fact that it’s not $70 per hour in wages. According to Kristin Dziczek of the Center for Automative Research–who was my primary source for the figures you are about to read–average wages for workers at Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were just $28 per hour as of 2007. That works out to a little less than $60,000 a year in gross income–hardly outrageous, particularly when you consider the physical demands of automobile assembly work and the skills most workers must acquire over the course of their careers.

So not only does he get his facts wrong, after all union busting is the real purpose of his efforts to oppose the bailout.  But really, even if it was $70/hour, or about $150,000 a year, that is for working for a year, not a gift to cover up a marital dalliance. 

Now you may ask yourself what also costs $96,000, not just paying off your mistress’ family, but something that most of us could understand a little better (that isn’t a house purchase which is closest most of us will get to that price tag).  Well we learned that Norm Coleman’s campaign had to pay some of Senator Al Franken’s costs in the contested Senate battle and the amount worked out to be about the same.

In the last chapter of a stinging loss to now-Sen. Al Franken, Minnesota’s Republican Party has sent the Democrat almost $96,000 to cover lawsuit costs.

Now if you want to be crude, you could say that both Ensign and Coleman got screwed, but Ensign got to have intimate relations with someone in the process, and kept his Senate seat.  So maybe he had the better deal of it.

-Josh

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What is that called…..collusion??

June 24, 2009 at 7:59 pm (Transportation)
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Over at the Huffingtonpost there is an article on even more possible airline fees that may be forced onto passengers.  But this parargraph made me take notice,

Ideas for fees don’t come out of thin air. Last month in Miami most of the big U.S. carriers and many overseas airlines attended a conference devoted to a-la-carte pricing and fees. (Motto, next to a cartoon of an airliner: “Discovering the flying store.”)

So does that sound like this definition of collusion from wiki?

In the study of economics and market competition, collusion takes place within an industry when rival companies cooperate for their mutual benefit

And this is what we have from the US Department of Justice,

The competitive process only works, however, when competitors set prices honestly and independently. When competitors collude, prices are inflated and the customer is cheated. Price fixing, bid rigging, and other forms of collusion are illegal and are subject to criminal prosecution by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

So I think they need to examine this “meeting” for possible collusion.

-Josh

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Health insurance question

June 22, 2009 at 5:34 pm (health insurance)
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You may think the Republican party is all about worshipping God, usually Judeo-Christian God. What you don’t realize is that something is worshipped equally or more feverently in the Republican pantheon is the full belief and trust in the sanctity of the free market.

What does this have to be the health care? Well unfortunately, the trust in the free market leads to a mistaken belief that our health care system is fundamentally sound, provided you have insurance!

In fact that belief in the sanctity of the free market means that government competition, isn’t really competition, but interference. If the government insurance is all that bad, then why don’t these Republicans put or shut up. If the private market is superior, the government public option will fail.

-Josh

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Charles Krauthammer is blind to his irony

May 30, 2009 at 10:19 am (Equality)
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Charles Krauthammer’s May 29, 2009 column is full of irony, but I am not sure that he sees it.

The sum of his criticism of Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor to be the next supreme court justice is this:

Since the 2008 election, people have been asking what conservatism stands for. Well, if nothing else, it stands unequivocally against justice as empathy — and unequivocally for the principle of blind justice.

So that is pretty clear, justice should be blind, it should look only at the law, not the situation of the defendants or plantiffs.

So why does he start out his column painting a sympathetic picture of Frank Ricci, a plantiff?

Sonia Sotomayor has a classic American story. So does Frank Ricci.

Ricci is a New Haven firefighter stationed seven blocks from where Sotomayor went to law school (Yale). Raised in blue-collar Wallingford, Conn., Ricci struggled as a C and D student in public schools ill-prepared to address his serious learning disabilities. Nonetheless he persevered, becoming a junior firefighter and Connecticut’s youngest certified EMT.

After studying fire science at a community college, he became a New Haven “truckie,” the guy who puts up ladders and breaks holes in burning buildings. When his department announced exams for promotions, he spent $1,000 on books, quit his second job so he could study eight to 13 hours a day and, because of his dyslexia, hired someone to read him the material.

He placed sixth on the lieutenant’s exam, which qualified him for promotion. Except that the exams were thrown out by the city, and all promotions denied, because no blacks had scored high enough to be promoted.

Seriously, if irony was water, Charles Krauthammer would have waterboarded himself here.  We shouldn’t be deciding cases on empathy, but hey you should look at this guy Frank Ricci and be empathetic to the obstacles he has overcome.  If Krauthammer really wanted to take on the issue of that case, he could have used his column-inches more wisely and explored the idea of throwing out the promotions because of the lack of diversity of those who passed the lieutenant’s exam, rather than a empathy building exercise.

And then there is some more irony, but this a multiple column irony, in this same column, Krauthammer says that empathy’s proper place is not on the bench but in other branches of government. 

Empathy is a vital virtue to be exercised in private life — through charity, respect and loving kindness — and in the legislative life of a society where the consequences of any law matter greatly, which is why income taxes are progressive and safety nets are built for the poor and disadvantaged.

But back on April 3, 2009, his column contained this gem,

Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. (Asked by Charlie Gibson during a campaign debate about his support for raising capital gains taxes — even if they caused a net revenue loss to the government — Obama stuck to the tax hike “for purposes of fairness.”) The elements are highly progressive taxation, federalized health care and higher education, and revenue-producing energy controls. But first he must deal with the sideshows. They could sink the economy and poison his public support before he gets to enact his real agenda.

Now in all fairness to Krauthammer, Obama is no longer in the legislative branch, but in the executive branch.  And he didn’t say that empathy belongs in the executive branch, but he didn’t say it must be excluded from it, like it must from the judicial branch.  So it could be a wash on the branch of government issue.

But yet, his April 3rd column made him seem like he was against progressive taxation, or at least extreme versions of it, and not that big a fan of the social safety net, at least looking like nationalized health care and more affordable access to higher education.

I guess that isn’t really irony so much as rampant hypocrisy, in one column railing against progressive taxation and social safety net programs, and then praising them as part of the empathy that exists in the legislative life.  That is often par for course for the highly paid talking heads that dominate the group-think inside the beltway, that often think that we don’t check what they wrote before.

-Josh

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Sadly there is truth in this

May 30, 2009 at 9:20 am (Uncategorized)
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One of my high school classmates wrote this letter to the editor in the Strib.

VETO OF BULLYING BILL

Future Republicans, start your harassment

Well, of course Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed the bullying bill. If junior high bullies can’t get practice beating up on poor kids, foreign kids and kids perceived to be gay, how will they ever become right-wing politicians?

BEN WEISS, ST. PAUL

Sadly, as the Republican tent has shrunken, it seems that it is based on xenophobia and focusing on tearing down others.  So I have to agree with my friend Ben on this one.  I dare the Republican party, not individual Republicans who may be more moderate, to prove him wrong!

-Josh

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Corporate Taxes too high??

May 19, 2009 at 10:46 pm (Taxes)
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The one trick pony that is the Republican Party, whose only solution to anything is tax cuts, have been whining about how our corporate tax rates are too high. Yet there are plenty of loopholes that corporations use to get out of paying their fair share. Al Norman reports on the Huffington Post about one that Wal-Mart was using and has lost in North Carolina.

Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story revealing that Wal-Mart pays billions of dollars a year in rent for its stores, but in 25 states—most of them east of the Mississippi—it has been paying most of that rent to itself, and deducting that amount from its state taxes. This scheme has allowed Wal-Mart to avoid paying several hundred million dollars in state taxes.

Based on a dodge developed by its accounting firm, Ernst & Young, as a “local tax reduction strategy,” Wal-Mart’s financial self-dealing has allowed it to pay rent to itself through a maze of eight corporate subsidiaries created in 1996, including Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).

Under the agreement with itself, Wal-Mart pays 2.5% of gross sales monthly as rent to its own REIT, which then wires the money quarterly to Wal-Mart Property Company in the form of a dividend, which is then paid to Wal-Mart Stores as a tax-exempt “dividends received.” All of these transactions are handled through a “cash management agreement” between all the parties. Neither the REIT nor the Property Company has any employees.

The REITs don’t pay taxes, as long as they pay 90% of their income out in dividends to shareholders. In Wal-Mart’s case, the REITs are owned by Wal-Mart subsidiaries registered in Delaware, a state that has no corporate income tax. Wal-Mart gets the benefit of the rent expense, but also gets the benefit of the non-taxed dividend, on the same monies. The dividends escape taxation, and the original rent that created the dividends is deducted from taxable income in the states where the “expense” is incurred. The rent, in essence, goes from one Wal-Mart pocket, into another.

Now if you were a person against paying your income or payroll taxes, wouldn’t it be sweet to be able to set up an automatic system to shuffle money to reduce your tax liability.  Of course, I think taxes provide useful services, so I wouldn’t do that, but maybe some of you readers would like to do that.

When North Carolina challenged this financial shenanigans, and required Wal-Mart to consolidate its financial earnings, Wal-Mart paid then sued.

On December 31, 2007 an Emergency Special Judge in Wade County, North Carolina Superior Court, ruled in favor of the state of North Carolina, and against Wal-Mart’s lawsuit. The Judge ruled that North Carolina had the statutory right to force a corporation to state its “true net income” through a consolidated statement, ” so as to properly reflect the extent of the corporation’s activities in the state.” The judge ruled that Wal-Mart’s treatment of rent had no “real economic substance,” and was only a mechanism for reducing the taxes it pays to the state of North Carolina. “Plaintiffs do not deny the facts demonstrating the circular journey taken by the ‘rents’ paid by these plaintiffs,” the judge wrote, “but contend that on each leg of the journey plaintiffs were only taking advantage of a lawful deduction afforded them by then-existing tax law. Such a piecemeal approach exalts form over substance, however…There is no evidence that the rent transaction, taken as a whole, has any real economic substance apart from its beneficial effect on plaintiffs’ North Carolina tax liability. It is particularly difficult for the court to conclude that rents were actually ‘paid,’ when they are subsequently returned to the payor corporation.”

That really is the sum of it, can you truly get a tax deduction for paying rent, when that money is returned to you, in effect, not paying rent?  Fortunately for North Carolina tax payers, the Wade County judge saw through the bullshit of this tax evader (and Court of Appeals upheld it).

-Josh

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Will we ever see this high capacity storage?

May 9, 2009 at 10:19 am (Intellectual Property)
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The New York Times reports that General Electric has created a digital storage system using holograms that would put the equivalent of 100 DVDs on one disc.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday  [article from April 28, 2009], is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

This is pretty exciting news, and I really hope that they can bring this to market.  Of course, my worry is that the RIAA and MPAA will try to stifle innovation to protect their industries, while denying or limiting consumers ability to have bigger and cheaper storage options .  You have to wonder about those defenders of the free market, what do they think about how intellectual property laws make the market a little less free. 

-Josh

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Tara Setmayer’s very narrow definition of pro-life

April 5, 2009 at 11:22 am (Uncategorized)

On this week’s episode of To The Contrary, Tara Satmeyer reinforces my theory that certain segments of the Republican party or as she identified her self as a Christian and a Conservative, are living in a world that includes an incredibly narrow defintion of what pro-life is.

I missed the very beginning of the discussion, but it seemed that it was about family planning, and families who have an unplanned pregnancy are having to choose abortion because they can’t afford to raise the children they already have.  Ms. Satmeyer, who is the Communications Director for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), ran with the standard that all life is sacred (makes me think of Monty Python) and in making her point talked about how people may need to forgo that large tv or four bedroom houses.  Irene Natividad was so angry, and rightfully so, at this dismissive comment about the economic challenges people are facing in this country.  You would think that Setmayer isn’t aware that we have increasing unemployment and a foreclosure crisis.

The conversation went on, and the most important point that was made, is that Setmayer and her boss consistently end their pro-life support when the children are born.  When the issue of feeding a child that is born into a family that may have otherwise choosen abortion, then the personal responsibility kicks in, that the family should “figure it out”, that means that the government is not responsible to help the family have food on the table – against food stamps and most forms of welfare (in a later segment she talked about the rampant fraud in the food stamp program).

Now personally, I can’t stand Setmayer, I really think that To The Contrary would be better served with other conservative, but rational voices on their panel.  I have made that comment before, and I will continue to make that comment.  If you watch this show and agree, you can contact them at  ttcviewers@yahoo.com.

Of course the struggle with seeking to have Setmayer’s voice off the program, is that it removes the perfect example of the rank hypocriscy of these Christian Conservatives regarding their supposed morals and values.  After all if you must insist that the family must have the child, but then turn around and say good luck on caring for that child, how can that be anything but hypocritical and morally bankrupt.

So as I have written before, even as a pro-choice advocate, I am far more pro-life than Ms. Setmayer will ever hope to be.

-Josh

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Come on Newshour – do the math

April 2, 2009 at 9:13 pm (Economic policy, Taxes)
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Journalism, in the form of newspapers are in state of crisis in the US.  Part of the problem with journalism in general, including at the supposedly liberal hour long Newshour on PBS, is that they aren’t calling people on their lies.

As I pointed out on this post, the Republicans are lying about the increase in the national debt.  Well tonight, I heard the same lies repeated by Rep. John Boehner of Ohio who said this,

And so you’ve got higher spending. You’ve got higher taxes. And then you get to the real whammy, and that’s the national debt.

President Obama’s budget will double the national debt in the next five years. It will triple the national debt in the next 10 years, given their projections.

This is unacceptable. I think it will imprison our kids and grandkids. It will slow our economy. It will slow job growth in America. It’s just not, in my opinion, not the way to proceed.

Remember that the debt is about $11.1 trillion, and if by “their projections” he means the updated CBO projections (pdf) which is $9.3 trillion.

The cumulative deficit from 2010 to 2019 under the President’s proposals would total $9.3 trillion, compared with a cumulative deficit of $4.4 trillion projected under the current-law assumptions embodied in CBO’s baseline.

Well the math again shows, that $11.1 trillion plus $9.3 trillion equals $20.4 trillion.  Dividing $20.4 trillion by $11.1 trillion is 184.5% or an increase of 84.5% not exactly doubling, in fact short of doubling.

So I showed I could do math, it would be nice if these journalist had prepped themselves with the likely talking points, after all Senator Judd Gregg’s radio address was 6 days ago using the same lies.  He should have expected it coming, and he should have called him on it.  But it instead we got this question next,

KWAME HOLMAN: The speaker, Speaker Pelosi, says your budget being offered by the Republicans in the House gives too many tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and does not do those kinds of investments in renewable energy, in education, in health care.  

REP. JOHN BOEHNER: I think we have a responsible budget. It does curb spending. It does curb taxes to allow more investment in our economy.

We’re in the middle of a serious recession. The best way to help solve that recession is to allow American families and small businesses to keep more of what they earn. And, most importantly, we have much smaller deficits as we go forward.

And so I believe that we have a responsible approach to our budget, far more responsible than the budget plan that they’re bringing up.

The point is, we usually know what these members of Congress are going to say, and often it just isn’t true.  So research what you might hear them say in the interview, you know anticipate because it isn’t hard, and then fact check that, and call them on lies when they lie.

-Josh

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