Health Savings Accounts: Follow the money

Nathan Newman, citing a New York Times article, points out that besides being bad policy, HSAs will be a bonanza for the financial institutions that will be managing the accounts. Of course, this is par for course, and eerily similiar to the way Medicare D was written on behalf of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

That's what you get I guess with our current system of legalized bribery (ie. lobbying). It is interesting that the insurance industry, which gives heavily to the GOP, may be losing out to the banks on this one.

Bush didn't spend much time in his State of the Union discussing healthcare, so I have no idea what he's planning to do for this huge domestic issue. HSAs may or may not be a good idea as supplemental insurance (there's a good economic/equity argument against it by Cindy Zeldin) but they certainly shouldn't replace traditional health insurance!

Ezra Klein explains how "[Bush's] last minute retreat from a confrontation on health care was a final admission of weakness."

Softening wages and weak job growth undercut Bush's economic agenda

Bush brags that the economy is just "fine" and that tax cuts will help improve the standard of living for Americans, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Cost Index (ECI) paints a different picture of where we are at after five years of GOP control of the federal government:

"On average, nominal wages rose 2.4% in 2005, the lowest annual result on record for this series, which began in 1982. With average inflation up 3.4% for the year, real wages fell 0.9%.

After rising 1.1% in real terms for full-year 2004, real compensation for 2005 was essentially unchanged—down 0.2% and the worst year on record."

Bush's claims of job growth are flat-out outrageous when one considers just how sluggish job growth has been in the past five years.

I guess for Bush, it doesn't matter that it's getting harder and harder for working Americans to make ends meet due to softening relative wages, corporate-written trade deals like CAFTA, the Bankruptcy Bill and exacerbated by expected budget cuts for social welfare programs like Medicaid and food stamps. All that matter for Bush, apparantly, is that his six-figure campaign contributors get their tax cuts, and that thesr tax cuts are made permanent.

That's right, never mind the decreasing quality of life for working Americans who are having more and more difficulty buying a house or paying for health insurance, or the fact that the federal budget deficit skyrocketing under this "conservative" president will have to be financed with future cuts in domestic spending.

No wonder the GOP will be running on security issues, and not pocketbook issues this November.

Another winning idea for Democrats

How about defending the interests of small farmers against the global agribusiness cartel? Marcy Kaptur's Farmers Market Infrastructure Assistance Act would be a huge step in the right direction.

Budget Reconciliation Bill vote imminent

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote tomorrow on the Budget Reconciliation Bill, a piece of legislation that would do immense harm to the intended beneficiaries of Medicaid. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, 75% of the bill’s Medicaid cuts would harm beneficiaries. Beneficiaries will shoulder billions in savings through lost benefits, increasing from roughly 900,000 enrollees sustaining such loss in 2010 to an estimated 1.6 million in 2015.

“Most of the reductions [in benefits under this legislation] would be for services such as dental, vision, [and] mental health.”
Billions in savings will be achieved by reducing the number of Americans covered by Medicaid and increasing the barriers to coverage.

60% of those losing coverage will be children.

E.J. Dionne has an excellent editorial in the Washington Post called "Where's the Budget Outrage?" that is highly reccommended.

The US will not negotiate with terrorists

Except, according to Newsweek, we have been negotiating with the insurgents in Iraq for months.

The talks are taking place at U.S. military bases in Anbar province, as well as in Jordan and Syria. "Now we have won over the Sunni political leadership," says U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. "The next step is to win over the insurgents." The groups include Baathist cells and religious Islamic factions, as well as former Special Republican Guards and intelligence agents, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the talks.

Apparantly when this administration tells the public that it will not negotiate with terrorists, they are really taking a page from the Pataki/Bloomberg playbook and merely posturing for political gain. The hypocrisy is truly stunning.

Making wages a moral issue

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the fact that for Dr. Martin Luther King, the issue of a living wage was a moral issue as well as an economic issue. I've also written about how raising the federal minimum wage (which hasn't been raised in eight years) would be a great issue for the Democratic party to run with in November. Now, the Christian Science Monitor has a fantastic article about how out of whack our capitalist system has become with regards to wages, and how it really is a moral issue.

The Monitor reports:

"A think tank study released last week found that between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, the incomes of the country's highest-income families climbed substantially. Middle- and lower-income families, though, saw only modest increases in income and have begun to decline again despite relatively low unemployment. So today the income gap between the richest and poorest one-fifth of families is "significantly wider" than it was two decades ago, note the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, two nonprofit groups in Washington, D.C.

In past tough years, Congress has shared in economic suffering by cutting its own pay - in 1932 and 1783, for instance. Not so now. Since members of Congress last voted to boost the minimum wage, they have raised their own pay by 23 percent. Last October, the Senate voted 51 to 49 to hike the minimum wage, but it would have taken a supermajority of 60 votes to pass."

Lobbying reform is not the only moral issue our political elites should be grappling with. To me, this is an issue that needs to be dealt with now. But as the article sadly points out, it is not likely that the minimum wage will be increased under this administration and Congress, both of which are far more interested in repealing the Estate Tax for the rich instead.

NYT on wiretapping

I still can't understand why the Times sat on this story until after the '04 elections, but this is a great editorial nonetheless.

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps
Editorial

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," he told Republican officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable suspicion" for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical issues" and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime measure." That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything.

Other presidents did it. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timeline conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

The rich get richer

Can anyone say "growing income inequality"?

From the New York Times:

In 2003, incomes in the top 1 percent of households ranged from $237,000 to several billion dollars.

For every group below the top 1 percent, shares of corporate wealth have declined since 1991. These declines ranged from 12.7 percent for those on the 96th to 99th rungs on the income ladder to 57 percent for the poorest fifth of Americans, who made less than $16,300 and together owned 0.6 percent of corporate wealth in 2003, down from 1.4 percent in 1991.

The analysis did not measure wealth directly. It looked at taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and rents. Income from securities owned by retirement plans and endowments was excluded, as were gains from noncorporate assets such as personal residences.

[snip]

The White House said it did not believe that the 2003 tax cuts had much influence on wealth shares. It also said that since wealth is transitory for many people, a more important issue is how incomes and wealth are influenced by the quality of education.

"We want to lift all incomes and wealth," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman. "We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap."

"The president thinks we need to close the income gap, and he has talked about ways in which we can do that," especially through education, Mr. Duffy said.

The data showing increased concentration of corporate wealth were posted last month on the Congressional Budget Office Web site. Isaac Shapiro, associate director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, spotted the information last week and wrote a report analyzing it.

Mr. Shapiro said the figures added to the center's "concerns over the increasingly regressive effects" of the reduced tax rates on capital. Continuing those rates will "exacerbate the long-term trend toward growing income inequality," he wrote.

The center, which studies how government affects the poor and supports policies that it believes help alleviate poverty, opposes Mr. Bush's tax policies.

The center plans to release its own report on Monday that questions the wisdom of continuing the reduced tax rates on dividends and capital gains, saying the Congressional Budget Office analysis indicates that the benefits flow directly to a relatively few Americans.

Rove announces GOP will play the Fear Card in midterm elections

As they say, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. In a speech to the RNC last week, Rove says the elections in November will be about "security", but this editorial in the Miami Herald argues that for Team Bush and his party, security really means playing on the fear and insecurity of Americans.

FDA argues federal preemption

Although this is slightly old news, I just recently saw this piece in the Washington Post about the FDA pushing an anti-consumer, pro industry reccomendation called "federal preemption". This means, in essence, that individuals who may have been injured by drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration should not be allowed to sue drug companies in state courts.

According to an FDA spokesman: "We think that if your company complies with the FDA processes, if you bring forward the benefits and risks of your drug, and let your information be judged through a process with highly trained scientists, you should not be second-guessed by state courts that don't have the same scientific knowledge,"

However, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America take a justifyably critical view of thie FDA's reccomendation:

Elminating the rights of individuals to hold negligent drug companies accountable puts patients in even more danger than they already are in from drug company executives that put profits before safety," said Ken Suggs, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

"The fact that the drug industry can get the FDA to rewrite the rules so that CEOs can escape accountability for putting dangerous and deadly drugs on the market is the scariest example yet of how much control these big corporations have over our political process," he said.

It is interesting to see a so-called regulatory agency like the FDA consistently side with the pharmaceutical industry as opposed to protecting American citizens from possible injury or death. One might ask why Pharma even needs the largest lobbying force on Capitol Hill when they already have the agency supposedly regulating already it in their back pocket.

Energy crisis ahead?

From the BBC:

It is perhaps too early to talk of an energy "crisis".


Fossil fuels have been the cheapest and most convenient so far

But take your pick from terms like "serious concern" and "major issue" and you will not be far from the positions which analysts are increasingly adopting.

The reason for their concern can be found in a set of factors which are pulling in glaringly different directions:

Demand for energy, in all its forms, is rising
Supplies of key fuels - notably oil and gas - show signs of decline
Mainstream climate science suggests that reducing greenhouse gas emissions within two decades would be a prudent thing to do
Meanwhile the Earth's population continues to rise, with the majority of its six billion people hankering after a richer lifestyle - which means a greater consumption of energy.
Underlying the growing concern is the relentless pursuit of economic growth, which historically has been tied to energy consumption as closely as a horse is tethered to its cart.


It is a vehicle which cannot continue to speed up indefinitely; it must at some point hit a barrier, of finite supply, unfeasibly high prices or abrupt climate change.

The immediate question is whether the crash comes soon, or whether humanity has time to plan a comfortable way out.

The downside of democracy

Bush and the Necons are quite open about overthrowing autocratic regimes throughout the world and spreading democracy, especially in the Middle East. But Hamas' electoral victory in the Palestinian elections, besides being a horrible development for the region, demonstrates clearly that sometimes democracy and free elections can lead to serious problems for the US and her allies.

Not to deny democracy is great and all, but only time will tell if the democratically-elected governments in Iraqi's future will end up supporting US interests or those of Iran, Syria and Islamic fundamentalists.

So the next time you hear Bush go on about the duty of the US to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, and that it's worth thousands of our men and women in the armed services being killed and hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used in domestic spending, remember Bush's reaction to the fair (though horrible) results of the elections in the Palestinian Territories:

"Speaking at a news conference, Bush did not directly answer a question about the fate of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, though he suggested Hamas' victory could have an impact. "I made it very clear that the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally Israel, and that people must renounce that part of their platform," he said."

So what Bush really wants is an election that favors US interests and those of our allies, not the will of the citizens of the country.

A proposal for lobbying reform

There is a provocative article by James Carville and Paul Begala in the Washington Monthly on how to fix the current system and defend against future Jack Abramoffs. The solution: effectively end lobbying as we know it.

Part of the proposal entails substantially raising Congressional pay. I personally think they get paid enough as it is. But the suggestion that "[incumbent] members of Congress cannot take anything of value from anyone other than a family member. No lunches, no taxi rides. No charter flights. No golf games. No ski trips. No nothing." would force our elected representatives to actually vote based on their convictions and the desires of their convictions as opposed to paying back the special interests that financed their campaign.

On the other hand, challengers could receive contributions of any size from any individual, with the proviso that they are electronically disclosed to the Federal Election Commission--and the data would be made available to the public.

Public financing of elections, I hope, will be the way of the future and our children will ask us how it was possible for our government to accept legalized bribery for elected officials for so long.

Congress' pension hypocrisy

Allen Wastler has a new column up on CNNMoney.com that will really make you mad. He brings up the fact that while some members of Congress feign outrage about the new "market realities" they say necessitate cutbacks in employee's pension plans, their plans are extremely generous and not at risk.

This is akin to Congress' decision last year to vote themselves a pay raise, despite the fact that there have been huge cuts in funding for things like education, environmental protection and homeland security, our country is facing a record budget deficit, the federal minimum wage has remained untouched for eight years and Congress earlier announced that in light of all this it would not vote themselves pay raises.

Even though most Americans are not naive enough to believe Congress is looking out for their constituents on economic issues, these decisions make it so blatantly obvious that it's disgusting.

(Hat tip to Sirotablog)

We suck at nation building

Another week, another document leaked to the New York Times. This report details our efforts to rebuild the country we invaded and bombed the hell out of.

From the article:

"The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office."

Nice.

Additionally, a 136 page report commissioned by the commies at the Pentagon concludes what is becoming more and more obvious with each passing week: "[T]he Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency." I think the rabid right owes John Murtha an apology

Dean Baker offers suggestions on Medicare

I came across a provocative research report written by Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research this month entitled "The Savings from an Efficient Medicare Prescription Drug Plan" that goes beyond criticizing the current, failed approach. He projects the financial savings from having a simple add-on drug benefit to the basic Medicare package. In addition, using data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other sources, he projects separately the potential savings from having Medicare negotiate prices directly with drug companies and the savings from having a single designated administrator of the program, instead of insurance companies. Baker then compares the costs of a simple Medicare add-on with the cost of the Medicare Modernization

From the executive summary:

"The projected combined savings from lower drug costs and lower administrative fees are large enough in the middle-cost scenario to allow for the government to fully cover the porjected cost of perscription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries over this budget window, and still leave a surplus of almost $40 billion compared with the projected spending under the MMA (current Medicare Modernization Act)."

Baker notes that the GOP controlled Congress passed the MMA in 2003 ostensibly to help senior citizens pay for their perscription drugs, but because it was designed to allow private insurance companies provide the benefit instead of the Medicade administration, the end result was increased administrative and drug costs, as well as a program much more complicated for beneficiaries.

Instead, Baker argues that the program should be centrally administered as an add-on to the traditional Medicare program.

Also, Healthy Policy Blog has more on the lobbying effort that ensured passage of Medicare Part D, referencing an article by Paul Krugman. Unfortunately, Krugman's article is behind a TimesSelect firewall, so here is the entire article (via Factiva):

The K Street Prescription
By PAUL KRUGMAN
20 January 2006
The New York Times

The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren't on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action.

At first, federal officials were oblivious. ''This is going very well,'' a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can't do anything right.

But government works when it's run by people who take public policy seriously. As Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, when Medicare began 40 years ago, things went remarkably smoothly from the start. But this time the people putting together a new federal program had one foot out the revolving door: this was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists.

Consider the career trajectories of the two men who played the most important role in putting together the Medicare legislation.

Thomas Scully was a hospital industry lobbyist before President Bush appointed him to run Medicare. In that job, Mr. Scully famously threatened to fire his chief actuary if he told Congress the truth about cost projections for the Medicare drug program.

Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms -- firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill -- while still in public office. He left public service, if that's what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies.

Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill's point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby.

Surely both men's decisions while in office were influenced by the desire to please their potential future employers. And that undue influence explains why the drug legislation is such a mess.

The most important problem with the drug bill is that it doesn't offer direct coverage from Medicare. Instead, people must sign up with private plans offered by insurance companies.

This has three bad effects. First, the elderly face wildly confusing choices. Second, costs are high, because the bill creates an extra, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Finally, the fragmentation into private plans prevents Medicare from using bulk purchasing to reduce drug prices.

It's all bad, from the public's point of view. But it's good for insurance companies, which get extra business even though they serve no useful function, and it's even better for drug companies, which are able to charge premium prices. So whose interests do you think Mr. Scully and Mr. Tauzin represented?

Which brings us to the larger question of cronyism and corruption.

Thanks to Jack Abramoff, the K Street project orchestrated by Tom DeLay is finally getting some serious attention in the news media. Mr. DeLay and his allies have sought, with great success, to ensure that lobbying firms hire only Republicans. But most reports on the project still miss the main point by emphasizing the effect on campaign contributions.

The more important effect of the K Street project is that it allows the party machine to offer lavish personal rewards to the faithful. For a congressman, toeing the line on legislation brought free meals in Jack Abramoff's restaurant, invitations to his sky box, golf trips to Scotland, cushy jobs for family members and a lavish salary after leaving office. The same kinds of rewards are there for loyal members of the administration, especially given the Bush administration's practice of appointing lobbyists to key positions.

I don't want to overstate Mr. Abramoff's role: although he was an important player in this system, he wasn't the only one. In particular, he doesn't seem to have been involved in the Medicare drug deal. It's interesting, though, that Scott McClellan has announced that the White House, contrary to earlier promises, won't provide any specific information about contacts between Mr. Abramoff and staff members.

So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn't the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news?

The future of Davos

One of the best editorials on Davos, Neoliberalism and globalization I've read in a long while. Not surprisingly, it was penned by Jeff Faux, best known as the founder of the respected Economic Policy Institute. Although opposition to Davos is small and unorganized, Faux sounds some optimistic notes about the future. The whole thing (which is fairly short) deserves to be read.

Additionally, if you are so inclined, Faux has a longer, similarly-titled but much more in depth analysis in the latest issue of The Nation, which can be read here.

USAID merged into State Dept

Interesting article from the Financial Times. Basically, Bush has decided to transform both its foreign aid and diplomacy efforts by merging the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) into the State Department.

To give the Bush administration some credit, they are providing more foreign aid than the Clinton administration. But they still give well under the 0.7% benchmark established by the UN. And as the article notes, politicizing foreign aid will cause USAID to lose a lot of whatever credibility it has left in many countries, especially in the Middle East. As an article in the Boston Globe a two years ago pointed out, "along with food and rebuilding supplies, USAID carries a reputation for doing more to promote US corporate interests than Arab economic growth, according to some business people and former US diplomats in the countries where it has been most active, Egypt and Jordan. They say the agency's policy of compelling countries to buy US-made goods inhibits local businesses, and overlooks the need for long-term changes to create sustainable economic growth."

One reason US democracy-promotion measures in the Middle East, including the ill-fated Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) failed to work is because many regimes in the region distrust meddling from the State Department and would prefer to work with NGOs. Moving to literally subsume USAID into State will make similiar efforts much more difficult--if not impossible--in the future.

Recently, USAID issued a dire report on the security situation in Iraq. Once subsumed into the Department of State, will USAID be as candid in its assessment of global events, especially if it goes against our diplomatic agenda? One of the advantages USAID has is that its members are literally on the ground in conflict situations around the world. It remains to be seen how this restructuring will affect our ability to know what is really happening, as opposed to relying on diplomats who speak mainly with leaders in the countries they are assigned to.

Media reactions to new bin Laden tape

The text of his speech (which has been authenticated by the CIA) is here.

The comments over at the right-wing blog littlegreenfootballs.com show just how "tough" the chickenhawks can talk, without actually going through the trouble of enlisting.

Meanwhile, our media pundits have been busy providing insightful, well measured commentary in their usual fashion. For example, Chris Matthews noted today that bin Laden sounds like Michael Moore while yukking it up with Joe Biden. Of course, Matthews is the same jackass who in discussing the NSA wiretapping scandal recently argued that breaking the law "may be the job of the president".

In reality, MSNBC is vying with CNN and FoxNews to become the most irresponsible cable news channel in the US. Just last week, fair and balanced Bill O'Reilly bragged that sooner or later we're going to have to bomb Iran. Why anyone would listen to the foreign policy advice of O'Reilly--who famously insisted during the runup to war that it was "certain" Iraq had WMD--is beyond me.

The failure of supply-side economics

More evidence that George Bush and the GOP are hurting working Americans. From an article in Bloomberg News:

American workers have rarely taken home a smaller share of the nation's prosperity, a condition that is undermining bipartisan support for free trade and creating friction between President George W. Bush's administration and the Federal Reserve.

After 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth, pay is rising at a slower rate than in any similar expansion since the end of World War II. Companies are paying less of their cash gains in the form of wages and salaries than at any time since the Great Depression, according to government figures.

The author goes on:

The weaker returns to labor, and the Fed's concerns about resource utilization, are even more perplexing when seen in the context of rising productivity.

Output per hour has grown at an average 3.6 percent annual rate over the past 16 quarters versus 2.6 percent the prior four years. Companies have room to boost pay without raising prices because productivity gains reduce production costs. They have little incentive to do so, though, with ready sources of low- cost labor overseas and declining union membership at home.

What's so perplexing about that? Workers are getting hosed.

This trend is having an impact on public opinion regarding "free" trade, Bush's approval ratings and the debate on raising the minimum wage. Read the whole article here.

(Hat tip: Kevin Drum. OK, so I haven't removed washingtonmonthly from my blogroll...)

Is CNN trying to beat FoxNews?

In terms of becoming the sleaziest cable news channel, that is.

Problems with Bush's Medicare drug plan

The new Medicare drug plan that Bush pushed is running into serious problems being implemented.

Planning is definately not this Administration's strong suit. Apparantly, neither is listening to the GAO.

Just how bad is Medicare D? Well, some all already saying the "D stands for disaster". And why would they say that?

There have been reports in the media that "[b]ecause of some computer glitches (and likely some human error) some seniors in the program have been told that they owe more than $100 for prescriptions when their Medicare D co-pay would actually be about $5. This has made some people on fixed incomes walk away from medicine they need to survive. Others have been told that they are not enrolled in any plan, even though they had. Many seniors (and pharmacists) who called prescription plans with coverage questions were met by overloaded phone systems and insufficient staffing to handle their questions."

The federal government had the bright idea to have senior citizens register for the program using the internet, even though research from the Kaiser Foundation shows that 76% of seniors have never used the internet before.

So now the states are being forced to step in with stop-gap measures to deal with what was supposed to be a federal program.

Keep in mind that Medicare D was basically written by the pharmaceutical and insurance industry lobbyists for those two industries. The pharma industry also happens to be the largest lobbying force in Washington.

According to USA Today:

Since 1998, drug companies have spent $758 million on lobbying — more than any other industry, according to government records analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity, a watchdog group. In Washington, the industry has 1,274 lobbyists — more than two for every member of Congress.

"They are powerful," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "You can hardly swing a cat by the tail in that town without hitting a pharmaceutical lobbyist."

Over the years those lobbyists have been very successful, demonstrating that the industry knows politics as well as it knows chemistry. Drug companies won coverage for prescription drugs under Medicare in 2003 while blocking the government from negotiating prices downward. They have so far kept out imports of cheaper medicines from Canada and other countries. And they have protected a system that uses company fees to speed the drug-approval process.

Another strong argument for public financing of elections, in my opinion.

UPDATE: Nathan Newman sees a silver lining in Medicare D.

UPDATE #2: Detailed analysis from Golden State Blog here.

MLK preached nonviolence, too

That is the name of a great editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle about a part of Dr. King's legacy that isn't discussed enough.

For King, the guiding principle of nonviolence is Christian love. King says that love means that all life is interrelated and all men are brothers. "Because men are brothers, if you harm me, you harm yourself." This approach is often seen as naive and utopian. It seems better simply to kill the bad guys in pursuit of justice. This is the basic idea behind the death penalty. It is also the guiding principle of the wars we fight. The worry is that if we do not fight evil with real weapons, the bad guys will win. But for advocates of nonviolence such as King, the point is not simply to win a fight. Victory without love, reconciliation and justice is fruitless. There are goods to be obtained that are infinitely higher than the good of victory.

Al Gore calls out Bush, Congress hard

Great speech today by Al Gore today (hey, I believe in giving credit where it's due) at the Constitution Society in Washington DC. He notes that the president has broken the law and greatly exceeded the authority of his office in violating the constitutional rights of Americans.

Importantly, it is a subservient Congress that has allowed this overreach to occur, with that branch of our government refusing to provide any oversight authority over the Executive branch.

The New York Times notes that Al Gore repeatedly invoked the name of MLK and how he was spied on by our government during the Civil Rights Era.

UPDATE: Gore smacked down the Administration's feeble attempts at a response.

MLK on poverty wages and unions

Thought-provoking article by Holly Sklar in TomPaine, discussing how for MLK, wages were considered a moral issue as well as an economic issue, and the he would be among the voices demanding Congress raise the federal minimum wage instead of just voting themselves pay raises.

As Sklar notes:

"Congress itself has taken eight pay raises since 1997, while denying fair pay for minimum wage workers. On Jan. 1, congressional pay quietly rose to $165,200—up $31,600 since 1997. And unlike minimum wage workers, members of Congress have good health benefits, pensions and perks."

Unchanged in eight years and adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage is less than it was in the 1960s, when King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Supporting the cause of organized labor, in fact, was a centerpiece of MLK's civil rights campaign when he was assassinated. This would be a great issue for the Democrats to run with in this year's midterm elections. The GOP can stay with gay marriage if they want.

A good resource on the minimum wage is this briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute.

Budget deficit madness

The Washington Post exposes the Bush Administration's desperate attempts at budget deficit subterfuge, trying to fool the public into thinking they know what the hell they're doing with our economy. News flash: they don't.

Oh, and by the way, they don't know how to manage the reconstruction of Iraq either.

"After more than 2 1/2 years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States' "Marshall Plan" to rebuild this war-torn country is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.

The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. Foreign governments have given only a fraction of the billions they pledged two years ago.

With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people.

[...]

[T]he commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, Gen. William H. McCoy, said at a recent briefing that the last of 3,100 reconstruction projects would soon be awarded, and almost all would be completed before the year ends.

"We were never intending to rebuild Iraq," McCoy said. "We were providing enough funds to jump-start the reconstruction effort in this country.""

The cost of the Iraq war

At least $1 trillion, according to a study by Joseph Stiglitz (link to an Asia Times Online article). Just a little bit over-budget.

Playing off his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of 1967, Juan Cole offers some thoughts on what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought about the Iraq war.

New Zogby poll: 52% of Americans support impeaching Bush over wiretapping

Read the results of the poll, commissioned by AfterDowningStreet and conducted by Zogby International here. According to the poll:

"Responses to the Zogby poll varied by political party affiliation: 66% of Democrats favored impeachment, as did 59% of Independents, and even 23% of Republicans. By ideology, impeachment was supported by Progressives (90%), Libertarians (71%), Liberals (65%), and Moderates (58%), but not by Conservatives (33%) or Very Conservatives (28%).
Responses also varied by age, sex, race, and religion. 74% of those 18-29 favored impeachment, 47% of those 31-49, 49% of those 50-64, and 40% of those over 65. 55% of women favored impeachment, compared to 49% of men. Among African Americans, 75% favored impeachment, as did 56% of Hispanics and 47% of whites. Majorities of Catholics, Jews, and Others favored impeachment, while 44% of Protestants and 38% of Born Again Christians did so.
Majorities favored impeachment in every region: the East (54%), South (53%) and West (52%), and Central states (50%). In large cities, 56% support impeachment; in small cities, 58%; in suburbs, 46%; in rural areas, 46%."

Interestingly (but not surprising), public support for the Clinton impeachment was much lower at the time.

"In August and September of 1998, 16 major polls asked about impeaching President Clinton (http://democrats.com/clinton-impeachment-polls). Only 36% supported hearings to consider impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal. Even so, the impeachment debate dominated the news for months, and the Republican Congress impeached Clinton despite overwhelming public opposition."

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum argues that all this impeachment talk is just silly, and that Dems should focus all their efforts on winning the midterm elections instead. Hard to imagine what would qualify for a Kevin Drum impeachment if breaking the law, lying about war, etc. don't do the trick. As usual, the comments are more intelligent and interesting than his original post. He also completely fails to explain why the aforementioned poll is, in his words, "childishly contrived".

I'm trying to decide whether to delink washingtonmonthly from my blogroll...

Marc Weisbrot puts Morales election into much-needed context

Excellent article by Marc Weisbrot, co-director of CEPR and one of the most important economists on the planet. In it, he urges Americans to view the recent Morales win in Bolivia as being more aligned with legitimate economic concerns in the region--especially anger towards the US, IMF, etc.--rather than reflexive anti-Americanism. He argues:

[Differences] over economic policy - much more than drug policy, the war in Iraq, immigration, or Cuba - is the main thing that has set Washington on a collision course with most of Latin America. Evo Morales is now the sixth candidate in the last seven years to win a Presidential race while campaigning explicitly against "neoliberalism." The others were in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Uruguay. And there will likely be more in the near future, as there are 10 more presidential elections scheduled in Latin America over the next year.

So how do the poor citizens of Latin American countries differ from the US in terms of economic policy? Mainly, Latin Americans look back at the failures of economic adjustment policy pushed on them by the IMF in anger (per capita income in Bolivia, for example, has actually dropped due to the implementation of these economic policies) and demand leaders who will put their interests first. Meanwhile, Bush and the supporters of "neoliberal" economics argue that the campaign of privatization and "market-driven reform" haven't gone far enough!

Contrast this with the reforms enacted by President Kircher of Argentina, who moved to pay off its debt to the IMF ahead of schedule to get the agency off his country's back forever. As Weisbrot notes:

"Argentina had to fight the Fund every inch of the way to adopt the polices that enabled its economic recovery: among them, a stable and competitive exchange rate, relatively low interest rates, and a tax on exported goods.

Keeping the currency stable and from becoming overvalued was essential for the export-led part of the recovery, and also to encourage domestic investment. Kirchner's government had to intervene many times in currency markets, and use the Central Bank for something other than fighting inflation, in order to accomplish this. The IMF remains opposed to these policies. The Fund also opposed the export tax, which was important in boosting government revenues. Instead, the IMF advocated a number of politically unpalatable and economically dubious policies including raising utility rates, running bigger budget surpluses, and paying more to money to foreign creditors.

Argentina's economic policy choices were decisive and successful. The economy has grown at about 9 percent for three years now, a nearly unprecedented growth streak in Latin America over the last 25 years. And it was done without any outside help and despite the net drain of money to the IMF and other lending institutions."

Of course, US economic/foreign policy in Latin America has been self-serving and disgraceful for decades, and the IMF has been pushing disasterous policies (backed by Washington) in many developing economies all over the world for decades, so it is not fair to blame all these problems on the current administrationl. But it is high time Americans stop blaming Latin Americans for electing populist, Left-wing and anti-American presidents without considering how the disasterous and self-interested economic policies our government and the IMF is pushing for makes this inevitable.

Some links for more background on the IMF:

Argentina's unorthodox rehab
Structural Adjustment- a major cause of world poverty
Columbia economics professor Joseph Stiglitz on IMF accounting tricks

Chomsky talks politics

In Alternet. Pretty short and well worth a read.

I definately have my disagreements with Chomsky, especially with regard to Israel, but there really isn't much controvertial in this interview. Dovetailing with my previous post, he does explain why the DNC hasn't been able to make any political gains, despite five years of George W. Bush:

Geov Parrish: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

Noam Chomsky: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they're getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can't do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, "How can you criticize it? You all voted for it." And, yeah, they're basically correct.

How could the Democrats distinguish themselves at this point, given that they've already played into that trap?

Democrats read the polls way more than I do, their leadership. They know what public opinion is. They could take a stand that's supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party. But then they're going to have to change their position on just about everything.

Take, for example, take your pick, say for example health care. Probably the major domestic problem for people. A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. And that's been true for a long time. (According to a recent ABC News poll this is true, although the support does fall off if the national healthcare program limits choice of doctors, entails waiting lists, etc. - ed.) But whenever that comes up -- it's occasionally mentioned in the press -- it's called politically impossible, or "lacking political support," which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn't want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don't want it, and so on. Okay, so a large majority of the population wants it, but who cares about them? Well, Democrats are the same. Clinton came up with some cockamamie scheme which was so complicated you couldn't figure it out, and it collapsed.

Kerry in the last election, the last debate in the election, October 28 I think it was, the debate was supposed to be on domestic issues. And the New York Times had a good report of it the next day. They pointed out, correctly, that Kerry never brought up any possible government involvement in the health system because it "lacks political support." It's their way of saying, and Kerry's way of understanding, that political support means support from the wealthy and the powerful. Well, that doesn't have to be what the Democrats are. You can imagine an opposition party that's based on popular interests and concerns.

Clueless Democrats lose on Alito

From the New York Times:

Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said that the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they were taking the courts too far to the right.

Well, duh. As John McCain has been known to say "elections have consequences". And one consequence of the 2004 election is a federal judiciary that has been unquestionably pushed to the right. And without a Democratic president and a whole lot of vacancies in the next decade, that trend is only going to continue.

For Democrats or liberals to think they can somehow block Bush's appointments just because they are conservatives show just how disconnected from reality the party's leadership has become.

Newsflash for Democrats: you need to start winning elections in Congress and the White House if you hope to prevent the Judicial Branch of our federal government from creeping even further to the right that it already was in 2000.

According to the Times:

At [a] 2001 retreat, [47 of 50 Senate ]Democrats listened to a panel composed of Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School and Marcia D. Greenberger, a co-president of the National Women's Law Center. The panelists told them that the court was at a historic juncture and that the Bush White House was prepared to fill the courts with conservatives who deserved particularly strong scrutiny, participants said.

The panel also advised them, participants said, that Democratic senators could oppose even nominees with strong credentials on the grounds that the White House was trying to push the courts in a conservative direction, a strategy that now seems to have failed the party.

So the majority of Senate Democrats didn't realize that a judicial nomination is mostly a numbers game, and that the GOP had enough conservative votes to win an up or down vote on Bush's pick? Were they counting on a filibuster on the grounds of extraordinary circumstances? Were they hoping to Bork Alito?

The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in particular Kennedy, are blaming the public for not being sophisticated enough to understand the issues in play during the hearings. Others Democrats are blaming the performance of the committee members. The bottom line is a bona-fide rightwinger is about to become the next Justice on the SCOTUS and will change the court's makeup. Let's just hope the Democrats are finally able to pick up some seats in November.

David Corn makes a similiar argument regarding the Democrats' cluelessness on his blog.

Middle Class on the edge

Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, author of TPMCafe's Warren Reports, has a new article in Harvard Magazine entitled "The Middle Class on the Precipice". It's well worth a read. She explains in detail how difficult it has become for Americans to carve out a Middle Class lifestyle, even with two spouses working full-time. And according to Warren, "at the same time that families are facing higher costs and increased risks, the old financial rules of credit have been rewritten by powerful corporate interests that see middle-class families as the spoils of political influence."

Warren debunks the notion that Americans are under increasing financial risk because of "luxury fever", or increased spending on non-essential luxury goods. Rather, she shows how most of the increase in spending is in fact for essentials like food, health care and fixed monthly expenses like mortgages and insurance. Even though two-income households make more than households from the previous generation, rising expenses are outstripping this increase, giving them less of a cushion than their parent's generation had.

She also lays out how powerful financial interests, abetted by Congress, have changed the rules of financing to the detriment of these families on the edge of bankruptcy. The two biggest culprits are the credit card issuers and mortgage lenders. Combined with the continued shift from defined benefit retirement plans from companies to defined contribitions, families are being asked to absorb more and more risk in their retirement income.

This summary really doesn't do the article justice, you really need to read the whole thing.

Update on Sago mining disaster

While the media, famous for its 30-second attention span, has completely forgotten the Sago mining disaster that occured at the beginning of the month. Fortunately, Jordan Barab at Confined Spaces has not dropped the ball, and he provides some much-needed evidence that Bush's regulation-lite philosophy deserves most of the blame for the tragedy.

There is just so much damning evidence in the post that I won't bother excerpting it. Also, make sure to check out Mine Safety Watch, which has been closely tracking the story. And to understand how lax enforcement of the mine from Bush-appointed Washington regulators was no accident but a function of massive political contributions from the coal industry, read this Village Voice article.

CII to vote on key governance reform in March

According to the Financial Times, the Council of Institutional Investors will hold a very important vote this March that will affect the corporate governance practices of many large public US corporations. The CII, which is comprised of the largest 140 pension funds in America, will be voting on whether to request companies to increase the transparency of their political and charitable donations. Although the CII doesn't have legal/regulatory authority to require that companies improve the transparency of their political contributions, the Council represents a large chunk of institutional investor assets and therefore where this money will get allocated--and where it will not.

There is no news on this vote at the Council's website, but this is a development that should be closely followed because of its potential impact on both corporate governance practices and curtailing government corruption.

UPDATE: David Sirota has a post on the FT article, but with a slightly different focus.

Public (barely) opposes Bush' illegal spying program

This is just sad. Although the AP article frames its recent AP-Ipsos poll as a repudiation of Bush's illegal wiretrap program, the fact remains that the numbers are pretty closely divided: 56% against and 42% for. I want to know, what are those 42% of Americans surveyed thinking? The FISA program works retroactively, meaning that the administration's claims that it is too slow to function efficiently is a lie. The ONLY reason why Bush refuses to follow the law and get FISA warrants is that he is engaging in bahavior that a count of law would find illegal--like spying on journalists and war protestors.

The most important takeaway quote in my opinion from the article is this:

Cynthia Ice-Bones, 32, a Republican from Sacramento, Calif., said knowing about the program made her feel a bit safer. ''I think our security is so important that we don't need warrants,'' she said.

If 42% of this country is so ideologically brainwashed and ignorant that they are actually fine with the president flagrantly violating the law, and they are able to rationalize this on the specious grounds that it somehow is making them "safer", we have even bigger problems that the current administration. We have a problem with a large percentage of the American people.

Another argument against Social Security "reform"

Brad DeLong makes--in my opinion--a very well-reasoned argument as to why in the age of the disappearing Defined Benefit pensions being offered by Corporate America, it may not be such a hot idea to privatize and scale back Social Security.

He says, in part:

"I am enough of a social democrat to believe that if there is an economic service or benefit that citizens value extremely highly and that only the government can provide, then the government should provide it....the collection of payroll taxes from tens of millions of workers and the writing of tens of millions of pension checks is the kind of routinized, semi-automatic task that the government can do well. And it is much more important and valuable that it do it in our future post-industrial network-age society than it was in the past."

Read his entire post. His argument that it is more imporrtant than ever to be providing social insurance as the private sector steps away from this role should have a lot of resonance with the tens of thousands of middle class Americans who have seen their pensions blow up in the past few years.

Privatize Social Security?

More proof that privatizing public pensions just doesn't work. (Hat tip Nathan Newman.)

Abramoff is not the issue, pay-to-play government is

Read this editorial by Nick Nyhart, the executive director of the fantastic organization Public Campaign. He neatly sums up how most Americans and their elected representatives are missing the real significance of the Abramoff scandal.

Haitian elections

The elections in Haiti have been postponed to February 7. Read this editorial by the Center for Economic Policy Research's Marc Weisbrot for some helpful context for understanding the circumstances under which the elections are actually being held.

Of course, those circumstances include the US-backed coup of Haiti's democratically-elected president. I'm currently reading Mountains Beyond Mountains for one of my graduate school classes. The book is a biography of medical anthropologist Paul Farmer and discusses in some detail the history of Haiti--particularly the way France and the US have both contributed to subvert democracy and harm public health in that country. In addition, multinational organizations such as the World Bank and IMF have done significant damanege to Haiti to further the interests of the wealthiest countries in the world.

US foreign policy towards Haiti in the past has been driven by concern for US investors and exporters rather than the interests of Haiti's poor. For example:

Since the early 1960s the U.S. has actively used its political influence and development assistance programs to help turn Haiti into a low-wage, export-friendly economy that provides profitable business opportunities for U.S. investors. In 1971, at a time when development assistance to Haiti had been cut off due to the terrible human rights record of the Duvalier regime, the Nixon administration agreed to give political support to the transition of power from Papa Doc to Baby Doc—dictator to dictator—in return for the establishment of generous incentives to attract U.S. private investors. These included maintenance of an extremely low minimum wage, the suppression of labor unions, and the right of foreign companies to repatriate their profits.

The IMF and World Bank have wrought their own damage to the country as well.

The International Monetary Find and the World Bank are dominated by the United States, and the dominant stakeholders in those institutions are American finance capitalists. In simple terms, the IMF and the World Bank have much in common with loan sharks. They do not come to countries' rescue. They hold out loans to desperate countries to restructure their debts, and take on more debt-which they can ill afford-in exchange for acceptance of draconian adjustments to economic structures that are beneficial only to a small local elite who are working with transnational corporations (TNCs). These are called structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Their purpose is to pry developing economies open for domination by the TNCs and international speculators.

That's what all the hoopla was about in Washington DC April 16th.

These SAPs are the lowering of tariffs, which in Haiti means subsidized foreign goods run local producers out of their own market; suppression of labor unions, which in Haiti means people continuing to work for $3 a day in sweatshops; privatization of state owned enterprises, which in Haiti means transferring the proceeds to a private foreign corporation instead of into social services and infrastructure; downsizing of the public sector, which in Haiti would mean around 45,000 additional jobs lost in a country with over 70 percent unemployment; imposition of taxes on basic commodities, which in Haiti is the continuation of a regressive tax system that has let the rich off the hook and will further immiserate the poor; and the cancellation of what few social services still exist there.

Mountains Beyond Mountains is a depressing read, not only because of the tragic economic and health crisis Haiti is dealing with, but also because of the role the US and the IMF/World Bank have played in perpetuating this disaster.

For more background, see this article from MADRE here.

UPDATE: Also in the vein of Paul Farmer and Mountains Beyond Mountains, it now appears that before implementing CAFTA, Latin American governments are standing up to US demands for legislative changes in these companies to ensure "stricter" patent rules. These rules will, of course, protect the intellectual property rights of huge pharmaceutical companies, but will result in more expensive medicine for poor peasant farmers in these Latin American countries. For a more complete rundown, see this commondreams here.

Snowwatch II

Angry Bear does a good job taking apart Treasury Secretary John Snow and exposing how he appears to be living in Fantasyland.

One thing Secretary Snow doesn't seem concerned about is the fact that the nation's net personal savings rate may end up negative for all of 2005, the first time this would have occured since the Great Depression.

Some good news for a Sunday evening

Bernie Sanders' VT Senate camapign is off to a very strong start.

An argument for developing a Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Program

I reccomend this detailed white paper published last year by the World Resource Institute on the subject. A similiar market-based approach for Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) trading seems to have been quite successful based on economic, environmental and administrative grounds. However, according to the authors of the report, instituting an emissions trading program for Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) will entail at least one significant challenge:

The target-setting process used in the OTC NOx Budget Program may not be replicable with GHGs, given the global nature of climate change and uncertainty surrounding the environmental impacts and benefits. It is not clear that the stringency of the OTC NOx cap can be mirrored in a GHG regime, at least at the outset, although the establishment of a GHG cap is a critical first step toward an evolving, global solution. Setting a cap is recognition of the responsibility to reduce emissions and sends economic signals for innovation and investment in low-emission technologies.

The reports offers a valuable contribution to the debate over whether market-based approaches like emissions trading work more effectively than simply taxing the emissions) to reduce GHG emissions.

Also of interest, The Nation's Michael T. Klare argues that natural gas will be the next big geopolitical prize. He says that natural gas will be to the 21st Century what oil was for the 20th. You can read the entire article, called The Geopolitics of Natural Gas.

NRA influencing "gun rights" battle all over the world

Fascinating article in this month's Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The writer notes the huge influence the National Rifle Association is having on public perceptions and additudes on gun policy not only in the US, but worldwide.

The article describes how an ad campaign that cynically framed a Brazilian referendum on gun control as being about the sacred "rights" of gun ownership being critical to "freedom from dictatorship", ended up swayed the vote for the gun lobbyists. The proposed ban on handguns would have prevented anyone except police officers and soldiers from being able to purchase guns or ammunition, and was favored by the government as a way to combat the 38,000 civilian casualties the country suffered annually due to gun violence.

In describing the instrumental role the NRA played in defeating the Brazil referendum, the author points out:

The idea that owning a gun is a human right as dear as, say, the freedom to protest, was new to most Brazilians. But the rhetoric used in the Brazilian commercials echoed talking points used by local pro-gun groups in Australia, Britain, Canada, South Africa, and elsewhere. Such a line of argument might not exist if not for the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), which had shaped, tested, and honed the message before many of these groups ever existed. The NRA, perhaps America’s most powerful political lobby, serves as spiritual godfather to gun groups around the world. Nor does it see its pro-gun agenda as one that stops at the water’s edge. Indeed, shortly before the vote, NRA spokesperson Andrew Arulanandam said, “We view Brazil as the opening salvo for the global gun control movement. If gun control proponents succeed in Brazil, America will be next.”

The NRA may not be actively funding gun lobbies around the world—the organization claims its charter prohibits it—but its influence is felt in much more than dollars. It lends support to the anti-gun control effort at the United Nations. It promotes lines of argument, strategy, and political tactics that others adopt for local use. And, if you contact the association, its representatives will come to explain how to get it done. Although many of the NRA’s members may not own a passport, their leaders are savvy operators in international politics. For all their red-blooded American pretensions, they have a deep understanding of how globalization works.

This influence is purposely exerted behind the scenes and kept quiet by both the local gun-rights proponents as well as the NRA for obvious political reasons, including the current unpopularity of the US in Latin America. But the article makes it crystal clear that the organization's role is far from passive. The fact that the NRA even has a emissary at the UN --something I definately didn't know--shows just how powerful and influential it really is.

Read the whole article here to get a better sense of the NRA's endless ambitions and the frighteningly successful strategies it has been employing to win what it views as an important cultural battle. Sadly, the civilian death toll gun violence claims every day--with many of the victims being minors-- doesn't seem to factor much into their lofty goals. In fact, Congress and the President Bush have already sold out the concerns of American citizens by essentially passing legislation which grants the gun industy immunity from civil liability law.

Stephen Zunes sets the record straight on Israel

Finally, someone on the Left has eloquently addressed the very sensitive--but critically important--topic of Israel's and American Jewry's involvement in and responsibility for the US's 2003 invasion of Iraq. I was gratified to see Stephen Zunes, a Middle East affairs expert I have a great deal of respect for, do something far too few of his fellow travelers on the Left have done: he categorically denied that the Iraq war was instigated by the Israeli government or American Jews.

Writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, Zunes points out an obvious (yet often unstated) fact:

While it is true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among the policy makers in Washington who pushed for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is also true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among liberal Democrats in Congress and leftist intellectuals in universities who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, while a number of prominent neoconservative intellectuals are of Jewish background, they have tended not to be religious nor have they, despite their support for the current right-wing Israeli government, been strongly identified as Zionists.

Make no mistake: Zunes' support of Israel is very limited. He argues that the Sharon government and its supporters in the US deserve blame for many "tragic" policies which have led, in his view. to needless human suffering, increased extremism in the Islamic world, decreased security, and rampant violations of the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, and other international legal principles. And to an extent, I have to agree with him. The Sharon government has committed human rights violations. I don't think Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch are anti-Zionist simply because they criticize policies of an Israeli government. What I have a problem with is when so-called progressives, Leftists or liberals reflexively blame Israel and the Jews for all of the problems in the Middle East because of a view that the Palestinians are the only victims, and I especially have a problem with those who, because of their hatred of the policies of particular Israeli governments, would flat-out reject the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. The hypocrisy of many of these rejectionists is astounding: they condemn Israel for violations of UN resolutions, yet fail to accept the validity of Israel's creation as a Jewish homeland by the same institution.

To sum up, criticizing particular policies of Israel is fine, and in fact very necessary in order to hold those who are in positions of great power accountable to Israeli and Palestinian citizens. And Zunes may be completely correct in pointing out that while many of Israel's policies are counterproductive or even disasterous, Israel and the Jews are not to blame for the invasion of Iraq. It is heartening to finally see a defense rather than a scapegoating of Israel coming from the Left--even if it is limited in scope.

Newt Gingrich: Hypocritical scumbag

Sirotablog has the full story. Suffice it to say that the former Speaker of the House doth protest too much with regards to corruption in government.

Pat Robertson blames Sharon stroke on Gaza pullout

Every single Jewish-American who voted for Bush, or any other Neoconservative politician in 2004, due to a belief that these candidates were somehow good for Jews and Israel need to read this.

Apparantly, Pat Robertson announced on his TV show that G-d gave Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a life-threatening stroke because he "divided G-d's land", a clear reference to the recent Gaza pullout.

Granted, Robertson is not your typical Neoconservative--the man is clearly a rabble-rousing bigot full of hate who cares more about his personal fortunes than any religious belief. But these comments, in my mind, raise an important question: do any of these right-wing Republicans really care about the future of the State of Israel, or is their seeming "support" just a function of anti-Islamic bigotry and a desire to shore up the votes of religious Jews? I think the answer is clearly the latter, and the sooner these scumbags are exposed for what they are, the better off our country and Israel will be.

The debate over whether to prosecute corporations

Oneworld.net has an interesting article which discusses whether it is a better tactic to prosecute executive malfeasors rather than the corporations they work at. One argument for why the executives should be targeted for criminal prosecution is that in reality, no corporate crime can be committed without an individual executive commiting the crime. Another reason put forward is that if the corporation itself were to be indicted, its stock value takes a hammering and lots of innocent shareholders would therefore be unfairly punished.

However, one argument being put forward in favor of prosecuting the corporation as well as an executive wrong-doer is that it is unfair to give corporations the constitutional rights of a person if they cannot similarly be held accountable under criminal law.

The author notes: "Like people, corporations are currently granted First Amendment guarantees of political speech and commercial speech, Fourth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable searches, Fifth Amendment double jeopardy and liberty rights, and Sixth and Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury."

In addition, it is argued that without the ability to prosecute corporations, it becomes much more difficult if not impossible to truly rehabilitate the corporate culture that might be encouraging such illegal behavior in the first place. According to a recent report on the matter by Corporate Crime Reporter and the opinion of Multinational Monitor editor Robert Weissman, because of these reasons and others corporations should indeed be held culpable and prosecuted in the event of serious corporate crime (felonies), in addition to the executives.

The debate is complicated by the belief held by many experts in the legal/business community that many large corporations are simply too important to fail (i.e.: receive the corporate death penalty via a felony conviction), for instance, any of the large accounting firms post-Arthur Anderson. In fact, according to the article, not since that company's collapse in 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal has a corporation been convicted of a crime.

The CCR report basically argues that by offering up their executives to prosecutors as sacrificial lambs, corporations are able to avoid punishment for serious crimes, and that they are aided by the increasing reliance on deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements.

This is an interesting legal and moral debate to follow, and how it is resolved will no doubt shape the future of corporate governance reform and the face of business ethics.

UPDATE: Brad Plumer has some thoughts on the debate here.

Meanwhile, in Iraq

AP reports 120 Iraqis killed in terrorist attacks, hundreds more injured, 7 US soldiers dead.

Karbala, Iraq - In the country's deadliest day in months, bombs killed at least 120 Iraqis and seven U.S. soldiers on Thursday - shattering hopes that last month's election and the new year would usher in a more peaceful era.

At least 200 people were wounded in the attacks on Iraqis in two cities. Another three bombs exploded in Baghdad, two of them detonated by suicide bombers. And insurgents sabotaged an oil pipeline near the northern city of Kirkuk, causing a huge fire.

The attacks in one of Shiite Islam's holiest cities, Karbala, and the Sunni Arab stronghold of Ramadi raised fears of an escalation in sectarian tensions.

The Sago mine disaster

The mine has been cited for 168 safety violations and the management came across as totally incompetent in the press conference. They "can't explain" how the miscommunication occurred, or provide too many answers at all.

"We will never know the whole story" says the CEO, but that may not fly for the 12 families that suffered this tragedy.

UPDATE: Hearing have been called by Democrats. Looks like this has just become a partisan issue. (Hat tip, Sirotablog.)

Analysis of the new Medicare plan

Writing in the American Prospect, Robert Kuttner dissects the new Medicare plan that goes into effect this year. He exposes in grand style just how pathetic it is in that it benefits the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries at the expense of senior citizens. This is a medicare policy that the non-partisan Consumer Union called "fundamentally flawed".

He writes:

A great many seniors will never get the coverage because the plan is a bad bargain, and they just won’t sign up. Of if they do sign up, they will run out of the ability to pay enough out of pocket before qualifying for needed benefits. Even with these disgracefully skimpy benefits, the plan is expected to add over half a trillion to the federal budget over the next decade.

Why would anyone have designed such an insane program?

Because the political purpose was never to deliver good benefits. One administration goal, running the program through the private insurance industry, conflicted with the imperative of a clear, cost-effective plan. Seniors must evaluate innumerable competing private plans, each with subtle differences in costs and benefits that make an impenetrable program even less fathomable, and raise total costs because each of these private plans tacks on a profit. This was a case of privatizing something done far more efficiently through a direct government program.

The second administration goal, fattening the drug industry, led to a provision explicitly prohibiting the government from negotiating bulk price discounts from drug companies, as the Veterans hospitals do. As a result, according to a study by Families USA, drug prices obtained by the VA are about 48 percent less on average than those expected to be charged to people enrolled in the Medicare drug program. Among the twenty most widely prescribed drugs for seniors, for instance, a year’s supply of Protonix (for ulcers) costs the VA $253, but the seniors in the Bush Medicare program, which prohibits such bulk discounts, pay a sticker price of $1,080. That will give you ulcers! A year of Zocor, the cholesterol-reducing drug, costs the VA $251. Seniors in Bush’s drug plan get whacked for $1,323.

The pharma industry gives 70% of its political contributions to the GOP and the insurance industry gave about the same.

Another beneficiary: Big Business. The new plan will allow employers to cut employee health benefits allowing them to, in the words of Daniel Gross "dump the burden of buying drugs for their retirees onto the federal government".

More criticism on the plan from Mark Weisbrot from the Center for Economic Policy Research.

The house that Jack built

Thinkprogress has the definitive report on the Jack Abramoff plea deal. AP is reporting the damage from the scandal may be in line with the 1992 House Banking Scandal that led to the retirement or ouster of 77 lawmakers. And Max Sawicky over at TPMCafe makes a strong argument that lobbying doesn't need to be reformed--it needs to be "blown up". I agree with him wholeheartedly: The time for public financing of elections is now.

John Aravosis points out that Abramoff didn't give money to a single Democrat.
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"Security threat" as a pretext for totalitarianism at home

Drawing on a recent report put out by the Washington Office on Latin America entitled Erasing the Lines: Trends in US Military Programs in Latin America (which is well worth a read), Professor Mario Murillo writes in Common Dreams about the real dangers that security concerns in Latin America could be used to "justify military responses to profound social and economic problems, ones that clearly do not warrant military solutions."

He draws analogies to how domestic spying is being aided and encouraged by the US in Latin America through the Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program to counter "emerging threats" from social movements which run could to US interests.

What are some of these "concerns" about?

Some of those "threats" include coca growers in Bolivia, indigenous organizations in Ecuador and Colombia, supporters of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil, all of whom are directly challenging neo-liberal economic policies promoted by the White House.

These are manifestations of what a growing number of U.S. policymakers have described as "radical populist" movements that seek to "roll back the democratic progress of the past two decades." Hugo Chavez is of greatest concern, now followed closely by the first indigenous president of any Latin American country, Evo Morales of Bolivia, who has made no secret of his disdain for U.S. structural adjustment and military interventionist policies.

Of course, as the author of the study points out, the aforementioned are examples of homegrown movements that reflect popular disenchantment with elected government institutions. This closely follows our history of supporting dictatorships in the region for the past half century, "National security" or the ever-unsuccessful war on drugs were often cited as a legitimate reason to target legitimate, popular protest, leading to unprecedented waves of repression in the region. Operation Condor and Operation PBSUCCESS leap to mind as particularly salient examples.

After the New York Times' previous reports on how the Bush administration used "security threats" as a pretext to direct surveillance of such disperate groups at Quakers and war protestors, I really don't think its such a stretch to imagine any perceived enemy of the state being targeted by a authoritarian administration for purely political purposes. Murillo is addressing his concerns about US military intervention in the Latin American continent, but I think real dangers exist here in the US as well.

For more historical background on US interventions in Latin America, read this informative article by Doug Stokes.