Unity and Progress

The American Economy and Labor Market are Completely Dead in the Oil

2010-07-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

Editorial Notes
While the focus of this site was much more on the health system failure and much less on the labor market failure in the early days (2009 and the first three months of 2010) this will reverse for the rest of the year. But rest assured, I will continue to report on the failure of “Obama Care”; for example, I’ll be focused on the roughly half dozen states that have laws in opposition, and as another example, I’ll be focused on every last detail regarding the penalty for not having health insurance.

Although the majority of “bloggers” and the vast majority of celebrity bloggers (who get all of the traffic) make numerous, very short postings, I generally make fewer but more valuable and much longer postings. But Unity-Progress is my one site where I mix short and long posts up. This is one of those short but very timely postings....

DEAD IN THE OIL
Aside from the dolphins, the pelicans, and numerous other fish and birds, the US economy is also dead in the oil slick as of summer 2010. The Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer” has become a sick joke. As I said before, Obama is Herbert Hoover on steroids because, not only does he like Hoover mistakenly assume that the private sector will automatically rescue the labor market, he has outdone Hoover in the "I am completely wrong department" by going from “recovery is just around the corner” to “recovery is here and now”. Whereas of course there is no recovery.

The July 2, 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics “Jobs Report” shows that the private sector created only about 83,000 jobs in May; this is little more than a trivial number. It is a pathetic number that reveals the US economy as nothing more than a pathetic and lame excuse for an economy. More than two and a half times that many is needed just to keep all those who have a job employed. Triple that number would be needed just to begin to very, very slightly cut in to the roughly 25 million unemployed. Five times that number would be needed for there to be a real "recovery".

The bottom line is that for the great majority of people, if you don’t have a job, you are not going to be getting a job. You read that correctly: If you don't have a job, you most likely will not be getting a job unless you have someone who has hiring influence or power to show gross favoritism to you and to pull you up into the status of employed. If you don't have someone who directly "pulls you up into a job" and yet you get a job through your own efforts, you deserve an award and a medal (or at least an Obama pin, laugh out loud) in this economy.

The economy is really that ruined by the super greedy “banksters” and investment shysters.

I’ll have far, far more regarding the collapse of the labor market in the months ahead. You just have to be patient because Unity Progress is only a small percentage of the totality of the work I do, and so only a small amount of time can be apportioned to it. On the other hand, this means that I will only cover the absolutely most important topics with the time that I have.

Remember, always ignore the unemployment rate; it is a meaningless, garbage statistic. See the recent reports about that.

As I said recently, this is a depression, not a recession. It will last at least a decade, through about 2017 at least. There will be up and down fluctuations within it (which will have millions of fools thinking the depression is over when it really is not) but the overall primary theme will be at best stagnation at a level leaving roughly 25 million unemployed, or quite slowly down from there (toward 30 million unemployed) at worst.

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Where is the Mandatory Oil Slick Insurance?

2010-06-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

Regarding the peasants losing their fishing businesses and jobs, why didn't Oilbomba get a mandatory oil slick insurance law passed by now so that these losers would not be leeching off BP and off the public dole after they lose their fishing businesses and jobs. These fishermen are irresponsible for not having bought oil slick insurance from a bailed out mega corporation, and/or Oilbomba is irresponsible for not making this a requirement already, as he did with the health insurance.

If this sounds funny to you, forgive me; I'm only trying to look at this in the way that Oilbomba looks at it: there is a solution to be found for every problem from the very well off executives and engineers of huge, bailed out mega corporations. According to Oilbomba, they have all the answers simply because in general people who have almost all of the money must have all the answers.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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A Depression Doesn't Magically Turn Around in a Couple of Years

2010-06-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

The US far right economy has failed yet the arrogant, mega wealthy elites refuse to recognize this, thus their pretending that a recovery exists. Specifically, the 2.7 percent growth rate of the first quarter, about one third of what is needed were there an actual recovery, and the trivial job gains reveal that the "recovery" is nothing more than propaganda and fantasy. Not to mention that even the 2.7 percent is mostly in sectors (especially finance and health care) where a majority of the players are extremely high income and very wealthy elites who technically don't need a job to survive. Meanwhile, those who have to have a job to survive work in sectors many of which have not yet seen even a mini recovery, sectors such as construction and education.

Some things never change. The rich are still getting richer and the poor are still getting poorer despite the changed economic circumstances from a few years ago to today. This process is seemingly all that really matters in the States anymore. As long as many of the rich are getting richer and regardless of how many tens of millions are getting poorer, the US economy is considered to be a success by the powers that be.

Many elites have conveniently forgotten that there have always been (for many hundreds of years at least) small and ultimately insignificant mini "recoveries" within overall depressions. Depressions simply don't magically reverse themselves after a year or two; they end only when sufficiently large scale counter forces are brought to bear. Things have to change on a scale commensurate with the scale of the depression or it will most likely both in theory and in fact never end the way American recessions used to end for about fifty years after World War 2. Instead, the depression will evolve into stagnation and it will be at least a decade, more likely many decades, and very possibly never before the economy gets back to where it was before the depression started in terms of income opportunities (jobs and business opportunities) available for the masses of unemployed.

Check any number of third world countries for further details about how big economic downturns are not automatically followed by strong recoveries. Roughly but accurately speaking, third world countries are essentially countries that are permanently depressed.

When Paul Krugman pointed out that Obama's stimulus was not going to be sufficient, he was of course exactly correct.

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Hoover 2.0 and Naive, Ivory Tower Partisan Hacks

2010-06-26T02:35:00.000-07:00

The following guest comment and Unity-Progress comment were in response to this article at Common Dreams.

Note that most of the title of this posting is thanks to Briggs Seekins, not to the author of Unity Progress. I could not resist installing the phrase "naive, ivory tower partisan hacks" in the title. For one thing, this insures I will enjoy rereading this years from now. Hoover 2.0 is mine.

Guest Comment:

Briggs Seekins May 29th, 2010 9:37 am
"Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them. Today was a grand opportunity to pull together the threads - BP and the spill, Massey and the mine disaster, Wall Street and the economic disaster, Anthem BlueCross and health care,"

Lakoff's POLTICAL MIND was one of the most useful books I read last year. Theoretically, he is brilliant. Too bad that in the real world, he is merely a naive, ivory tower partisan hack.

His idea of the moral narrative is an important concept for the radical left to grasp. The thing is, we already do grasp it. We have been framing the moral narrative for years--those of us who are old enough were doing it back during the Clinton years and beyond. It is easy for US to make that narrative--we are the ones that the corporate privateers, the banksters, the energy company thugs, are viciously exploiting and threatening EVERY DAY. We understand the morality because we live with its twisted consequences.

Obama lives with the privileges of that twisted morality. He got elected with there money. He works for them. He isn't going to start presenting a moral narrative that indicts his own bosses.

Lakoff is clearly hopelessly naive--he just doesn't get it. The Federal Government is owned by the corporate overlords. Nobody gets to an important position without their consent.

Many of us were naive enough early on to think possibly Obama could be different--that we could push him and force him to break ranks. But it was very obvious from the earliest appointments he made that it was not going to happen. He is merely Clinton 2.0. The real moral narrative needs to drum home to Americans just how thoroughly Obama and the democrat party stand on the side of our exploiters.

Briggs Seekins
briggsseekins.wordpress.com

Unity Progress Response:
"Theoretically, he is brilliant. Too bad that in the real world, he is merely a naive, ivory tower partisan hack."

Laugh out loud, and I am afraid you can say this about the vast majority of popular political and economics writers who might and sometimes do make the New York Times bestseller list. Naive, ivory tower partisan hacks are popular it seems.

"He is merely Clinton 2.0."

Or "Hoover 2.0: Hoover on Steroids: ..." because Obama skipped Hoover's "the end of the depression is just around the corner" riff and with no justification went straight to "the depression is over" riff.

Unfortunately for Obama and everyone else who thinks the depression (or if you insist the great recession) is over, there are always ebbs and flows within depressions, and a depression is not over until the flowing vastly exceeds the ebbing.

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Obama's Republican Proclivities

2010-06-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs to face facts: Obama's economics outlook is Hoover on steroids, his "anti-terrorism" outlook is George W Bush on steroids and most of his other outlooks including his outlook on public education are Reagan on steroids. But unlike those three former Presidents who didn't try to confuse people about who they were, Mr. Obama is a complete fraud.

The above was written in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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The Big Ones: 20 Billion Dollars and up Bankruptcies in the US: Is BP Next?

2010-06-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

DON'T YOU DARE MISS THE WONDERFUL NEW FEATURE NICKNAMED THE "WHERE IN THE HELL HAS TREMAINE BEEN LATELY?"
Look around and you will find it right on this page. Better yet, visit the page dedicated in full to the great new feature.
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Comments are very much appreciated. Comments are moderated but all comments will be approved except for those that do not belong on Unity-Progress. For example, comments that contain any commercial advertising and ones that contain objectionable hatred will not be approved. Many comments that appear will receive a return comment by Unity-Progress. To comment click the green "comments" link at the bottom of this post. You can also send an email. The email address for Unity-Progress is unity.progress.mail at gmail. Use this address for all communications, including requests for link exchange if you have a good economics or political site.

Liberals Versus Socialists

2010-06-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

Editorial Note: As anyone checking this site can tell, Unity-Progress has been since 2010 began experimenting with changes and making some changes in the general and specific editorial parameters of this site. Through the end of 2009, we had one and only one type of post: a response to an article on Common Dreams. If we were responding to someone else's comment or if someone made a comment on our comment, we would usually include those other comments.

Today Unity-Progress produces articles that are not directly tied to specific articles at Common Dreams or anywhere else.

And even when we do post a short writing in response to a Common Dreams article, we will seldom post comments of a third party anymore. But on the other hand, if we see a comment at Common Dreams that is so good that it is better than most of the main articles at Common Dreams, we might post the comment on its own. Here is the first ever example of that type of posting. So what follows is a Common Dreams comment that is as good or better than the articles there. Remember, I am not trying to gain credit for this great piece; the following great item is NOT written by the author of Unity-Progress (me).

mcoyote June 20th, 2010 9:19 pm
Both liberals and socialists empathize with the suffering of society's weaker members, and are sensitive to "man's inhumanity to man." However, the liberal is basically at peace with the socioeconomic system that produces this suffering, while the socialist recognizes that the system itself is the core cause of the suffering.

A liberal might get upset by militarism, but happily invests in Martin Marietta Corp, and rejoices when it increases its dividend. Liberals are also often susceptible to nationalist propaganda appeals, & thus can easily be persuaded to support wars like the NATO war in Kosovo, simply because it was cleverly marketed as a "humanitarian intervention." A socialist would never fall for this sort of ploy.

A liberal might be properly horrified by pollution, waste, hyper commercialism, and many of the ills of modern society, but pays little conscious attention to the underlying issue of capitalism which allows such things to dominate our lives. A liberal will vote for Democrats, despite the obvious fact that these contemptible worms are nothing but bought servants of corporate monopolies or oligopolies. The liberal sleeps easily, figuring, "Well, at least the Dems are better than the Repubs" as though this really implies some sort of resistance to rampant capitalism.

Basically, the liberal tut-tuts disapprovingly at some of the blatantly horrible end-effects of policies, politicians, and economic philosophies that, for the most part, he accepts. A socialist, on the other hand, is conscious of where the roots of these disasters lie....

Now is a good time to cue up some Phil Ochs:

I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I'd lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad the commies were thrown out
of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I read New republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I vote for the democratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
======

"By the way, I would reach out to the first George Bush. You know, one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn't get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us 20 billion dollars. That's all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people. So I want a bipartisan team that can help to provide me good advice and counsel when I'm president of the United States."

- Barack Obama on LARRY KING LIVE: March 20, 2008

There it is.

Obama lauding the way GHW Bush "prosecuted" the Iraq War. Remember that? Incredible huh? Not at all. Birds of a feather.

Who is Obama? In a word, he's a company man.

Obama would never have risen so quickly and remarkably to his current position of national prominence and chief errand boy for Empire if he was anything like the egalitarian and democratic “progressive” that liberals imagined. In the corporate-crafted and money-dominated swamp that passes for “representative democracy” in the U.S., concentrated economic and imperial power open and close doors in ways that preemptively suffocate populist potential. Big money is not in the business of promoting genuine social justice or democracy activists.

Liberal thy name is hypocrisy. What's new?

Unity Progress Response:
Wow, just when I was calling liberals (establishment progressives in my terminology) wusses you explained why they are wusses in great detail and very nicely indeed.

The above is from the comments to this article.

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Establishment Progressives Versus Real Progressives

2010-06-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

The only time the establishment "progressives" don't seem to be (and are not actually) hapless and politically meaningless wusses is when a far right Republican is in office. At least then they demand a few real changes that are favored by more than half the population. Those changes never happen, of course, but at least they are demanded which is more than happens these days. The establishment "progressives", pathetically and ironically, stopped demanding changes after the "Change is Coming to America Guy" was inaugurated. And there have been no changes from Bush other than trivial ones and for the worse ones.

Laugh out loud at how far to the right this Big Dog and Pony Show is.

While at this forum (Common Dreams) most of us know the multimillionaires running corporations are really in charge, many of the clueless establishment "progressives" think that Oilbomba has some real power over the domestic economy in general and over corporations in particular, so when those faux progressives don't get upset with and don't demand change from their guy Mr. Obama they can be laughed at and derided fairly. Whereas many of us here know that Obama is largely powerless so it isn't logical for us to be demanding things from him.

This was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Slimes of our Lives, Part One

2010-06-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

Slime One is of course the oil itself: 60,000 to 75,000 barrels of oil a day of it, which is 2,520,000 to 3,150,000 gallons a day of the bird, fish, and economy killing gook. As of July 29 the gusher will be 100 days old and we already know it will be alive and well even on that date. So between 6 and 7.5 million barrels of oil will be in the Gulf as of July 29, or between 252 and 315 million gallons of oil.

As foul as it is, the slime that in southern Louisiana has ruined lives not already ruined by the failed US economy has served to reveal other slimes as bad or worse as the slime of the moment. Before we start on those other slimes, a quick word about the slime most in the limelight at the moment:

THE SLIME OF THE MOMENT
It has gradually become apparent that neither BP nor any other huge oil Corporation knows of a good way to stop a gusher like this within a week or a month or a quarter of a year. They have plenty of resources but the technology to stop it apparently simply doesn't exist or is too expensive even for a huge corporation.

So why was BP allowed to drill the well in the first place and why wasn't all big corporation oil money invested in renewable energy instead? Or, at a minimum, why does the US have to play the role of oversized third world country by for example refusing to adopt Norway's deep see oil drilling regulations which reduce the chance of a gusher to just about zero in the first place?

As for the US government, even if the technology to quickly stop the gusher existed the government wouldn't have the resources to buy it and, in any event, the elites controlling the government rule out the government being in charge of anything currently controlled by huge corporations. All non-military large scale industrial equipment is owned and controlled by huge corporations, which also of course have far more discretionary money than does the government. The rich had to get their tax cuts you know, so that they could invest in companies like BP. So the Government is broke while BP has all the money and all the industrial equipment.

Big corporations including BP are supposed to have all the answers too, but since in US society money itself is more important than the answers I guess we'll have to excuse BP for not having all the answers. BP having all the money will have to suffice. Poor, naive Obama actually thought that BP literally has all the answers with regard to oil but when the gusher became a month and a half old he apparently at least partly abandoned that mistaken belief.

OTHER SLIMES NUMBER ONE: THERE IS NO PRESIDENCY ANY MORE
After President Obama’s oval office speech of June 15, most people (and basically all people in Louisiana) were unimpressed and were disappointed that he wasn’t tough enough on gusher well owner British Petroleum (BP). In fact, Obama’s speech was the same as all his other speeches: long on rhetoric and very short on announcements of real (legally binding) actions that actually change anything. It is a waste of time to listen to his speeches because very little and rather often nothing changes from them. You could listen to frogs at the pond and be just as satisfied about what they say about the oil gusher.

The night before his speech there was talk that Obama would announce a multi billion dollar plan to reroute the Mississippi River so that the wetlands could be substantially rebuilt and so that the oil could be cleaned up more quickly. This was just hot air from Anderson Cooper at CNN and so forth. Obama is someone who would begin a very large new government investment program that would change things for the better only in fantasy land.

There was even more talk in the days before the speech that the President would announce that BP would be compelled to put at least 10 billion dollars and preferably 20 billion dollars into an escrow account controlled by a third party from which claims would be paid. Translated into plain English and into real legal terms, Obama actually announced that he would merely request that BP voluntarily start the escrow and relinquish control of those funds to the third party. He will ask nicely and see what the big bosses at BP have to say about the proposal.

What is the largest overall implication of Obama’s waste of time speech in general and about what was not stated in particular? It’s clearly that Obama is not the President the way, say, Eisenhower and a few before and a very few after him were the President. Obama has less power and less real money to work with than Eisenhower or Jimmy Carter did. Much of Eisenhower and Carter’s power now resides with huge multi billion dollar corporations such as BP. Obama is just a junior partner to top corporate executives nowadays: they call the shots including as in this case the shots about how the oil gusher will be stopped (or not stopped to be more accurate). Obama can seek to advise BP CEO Tony Hayward about things, but the final say is Hayward’s, not Obama’s.

Since the locals don’t understand who really controls the Louisiana coast and whether and how much oil will be sitting on it, they were especially disappointed and frustrated about the speech in particular and about the response (non-response to be more accurate) to the gusher itself in general. For example, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser (let’s all hope he doesn’t have a heart attack on TV) has repeatedly explained to anyone with a brain that “no one is really in charge” and that it is totally unclear whether BP or the Coast Guard or the federal government in Washington is in charge.

Well, as we have very recently stated, BP executives such as CEO Tony Hayward are in charge, though they do often take orders from the Coast Guard in general and from “Incident Commander” Thad Allen in particular. They don't mind taking orders from the Coast Guard because they have public assets to help with the gusher that BP doesn’t have to pay for and because the Coast Guard doesn’t have the political power to make expensive, multi-billion dollar demands on BP. The Coast Guard can only make small, relatively inexpensive demands of BP. The other branches of the military have little power over huge corporations and the Coast Guard as the little junior partner to the other services has even less power.

So for executives such as Tony Hayward, taking orders from President Obama is another thing entirely. Were President Obama able to and disposed to act like Presidents of yore, if he were to for example demand that BP put twenty or thirty billion dollars in escrow controlled by a third party, Hayward could be saying no because that’s real money needed for BP shareholders and executives. The shareholders and executives are far more important to Hayward and other top BP executives than are President Obama and the people of Southern Louisiana.

If BP eventually agrees to the escrow (and I’ll believe that if and only if I see it) it will be a free choice of theirs and it will be because if they do not BP's credit rating and/or its stock price will collapse completely if they refuse.

And that of course is the root of the problem. When most of the power resides with the executives and shareholders of huge multi-national Corporations and little of the power resides with the government that the people elect, what any government official wants is substantially irrelevant. More broadly, that means that what you, I, or the people of Southern Louisiana want is irrelevant to the executives and shareholders who are in control.

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READING LIST:
A small sample of items discovered recently that I am convinced are important and that are more true than false.

Brazil is far, far ahead of the US in renewable energy

Corporations playing God in unregulated pursuit of massive amounts of ultimately fake money
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Summary of the Unemployment Calculation Scam: the Two Biggest Flaws

2010-06-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

In the last post, the one titled "More Than Fifteen Million Unemployed Americans are not Recognized or Counted as Unemployed by the U.S. Government" I reported how the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics distorts unemployment reporting. Today I set out to find out what the real, true unemployment rate is. In other words, I set out to design my own system. I have made quite a bit of progress, but I do not yet have a publishable system. I am currently having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to deal with college students and I have a few smaller problems to deal with.

While designing this new system, I have become more convinced than ever that much of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does with respect to employment and unemployment counting is pure garbage. Specifically and especially, the "Current Population Survey," from which all of the unemployment rates are calculated, is total garbage. It is complete and total garbage and is useless with respect to measuring employment and unemployment.

The other main BLS survey, the Current Employment Statistics, is a survey of employers and is nowhere near as flawed as is the Current Population Survey. One problem with the Current Employment Statistics, however, is that agricultural employment is totally ignored. And there are a few other relatively minor flaws but on the whole its a good product. But never forget, Current Employment Statistics is NOT used in any way to determine unemployment rates, so the fact that it is nowhere near as flawed as the other survey is not all that relevant.

Notice that stock market investors react to the number of jobs gained or lost coming out of the Current Employment Statistics and they generally ignore the “official unemployment rate” coming out of the Current Population Survey. Investors do this because they long ago realized that the Current Population Survey and the official unemployment rate are largely garbage.

I gave many and hopefully most of the reasons these are garbage in that previous posting. But I thought it would be useful to emphasize the two biggest flaws of all in what BLS does, to in other words summarize the last, much longer posting.

THE FIRST OF THE TWO BIGGEST FLAWS
The first of the two biggest flaws of all is that BLS assumes that people who are not looking for a job do not want a job. These people are pigeonholed into the Orwellian world of "not in the labor force". BLS is living in a fantasy world, because there are tens of millions who would like a job but who never look for a job except maybe once in a blue moon.

Strange as it may sound, some of them wait for someone to more or less come looking for them with a job (a friend, a former associate, a family member, etc.) which happens more often than most would think.

But for the majority of those who never (or almost never) look for a job, it’s a matter of simple microeconomics. Looking for a job costs money that many millions of people do not have. If you don't make certain job hunting expenditures than you almost certainly will not get a job, period. To look for a job you need money for transportation, you need money for clothes, you need money for producing resumes, you need money to get on the computer for research, and so on and so forth. If there are almost certainly (or definitely as the case may actually be) no jobs for a particular person, than any time and money at all spent looking for a job is 100% wasted. Obviously, if someone doesn't have a job, he or she may have so little money to begin with that wasting even a very small amount of money is going to create a lot more hardship than already exists.

Also, it should be realized that roughly half of the employed population has either never looked for a job or has spent only a small number of days or weeks looking for a job during a working lifetime. But now with the advent of the 2nd Depression, unemployed people are apparently expected to spend months and even years in the unpaid job of "looking for a job". Something doesn't seem quite right about that. A career in "looking for a job" at no pay seems just a little unfair even by American standards if you know what I am saying. Increasing millions are saying "no way" to the total insanity and to the gross unfairness of months and years of unpaid work "looking for a job".

U6 IS A (SMALLER) SCAM
For those who think that the U6 unemployment measure (the one that includes "discouraged workers," but only some of them actually) absolves BLS of being to blame for a misleading and useless unemployment calculation, consider:

(a) Someone is counted as unemployed under U6 only if they have looked for a job within the last year. But there are increasing millions who have been too discouraged and/or too poor to look for work for longer than one year.

(b) U6 is not promoted as the official or real unemployment rate, U3 is. Few people other than economists and policy wonks know about U6 and U6 is rarely if ever reported in the mainstream media. The common man has no idea what U6 is.

(c) U6 counts self employed people who make little money or who lose money as employed as do all of the other measurements (U1, U2, U3, U4, and U5) which leads us to....

THE SECOND OF THE BIGGEST TWO FLAWS
The second of the two biggest flaws is that BLS assumes that anyone self employed is employed. Let me emphasize, its NOT that the self employed are considered to be not in the labor force (which arguably could be partially justified.) It's that they are considered to be employed that puts BLS in that fantasy world again. They are employed whether they make any money or not. They are considered employed even if they lose money!

In the real world, someone is employed only if someone is working AND making money. Those who are self employed but who are making less than about 1.5 times the poverty line per year should be classified as unemployed. Moreover, by rights anyone who is "working" but not making at least above the poverty line (or better yet 1.5 times the poverty line) should be classified as unemployed.

The previous post was wonkish (but very accurate if I do say so myself, laugh out loud). This one sums up the Bureau of Labor Statistics scam more concisely. As I said in the prior post, the list of types of people who are unemployed but are not counted as unemployed seems to go on and on and on.

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More Than Fifteen Million Unemployed Americans are not Recognized or Counted as Unemployed by the U.S. Government

2010-05-28T17:26:00.000-07:00

Always multiply the main, most commonly reported "unemployment rate" in the US by two to get a conservative estimate of the real unemployment rate. Multiply by 2.2 to get a middle of the road estimate and multiply by 2.5 to get a high end but still reasonable estimate. You would have to multiply by 2.5, for example, if you wanted to include inmates who would not have committed crimes had they had a job at the time they ran afoul of the law.

That 50% unemployment for blacks in New York that Kay Johnson mentions in these comments must have been calculated in accordance with this calculation reality. Because of the way unemployment rates are falsely calculated, there never has and never will be an official 50% unemployment rate reported out for any group anywhere. The way the unemployment rate is cooked up, probably the highest possible official unemployment rate you could have for the US as a whole is roughly 12 percent (not far from the 10.2 percent that was actually reached recently) and the highest possible official overall or regional black unemployment rate you could possibly have would be roughly twice that (25%).

Note that the multipliers above apply to the current situation. Those multipliers will have to be gradually increased in the years ahead if the growth in jobs remains trivial or worse, because if so, the official unemployment rate will be more and more distorted downward.

Although people who read real news are generally aware that if you stop looking for work because you have concluded you most likely can't get one you are not counted as unemployed, what even they are not aware of is that once you have been unemployed for more than a year or two, you are generally not counted as unemployed even if you ARE actively looking for a job. The "actively looking for a job" thing applies, if not officially, certainly unofficially to only those who did have a job within the last year or two. At the very least, it can be said that the survey and statistical methods used preclude picking up as unemployed many and probably most of those who are actively looking for a job but who have not had a job for more than a year or two.

Furthermore, if you are self employed in any way shape or form (including even if your "business" loses money) you CAN NOT be counted as unemployed in the US even if you would much rather have a job and so you are actively looking for a job at the same time you are self employed. If you are “self employed” (and who isn’t who is “unemployed,” really?) you are BY RULE not counted as unemployed even if you make virtually no money from your self employment, or even if you lose money. This distortion is never ever mentioned even by all the “why the unemployment rate is much more than reported” articles.

The upshot of all of this is that the only real way to get at unemployment in the US is to look at the number of jobs (with any income or else above a certain pay level of your choice) and then divide that number into the number of people who you think in a perfect full employment economy would have a job (for example, say, 80% of those between the ages of 25 and 60). Then you would subtract that percentage ratio from 100% to get a real unemployment rate.

In practice, to save a lot of time you can use the multipliers or, better yet, you can get at real unemployment by using the employment to population ratio, which is, ironically, reported out monthly by Bureau of Labor Statistics itself. (Who would have known that BLS actually does have information with which the actual unemployment rate can be determined, laugh out loud?)

That ratio, expressed annually, declined sharply from a peak of 64.4 percent in 2000 to 59.2 percent in 2009. This means that 5.2% of the population (about one in twenty people) had a job in 2000 but did not have a job in 2009. The latest percentage reported is even worse, about 58%. Note that this methodology is excellent for tracking the real change in the labor market, although to use it to calculate a real unemployment rate would require you to estimate what percentage of the entire population would not need or be able to have a job even if jobs could be automatically obtained.

Then you would have to adjust the raw employment to population ratio accordingly. If you did that, you would probably arrive at a similar place as with the multiplier method: the employment to population ratio right now when those who definitely don’t need or can not have a job are removed from the population is roughly 78%, meaning that the real unemployment rate is roughly 22%.

In summary:

--58% of the population has a job
--20% of the population would not need or could not function on a job even if they could automatically get one. This would include true criminals and also self-employed who do better self employed than they could with a job.
--22% of the population is unemployed: they need a job and there is no job for them.

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Someone begged to differ with the above overall, but he started off with an apparent agreement, which ironically I construed as a disagreement....

Unity Progress said:

Although people who read real news are generally aware that if you stop looking for work because you have concluded you most likely can't get one you are not counted as unemployed....

The Doubting Thomas said:

Correct, that's because you are not considered part of the work force if you don't have a job and are not looking for one.

Unity Progress:

And you are wrong. Most people are part of the work force whether they are looking for a job or not. Anyone who could theoretically work is part of the work force. People who are self employed are part of the work force; whether they are gainfully employed should be determined by whether and how much money they are making.

During World War Two and at the end of the First Great Depression, factory employers virtually came looking for people who were not actively "looking for a job" to work in the war factories.

Where is it written that people have to waste valuable time and money "looking for a job" that probably does not exist for them? Money and time spent looking for a job is money and time not available for self employment or for just enjoying life which, unlike "looking for a job," is free of charge.

What about people who don't have good clothes or who don't have transportation with which to "look for a job"? What about people whose teeth have rotted out because they can't afford dental care? Are they going to get a job after even a year of looking for a job? What about the millions of homeless people? What about people who have no phone service? Unless you toe the right wing line, all of these people are part of the work force.

The most well known requirements for being counted as unemployed are analogous to the requirements for voter registration. How so? Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that it is no big deal to have to register to vote in any way the local government sets up those requirements. And yet voter registration has been a perpetual source of opportunities for shady right wing operators to deny people the right to vote. In recent years brand new identification requirements have been added to the list of voting registration requirements in various states. People have lost their lives in disputes about and there have been numerous court cases over the years over the seemingly innocuous requirements that are actually sometimes onerous and not possible to meet requirements for voter registration.

Americans are conditioned to think that things such as voter registration and needing to look for a job to be counted as unemployed are no big deal, but unfortunately, they are a very big deal indeed when all of the facts and all of the diverse circumstances of real people are taken into consideration. In many other countries, voter registration is much more automatic than it is in the United States. Similarly, being counted as unemployed when you are unemployed is much more automatic than it is in the States.

The person who begged to differ was especially dubious of this line from my original:

What even they are not aware of is that once you have been unemployed for more than a year or two, you are generally not counted as unemployed even if you ARE actively looking for a job.

To which he said:

"I call BS. Where do you get this information and why do you think it's true?"

To which I responded:

In real life, anyone who has been unemployed for more than a year or two will have one or more of the following characteristics:

--They will be homeless, so there is no way they can be interviewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to be counted as unemployed.

--They will not have a phone at all, so there is no way they can be interviewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be counted as unemployed.

--They will have a cell phone number only, which traditionally and so far as I know can still not be used by survey takers including BLS.

--They will have an internet phone number only, and such numbers are most definitely not used by survey takers including BLS.

--They will have joined the military and are not in any BLS classification. But clearly they are unemployed from the civilian labor force, or else employed with respect to the civilian plus military labor force combined, take your pick. They are not, as BLS claims, in no relationship whatsoever with respect to the labor force.

--They are in prison and are not in any BLS classification. But clearly they are unemployed from the civilian labor force.

--Anyone who works even an hour a week is counted as employed! As absurd as that is, it is literally true.

--Anyone who is self employed, who in other words has even the tiniest and/or the flimsiest of businesses, including one with no customers(!) is counted as outside the labor force, and so that person is not employed even if looking for a job while operating that business. The first question in the BLS unemployment survey is: “Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm?” If the answer is yes, than that person (or those persons) are not part of the universe from which employed and unemployed is calculated.

--All persons who did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family-owned enterprise operated by someone in their household are classified as employed, even though they made no money!

--All persons who were temporarily absent from their regular jobs because of illness, vacation, bad weather, industrial dispute, or various personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off, are classified as employed!

--Certain ways of looking for a job don't count as looking for a job according to BLS. Only certain, traditional kinds of "active job search" qualifies an unemployed person for being declared to be and counted as unemployed. According to BLS, “passive methods of job search do not have the potential to result in a job offer and therefore do not qualify as active job search methods. Examples of passive methods include attending a job training program or course, or merely reading about job openings that are posted in newspapers or on the Internet.”

And even this is not a complete list of people who are unemployed but are not counted as unemployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The list of loopholes, of categories of people who are unemployed but are not counted that way goes on and on and on. A certain number of unemployed people commit suicide every year due to the many ravages caused by unemployment.

A very substantial percentage (very possibly a majority) of those suicides are not even considered to be unemployed by the Government. In other words, there are people every year who lose their lives due to a condition that the Government does not even recognize as having affected them!

The BLS page for this matter is here: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
You will see that this page covers most of the above loopholes if you take the time to read it through.

The BLS itself publishes more expansive measures than the “official unemployment rate” that is reported by the Corporate Media, but even the most expansive one leaves several of the loopholes above intact.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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There is no Evidence That Obama"s "Rube Goldberg Care" Will Improve Things

2010-05-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Editorial Notes: The following was written on March 27 and not posted until now (May 27). Beginning April 15, 2010, Unity-Progress will post anything new we do here first and then later "cross post" at CommonDreams.org if and only if:

(a) There is a relevant article at Common Dreams under which the item can be posted and
(b) I think of cross posting and take the time to do that. I will not cross post everything nor even necessarily the majority of what goes here.

In other words, beginning immediately Unity Progress gets first priority, the automatic tie-in between Common Dreams and Unity is repealed, and therefore the miserable pattern of late postings at Unity will end. None of this is meant to state or imply that I think anything less of Common Dreams, which I continue to look at as the best progressive Site on the Internet. I'm just expanding from the roots, so to speak.

This site will only very seldom show up in Google Search results. If you don't want to lose track of this site, you need to bookmark this site in some way.

====================================================

Are they gone yet? I mean the special event guests of Common Dreams stopping by to brow beat and chest pound against the unreformed commies here at Common Dreams, the one and only site among sites with comments and some traffic that I know of that was overwhelmingly against Obama and Big Insurance' Rube Goldberg Care from day one. Firedoglake has been almost as resolute and you have to love Jane Hamsher over there, but even Firedoglake also has a disturbing number of Daily Kos and similar refugees with minds that seem to be seriously watered down by pro Obama corporate mush from the campaign and the early months of Lord Obama’s reign over the peasantry.

No, having read most of the comments, the special guests are thinning out but they are not quite completely gone yet. I see they are still posting their “but it’s better than what we had” and “how can you be so mean as to deny coverage to women and children due to preexisting conditions” riffs. Um, we don’t deny health care to anyone with our plan, not to mention that we don’t even need greedy, monopolistic, health care denying health insurance companies to run our plan. So get a clue before you try the equivalent of lecturing Einstein on physics.

We want our plan which is by far the best plan; we don't want no new plan at all.

Specifically to our guests: first, what is so complicated about understanding that some people will be hurt and some people will be helped by all the new laws? At this time, we can’t say exactly how many will be hurt and exactly how many will be helped, but it is a definite certainty (and admitted up front by the Democrats and the Congressional Budget Office) that there will be large numbers of both.

But is it normal or “to be expected” that major new laws benefit and hurt large (and different) groups of people? Yes, it is normal, that is, it’s normal if you are talking about a third world country! (As examples, removal of food import tariffs in Haiti or privatizations of water in various remote South and Central American countries come to mind.)

But on the good side of town, in the advanced countries, many of which you find in Europe and some of which you find in East Asia, virtually all major new laws benefit many more people than they harm. There are never large groups of people threatening to take up arms against Internal Revenue in those countries, no sir. And in those countries, there’s no “Well, in the years ahead, we’ll just have to keep track of the millions who are helped and the millions who are hurt and then about twenty years from now we’ll know whether the huge new law was a net benefit or a net loss for the citizens.

But it’s going to be a real nail biter. Dan Rather is saying it’s going to be tighter than a tick on a hog on a hot summer day. Laugh out loud. No, in the reputable and credible countries, they know for an absolute fact that the vast majority of people will be helped by major new laws before they even think of passing them. Whereas in the US, both the Democrats and the Republicans recklessly pass laws that are in effect and in part experiments to find out just how many peasants are hurt and just how many are helped.

And whereas, by contrast we know for an absolute fact that various types of single payer based systems work very well for decade after decade because we have more than enough evidence for that from numerous countries throughout the world. Whereas, we have no evidence whatsoever at the moment as to whether Obama's Rube Goldberg Care will work well.

And it almost goes without saying (but I’ve learned from experience you should say most of the “goes without sayings”) that no country other than the United States would seriously consider what actually just passed in the US, a particularly obnoxious, dangerous, and ironic combination of regressive taxation, restrictions on health care freedom, cuts to existing programs, and on the plus side curtailments of many of the most egregious violations of humanity of health insurance companies. ("Whew, that was one whopper of a price paid to stop pre-existing condition and rescission. I can’t imagine what the price the peasants will have to pay if WellPoint and the rest are to be forbidden from being monopolies! I think the peasants will be wearing togas and eating worms from the back yard if we go for anti-trust reform or the public option, so we better stop now.")

Second, what is so complicated about understanding that only in Wonderland can you look at the health care effects only while ignoring the effects on jobs and the economy as a whole? If the new laws prevent the labor market from recovering (to whatever extent it could without those laws which even I would say has to be to some extent) then Obama and company will be responsible for the worst and most reckless economic mismanagement since the Hoover and those who in 1935 and 1936 told Franklin Roosevelt that the Depression was over and it was time to get back to fiscal discipline (which resulted in many more Depression years featuring an extremely low stock market and many more years of additional job losses and lack of new jobs). Obama and company are gambling with the economy in general and with the job market in particular (not that they really care about your job or anyone else's job) but as I already implied, at least historians, who are sort of a “Super CBO,” will care.

Later, Dreamers.

A long discussion was generated by this intentionally provocative article. (Is anything I write not "intentionally provocative," laugh out loud?) Both the original article and the discussion about the article and about my response to the article (above) are here.

Here is by far my favorite among the postings in the discussion generated by my posting:

ardent1 March 28th, 2010 11:07 am
Look, Scott. I think that you are simply playing deaf. Obama called this an 'health care insurance reform' and though that is partially incorrect since it really doesn't even reform the insurance racket, at least it gets it right about this not even being any reform of health care itself. Don't you get it? I don't want health insurance but want health care coverage. The two are not the same at all, Dude! 'Your' insurance will not get you health care coverage much of the time. Your money (lots of it if you have that) will though, since 'care' has been made into a commodity by the US government controlled by the Big Business community.

Even with health care coverage in this country, you get an abomination and Obama and the Democrats don't even pretend to address that. For one example... do you really want the government to put you into a Big Business run 'nursing home' in a box when you get older? Do you really want the government to guarantee that you be 'treated' (tortured) to death if, God forbid, you came down with incurable cancer? The medical community in the US has no standards hardly, since the care given to you is seen as a commodity on a profit making assembly line. You get about as much quality control as a hamburger does at Wendy's on that assembly line.

Public community health does not exist in the US. It was all privatized and mainly disassembled decades ago. You have the CDC when you really need sick leave guaranteed to sick workers now having to work for minimum wage while ill. You have Planned Parenthood (maybe?) instead of single payer for all health issues being available. There are so many issues here that would fall under real health care reform. However we are talking only about what Obama calls only semi-correctly as 'health insurance reform'. Yes, it is about health insurance. No it is not a reform of even that, but a forced bailout of this racket to be paid for by those who hardly ever benefit form the so-called care that will then be DOLED out to some of them ONLY.

You want to believe in this 'reform' more than a Jesus Freak wants to believe in 'salvation' through Jesus. We just aren't buying your religion though no matter how starry eyed and vacant faced you get about it. Sorry... There just is no Obama, Pal. There just is no 'reform' being made. This plan is a deform of a deformity, not a reform. Get it yet?

To answer your question of .... "Do you think keeping the current healthcare system in place would provide you with better care and benefits than the reform?'

Yes actually I do. I think that from having next to nothing guaranteed by the current situation, that now I will actually have to pay for that next to nothing even more than I already do because of this Deform legislation put into motion by the Democrats. That's sad but exactly how I see the sad situation unfolding. It is a proposal designed to allow the current disintegration of Health Care to hold together by threads yet still longer, by victimizing the working poor even more! How sick is that, Scott?

'If you do, I hope you are wrong. I find it hard to believe so many people know exactly how this all is going to unfold.'

Well nobody does, least of all yourself, Scott. But I think that it is easy to see that the Democrats have advanced nothing of this cause for any of us Working Class folk. Why should they? They are a corporate made party made for the corporate class to act against the rest of us. You don't seem to get that though? This is deform legislation made to help the insurance business stay in operation at our expense.

Both the original article and the discussion about the article and about my response to the article (which is above) are here.

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Sign Your Health Insurance Policy Contract with a Gold Pen or you will be out of Place

2010-04-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

The three most basic reasons why the concept of insurance is not appropriate for financing health care are:

(1) Insurance is for things that are not supposed to happen, seldom happen, and rather often never happen to individuals in a lifetime. But health care is inevitable and therefore insurance is not by itself an appropriate funding mechanism for health care. The vast majority of people need health care during their lives at some point, usually due to both one or more accidents and to one or more sicknesses. Even if you live and die without ever getting sick or getting injured, you are still by rights supposed to get preventive care such as annual or biannual check-ups.

(2) Insurance was invented as a luxury product for wealthy people. The real purpose of insurance was and still is to protect most of the wealth of well off families if they happen to suffer a major misfortune or two. To this day, insurance has not really lost its' association with the high income and high wealth population. Simply because of the nature of and the mathematics of wealth itself, insurance is much less valuable to those who are not well off than it is to the well off.

Quite frankly, lower income and lower wealth people who "load up" on insurance are rightly regarded as kind of foolish by most financial people in the know, and even by insurance sellers themselves, who if they are honest at least caution people of lesser means to avoid going overboard on buying insurance that they can not afford and/or that will not prevent them from becoming impoverished if and when misfortune strikes.

(3) Health insurance in the US, to anyone who is neither relatively poor nor very rich, is an absolute necessity since health care itself is an absolute necessity unless you want to take risks of dying young. The health insurance industry therefore has a captive market, which gives them far more power with which to charge higher prices and with which to dictate fine print terms in contracts in their favor.

But during the 20th century, in the most economically successful countries, things which people desperately need were gradually removed from the vagaries and ravages of the private sector and into the public sector. It was more and more understood in the successful and well off countries that people should not be at the mercy of private, profit-making companies always free to just say no (and free to go out of business) for things which everyone perceives that people absolutely have to have.

America, however, much more so than other countries, resisted the trend over the decades of the 20th century. While between 1900 and 1980 other countries were making utilities such as electricity and local bus service public, the U.S. resisted, although certainly not entirely. For example, even in the U.S., the interstate highway system built starting in the 1950's was considered a public enterprise.

But in the late 1970's, in much of the world the winds shifted against the common good in favor of private interests. The well off moved to take control of things. In the last 30 years, while the US became a very right wing economy indeed and moved to privatize enterprises among its relatively small number of them, the countries with the most public enterprises (such as in Europe) reduced them but certainly did not eliminate them entirely or renounce the concept the way the US did.

This is the context or background for the scrapping of for profit insurance companies in favor of public financing of health care in most of the world outside the US. There were ebbs and flows between public and private world wide, and in some places the common good made much more headway than in others. But while most of the rest of the world accepted the concept that health care (and certain other absolute necessities) are not appropriate for the private, profit making market because for one thing people are absolutely desperate for the product, the U.S. never accepted the concept and, indeed, didn't much accept it for anything else.

ORIGIN OF INSURANCE
Insurance companies began about 1680 (about 330 years ago) in England and the first policies insured ships, which were about the most expensive things in existence at the time, especially considering that England was at that time in its' fairly lucrative mercantile and colonial era. Obviously, it was well off people who owned the ships.

One of the most well known insurance companies has always been and is still today Lloyd's of London. This company was founded in 1689 by a group of men who met in Lloyd’s coffee house in London, and originally sold only ship insurance. From its' inception right on down to today, Lloyd's of London has specialized in offering insurance products which are customized to the needs of the well off and of well capitalized businesses. Give credit where credit is due: Lloyd’s is one insurance company that doesn’t very much try to turn a buck by selling insurance to less well off people who will really not benefit from it.

In the United States, the first insurance policies were offered in the early 1860’s, when the Civil War was raging. Obviously, well off people in both the North and the South were worried about losing what they owned directly or indirectly due to the War, so the concept of insurance was, under duress, imported from Mother England despite the fact that, overall, both the American political and the American economics systems were clean breaks and fresh starts from those of England. Note that for about 85 years after the Declaration of Independence, America got along just fine with no insurance industry at all.

Just as in England 170 years earlier, insurance in the States started out as a product exclusively for well off individuals (and businesses owned and operated by those individuals) to insure against losses associated with very, very expensive things. Of course, insurance of various types gradually became more and more popular in the 20th century in America. But in the first half of the 20th century, insurance was sold mostly to wealthy people and to businesses mostly owned by relatively wealthy people.

Insurance was the type of product that was and still is seemingly custom designed for enterprising or conniving sales people to sell to those who were worried about this, that, and the other thing. And to those who are worried about financially "keeping up with the Jones'". More broadly, insurance turned out to be one of the mainstays of the great American commercialization and industrialization from 1860 on.

Eventually, along about 1950, banks granting mortgages required all “homeowners” with mortgages to carry house insurance. Similarly, virtually all of the states eventually required those to whom drivers’ licenses were issued to carry liability car insurance, which can pay for damages caused by the driver.

So during the 20th century, insurance began to be sold more and more to people not so financially well off. When after and due to Franklin Delano Roosevelt the American middle class grew by leaps and bounds, the insurance industry, armed with more and more types of insurance products and with more and more and ever niftier sales pitches, pursued this vast new market without hesitation. Since during the 20th century the American middle class had its' apex, the insurance industry naturally penetrated this class of the population so that it could vastly increase its' sales.

Thus by the late 20th century, insurance was as much an everyday industry among large sectors of the American population as is food sold at the grocery store.

And yet insurance was and is still, well, insurance. Legally it hasn’t really changed much from 17th century England. The problem is that insurance as a product is at heart still far more appropriate for the wealthy than it is for the non-wealthy. When a wealthy person has a misfortune and files a claim with his insurance company, he or she has plenty of money to pay all of the deductibles, co-pays, and uncovered items associated with the claim. In fact, the wealthy person often technically has enough money to pay for the entire misfortune lock, stock, and barrel, but that could make that wealthy person not wealthy anymore, thus the need for the insurance. Again, the objective of insurance was and still ultimately is primarily to keep wealthy people wealthy, not exactly as wealthy as they were before the misfortune, but almost as wealthy as they were.

But when a non-wealthy person who happens to have an insurance policy files a claim, he or she can become destitute even if the insurance company honors both the spirit and all of the fine print of the contract. We have seen this in the massive number of medical bankruptcies filed by those with health insurance policies that have occurred in recent decades in the States.

With the new health insurance laws, we will continue to see large number of medical bankruptcies in the future in the United States, although many of them will be disguised for political reasons as old fashioned "the debtor made bad decisions" bankruptcies.

Under the Democrats' unconstitutional health insurance laws, people who think they can but really can not afford premiums and all of the other less talked about health insurance expenses that come up from actual claims (deductibles, co-pays, disallowed items, uncovered items, prescription drugs, vision care, dental care, etc.) will end up in bankruptcy court. Meanwhile though, other, wealthier people will avoid bankruptcy thanks to the new health insurance laws, because for example they really need health insurance but they were denied it prior to the new laws due to a preexisting condition.

This is why we have already stated in a previous article that bankruptcy is "moving down the income scale". The total number of medical bankruptcies will neither greatly fall nor greatly increase due to Obama Care, but the income and wealth of the bankrupts under Obama Care will be lower than it was before. The gap between assets and liabilities among the bankrupts will be lower than before due to the subsidies and due to new annual “out of pocket” limitations.

The annual out of pocket limit regulations in the new laws do take direct aim at bankruptcies, but will not help one iota those who “live paycheck to paycheck” and so don’t have $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 lying around to cover the amount they are supposed to pay for the deductible, the co-pays, the prescription drugs, and the uncovered items. Ironically, a much higher percentage of Americans live paycheck to paycheck than do people in other countries who don’t have to worry about any of the things we are discussing because their health care expenses are taken care of completely (or at least virtually completely) by the general tax system of the country they are living in (which is the core idea behind “single payer” financing of health care).

If you wanted to be crass about it, I guess you could say that thanks to the Democrats, medical bankruptcy is moving to the "bad neighborhood" where the rest of the bankruptcy family lives, laugh out loud. In other words, the Democrats’ unconstitutional health insurance laws are all about moving medical bankruptcy to what is in their view its’ rightful address on the wrong side of the tracks.

It is interesting to note that in the final days before passage, the Democrats who were the most insistent that the new laws be passed despite heavy opposition often brought up the notion that people who refused to buy grossly overpriced insurance simply because it is unaffordable were freeloading. The freeloaders were getting care in emergency rooms effectively almost for free. This is known as uncompensated care, the cost of which is partly passed on in the form of health insurance premium hikes but is also partly absorbed by the commons.

But the Democrats are all about supporting wealthier people these days, so unlike Democrats of decades ago these Democrats were disgusted with common people trying to “freeload” off the wealthier. So there was an undercurrent of disdain and disgust toward the common people freeloaders, who of course are merely innocent bystanders to the US health system wreckage in general and to unaffordable health insurance in particular.

Not only will the Democrats' unconstitutional health insurance laws move bankruptcy to (in the view of the Democrats) back to where it belongs on the income and wealth scale, but the new laws will also remind us over and over again in the years ahead that insurance is not a fully appropriate concept for those who are not above average in wealth and income (before any misfortunes strike). Because despite having insurance (that they were bribed to buy with subsidies and prodded to buy under threat of tax penalties) people with lower incomes and little wealth will be going bankrupt right and left under Obama Care when they discover the hard way what the wealthy already know: that insurance certainly can not and will not pay for everything, and when misfortune strikes you will take a hit despite having insurance.

Unlike the wealthy, if you are lower down the income and wealth scales, you won't be able to take the financial hit that comes despite the insurance and financially live to tell about it. That "hit despite insurance" is relatively small to a wealthy or to a high income person but hardly so for others. So if you are induced to buy health insurance and then you can’t cover all the things that the insurance won’t cover, it will be off to bankruptcy court for you to file an "Obama Care bankruptcy". There may be a waiting list, so get your bankruptcy filing in early, please.

Remember, if you do buy health insurance, make sure you are wearing expensive, formal attire and have a gold pen when you sign your policy contract. Otherwise, you will look like a fish out of water.

By the way, did you know that bankruptcy has become so commonplace that you can largely do it on the Internet with no attorney?

READING LIST
Wall Street loots Birmingham

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Who is Helped and Who is Hurt by Obama Care: The Blood in the Water

2010-03-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Among the health insurance contract aspects, a few things were fixed by Obama Care (at least fifty years late; what took the Democrats so damn long?) but many more were not fixed. For example, insurance companies can still deny payment for unusual and novel treatments even if doctor requested and doctor approved. If the new or unusual treatment is not in the Government mandated health insurance package, you don’t get coverage for it whether it is approved by doctors and scientists or not. The new health insurance policy management system will be quite inflexible, slow moving, bureaucratic, and financially conservative due in part to the overall economic context.

Also, insurance companies can still deny payments and rescind policies if they declare fraud. Unlike before when whatever the insurance company said was automatically worshipped as gospel and dutifully obeyed by every governmental and judicial official, the companies may now have to "prove" fraud at a hearing IF the consumer actively contests the fraud. But with huge staffs of extremely high paid attorneys, the insurance companies will be able to prevail in most hearings when they decide to kick someone off the policy they don’t want to pay on by declaring fraud.

The concept of fraud, which is still alive and well with Obama Care, is vague and wide ranging enough to allow for a lot of successful attacks on consumers by the insurance companies. (And no, there is nothing you can do to eliminate the chance that your insurance company will falsely declare something you filed was fraudulent. Along with the huge staffs of highly paid shark type attorneys, they have plenty of legal tricks up their sleeve with which they can successfully accuse anyone of fraud.)

As I have said before, all these new laws do is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. The system will eventually go to the bottom of the briny blue, but in the meantime, some people will enjoy a better position on the deck than they have now. In particular, here are some who will be helped:

--Higher income people who know how to "do health insurance" and have a big enough and dependable enough income to back up those skills and make all the right payments at all the right times will be helped by Obama Care.

--Those who have been hammered by the “donut hole” (that big gap in Medicare Part D prescription coverage) will be better off in about ten years when it is finally gone (assuming no repeal).

--Those who simply can not get health insurance under the status quo but have enough resources to pay for premiums, deductibles, co pays, uncovered items, prescription drugs, dental care, and vision care in full and on time year after year after year. These would be fairly rich people by definition and it is no surprise that the right of center Democrats are strongly behind them.

Here are some of the groups of people who are harmed:

--Those who are ignorant about the many complexities and consumer traps of private, for profit health insurance. Such people will still be subject to disasters caused by such things as lapsed coverage due to missing premium payments, for example, interrupted health care, incomplete health care, and inadequate health care.

--Lower income people in general, especially those between 133% and 250% of the federal poverty line. Those with less than 133% will get Medicaid, but actually getting quality treatment with Medicaid (especially in a quasi depression when states are completely broke) will be at best a very dicey proposition.

--Some people who would have declared one or more bankruptcies pre Obama Care will now never have to declare bankruptcy. But lower income people (mostly among those with incomes less than 500% of poverty) have been often avoiding medical bankruptcy by not attempting the impossible (for them) task of feeding the private health system beast year after year, but now they will be induced to feed that ever growing beast, and numerous bankruptcies among them will inevitably follow. In other words, medical bankruptcy is moving down the income scale. Going forward, the people filing medical bankruptcy will be lower income and will perhaps have a smaller gap between assets and liabilities than the prior group of bankrupts. But this is obviously a key way in which Obama Care does nothing but rearrange those Titanic deck chairs.

--Those who become unemployed due to a bankruptcy filing. Many professions and employers become very negatively disposed to employees who have filed bankruptcy in the US and they start looking for pretenses to get rid of such employees.

--There will be a good number of people who get so totally carried away by "their responsibilities" under Obama Care that they will end up homeless when they would never have been homeless under the status quo. These people will ironically end up in much worse health than they would have been with no Obama Care since homelessness is usually devastating to a person's health.

--Medicare Advantage enrollees, since that program has been heavily cut. My understanding is that many will simply drop out of that program in the wake of the big cuts to it.

--Existing Medicaid beneficiaries, since the demand for service among the big influx of new Medicaid people will be much in excess of new resources for the program. The number of people on Medicaid is supposed to increase by roughly 50%.

--Small businesses, especially those with roughly 50-250 employees, which operate with their heads just above the waterline financially speaking.

--Employees of those small businesses who are fired so that those small businesses can offset the new health insurance mandate they must take on, or so that the small business can reduce it's workforce below 50 employees and thus escape the new regulations that target small businesses.

--People who harbor a lot of resentment about being denied health care freedom. Different people come at this from different perspectives but end up in the same place: very much in opposition to the Obama Care “mandate”. Generally speaking, everyone but especially right of center people very much resent being told by the government to buy a particular product. (This is of course unprecedented not only in the US but world wide.) Rather then being told what they must do, people want the freedom to buy it, to buy something different, or to buy nothing.

Progressive people are more often most resentful of being indirectly blamed for the mess when a health system is a governmental responsibility that the government should discharge with ordinary public and progressive financing methodologies, and/or they are very resentful of having to help pay the massive salaries, massive perks, and massive profits of private health insurance companies.

--In my wide angle view, probably the most outrageous thing of all about Obama Care is that it is a slap in the face of basically the entire rest of the planet on the issue, which has decided that health care is ultimately a societal and governmental responsibility rather than an individual responsibility.

Coming next is a complete exposé focusing on this last aspect.

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The Republican Proposals Versus Obama Care

2010-03-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

GUEST COMMENT
Mookie March 22nd, 2010 1:35 pm
What Republican plans? The absolutely only thing Republicans harped on was tort reform. Yeh, let's let the existing poor health care system in the United States continue to kill 200,000 a year through malpractice and unclean medical care.

No one who thinks Republicans are worth a frack is worth listening to.

UNITY PROGRESS
Laugh out loud, I don't agree with Republicans very often and I suppose I am playing the novelty of the moment for all it's worth, but I do agree with them regarding how bad Obama Care is. I mean, it may never happen again so I have to enjoy the novelty of it now.

Seriously though, if you want specifics, the Republicans' allowance of interstate health insurance purchasing and their proposal for allowance of a very low cost but limited insurance policy, useful for full out health/financial catastrophes only, are economically well grounded proposals within the context of the current bad system and would slightly (or marginally if you prefer) improve it.

Although a few Republican ideas were included in the thousands of pages of new laws, I do not believe the two I just mentioned, which were among their best, were included. If I were a Republican economist (laugh out loud at the thought) I would know enough to be able to tell you definitively whether or not it is generally true that the best or at least the biggest Republican ideas were not included while the lesser and not so good ones were included. But I do suspect this is true.

Moreover, the mandate is so extremely regressive that the mere absence of it in the Republican proposals means that they are much more progressive than Obama Care (or much less regressive, to put it more accurately).

So of course I stand by my rankings. Technically the Republican proposals are more progressive than Obama Care despite the fact they are still overall quite regressive by world standards and doomed to eventual total failure as is Obama Care. And then we don’t know whether the Republicans would actually vote for them or whether they are just for public relations.

The truth is neither the Republican plans nor Obama Care are really worth even discussing if your objective is a truly good working system. No serious person in most other countries of the world who had any say in system design would take either very seriously. On my ranking scale, the Chinese system is much better than the Republican modifications of the US status quo while the distance between the Republican proposals and Obama Care is less than that.

The issue of Republican proposals versus Obama Care is only a side issue by world standards and amounts to just a matter of deciding which would be better among two very bad health systems. But for the record, the Republican system would be a little better than Obama Care if both economics and health care are taken into account. If ONLY health care is taken into account without regard to costs and economics, I suppose Obama Care is better than Republican proposals. But only in Wonderland can you support one health system over another while totally ignoring costs and economics, especially in the current context of labor market collapse.

The above was in response to this article.

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Obama Care: A new low in Health Care Systems; A Very bad System Gets Even Worse

2010-03-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

Just to make sure everyone who visits here understands exactly where this Site is coming from, here, based on tried and true economics and health care theory, is a rank order of health care systems from best to worst:

1. Single Payer with insurance companies eliminated for everything except for luxury types of care intended for rich people. (For example, United Kingdom, Sweden, and Canada.)

2. Modified or indirect Single Payer with people required to sign up with a heavily regulated but technically private insurance company. The company "selling" the insurance at the bequest of the government is strictly not allowed to make a profit on the insurance package that the government requires people to buy: they get reasonable costs only. Moreover, low income people pay only token amounts or nothing (beyond anything they already pay in other taxation) since the subsidies are huge and are much larger relative to income than proposed American subsidies for people to buy grossly expensive private US policies. (Examples of countries that most closely represent this system would be Switzerland and The Netherlands.)

3. The (mainland) Chinese Plan (a work in progress): heavy subsidies of community based health providers and other various interventions, provisions, and system organization plans to keep health care prices low enough for most people in diverse situations to afford. Note that at least for most people in China, for profit health care insurance is a totally foreign concept. Due to not being tied down to the concept of for-profit insurance (which fails for health care) the Chinese in effect get a big head start in their quest to design a good system for their country with its gigantic population.

4. Various Republican plans existing in 2009 and 2010 to modify and slightly improve the status quo.

5. The U.S. status quo as of March 21, 2010 (outside Massachusetts which already had drunk the kool-aid). There were actually progressive features in the status quo, backdoor as they were. Most notably, you had a small ( much smaller than claimed by the Democrats, however) subsidy of poor people lacking insurance by those with it, brought about by the 1986 Act which mandates that those without insurance be treated in emergency rooms of hospitals. Technically this backdoor progressive subsidy will apparently continue on, although now the amount will be even smaller than before.

6. Obama Care.

Yes it’s true; Obama Care is virtually the worst possible system and represents a new low in humanities’ efforts in the area. It not only maintains but reinforces and gives new official backing to all of the bad elements of the existing system and also makes things worse in many ways, for example, by subsidizing items that are drowning not only the health care system but the economy as a whole, particularly health insurance. When you subsidize something you raise the cost of it. It has been downright amusing to see Democrats claim that health insurance prices will be restrained or even go down going forward when roughly 15 million new people (a good number of them sicker than dogs) suddenly buy the product. (Do Democrats never take any economics courses?)

In other words, the Democrats’ new system digs the hole deeper cost wise and sooner or later health care wise as well. And now the hole is deeper still because now the new authoritarianism in the US system is unprecedented among such systems.

The Americans' refusal to follow the rest of the world into a single payer approach (and to end their unhealthy obsession with for-profit health insurance) has caused them to end up very, very deep in the health care hole indeed. They now have:

--By far the most expensive system

--By far the most unfair system

--By far the most dysfunctional system (many get care they don't really need and many more don't get care they really do need.)

--By far the most authoritarian and regressive system: the system with the least freedom, the most needless bureaucracy, and the most regressivity.

The last one is added into the toxic mix by Obama Care. How ironic is it that the country that supposedly has the most people obsessed with freedom from authoritarian, heavy handed government now has the most authoritarian health care system among advanced countries? Very ironic indeed.

Laugh out loud. They always say truth is stranger than fiction. Indeed, I couldn’t with a straight face have written a fiction book about how the Americans would make their health system even worse after having an election driven by fear of massive unemployment. I would have laughed myself out of the room at the thought of writing such a work of fiction (but it would now be fact, so laugh out loud.)

And I told you the Americans will never get health care right. I guess hell will freeze over before they get it right. The same would appear to be true about unemployment (despite the motivations of voters in the most recent presidential election): hell will freeze over before the Americans take real action to get unemployment down now and keep unemployment in check in the future.

READING LIST
The Health Care Hindenberg has Landed

The Hindenberg has landed indeed (a very sharp analogy). I can't wait until it blows up. And I have a folder ready for downloading 2010, 2012, and 2014 concession speeches of Democrats who voted for this and then lose their re-election. This folder will hopefully include Obama's 2012 concession speech.

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Unity Progress is Reborn Bigger and Better

2010-03-22T04:24:00.000-07:00

We are making the following changes:

1. Postings will no longer necessarily be tied to articles appearing at Common Dreams. Going forward, some postings will be tied to articles at Common Dreams, some will be tied to articles elsewhere, and some will not be tied to any article at all. When we say "tied to," specifically we mean that the posting is in direct response to the article and that article is linked to at the conclusion of the posting. In other words, the article linked to has motivated the posting here.

2. Whether or not a posting is tied to an article at Common Dreams or elsewhere, there will be going forward intra post links from time to time. If the text color suddenly changes from gold to green, you have come upon one of these. These intra post links are used by me and other writers to direct readers to a good source of supporting and/or of additional information about the subject being covered at that moment.

3. On the right sidebar we recently installed crucial article reading lists. These are all-important, totally on point articles that we rank a nine or ten (usually a ten) on a scale of one to ten. These lists will be added to and will eventually grow to the point where separate pages will have to be made for them. We hope some people will use these lists as Internet surfing time savers.

Separately, from now on we will also from time to time append a reading list of one or more articles at the end of postings. These links will be to articles rated between 7 and 10 on the scale. Those ranked 9 or 10 will simultaneously be added to the most crucial lists that are currently in the sidebar.

4. Even though we disagree with "tea baggers" and other off the deep end conservatives most of the time, we agree with them whole heartedly that Obama Care unnecessarily and unconstitutionally restricts health care freedom. We also agree with them that Obama Care fails to control costs more than trivially and will be economically counter productive to one extent or another. Therefore, we will from time to time link to anti Obama Care and anti Romney Care articles at right of center and conservative sites.

5. While resources for producing Unity Progress remain limited, we expect to soon get approval to slightly but significantly increase the planned production time for articles produced for this site. We are doing so mainly because opposition to Obama Care is even stronger than we thought it would be, so an increase is needed to correlate with that.

6. Readers have been installed that show the titles of the most recent 85 postings. There are five readers that each have 17 posts in them, placed in order from newest to least new from highest to lowest on the home page. These are not simply links that you can click on to pull up the item. No, this is much better than that: you can actually read the item right in the reader after you have clicked on it. A Massachusetts based software / internet company provides this extremely valuable resource.

7. "Pages" have been installed. These are particularly important resources collected on a single, stand-alone, but updatable posting that you click a link to get to. The links to pages are near the top of the right sidebar under the header “Health Disaster Monitor”. (Google Blogger uses the term "pages" but this is really a misnomer since only the posting is unique while everything else is the same as it is on the main, multi-post page.)

The “pages” currently are:

--Health System News
--Physicians for a National Health Program Press Releases
--Health System Disaster Blogs
--Single Payer Explained
--Penalties and Enforcement

The first four are mostly links to the latest news, commentary, and research on the health front. The Penalties and Enforcement page will be custom designed by Unity Progress and will be a vital and unique consumer aid for those facing the authoritarian ravages of Obama Care. Here the penalties and the enforcement will be objectively and in detail explained. Commentary and context about the penalties and enforcement will continue to appear in various postings on the main page.

8. The new Unity Progress satellite site (or page) called NDP Canada is launched. The NDP items that were on the main page have been farmed out to here in the never ending fight to prevent the main page from becoming overloaded (which causes it to take too long to load).

9. The new Avoidance, Repeal, State Opposition, and Lawsuits Site (or page) is launched. This will keep you up to date on the many and varied ways Obama Care is being opposed, thwarted, and hopefully eventually nullified. Obviously, the motivation for this page is the unexpectedly strong opposition to Obama Care. Although I still disagree with them on most things, I have a new found respect for conservatives due to their clear and strong rejection of Obama Care and due to their active plans for opposing it. The status quo is horrible, but it is better than Obama Care. Many Americans don't seem to understand that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.

Note that the main topics of this site remain the same regardless of these changes, improvements, and expansions. The focus remains on:

--The health care system disaster in the U.S.
--The labor market disaster in the U.S.
--The economic disaster in general in the U.S.
--Haiti (will remain a sub focus, but time limitations will not permit continual coverage of Haiti)

The main ultimate mission of the site remains the same as well: to unify Americans into a new and instantly popular political party that will be center-left but be so with American characteristics. The ultimate goal must be to restore maximum freedom by reestablishing lost economic freedom and by establishing economic fairness in the first place in America. Economic freedom and economic fairness are by no means contrary objectives as many on the right in America falsely believe.

I hope you will agree that Unity Progress has now been reborn as bigger and even better than before and I thank you for visiting.

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Pesky Left of Center Reporters Keep Trying to Blow Obama's Cover

2010-03-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Shame on you Bob Herbert for trying to blow Obama's cover.

He has worked feverishly to pull the wool over everyone's eyes not only by claiming the depression was averted but also by claiming the new health insurance laws are pro consumer and anti health insurance industry. And you come along with your damn depression reporting to spoil the fun and poison the atmosphere on this joyous weekend when the right wing establishment Democrats are thumbing their noses at the majority of the American people and at most of the rest of the world by ramming through a Rube Goldberg authoritarian health care system instead of tried and true single payer.

The next thing you know, we'll have numerous people in bankruptcy courts who didn’t know jack about deductibles and uncovered items claiming they were bankrupted by Obama care. Not to mention the down home right wingers are warning about taking up arms against the Internal Revenue Service. Damn all you muckraking truth tellers.

And damn the Internet too while I am at it. There is entirely too much anti-Obama truth on the Internet if you ask me.

All presidents (and Obama more than most, I must admit) need people to be dumb or at least act dumb about what is really going down. How else are they supposed to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? And you, Mr. Herbert, are not cooperating. You would never win an election in Chicago, let me tell you.

The above was in response to this article.

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The Damage Epicenter for the Democrats' 2,700+ Page Monstrosity: Who is in the Bullseye

2010-03-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

In the last year there have been many thousands of lies told by many hundreds of elites about what is in the 2,700+ pages and about how it will pass. These pages indeed add up to economic doomsday for many people. The epicenter where the devastation will be the worst will be for those with incomes between 133% and about 250% of the poverty threshold. Think of Port-au-Prince for the level of household budget devastation that will fall on many people in this range.

The somewhat more generous subsidies of the now pushed aside House legislation are history; the more restrictive and more limited Senate subsides are the only thing left on the table.

In the 133% to 250% of poverty range, in the epicenter in other words, the premium subsidies will be much larger than they will be for people in the 250% to 400% range, but people in this range (unless they live in extremely low cost of living areas) are in no position to pay much of anything for health care, particularly if they are not reliably employed 365 days a year every year without fail. (And how many can say they are more or less guaranteed continual employment these days? Given today's cost of living, these people are basically taxed out already when all taxes and fees are considered. The “mandate” tax will join the sales tax as a heavy, regressive tax for lower income households in the US.

Furthermore, people in this range, even if they scrape up money to pay premiums, will seldom be in position to pay these items:

--Deductibles
--Co pays
--Uncovered items
--Prescription medications
--Vision care
--Dental care

Financially speaking, premiums only get your foot in the health care door. You are not allowed to actually come in the room, have your health care, and leave without having to file bankruptcy until and unless those other items are paid in full. If you pay premiums but don't have enough money to pay the other items, BOTH your health care and your personal finances will be heavily damaged.

With respect to many of the items above, namely vision care, dental care, and prescription medications, up front payment requirements often mean that you do not have the option of getting the care and then filing bankruptcy. If you can not pay up front for those you don't get them, and if you pay high health insurance premiums you may no longer have enough money to cover those other things which operate differently than does primary health care at the day to day micro level.

Numerous disturbing questions arise if you pay premiums and get health care, but then are unable to pay co pays, deductibles, and/or uncovered items. Will you declare bankruptcy or not? Whether or not you declare bankruptcy, will your insurance now be suspended or terminated? If so, in effect you had one shot at the health care apple and if you need more care then that you are out of luck.

Do you lose your job if you file bankruptcy? If you become homeless but you still have health insurance at the time could you actually receive care and, if so, would it be at the same quality level as it would be if you were not homeless? There is almost no end to the disturbing questions that have been and will continue to arise for beleaguered Americans whether or not the 2,700+ pages pass.

Based on the current poverty thresholds, here are the income ranges that will be where the mandate and the other tax hikes will fall most severely. The first number is the number in the household and the dollar numbers show you the range of annual income that constitutes 133% to 250% of the federal poverty guideline threshold….

1 $14,400 to $27,100
2 $19,400 to $36,400
3 $24,400 to $45,800
4 $29,300 to $55,100
5 $34,300 to $64,500
6 $39,300 to $73,800
7 $44,200 to $83,200
8 $49,200 to $92,500

Since subsidies for buying health insurance under the 2,700+ pages tail off to insignificance and eventually to zero from 250% to 400% of poverty, those in that range who live in higher cost areas and/or who have unusual expenses and/or who have only sporadic employment will face personal financial devastation as well.

The one and only European country that has a system that is supposedly similar to the 2,700+ pages is Switzerland. But when the details are checked, you find that the system in Switzerland is not really even remotely like what is proposed for the US. In Switzerland:

--The cost of basic health insurance and health care is only roughly 40% and 50-60% respectively of the costs in the US.

--Health insurance companies are strictly not allowed to earn a profit for the basic coverage that everyone is supposed to buy.

--Any health insurance company that denies payment for care or tries to kick someone out of coverage will be quickly corrected by the government. Health insurance companies that repeatedly try to cheat people as US companies do will be very heavily fined and eventually dissolved by the Swiss government if they don't desist. American regulation of insurance companies is far weaker and will remain much weaker even if the 2,700+ pages pass, although there will be some improvement on this score.

--The subsidies are much higher in Switzerland than they would be under the 2,700+ pages.

--The cost of living in cities in Switzerland is lower than what it is in most American cities.

--The penalties for those who simply don't comply in Switzerland are much less.

--The percentage of the population that is poor and the percentage of the population that is near poor is far less than in the US.

--The number of and the percentage of people who are "in and out of" employment is much less than in the US.

I expect there will be a lot of slander and libels regarding the Swiss system in the years ahead; it will be interesting to see the Swiss themselves explain the differences between their system and the 2,700+ pages.

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Why Common Dreams is the Best Progressive Internet Site

2010-03-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

With respect to anyone who is not a “regular” at Common Dreams who has or who will be making one or more one hit wonder type “guest comment(s)” about how we regulars are wrong about opposing the 2,700 pages and about how all the establishment progressives (who aren’t really progressives at all by World standards) are right about supporting the 2,700 pages, please understand that no Common Dreams regular will be swayed one inch by your shallow, childish, and baseless accusations about how we are supposedly too theoretical or perfectionist or whatever for not supporting the 2,700 pages.

True, we have won the theoretical debate hands down as you would expect. In theory, single payer (in all its real world varied manifestations) is very clearly much superior in virtually all respects to both the current system and the system envisioned in the 2,700 pages. Unfortunately, on this issue, the US is very wrong while the rest of the civilized, reputable world is very right.

But also, I and other regulars here at Common Dreams have during the last year been explaining countless hard factual, no pretending, no kidding, and very real world reasons why the 2,700 pages are going to do much more harm than good to the population as a whole.

Indeed, this health insurance issue has once and for all proved that Common Dreams is about the only place, and is apparently the best place, where (a) there are a lot of comments and (b) where most of the comments and the folks making them are truly progressive. Whereas at the other sites that are supposedly comparable, mixed in with some true progressives are a whole lot of confused people who don't really know what a progressive is and, worse, are unable to identify a right wing approach to solving problems when they see it.

True, some of those gushing in favor of the 2,700 pages at those other sites (like Daily Kos and Huffington Post and so on) are right wing plants, some are stakeholders (such as insurance company and hospital employees) and some are both. But there are also at those sites a good number of plain old confused folks as well who think they are progressive but are really not.

Regulars: I’ll have much, much more later (you know I will, laugh out loud).

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Failed Job Market and Far Right Bankruptcy Laws Cause Millions of Student Loans to go to the Grave

2010-03-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

GUEST COMMENT

Buck March 15th, 2010 10:17 am
Borrowing money to get an education is useless in today's world. You are going to wind up working at the gas station anyway, providing you don't join the army.

UNITY PROGRESS
How true. Unless you have a rich friend or a relative who you know for an absolute fact will be able and willing to directly help you get a good job after graduation, don't borrow for education. If you borrow and can't get a good job, you will be joining tens of millions who have made that mistake and are in that situation. In other words, the far right wing US economy is simply not worth investing in via large student loans (more than $10,000).

Student loans can virtually never be discharged. US residents are now going to be more and more going to their graves having worked their heads off during their lives (in many cases having worked harder than Europeans and Asians with very small or zero education debts) and yet they still owe penalties and interest on student loans made four, five, and six decades ago!

You can get all the education you need on the Internet for the cost of your computer and your internet connection.

The above was in response to this article.

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Fake and Real Progressives: Only Those who vote "No" on the Health Insurance "Reform" are Doing Their Progressive Duty to Protect the Jobs and Resources of the "Common People"

2010-03-10T18:10:00.000-08:00

It is Dennis Kucinich who is right in his no vote and it is all the other "progressives" who are planning to violate their pledge and vote yes who are wrong. The other progressives swore more than once that they would not vote for a right wing health insurance bill with no public option. Now, we will apparently soon see that they are liars. I honestly don't care if the turncoats lose their seats to right wingers after voting for laws that will do almost nothing in the short run other than collect some new taxes and impose some Medicare cutbacks, do at least as much bad as good in the medium term, and most definitely do more harm than good in the longer term (15 years and more).

In fact, it would be nice to see every single one who votes in favor of the enhanced looting by the health insurance companies that these proposals will enable be defeated. This would clear the decks and pave the way for a new center-left party in the US.

In a new American center-left party, everyone except the loonies who think that a government can not do anything at all well will be welcome so that the numbers are adequate to actually win a lot of Senate and House seats. This center-left American party would favor more libertarian and less bureaucratic solutions to solve problems than do center-left parties elsewhere, simply because Americans favor these approaches by fairly wide margins.

Actually, some government bureaucracy is actually a good thing, but Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that any bureaucracy is bad, thus the need to minimize it. But the era of government not being able to do anything good has got to come to an end: that madness has to end. In other words, America needs a party that will create government operations that are stripped down to the barest essentials but will nevertheless accomplish important objectives that the private sector can not or will not achieve. Although unusually simple and basic approaches will be favored, I repeat for emphasis that anyone who thinks that governments can not do anything at all well will not have a place in the new party.

But let us return to health insurance. The looting victims of the health insurance mandate, if it passes, will of course be lower but not extremely low income citizens who can not really afford health insurance even with the planned subsidies, especially when the total cost is figured, which includes most or all of: premiums, deductibles, co pays, prescription drugs, and uncovered items of various types including vision and dental care.

The "liberal principals" involved, as wonderful as they are (most notably that there is a "right" to health care) are not the only reasons why a true progressive must vote no on the health insurance laws that the obsessed and misguided Democrats are doing somersaults on the lawn to try to pass. It is also that the health insurance subsidies are going to further damage the economy at a time when it is teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Americans do not seem to understand (as most Europeans do due to a rougher and much longer economic history) that no matter how bad an economy is, it can always get worse. Single payer, as all the reputable countries have realized, is an economic necessity, not a social luxury.

True progressives do not take gambles with the economy when there is already a 25-30 million jobs deficit. (There has been no increase in the number of jobs for about 11 years and a reasonable rate of growth requires at least 2,500,000 jobs per year.) Rather, true progressives are supposed to support the availability of jobs for those who need them over and above everything else.

But these new laws, if passed, will not lower total health costs for businesses or individuals. Any reduction in health inflation will be minimal at best, trivial at worse, and will be ridiculously small compared with how much real, no pretending, and no wishful thinking cost containment is really needed for the US. Unless single payer is adopted, health costs will remain excessively high and thus the severely depressing effects those costs have on job creation will continue.

It is logically and clearly true that progressives must support single payer and only single payer or they are not only voting for an inferior health system but they are also failing to help rescue the job market (with lower health costs) when that market is already partially collapsed.

Shame on anyone who supports subsidizing already well off physicians, health insurance companies, and so forth at the expense of job creation for those who have virtually no income.

Oh, and judging from his threatening of a primary challenge of Dennis Kucinich, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos Internet site is a whiny fool and he is hardly a progressive. For one thing, Kucinich is just one of more than 400 Representatives who are split down the middle on the health insurance "reform". For another thing, Kucinich and those voting no are in the right and those voting yes are in the wrong.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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How big does the Jobs Deficit have to get Before There is a new Political Party in the US?

2010-03-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

It's not true that "3rd parties" can not possibly succeed in the US. For example, the Republican Party was formed in 1854 and its standard bearer Abraham Lincoln became President a short time later in 1861.

There can also be a split of an existing party into two parties, both of which can be viable for some time after the split. This is technically how the Democratic Party formed about 1825.

Yes it is much more difficult for a viable (one that can win elections to the House and Senate) party to form in the US than elsewhere, but it is not impossible.

There has been no increase in gainful employment in the US for about 11 years, creating a job deficit relative to "normally functioning" advanced economies of about 25-30 million jobs.

Since both the current Republican Party and the current Democratic Party are too far to the right (and too much controlled by elites in huge corporations) to be able to support policies that will create jobs, "progressives" in the Democratic Party are doomed to be eventually exposed as totally irrelevant if there are few or no jobs indefinitely. To me and to many others here at Common Dreams, the "progressives" are already seen as irrelevant. Obama is worse than irrelevant. If the labor market collapse continues for a second decade or more, sooner or later the "progressives" in the Democratic Party will have two choices: form a new party or be defeated by fascists of various types.

Fascist voters don't like unemployment either if only because they don't want to support those who don't have a job. Fascists came to power in Germany due to economics in general and lack of enough gainful employment in particular (along with massive inflation).

If the progressives split from the Democrats when the job deficit reaches 50 million or whatever, the new party will obviously (a) promise jobs and (b) be instantly viable. If instead the progressives go down with their ship, a new party can and presumably will form from the ground up. Either way, if and when the point of total economic desperation arrives, the new party will instantly gain massive support from roughly 50 million or more people lacking jobs and another 100 million or many more who don't want to or simply can not support them anymore.

In other words, I doubt that even in the US it will ever get to the point that millions are starving in the streets and yet still there is no new party to address the economic wreckage that the Democratic and the Republican parties have caused.

Precisely because it is so difficult for a new party to be viable in the US you have no choice but to base it on economics rather than on a less popular concern such as the environment. It is no surprise that the Green Party concept works to some extent in parliamentary Germany but not in the more crude US system.

But yes, I do know that the environment is ultimately more important than the economy, please don't waste your time typing that.

Technically I am just speculating and the country’s economy could be destroyed beyond repair (creating the need for very extensive international intervention) but all of those possibilities are beyond the scope of this comment.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams
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The Economy has been Split into two Economies and Why Obama is Actually Worse than Herbert Hoover

2010-03-03T17:55:00.000-08:00

Doomsday is coming for the financial system? Yeah! That's exactly what we need. The financial system is holding the rest of the economy hostage and we want it to fail completely and once and for all. We need a new system in case you have not noticed. The US needs a true national banking system with one component of it being a publicly regulated publicly owned bank in each and every county where small business people and perhaps large corporations as well can get grants and loans.

The current financial system is one of the main pillars of the "upper level economy" that has emerged during the Bush and Obama administrations and completely detached from the “lower level economy” by the two right wing US parties. Roughly speaking, the upper economy has 2% of the people and 95% of the money while the lower economy has 98% of the people and 5% of the money. (I'm simplifying but the general idea is accurate.)

The whole upper level economy clearly needs to collapse and obviously there should be one and only one economy in each land.

The elite Americans with their two economy model are engaging in sheer lunacy. Even in third world economies, you can not build an impenetrable wall between the upper and the lower. In a third world country, when the lower goes to hell completely, the elites may stay sort of rich but they definitely won't get much richer over the years, so then they fall behind the elites and even the middle class in the first world. This is one of the main distinguishing characteristics of a third world economy: even the relatively rich (the elites of the third world country) are handicapped and fail to keep up with the rest of the world.

I would rather be middle class in Sweden than upper class in Botswana or Papua New Guinea. Hell, I'd rather be lower class in Sweden than upper class in Botswana or Papua New Guinea.

In 2009 it was noted by a few observers including yours truly that Obama was remarkably similar to Herbert Hoover. Actually, I have recently come to the realization that Obama is worse than Hoover. Hoover would not have approved of massive bailouts, but rather he would say that misdeeds and mismanagement should result in bankruptcy. Moreover, although Hoover was mocked for saying that "Recovery is just around the corner," when it was not, at least Hoover never, as Obama has, stated falsely that recovery has arrived.

Yes, recovery has arrived to those few in the upper economy, but the collapsed labor market, massive foreclosures, inability of credit worthy small businesses to get loans, and other continuing plagues remind us that recovery has most definitely not come to the lower economy. Moreover, spokesmen for the upper economy have already openly predicted that the labor market will not fully recover to what it was (which was already no where near good enough) for at least 10 years.

Of course, you can take such predictions with a grain of salt. The labor market will never ever recover to what it was until and unless the current two economy system crashes and burns. So with that I arrive back where I started with this comment: we should be hoping for "doomsday" for the financial sector.

The above was in response to this article.
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Do you want the Coffee, the Tea, or a Cold Bucket of Water in the Face so you can wake up from your Alice in Wonderland Make Believe?

2010-03-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Are the Coffee and Tea Parties the Alice in Wonderland parties that Americans can pretend really exist and are really viable while in reality the only viable parties will continue to be just the two traditional right wing parties for the gigantic but now 3rd world country with a collapsed labor market? I mean, the Americans can pretend to be in an electable party that is not completely right wing and is not controlled lock, stock, and barrel by big corporations. It will be a hoot, and very much in keeping with the overall cheap celebrity and entertainment culture of the country. Sort of like the holodeck on Star Trek.

For the record, even a very popular Facebook page does not draw enough visitors to worry Rahm Emanuel and all the other servants of the corporations. They know that the dominance of the corporations and of the traditional parties will continue regardless of any doings on the Internet. There are 50,000 sign-ups at a Facebook page? So what? when you need 120,000 just to reach one tenth of one percent of the number of people who voted for Obama or McCain in the last presidential election. 50,000 is not even a blip on the political radar screen. You need 1,200,000 for one percent.

No, the only way the lords of politics would become concerned would be if somehow an umbrella organization united at least tens of thousands of Internet sites, thousands of organizations, and dozens and dozens of unviable parties into a viable non-right party. Barring such a an unprecedented and plausibly impossible massive unification, where everyone agrees to not merely be a big fish in a little pond anymore, the Internet has been and will continue to be a dud with respect to high level, historically significant political organizing.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Why you can Forget About a Populist Social Movement at the Moment

2010-02-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, this is a totally invalid and off point essay. All that history where "movements from the ground up" induced leaders to get busy changing things is irrelevant to the present moment.

In the present moment there are no mainstream center, let alone left parties in the US. Both the Republican and the Democratic parties are right wing parties now, one far right and one right. (There are a few centrist and center-left politicians in the Democratic Party but they are always ignored when it comes to real legislation.)

Those successful historical movements occurred when the Democratic Party was a centrist or at least a center-right party. Once a party becomes a true right wing party, as the Democrats most definitely are today, they are not going to respond in the least to populist social movements.

There are real differences between centrist and right and that is one of them: again for emphasis, right wing parties will not respond to populist social movements. It is absurd to think that they will. It is absurd for anyone to blame non-right people for Obama being the failure that he is.

This is why there is one and only one solution: non-right people must unify their five zillion low traffic websites and their many thousands of ultimately meaningless political organizations into a unifying umbrella organization, from which eventually a non-right wing party would emerge that would be so large that there is no way it could be kept off the ballot by petty ballot laws which do, however, keep any of the "many thousands of meaningless political organizations" who want to contest elections off of the ballot most of the time.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Everyone Killed Should at Least get an Apology

2010-02-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

Civilians killed by Americans abroad receive an apology but American civilians killed by the economic collapse (fathers killing their families, suicide, death by cop etc.) don't even get that. Maybe they get an unmarked grave provided by the town.

As for the Democrats, they can't create any jobs, they can't reform the health system, and they can't grow the economy except for the rich getting richer, but by God they can kill civilians abroad and they can promote killings, suicides, and crime in general at home as well as the Republicans can.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Stop Feeding the Beast

2010-02-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

Don't ever vote for any Republicans or any Democrats ever again. Stop feeding the beast. Stop being an accessory to murder and to economic collapse. That's the real message from this writer, fully intended or not.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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What if There was a Depression and the Government was too far to the Right to go for Direct Hiring as Franklin Roosevelt Did?

2010-02-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT
mcoyote February 11th, 2010 12:05 pm
The Democrats are the piss that "sets" the cloth

The Romans built dye shops with vats outside that served as free public toilets. Not only did they act as your basic "rest area" for passersby, but the urine was used to "set" cloth that had been recently dyed - the same way that vinegar is sometimes used today with natural dyes.

So too the Democratic Party. Since FDR, the move of the Democratic Party toward Social Democracy was stillborn; a casualty of McCarthyism which was as much a Democratic Party invention as it was anyone else's. The old coalition, such as it was, essentially fell apart under Kennedy and LBJ. Since Nixon, the "modern" form of the two party system has emerged.

Each Republican president dyes the political fabric a deeper shade of reactionary brown, and each succeeding Democratic president pisses on the new shade to set the color. Thus with Carter, Clinton, and now, Obama.

All of it is maintained through the ambiguity of middle-classdom and the rest, but people can be forgiven for thinking that the shirts are increasingly brown, all talk not withstanding, and that the whole scheme reeks of piss.

Of course the Romans used various scents to mask the process. Our assholes call it the smell of success and don't even bother with perfumes.

__________________________________

There is an economic depression in the United States and there is a shortfall of twenty million jobs. To address that there is a TARP of roughly a trillion bucks, a stimulus of roughly a trillion bucks, a budget deficit of roughly a trillion bucks, and cash outlays from the Fed, FDIC and others that amount to another three trillion bucks... that is all in a year... and at the end of that, there are still gonna be twenty million to twenty five million people without a job.

Yet, any twelve year old can fix the problem. How? Give twenty million people jobs. Do it tomorrow and figure out later what they will do. Pay them $50,000 a year and that is only 1 trillion dollars total. Problem solved.

But wait, those are "fake jobs". What about "real jobs"?

Well, stimulus jobs are "fake jobs" too. But, don't make them fake jobs. Make them real jobs. Let those twenty million make stuff... food and trains and paintings and mocha lattes. So what if they don't make a profit. Subsidize it. The whole thing is subsidized now.

But those twenty million have no capital. Where do we get the means to make stuff?

Confiscate it. Start by taking the idle mills, mines, land that produces nothing today. If ya wanna be "moderate", give the "owners" a few bucks in "rent". It's better than what they get today. And have the banks lend the rest.

But the banks won't lend to such "unprofitable enterprises". How do we get them to finance it?

We take the banks too. The state has already paid for them twice over.

But, but, but... $50,000 a year is too much. That is close to the median income. If you hire twenty million people another 40 million will quit to take the new jobs. What do you do then?

Hire the 40 million. Let them make or do what they were doing before.... or maybe let them do something better. Let people get their own damn whopper if they gotta have it.

But, that will be inefficient, won't it?

In fact it is a matter of degrees. Too inefficient to survive in the private market? Maybe. More inefficient than wiping out all of American economic growth since the mid 1970s in one big depression? Not a chance.

But, that's all pie in the sky. The major political parties will never go for that and the people with money will never allow it.

Well then, we've identified the actual political problem, haven't we?

UNITY PROGRESS RESPONDING
The fact that having the Government directly create even just one job is completely off the table in the second depression (by sharp contrast with the first) is a very clear reminder of how far to the right the US is, very, very far indeed.

Didn't you know, you are supposed to start your own business if you can't get a job. You are supposed to ignore problems such as having no money, can't get a loan, don't have a product or service that will sell, and so forth. Just wake up from that ground under the bridge where you sleep every morning and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get that business up and humming. There is money to be made by people living under bridges, laugh out loud. Yes, even if you are homeless you are supposed to start your own business. Come to think of it, many of the homeless do run their own businesses, most commonly panhandling. (But those, alas, often violate zoning or petty crime regulations. Nutz, I thought I was on a roll there.)

I do believe Jimmy Carter was the last President who signed legislation that directly created jobs without the slavery to tax cuts and the private sector thing going on today. He had for example a summer jobs program for young people. Clinton was, let's face it, even more of a pimp for the private sector than Obama is, or at least he was a more successful pimp than is Obama. And poor Obama suffers from incredible political incompetence, especially in comparison with Slick Willy.

Notice too that in 2010 the poor can not even be mentioned by major US politicians or their sidekicks. As recently as 1975, the poor still existed; they were a constituency. Between then and now, the poor completely disappeared from the lexicon of elites and now the “middle class” (which is more and more the equivalent of the poor in 1975) is that "lagging, unfortunate group of people who through their own fault can't keep up with us rich people".

Meanwhile, as far as elites are concerned, the rightful place of the poor is in prison today. No more summer jobs programs for them, unless they are at the slammer for ten cents per hour.

Oh, and as a sociologist I would like to see the cave that Katie Packer lives in, laugh out loud.

My new jobs, incomes and prices site is here.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Almost Everyone has and is Paying a High Price for one of the Most Unequal Societies in History

2010-02-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

The scientific mobility studies that proved that the US is last in mobility finally came out in the first decade of the 21st century.

Thirty to fifty years ago, as the far right moved toward taking complete control of the US, one of their favorite arguments was that "the greater economic freedom in the US as opposed to Europe means that it is easier for a poor person in the US to economically achieve than it is for a poor person in Europe. Like so much more "wisdom" from the right, we can now see what utter trash that argument was. Trouble is, the far right got the prize that motivated that and other false arguments: they received and they maintain today full control over US society.

And what an irony it is that shortly after those studies were produced, the entire US society (except maybe the top half of one percent, and even they were temporarily damaged) experienced downward mobility. Everyone had to pay a price when the orgy of right wing economics produced one of the very most unequal societies in world history. There is some classic poetic justice in that history for you.

That price is not yet fully paid, by the way.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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You Wonder why Haiti is so Poor? Consider that Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have Received About 22 Times the Foreign Investment that Haiti has Received

2010-02-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

QUOTE: "...even though Obama himself is not a rightwing politician."

Laugh out loud.

In case anyone doesn't know, Haiti has not, in the last 100 years anyway, had anything other than a right wing, corrupt government. Aristide never got anything significant passed into law before he was deposed (twice!) so that would not really count, would it? Whereas the countries in the region that have not been so relentlessly right wing are far more prosperous than Haiti. Both Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have attracted more than 22 times the foreign direct investment that Haiti has.

To see a detailed spreadsheet showing international investment by country, click here.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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The Left-Right Paradigm: how it can go Away and What Often Happens if it does go Away

2010-02-03T12:18:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENTARY

guerrillaG February 3rd, 2010 4:26 pm
"... Obama himself is not a rightwing politician." (Yes, I see how many people already quoted this, and that is quite encouraging to see actually.)

" ... Obama himself is not a rightwing politician."

Realize this - There is NO difference in American politics, not for the people in charge anyway. Sure, maybe the people on the ground get fooled by this party bickering stuff, but those in charge, the President, the Federal Reserve, they do not play party politics, that is all for show, to confuse and divide the people on the ground.

I am not saying, like say Common Dreams socialists or like Bill O'Reilly fans that there is no difference between Left and Right. Sure there are, even in politics to some degree, BUT regardless of the slight differences the main goal from BOTH parties the Democrats and the Republicans, Socialists or Fascists, is CONTROL. They BOTH want to tell you how to run your life, what insurance to buy, what to think etc. etc. etc.; they BOTH want to control things. They just might have slightly differing ways of getting that control.

Saying that Obama himself is not a rightwing politician is a naive way of looking at American politics. It is believing the smoke and mirrors game, that because you get to cast a vote, that you are actually making a decision.

I am sure that everyone here that voted for OBOMBer (not me) thought they were voting for a guy of PEACE (real Peace, not some obviously meaningless prize) and they thought they were voting for CHANGE for the Better and not just a change of the face of the power of the status quo. But unless you are totally blind you have awoken to the fact that you were Bamboozled, and I hope you understand that this whole system is a Bamboozle. I don't care if you are a Dem or a Repub, both the parties are corrupt.

This is why the Real, the honest people of these parties, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, they get no love from the system: because the game is fixed! Its actually broken, but thats why or how it is so easily fixed.

I give a hell of a lot more credit to the comment posters here on Common Dreams than I do to the writers of the articles. At least it seems the comment posters are mostly awake to the fact that OBOMBER is a stinking LIAR, but most if not all the writers of the articles seem to be apologists, naive or maybe they are controlled by the parties and are here to keep the divide alive, to keep the wedge between the so-called left and right, to blame everything on the Republicans and not look at the real problems, the System itself, the Federal Reserve, the printing of DEBT money out of nothing, the perpetual ENDLESS WARS, the Military Industrial Complex, the Government subsidies of the Too BIG To Fail system, the strangle hold of the poor via the supposedly to help the people entitlement programs, the corporate welfare programs in the names of Bailouts and Stimulus packages, and the list goes on and on.

The system is rigged from the inside. The left/right paradigm is used to divide people like classism and racism and all the others.

Until this is understood and corrected, the problems will only continue.

UNITY PROGRESS RESPONDING
The reason that the left-right paradigm is largely meaningless in the US as you say is that the US system has collapsed to the point where that paradigm is beside the point. It's all about survival now, particularly of course for elites. Nuanced and sophisticated left-right discussions are not relevant in a society as damaged as the US one is.

If you want to get perfectionist and technical, you can argue that the left-right paradigm is not yet completely irrelevant in the US and that the economic and political systems are not yet completely collapsed, but all of those things are heavily damaged and hanging by a thread.

In Germany between the two major World Wars, Hitler and the Fascists came to power precisely because that society was damaged to the point where the left-right paradigm became irrelevant. When the left-right paradigm goes away, dictatorship can and very often does follow.

Today though, in many, many other countries, including almost all of the well off ones, the left-right paradigm is still very much alive and well. Needless to say, all truly well off countries feature parties of the left who actually win at least some national-level elections. Also, it should be noted that whether a left-right paradigm exists or not in a nation's political system is one of many tests to determine whether that country is effectively a third world country or not.

For the record, as the US fell apart since 1980, the Republican party moved from right to far right and the Democratic party moved from center or more precisely center right to plain old right. Now they are stuck where they are because the system has collapsed to the point where the elites can't make any big changes or they will be thrown into unemployment and as we all know, unemployment can be basically permanent now and the elites definitely don't want to be permanently unemployed.

In other words, you need a decently functioning economy, a decently functioning political system, and overall a decently functioning society to have a left right paradigm operating. The US has collapsed to the point where you can say it does not have those prerequisites. The US is mostly about looting nowadays, which in non-collapsed countries both the right and the left will oppose and, more importantly, will prevent.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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2010: Two Parties of the Right Fighting it Out and you have no dog in that Fight

2010-02-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

One of the many things Rich doesn't understand is that Democrats in 2010 are way to the right of Democrats of the 1960's. So trying to compare Lyndon Johnson to Harry Reid is comparing apples and oranges. (Please save yourself some typing, I am aware that Lyndon Johnson did some right wing things in his day, but the point is that he was no where near as right wing as are most of the Democrats of 2010.)

When you see the Democrats and Republicans sparring these days, you are looking at two right of center parties fighting it out, nothing more and nothing less. This is why you can forget about, for example, real action for real job creation. All right wing parties are opposed to direct forms of government action for job creation. Whereas Lyndon Johnson was in favor of some direct government job creation.

It should also be noted in this very quick posting that most third world countries are more or less confined to right wing parties for their rosters of parties that can actually win national elections. So this is another one of those little signs that the US has crossed over into third world status.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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I'll Take any of the Three Popular Canadian Parties Over Either of the two American Parties

2010-02-01T12:09:00.000-08:00

There is no need to look at Europe, actually. You can just look at Canada to see how far into right wing loony land the US has gone. All three Canadian political parties are left of both US parties. That is, all three Canadian parties are more pro-worker and pro-common man than both of the US parties.

Just to name a few examples of differences, all three Canadian parties support national health care, public ownership of many utilities, and true public education. All of these things are lost or in the final stages of being lost in the US.

The US starting about 1980 went off the deep end, pure and simple, and now people who can't get a job or who don't have a house are paying the price. And they will continue to pay the price in most cases for the rest of their lives. Through such things as credit ratings, elites are able to transfer responsibility for their failures onto ordinary people.

Both US parties are dragging the country down the drain now. We can only hope, especially if progressives and perhaps libertarian conservatives continue to stubbornly resist unifying into a new party, that if the system completely collapses, that BOTH the Republican and the Democratic parties go into the dustbin of history. At that point, there would be a clean slate for a fresh start.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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Waiting for or at Least Dreaming About Political Evolution in the USA

2010-02-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENTARY

Trylon February 1st, 2010 8:49 am
Well, in the POV of a dual citizen the State of the Union is not Comatose, it is Deceased. The United States has ceased to be governable under the form of government it created in the Constitution. This form envisioned a "loyal opposition", not over-my-dead-body, better-dead-than-liberal/conservative, lock and load obstructionism. That experiment has failed. It is a "late parrot", as John Cleese would say.

We are in a political prison because of imprinting upon a two party system, an imprinting that has no more validity than the stupid refusal of Americans to use two dollar bills. Dual citizenship has exposed me, for 30 years, to the system of parliamentary democracy. It works. Citizens vote for the party that best expresses their view of the correct relationship between the individual and the state. Having done so, they entrust that party to choose their leader. What could save this country is the intelligence to abandon the Presidency. Wake up. State of the Union events show that our Presidents are really evaluated as good or bad kings. We get really ticked off by lousy kingliness.

If the American people get paddles on the government chest fast enough there could be a chance. The shock that is needed is the total dissolution of both the Democratic and Republican political parties, and their replacement with the full range of political viewpoints. If we don't have the sense to do this, we will turn into lurching Zombies. Not a few citizens of other countries feel that's what we already are.

UNITY PROGRESS
Exactly true, the best countries in the world have moved beyond domination by kings and presidents and by those few that fund them and militarily support them. Obama apparently knows all too well that it is his funders and not his voters that support him the most.

Those who have not moved on from presidents and kings are mostly your third world countries and countries that are borderline third world. How ironic, for example, that the results of the American Revolution have been more or less turned upside down. Another big irony is the big role that the Americans had in setting up the Japanese and German governments after World War 2. These governments have over the years proven to be much superior to the American one in the age of huge piles of money and globalism.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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Why the Health Insurance Proposals Suffered an Apparent Demise

2010-01-29T16:53:00.000-08:00

Obama obviously has no allegiance to either those who voted for him or to members of his party. Today he was meeting with Republicans to determine what they will support going forward. Obama and his right wing advisor Emanuel are more concerned with what Republicans think than with what Democrats think. He doesn't care at all about what progressives (who don't have a party) think.

The health insurance deform that was heavily supported by Obama was right wing legislation that, to Obama's surprise, no Republican agreed to support because it wasn't far enough to the right for their extreme tastes. The Republicans may secretly favor the mandate but they don't support, for example, the government regulating the coverage details of private insurance policy contracts.

If passed, these health insurance proposals would hammer the already partially collapsed economy and the totally collapsed labor market and cause additional damage to both. It would be sort of like force feeding someone very sick a huge, multi-dish meal. Whereas single payer is the medicine needed.

The "public option" shrunk to the point where it was just a mockery of the original public option as proposed by Joseph Hacker. And even that one, with over 100 million enrollees, would fail to control costs to the extent necessary, although that one would probably be a little better than nothing.

Why make things more complicated than they are? It's single payer or nothing, especially with a collapsed labor market involved. Democrats, to avoid a total wipe-out in November and due to inability to agree with hard right provisions in the Senate bill, have apparently wisely decided to cut their losses on this effort, which was doomed to failure from the very start. Were these laws to pass, the damage would have been much more extensive. If the legislation passed, the losses would accrue not only to the Democrats but to the economy and the people in it.

In the end, the only strong support for the proposed health insurance laws came from those who would directly benefit the most: from those directly or at least indirectly working in the health related industries. That alone tells you the proposals were not going to help the economy or the health care of the people as a whole. The health sectors are acting as a severe drag on the economy that is left, and quite frankly they need to be hurt a little in the short run if the economy as a whole (including health) is going to be helped in the longer run.

The Democrats should attempt to pass certain components piece by piece. They could catch far right Republicans red handed for voting against the banning of pre-existing condition clauses and the like. That they won’t do that proves that it is not only Obama who favors the Republicans over 1930’s-1970’s grade Democrats, but it is also the current right wing Democratic legislators. Durbin, Hoyer, Pelosi, all of them are essentially Republicans by 1930-1980 standards, not Democrats.

The above was in response to this article.

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Men Who in Obama's Book are too big to Fail

2010-01-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

UNITY PROGRESS

Emanuel, Geithner, and Summers, Bernanke, these are all men who, just like the huge banks, are all too big to fail in the present regime. These are very big, very rich men. Obama is afraid to fire any of them. So Obama is small compared to them, very small.

So we can see that yet another problem with the US is that the President can end up being just a little blip on the radar screen, especially if, like Obama, the president happens to be a wishy washy person who naively thinks that agreement regarding making the economy work for everyone can be reached with people whose only interest is for themselves and their friends to get richer at all costs.

GUEST COMMENT

wawa January 27th, 2010 7:56 pm
It seems that you are the naive one for thinking that Obama is simply wishy-washy, and not an active part of the ongoing conspiracy against us.

UNITY PROGRESS
Not at all, I have repeatedly and since about March been ripping Obama for abandoning basically everyone who voted for him and for being way too far to the right. I've been extremely anti-Obama and I was one of the very first to predict that he will lose in 2012.

However, technically Obama is not fully part of "the conspiracy," as you put it, to destroy the US economy because the economy was essentially wrecked long before Obama even ran for President, and because he has been working mostly in the public sector over the years, whereas advisors such as Geithner and Summers are mostly private sector fortune seekers. If he is part of "the conspiracy," he is a johnny come lately.

It is possible that Obama is simply extremely naive and has not understood just how bad the economy is until perhaps recently. After all, other than in the 1930's, the economy has always bounced back and jobs have always increased after every downturn. Until now.

My point in my short comment just above (which suffered like all short comments from a lack of enough context) was that whether or not Obama is part of "the conspiracy," he suffers from lack of political courage and from political naïveté. His lack of courage is shown by his being afraid to fire anyone.

With regard to the naiveté, When Obama thinks he can make agreements with those who don't really care whether the economy and /or the health care system works or not (with those who definitely are part of “the conspiracy”) and then no agreements emerge, does it really matter whether Obama is conspiratorial or not? He isn't going to be successful even if he is not conspiratorial.

In other words, even if he is not part of "the conspiracy," he might as well be. Whether he is part of "the conspiracy" is technically irrelevant in Obama's case, given the fact that he puts way too much faith in right wing Democrats such as Ben Nelson and in even farther to the right Republicans. He has not understood up to the present day that politicians such as those are obstacles that have to somehow be overcome (for example, by threatening them with prospective assistance to primary challengers) rather than assets that he can work with. The economy and the society as a whole is simply too damaged for the likes of Ben Nelson and Susan Collins to be relevant anymore, other than to the rich of course.

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Quake Recovery in Haiti Versus the Quake Recovery in Italy

2010-01-26T16:53:00.000-08:00

The Italian government official, Guido Bertolaso, who led the country's response to the L'Aquila earthquake, has condemned relief efforts in Haiti as a disorganised "vanity parade", ahead of an international conference on rebuilding the devastated country. Thank you Guido Bertolaso for helping to get the truth out: this recovery effort smells like, well, it smells like a dead body actually.

I was just thinking the other day how the Italian quake was handled so well and yet until now I failed to think of bringing that up to support statements I have already made about the Haitian governments' failings being a major problem for the recovery of Haiti. That the US military will do relatively little good in the recovery effort is so obvious to me that I have seldom mentioned that aspect. (Is there anything left that the US civil government should do that the US military and the contractors associated with it is NOT asked to do anymore?)

You either have a good government that has real capabilities, some of which become far more needed after an earthquake, or you don't. Italy has a decent government with real capabilities and Haiti does not. Haiti is far right and Italy is not. America is closer to Haiti than it is to Italy on this subject. Enough said on that topic for now.

Shame on Italy's foreign minister for indirectly knocking his own countries’ fine earthquake relief job by criticizing Guido Bertolaso's criticism of the Haiti relief.

In the old days the common narrative coming from the right was that governments are bad because they are bureaucratic, which automatically means they are less efficient than other organizations, including private corporations and non-profit organizations (cutely referred to nowadays as NGO's which stands for non government organizations). Like all the other lies about government, this one is today seen for the farce that it is.

As an important side point, it should be noted that many NGO functions and capabilities exist only because right wingers have gutted government to the point where capabilities that need to exist don't exist in government agencies anymore, so they have to be created within the NGOs.

But we see today in general and after this earthquake in particular that most if not all private corporations and many non-profit organizations, as they go into action to fill the void caused by the lack of various important capabilities within the Haitian and the American governments, have burdensome bureaucracy and needless “rules and regulations.” Everything has to be run through the corporate committees and through the corporate chain of command, you know, and this guy, that guy, and that lady over there have to review things and sign off, you know. Every "i" has to be dotted and every "t" has to be crossed.

The vast majority of people who might want to physically go to Haiti to help out are simply not allowed to do so due to one bureaucratic reason or another. If the NGO doesn't stop them, one or more of the governments involved will stoop them. Many corporations and large NGO's today act like little tyrannical governments with nasty bureaucracies.

And of course, in a world where globalism has run amok, for anything more than pocket change to be deployed either by a NGO, by a government, or by both in tandem, there has to be a big flashy meeting featuring a lot of convoluted discussions in a nice place like Montreal among elites who wouldn't know how to dig for a survivor if a shovel hit them on the rear end.

So much for the idea that only government is subject to being partially paralyzed by too much bureaucracy. The most relevant issue is always going to be whether the bureaucracy problem is under control or not, whether government agencies or NGOs are involved. Bureaucracy can be under control, or not, in government, and in non-government organizations. Roughly speaking there are four possibilities:

--NGO bureaucracy out of control
--NGO bureaucracy in control
--Government bureaucracy out of control
--Government bureaucracy in control

The best combo is the last one: a government that avoids needless bureaucratic burdens while having enough capability and reach to deal in an organized and purposeful way with the aftermath a massive catastrophe. This is apparently what Italy enjoyed after their quake.

If as in Haiti you have 1,000 or more NGO's trying to deal with the aftermath, many of them are going to be semi-paralyzed by their inner bureaucracies. Moreover, you can forget about coordinating their actions so that the country as a whole optimizes both the relief and the rebuilding. Instead, with NGOs instead of governments in charge, you can count on a lot of confusion, a lot of inconsistency, and a lot of unequal treatment of various segments of the population, including for example the little detail of some getting adequate food and water after the quake and others not getting it.

Oh, and I am so enthusiastic about Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive supposedly taking charge of things! I'm bubbling over. I'm sure given the dire circumstances that the Americans will loosen up his dog collar and allow him a greater length of chain, laugh out loud.

Then again, maybe not: since Bellerive has a European education that the Americans will not trust, they might keep him on a very short leash despite the circumstances.

And if the Haitian international debt is not cancelled, the whole recovery effort is nothing more than a joke, and in that event people should have the right to have their donations refunded. There isn't going to be any real recovery in Haiti unless the foreign debt they supposedly owe is cancelled.

The above was in response to this article.
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The Failure of the Haitian Economy and the First Steps Needed to Improve It

2010-01-24T16:16:00.000-08:00

In Haiti, agriculture has been damaged:
 Physically by deforestation and the soil damage that results and to a much lesser extent by occasional hurricanes.
 Economically by the forced take downs of import tariffs and other economic factors
 Politically by the lack of progressive laws on land concentration and other political factors.

Nevertheless, any lush tropical country where vegetation grows rapidly and continually but which has agricultural shortcomings can always stop what they have been doing, make a fresh start on agriculture, and eventually reap big rewards. There are countries in Africa that would practically give everything they own for the kind of "pro agriculture" climate that Haiti has. It is absurd that Haiti should have to import anything that grows there.

My main point regarding the Haitian economy is that in general corporations see relatively few opportunities in Haiti where they can get competitive returns as compared to many, many other countries. It is ridiculous to expect that international corporations will be providing a decent living for any more than a very small number of Haitians for at least the next three decades and probably for much longer than that. Any Haitian or anyone else who thinks that international corporations are as a result of the Quake going to now all of a sudden raise Haiti up to the Dominican Republic's level is living in a dream world.

This is precisely why it is even more criminal than you might think that Haiti has a right wing, murderous government that the people don't want foisted on them by the "thanks but no thanks" corporations and by Washington. Haitians need the opposite type of government because that is a prerequisite for them to develop indigenously, with agriculture leading the way.

Note that I am not saying I would support the current Haitian government even if the corporations were investing heavily in Haiti. I am saying that if Haiti is going to move forward they have no choice but to be rid of the current government.

How about some reference for my point about the corporations being in the "thanks but no thanks" mode regarding Haiti? Here you go:

The World Fact Book (Central Intelligence Agency) Foreign Direct Investment in Countries

Wikipedia Foreign Investment Listings

and finally, here is a detailed spreadsheet showing foreign investment by country and by year.

The amount of investment in Haiti is so small that Haiti DOES NOT EVEN SHOW UP in the first two of the foreign investment by country lists above! If anything I am understating the problem, which wouldn't be the first time.

Haiti is a complete and total economic failure because it has been living a complete lie: that foreign investment will come as long as a regressive government eliminates tariffs and eliminates reasonable land distribution and so forth, and as long as the "security situation" is "handled" by a right wing government.

The government has to be replaced as a first and very important step toward discontinuing living the lie.

Given the actual lack of investment despite the government requested by the corporations being imposed on Haiti over and over again for many decades, and despite the specific policies requested by the corporations being imposed, it is completely absurd, obscene, and criminal for Haiti to have the type of government it has.

Even in New Orleans, investment by mega corporations has been far less than what was envisioned in the wet dreams of the far right free market drones. In Haiti, post quake investment will be miniscule, especially if you don't count the cruise ship landing facilities, laugh out loud. You see, in the free market, corporations can and do say "thanks but no thanks" all the time.

When the corporations say no thanks to post-Quake Haiti more so than ever before (they were already mostly investing elsewhere) the relevant questions become:

1. Will Haitians act to remove, curtail, territorially outflank, or at the very least ignore a formerly counterproductive and now irrelevant Haitian government led by Rene Preval and a Prime Minister?

2. Will the US take over from the now crippled Haitian government the roles of oppressor and killer so that those pesky dissenters now running loose can be kept in check? Or will the US say "Why bother oppressing, jailing, and if necessary killing?' in a country where there is no gold, no oil, virtually no Muslims, and very little investment interest among corporations?

3. (The real long shot...) Assuming (1) happens and regardless of whether (2) happens or not, will 2010-2020 Haitians eventually look at being occupied by the American military in roughly the same way as they eventually looked at the French plantation owners in the late 18th century?

But then, realizing that they are totally outgunned in Port-au-Prince, will they concentrate on keeping sweatshops, Haitian oligarchs, and troops out of at least North and Central Haiti?

Haitian history is all about things never working out the way they were supposed to despite foundations being laid, or about never working out in good ways, if you prefer. The Quake’s destruction creates a theoretical opportunity for at least some Haitians to get out of the rotten dynamics of oppression, killing, and economic backwardness that have been powered from both within and outside the country.

In other words, an opportunity has arisen for things to go right for a major change. It would truly be a shock if things went right in Haiti, wouldn't it? It would be sort of a new Quake as big as the first Quake.

The first step is for Haitians who could create a viable government to get out of Port-au-Prince, which is happening. We await signs for another step in the forward direction.

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Just a Little Teensy bit too much Intervention in Haiti: The President Can't get a Passport!

2010-01-24T15:20:00.000-08:00

Wow, the Haitian President can't get a passport to go to Haiti. Sounds like there has been just a wee bit too much foreign intervention and exploitation in Haiti. A President not being able to get a passport so he can go to his own country is just a little over the top, don't you think? Why hasn’t Hillary Clinton taken care of this,? laugh out loud.

So in the wake of gross interference the people of the intervening countries are financially on the hook when disasters strike and the losses are magnified due to the interventions? Apparently so. Technically, earthquake donations can be thought of as payments to offset the extra Quake damage and loss due to the effects of the excessive intervention.

Nice summary here but the author is squeamish about mentioning that Haitian dissenters, who for one thing wanted to have a government much more ready for a Quake, have simply been murdered by their government over the years with many more dissenters imprisoned, at least until the Quake freed them.

Meanwhile, the actual Haitian government installed by foreigners was quite content to range from counterproductive to deadly in normal times, and then was completely irrelevant and worthless after a big Quake.

I actually prefer the irrelevant version to the counterproductive version.

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Obama's Grand Canyon: The Massive Gap Between What he Proposes and What Actually Happens

2010-01-24T15:16:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

Pitch Fork January 24th, 2010 1:02 pm
This is one of the most pathetic pieces I've read in a very long time. It is a good example of the Obama co-dependent mindset that will have his party get a bigger shovel instead of a course correction.

On Wednesday morning, for the first time, I saw Obama on teevee and thought, "Hmmm, maybe there's some potential in this president after all." Why? Because he made a short statement about collecting $5bn in taxes owed by corporations who also do business with the government. It was a concrete, achievable step.

Next day, the president is out talking about reinstalling a firewall between banking and investing. It sounded good. Everywhere I went on the internets people were saying, "It sounds good. Now let's see if he delivers."

The president has a credibility chasm. If he set goals for progress that would help the American people, AND THEN FOLLOWED THROUGH, he could rebuild his credibility and salvage his presidency. But, alas, no. Next day I hear that Obama is back on the campaign trail and bringing back Pouffle, Piffle, whatever his Rove's name is, which is the last thing this president needs and the last thing this country needs.

UNITY PROGRESS
I too see this article as riddled with errors and misconceptions. I was actually fascinated as to how bad it is, at least in my opinion. I see that other comments are ripping into this article; it's always good to see CD comment writers right on the ball.

I nominate this article for Worst CD Article of the Year 2010. But I don't have time to specifically lodge my many disagreements with the article; I am just making a quick response to another comment....

The Obama modus operandi is that all actual budgets, laws and regulations will range from right to hard right, but occasionally, when for example his ratings are tanking even worse than usual, there will be some populist talk and a few populist proposals. But notice that very, very little of what Obama proposes during his populist talk fests ever actually becomes law.

What does become law is going to be very, very small scale. You sitting there will most likely not benefit from anything that actually is made law coming from an Obama populist talk fest.

The above was in response to this article.
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Exactly how bad is the Labor Market?

2010-01-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

Here is the publications page for the "Center for Labor Market Studies". Nice material for anyone keen on finding out exactly how bad things really are.

The above was in response to this article.
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Media Constructs Versus Reality

2010-01-23T15:08:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT ONE

qatzelok January 23rd, 2010 1:11 pm
I think Laura embarrasses herself and pseudo-left-wing media with this show.

"Haiti" isn't a mass media meme that needs to be analyzed in terms of which narratives it helps construct. It's a country of people who have been abused by the colonial thinking and behavior of rich countries and their business elites.

This post-modern gab-a-thon about "comparitive disaster narratives" is an affront to reality and to the rich/poor and broadcaster/viewer divide.

Rich broadcasters - both left and right - tend to present the world in terms of which texts are the most amusing - most stimulating. There are no real people with real needs. The world - from the vantage point of the broadcaster - is made up of abstract political actors with strategic reactions to measure and compare for media points.

UNITY PROGRESS
True, and notice that not one mention was made of how the Haitian government installed from without (repeatedly) has been killing its opponents in substantial numbers.

GUEST COMMENT TWO

redballoon January 24th, 2010 2:09 am
"...a country of people who have been abused by the colonial thinking and behavior of rich countries and their business elites."

This is also a narrative that has been constructed. Narratives are constructed because they contain the meaning of events. Narratives are important because they are the basis of belief and action.

Some call them history; some call them myth. But they drive interpretation and agency.

What the "broadcasters" are presenting is a false narrative, with false meaning, intended to misdirect.

It is entirely appropriate to ask how Haiti and New Orleans are similar or different, and to find disturbing parallels there. It's a little narcissistic: no matter what happens to others anywhere in the world always goes back to Americans worrying about themselves - Can it / Did it happen to us? to me?

What was missing from the discussion was the similarity of the deployment of heavily armed military forces, the application of a military solutions to humanitarian problems, the criminalization of self-help, especially by Blacks, the heavy-handed use of force by those who do not understand or care about the local situation (shooting first and asking questions later), and the treatment of Blacks as vermin. Further parallels will emerge as time goes by- you watch. Ultimately, the basis of the similarities is the issue of how the moneyed elites can enrich themselves even further by intervening. Like New Orleans, Haiti is merely another "opportunity".

The above was in response to this article and video.
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Appearance Versus Reality: Where Exactly is the Competence?

2010-01-22T15:27:00.000-08:00

There was this business associate in Ohio I knew once who Obama reminds me of. He was on the surface professional, competent, and well spoken. So I started doing business with him with a fairly high confidence level. Within a few months, however, it was revealed he was generally incompetent and also in his case dangerously volatile. I had to discontinue working with him; I had no choice in my view.

Obama is like him except that Obama is at least not volatile. As the author of this article states, Obama is showing incompetence in a rather dull, non-volatile way.

Although I am not an expert on personalities, I think that people like this, who appear to be competent but when all is said and done are not very competent, are all too common.

As for this article, it’s very thorough, very accurate, and very well written. Its very, very unfortunate that anyone would be motivated to write this article, but it is Mr. Obama's fault that someone was so motivated.

GUEST COMMENT

Samalabear January 23rd, 2010 3:12 pm
It is my impression, from reading other articles, that Obama's volatility comes out on members of his own party when they disagree with him, if the DeFazio incident is to be believed. He's subtle but vicious and snide. That came across in a couple of his town halls. I'm sure Obama would have no idea that us common, stupid, gullible people caught these "slips," but we did -- because there's a large measure of us that aren't that gullible and do look closely at something or someone who appears "to good to be true."

I have never found Obama warm, convincing or sincere. I remember during the campaign they had a lunch or dinner with Obama thing -- some contest. I remember thinking at that time thinking this is the last person I would want to have an extended conversation with. He leaves me cold.

The above was in response to this article.
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What Needs to Stop in Haiti and What to Hope For

2010-01-22T14:46:00.000-08:00

It seems that since the Revolution in 1804 there has continually been too much foreign intervention in Haiti. There has been for example installation of several dictators by the US, removal of tariffs by the same at the point of a gun, and never ending onerous and impossible to resolve debt burdens. Another constant seems to have been the continual killing of opponents of Haitian dictators by government thugs working for dictators. These are among the primary reasons for the failure of Haiti to achieve even $1,000 per capita income.

All of this needs to stop or Haiti will remain dirt poor indefinitely. No more debts for Haiti, and existing ones need to be renounced. No more dictators and foreign imposed rulers for Haiti, and the existing one should be forced out of the country by Haitians who understand how to travel the road to escaping extreme poverty.

That road out of extreme poverty is all about true freedom, unity, and cooperative and fair economics. Note that Cubans whose government roughly and imperfectly follows these principles are rich compared to Haitians.

Violent opposition by forces of the dictator to progress in Haiti, unfortunately, should and probably will be to one extent or another met with force from those desperate for post-Quake progress. For once, "the other side," the side that has been largely shut out of Haiti for its entire post-colonial history (and this would be the right side) needs to win the war on the streets in Haiti. Let all those murdered by the Haitian government be honored post-mortem.

Post-Quake, you can actually imagine the right side winning for a change in Haiti.

But what about the US? Would the US kill roughly half a million people in response to a mass uprising against the Haitian dictator of the hour? I doubt it; there’s no oil, no gold, and nothing else of major value to the Americans in Haiti anymore, especially now after the Quake. And the international corporations have always been relatively reluctant to invest in Haiti; they will be even more reluctant now.

The Haitian dictatorship is even more useless and counterproductive now than it was before the Quake. It was already useless and counterproductive to everyone including even the corporations and the Americans. Only the dictator and his top cronies benefit from the dictatorship, so what is the point?

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Ultimate Summary of Reasons why the Democrats' new Right Wing Health Insurance Laws do Much More Harm than Good

2010-01-22T02:18:00.000-08:00

As of January 23 2010 there are 25 reasons why the new laws do more harm than good. We expect that eventually there will be at least 40 reasons. As of January 23 2010 this outline of and brief discussion of reasons contains about 4,300 words. We expect that by the time this cruicial report is considered completely done that there will be about 7,000 to 8,000 words. This project is expected to be completed by May 1, 2010. It will be completed regardless of whether or not the proposed law is passed in early 2010.

This date of this post will be changed so as to make sure that it is always the first post that is seen when someone visits Unity Progress. However, since the root post will not be deleted, bookmarks to this particular post will continue to work regardless of how many times the date of the post changes. Eventually, sometime after it is completed in 2010, this post will probably be placed on it's own separate page, and there will be impossible to miss links to it from the main page.

Until this all important post is given it's own page, visitors can scroll down below it to see much shorter new Unity Progress posts that have been made since their last visit. Or they can use the Google blog archive in the right sidebar. Remember, health care is just one of three main topics we like to cover here. The other two are jobs and how the non-right wing people should organize and unify themselves.

The following are reasons why the Democrats' health legislation of 2009-10 will do more harm than good if passed and implemented. There is a basic explanation of each reason, but time and space limitations prevent an exhaustive explanation of most of them. From time to time, we will be adding links to exhaustive explanations of reasons, whether those explanations are by Unity-Progress or by other respected sources such as Physicians for a National Health Program.

The reasons are categorized into the following seven categories:
BAD LEGAL FOUNDATION
BAD POLITICAL FOUNDATION
BAD ECONOMIC FOUNDATION
EXCESSIVE COSTS CONTINUE--INADEQUATE CONTROL OF COSTS
LOOPHOLES THAT INCREASE INSURANCE COMPANY PROFITS AND DENY PEOPLE HEALTH CARE
LACK OF UNIVERSAL AND ADEQUATE ACTUAL HEALTH CARE
UNNECESSARY RESTRICTIONS OF FREEDOM

BAD LEGAL FOUNDATION
---Even if a shot is never fired over this, it is obvious that existing non-compliance with tax laws will be vastly increased over this. Specifically, the motivation for criminals to not report income and/or to not file at all will more than double overnight. The IRS will become much “more hated” than they already are among anti-tax type people.

---The mandate is unconstitutional regardless of whether it is ruled thus or not. At a rock bottom minimum, it violates the spirit of the Constitution and, indeed, it violates the whole purpose of the US revolution and the Constitution that emerged out of it, which was to put an end to taxation and other burdens without representation and without freedom of action and thought. This law creates taxation where regardless of how incompetent they are you can’t vote those who get the tax funds (the insurance executives and employees) out of office.

And obviously, the whole idea behind the Constitution and the Revolution was to expand freedom to the maximum extent possible, whereas this law limits freedom for no compelling or truly valid reason. The reason might be valid if this were the only way to get more people access to health care, but (a)It is obviously not the only way and (b)This bill is inferior to other ways and (c)This bill fails to pass basic cost-benefit hurdles.

BAD POLITICAL FOUNDATION
---People will be legally slaves to health insurance executives or to the penalty division of the IRS, their choice. This is a very fascist oriented bill in many respects. It is also distinctly feudal, with the health insurance executives similar to powerful feudal lords and the people forced to pay them the serfs and the weaker feudal lords who “need protection”.

---The Congress has no excuse for why all the “good things” such as no pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps, no recessions, and so forth, were not already law years and years and years ago. Moreover, obviously, the Democrats could easily pass “the good things” now (right now, this month) without the slavery mandate and you would have no major complaints (and Obama might even be able to win re-election, so if he does lose in 2012, which seems increasingly likely, it will be 100% his fault.)

---You can not trust much of anything that proponents are saying about this; they are out to in their mind save their political futures by ramming through anything they can possibly ram through. Obama and his cronies have lied about literally everything important. He said there would be no mandates when he was campaigning. He claimed that there would be no new taxes on those earning less than $200,000. He claimed he wanted “the public option”. He claimed the process would be deliberative and transparent. He has claimed that the country would go bankrupt if this particular law is not passed by the end of 2009. Obama has been a chronic liar during this entire sordid process.

BAD ECONOMIC FOUNDATION
---Insurance is actually a bad way to do health care, period. Insurance was created to protect people from events that are not supposed to happen at all. Health care is most definitely not something that is not supposed to happen at all, not only because preventive care should be ongoing, but also because unless they die young, people need health care sooner or later, even if it’s just some minor treatments here and there. By contrast, when you buy house insurance, you nevertheless hope and expect that your house will not be burning down or blowing down (and your hope and expectation is often what actually happens: your house never burns down or blows down).

---Although there are some progressive aspects, most notably the expansion of Medicaid, The majority of the taxes, and certainly the mandate itself, which is heavy taxation in disguise, are very, very regressive. Such taxes are a very bad idea in any economy of course, but in a depressed economy, new regressive taxes must be about the worst thing you could possibly do. The financial provisions in this legislation could easily cause another million or more people to lose their jobs. At a minimum, the clock will keep ticking on the 10 years plus and running during which there has been no increase in jobs. It almost goes without saying that the US government would be far, far better off spending money on job creation right now than on subsidizing grossly overpriced and dysfunctional insurance policies.

Additionally, the new taxes will indisputably make the US a high tax country, even though US citizens enjoy only a small fraction of the benefits that other high tax countries get. Obviously, if the threatened laws are implemented, and to the extent they have income and don’t cheat on their taxes, US citizens will going forward be treated worse by their taxation system than people of any other country.

---US companies will continue to be at a major competitive disadvantage versus companies in most other countries if and when this health insurance deform passes. Obviously, you have to lower the actual costs of health care if you want the US companies to be on a level playing field.

---States are being treated harshly by being, along with individuals, given an unfunded mandate for Medicaid expansion. Medicaid is being expanded from being a program limited to poor people in various specific designations to being a program that all very low income people including "generic very low income people" are eligible for. However, following two years of total federal government funding, the states will have to pay various percentages of the cost of the expansion.

As you might expect if you are familiar with the byzantine ways that states interact with federal legislation, states will be treated very unequally based on several characteristics including their pre-existing relative Medicaid eligibility. States that have been most restrictive until now with offering Medicaid to poor residents will get the most federal assistance after all very low income people are eligible, whereas states that have been far more humane will face much lower federal reimbursement. States such as New York, California, and even Arizona will get financially penalized for having expanded Medicaid eligibility years ago, whereas far right, harsh states such as Alabama and Tennessee will receive far more federal assistance over the next decade.

But wait, it gets even worse. The ultimate state fiscal inequality is that Nebraska will pay nothing! To secure the crucial 60th vote from Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, Senate leaders permanently exempted his state from paying to expand Medicaid!

EXCESSIVE COSTS CONTINUE--INADEQUATE CONTROL OF COSTS
---The administrative overhang for health care will be even worse than it is already. There will be no reduction in health insurance company overhead, but now there will be many new government bureaucracies creating many new overheads. The sheer number of bureaucratic components involved in the new laws will inevitably lead to confusion between different bureaucracies as they interact with each other, which will lead to additional waste.

---Health care will remain unaffordable for millions and millions of ordinary families. Anyone who claims this law will be affordable for ordinary families is, whether they know it or not, being a moron, because no one and nothing is talking about the following items which determine whether a very large expense is affordable or not.

In other words, the following are the reasons why there is no way that a scheme like this will ever be affordable for a good percentage of the peasants, public option or not.

1. The federal subsidies are determined only by adjusted gross income (AGI) and without regard to expenses that can not be deducted when AGI is calculated. Some families simply can not afford 20% or more(10% for premiums and 10% or more for deductibles, co-pays, medications, and uncovered items) of income for health care; there are too many other important items on the expense list. Families living in high cost of living areas are especially hurt by the false assumption that 20%-25% of income on health care is reasonable.

2. The subsidies are determined without regard to net worth, liabilities (debts) and debt repayment. A family paying $1,000 or $1,500 a month on student loan and/or credit card debts gets no more subsidy than one paying nothing on student loan and credit card debt. Since the majority of but not all families have debts, and since debt servicing varies radically from one family to another, this issue alone makes the scheme unworkable.

3. In the real world, incomes can fall from whatever they were in year x to next to nothing in year y. Since the subsidies are based on last year's income, some families will face an impossible cash flow problem and will not be able to actually pay the premiums in year y when unemployment or other fiascos strike. So they end up uninsured even though they paid handsomely for some years prior and even though the federal government paid the subsidy to the insurance company.

In the real world, families have sometimes been paying premiums (full or employee share) and sometimes not, depending on whether they are employed or not and what their pay rate is in different years. When you deny that reality and declare that families should every year pay for grossly overpriced health insurance policies, you have completely moved to la la land where money grows on trees, and you have totally messed up the household finances of tens of millions of people.

Yes, it's true, this cumbersome system will result in the US government, using your income tax receipts and money borrowed from China, paying subsidies to insurance companies, but then the people for whom the companies were paid are uninsured because they can't pay their share when they get invoiced. Will the federal government get a refund? I highly, highly doubt it. That money will be down the rat hole.

Not to mention that even if and when the policy is fully paid for, if the family can not afford the deductibles, co-pays, medications, and uncovered items, they are not going to get the actual health care or else they are going to get it and file for bankruptcy! And that means more of your tax money and more of China's money down the rat hole, too.

4. The subsidies are also without regard to number of children, and without regard to whether those children are in college or not. Families with the same adjusted gross income obviously have radically different expenses depending on those and related factors. Some of those expenses incurred for children of all ages are deductible when AGI is calculated but many of them are not.

5. The rest of the world has decided that middle income families should pay no more than about 10% of their income for health care and low income people should pay nothing, while the right wing Americans are saying 20-25% of income for middle and 10% of income for low income families is good.

No, that is not at all good. Sorry, but the days when the rest of the world is wrong and only the Americans are right are over.

---The percentage of income that Americans are induced to pay for health care remains excessive and economically damaging. The percentage of income that Americans will pay for health care under the deform remains in excess of 10% for those who don’t use health care either because they are not sick or because they are sick but can not afford the deductibles, co pays, medications, and/or the non-covered items. So that's 10% for nothing, actually.

For those who are sick, 20-30% of income in total health related payments will be the norm, roughly triple what sick people would pay in Canada, almost all of Europe, and much of Asia for that matter. That is nothing short of extortion of Americans even without a mandate, let alone with one. And again, this means that there will be very little reduction of medical bankruptcy.

Note that this reason is the cousin of the one just above it. The one above gets at real budgets and real cash flows of real people, up to and including people not being able to pay their health insurance invoices they get in the mail. That reason is, in economics jargon, a microeconomics reason why the new laws will fail.

Whereas the reason you just read evokes macroeconomic theory and especially the concept of opportunity cost. This concept actually simultaneously operates at the family and at the national levels. Every dollar spent on health insurance is a dollar that can not be spent on other needed goods and services or on investing in growing the productive capacity of the country. Each dollar can only go to one place, and it is supposed to go to the place that is optimal for the family or the economy as a whole.

Families who are “forced” to overspend on health insurance and health care will be left without enough money for other badly needed things, some of which will in the long run be even more important than certain health expenditures they were induced to make.

At the national level, health insurance and health care in the US are soaking up trillions of dollars that would be much better spent elsewhere. Thus, an economist would say that there is an excessive and sub-optimal opportunity cost being incurred as a result of the dysfunctional US system.

---At least $300 (probably $325-$350) of every $1,000 you pay to the insurance company will continue to not go for yours or anyone else’s health care. It will go for $20 million or more a year insurance executives, it will go to the claims denial departments of the insurance companies, it will go to dividends for shareholders, it will go for that nice big insurance company building with the nice artificial plants in the lobby, it will go for advertising of health insurance, and it will go for other corporate perks and pork. The $625 to $667 remainder of each $1,000 you pay the insurance company will go for health care, but only for the health care that the insurance company, not your doctor, decides should be paid for. Whether you get covered for what your doctor recommends depends on the insurance company, not your doctor and certainly not little old you. If you and your doctor think something should be covered but the insurance company doesn’t, well, you’ll have to start your own insurance company, buddy.

---The cost control (more precisely, the protection from premium increases in excess of general inflation) in this bill is literally trivial. All of the things that would have led to some cost control were stripped, leaving only trivial cost control (that you won’t even notice) and a few window dressing “studies” or “pilot programs” that look to the future. Whereas, the US has already gone off the deep end of the cost curve, and should be slashing and burning health costs, rather than just studying things that might slow the rate of increase in the future. To say the cost control is inadequate in this law is a ridiculous understatement. It’s like your house is burning down and all that you have decided to do is to plan to call your buddy down the street some time next month about borrowing a hose.

LOOPHOLES THAT INCREASE INSURANCE COMPANY PROFITS AND DENY PEOPLE HEATH CARE
---The biggest loophole of all would be that, as is often the case when the US government is giving the store away to private corporations, there will be very little effective regulation of health insurance contracts, including the charges made and paid for those policies. First, since insurance companies are still completely free (and encouraged!) to offer many different policies with complicated differences between them, the difficulty factor for enforcing the few federal level regulations that exist is so high that even if the federal government was doing the enforcement, the regulation would still fail.

The second reason that regulation will fail and the private insurance companies will continue to cheat their customers is that none of the detailed policy provision regulations will be regulated at the federal level. The regulations will be poorly and unevenly enforced on a state by state basis. No state including California has the resources to actually monitor and enforce the limited regulations that do exist, due to the complex differences between policies and due to sheer lack of resources.

The insurance companies will have to regulate themselves (good luck with that).

Adding insult to injury, the insurance company behemoths have been authorized to avoid state regulators that they don't like by changing domicile of their policies; they can choose to be regulated by the state that has the easiest state regulations and/or the most lax enforcement. When and if you buy a policy, it will be regulated by a state’s insurance regulators, but it won’t necessarily be the regulations and regulators of your state! It may be a state with extremely loose regulation as opposed to simply loose regulation. All states have loose regulation, but some have looser regulation than others.

---The insurance companies are still allowed to cap annual payouts, although now they can do so only if the payouts above whatever they think the annual limit should be are considered "non-essential"– non essential to them! The new 80% of premiums must go for health care will rule will reduce the motivation for insurance companies to cap annual payouts, but will hardly eliminate the heavy motivation to do so.

---There is a loophole in the no pre-existing conditions prohibition. If the insurance companies declare fraud, and obviously they will still have wide latitude to do so, someone with a pre-existing condition can still be retroactively denied coverage, regardless of any premiums they have paid.

---Insurance companies will still be able to deny coverage as they wish, so whether you actually get anything back from your premium payments if you get sick remains completely up to the insurance companies, who obviously have ulterior motives to deny your claim. There will be a small reduction in the motivation of insurance companies to deny your claim due to new minimum percentages of premium revenue that they must pay for health care (80-85%), but there will still be a lot of motivation for them to deny your claim.

This is another reason why medical bankruptcies will be going down by a very, very small amount, certainly no more than 20% when everything is factored in.

This reason could be alternatively classified in the “Lack of Actual Universal Care” section, since some people in some situations will decide not to get the care if they know in advance that the insurance company will not pay the claim.

LACK OF UNIVERSAL AND ADEQUATE ACTUAL HEALTH CARE
---The “30 million are going to get health insurance” claim that is being bandied about by the Democrats is very, very misleading. It sounds kind of impressive when looking at the current total number of uninsured, which is roughly 50 million. But it is very unimpressive when you look about six years into the future, which is when the 30 million increase is supposed to take place. The big problem for the Democrats is that they are chasing a swiftly moving target when they try to reduce the total number of uninsured in the inefficient and expensive way they are trying to do it.

This bill does not by any stretch of the imagination constitute a national health program, or even a national health insurance program, for that matter.

For a complete, detailed explanation of this very important reason, see this article.

---These will be millions of people who have insurance policies as mantle piece novelties only, never to be used. Why? Because they can and do pay premiums, but then they can not afford deductibles, co pays, medications, or uncovered items. This problem is often called underinsurance, a problem that will be much, much worse if this is passed. The entire notion of deductibles is poisonous with respect to people seeking necessary screening and treatment early when it does the most good. Deductibles and co pays encourage people instead to put things off until the situation becomes intolerable, by which time it’s often too late.

---Due in part to the fact that insurance is not appropriate for health care, and obviously due to the profit motive, the insurance companies deny claims whenever possible. This constant possibility of claim denial creates a fear factor in the public, where people become afraid to actually seek treatment unless it is obviously an emergency. People not seeking care when they should to be on the safe side defeats the whole purpose of the health care system! Doctors might as well not have gotten all the training and education they got if their patients are going to be extremely reluctant to see them despite having insurance. The bottom line is that the very concept of insurance is bad for health care, so the last thing a country should be doing is subsidizing the purchase of health insurance.

---The number of people dying due to lack of health insurance and due to underinsurance will decline by a small percentage, perhaps by a greater percentage than bankruptcies will, but by less than 33%, I would project (someone’s got to do it). Underinsurance, again, is where the insured can not afford deductibles, co-pays, medications, and/or uncovered items and so he or she decides to not get care. Gambles like that sometimes lead to early, preventable death.

---The percentage of small and medium sized businesses that do not offer their employees a health plan will increase after this is passed, because some companies who have been providing limited policies will not be able to afford to provide their employees the government-mandated package of benefits, because some will decide to wash their hands of the whole mess for ideological and/or anti-bureaucracy reasons, and because some will be cutting this benefit as a result of the lack of true, real economic growth. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that some 10 million workers who currently have employer-provided health care will lose it, but other experts predict that the number could be much higher.

---There are no provisions for increase of supply of health care goods and services. This means that all programs and plans new enrollees come into will be stressed and strained. People will have to in many instances wait longer for care now. There will in fact be some new rationing across the board, and this will be a very serious thing in Medicaid, where already about 40% of physicians refuse to participate. Whereas, many other countries subsidize the training of doctors and nurses to a far greater extent than does the US. For example, huge student loans are still considered bad things in most other countries. Those countries have the capability of rapidly increasing the supply of doctors, hospital beds, and so on, whereas the US does not realistically have this capability.

(This could alternatively be classified in the Bad Economic Foundation section.)

UNNECESSARY RESTRICTIONS OF FREEDOM
---Roughly 2/3 of the public is opposed to the mandates, substantially more than I would have predicted. Internet comments are running at least 90% against the mandate. I have myself been perusing hundreds of such comments at sites of all types and ideological persuasions. The right wing sites feature comments from “patriots” who claim that violence or even revolution is a possibility if this law is passed.

Although I think the right wingers need to be educated on the huge advantages of well run government programs, I do agree with them that more freedom is always preferable to less freedom, and I agree with them that this bill takes freedom away for bad, invalid reasons. I also agree with them that there should be no taxation unless there are extremely good reasons for it, and paying for health insurance is not even close to being an extremely good reason, due to the other ways that health care can (and is around the world) being paid for.

Can't Decide Whether to Abandon the Democrats or Not? You Don't Have to Decide, Actually

2010-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

From the article linked to below:

"Meanwhile, at the grassroots, many progressives are apt to buy into a false choice between capitulating inside the Democratic Party or staying away from it. But there's another option: an inside/outside strategy that involves openly fighting for progressive power within the party while also organizing outside of it."

Not to mention that those who refuse to face the music regarding the total and complete failure of the Democratic party can, until a new party shows it can win at least one federal election, be in two parties at once: the Democratic and the new one: the New Democratic Party or American Party or whatever marketable name is chosen. (Your registration is a meaningless technicality; you can always work within as many parties as you want.)

As to this article as a whole, I agree with all of it.

The above is in response to this article.
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The Fifty Million Stooges

2010-01-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

johnny u January 21st, 2010 2:12 am
It's simple, folks. As soon as the economy teetered in 2008, people began having basic questions and doubts about the form of our capitalist economy. Polls then showed that a sizeable minority of voters under 30 preferred a socialist system.

What to do, then, if you're part of the capitalist elite who hears the faint hoof beats of the proletariat from somewhere out in the distance? Well, invent a white working class icon like a Joe Plumber and get him over to Uncle Rupert to give him a forum for his rants on Fox News. Poor, underachieving, and angry Joe, so typical of those right wingers who rage in the streets, decried redistributionist economics and became hugely popular among latent racists looking for a pretext to slam Obama.

Then the tea teabaggers appeared, not out of nowhere, but through the monied mediation of the elite interests that so cringed at the same sound of the distant hoof beats. The elites sensed a creeping loss in the capitalist faith, so they had to put a brake on real populism. They spent millions to organize average citizens into a venomous street army that demonized any doctrine save laissez-faire capitalism.

The tea partiers achieved their masters' aims by making it seem wrong for people to expect basic economic justice. With carefree abandon, they misused terms like socialism, fascism. dictator, and even communism. Their bombast served to divert the proletariat's mind from the true makers of the current crisis, those who would make war and money without end.

Later, Rupert Murdoch set Fox News after Acorn. Crippling Acorn's funding sources would disempower about the only institution left that can organize the poorest of Americans for their political or economic betterment. The threat of real political power in the hands of the poor when the economic system is trembling is something that Murdoch and his elite can not tolerate.

If Obama had addressed the concerns of these disgruntled folks by using his oratorical skills to put a national spotlight on where the blame belonged, then perhaps some of the unfocussed rage could have been harnessed by a true populist movement. But, Obama allowed the progressive groups that got him elected to wither through neglect, as he knew that cultivating their power after they had served his electoral purpose could check him from becoming the corporate and military headmaster that he probably planned to be all along. For that reason, he has not forged a clear line of demarcation between the forces of greed and militarism that produced the national crises and the progressive ideology that could defeat faux populists and underline a new system of values and laws that would make people hope and work for a better day.

UNITY PROGRESS
This was an extra outstanding exposition that I was glad to organize into paragraphs and to which make a few grammatical corrections. I especially love this description of how and why the "tea partiers" (and Fox News) are just stooges for the rich and powerful. At one time it was the "Three Stooges", but now it's more like the 50 Million Stooges.

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What Besides the Police Force Actually has Real Capabilities in Haiti?

2010-01-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

Again, I repeat that Haitians, particularly the ones who have left Port-au-Prince, should use this opportunity to declare a new Haiti (with a new constitution). If they did this, things in New Haiti or North Haiti or whatever could not possibly be any worse than they have been until now: a gigantic slum overseen by a puppet, killer regime run by Washington and the international corporations and the international financial organizations.

As just one specific example where improvement can come (time for more is totally lacking at the moment) in the Preval dictatorship, how much money was provided for the Health Ministry? Almost nothing, assuming there was a truly functioning Health Ministry in existence at all. How about a Health Ministry in a New Haiti or a North Haiti that actually provides real assistance to people?

Why is it that the only Haitian Government operation up and running to any degree a week or so after the quake was the police force? You may already know the answer: the Preval government was nothing more than a stooge for the US and the corporations and was clearly an enemy of the people of Haiti.

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More on Obama's Mistakes

2010-01-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

I agree with most of this article (see link below) except that I would point out that the health care mess is one of the reasons why the US will not be creating all that many jobs for the foreseeable future. Health care costs have gone off the deep end, to the point where they are harming the economy in general and job creation in particular. Of course, since Obama and the Democrats failed to actually come up with cost reductions in their failed legislation, the fact that they spent a lot of time on health in 2009 was meaningless instead of smart.

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A Doctor of Philosophy Reads Obama the Riot Act

2010-01-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

I agree with this great summary of Obama (see link below), who is either a complete fraud or one of the most incompetent Presidents in the history of the US. In a parliamentary system he would be gone by the end of 2010 at the latest.

Anyone who ever again votes for a Democrat or a Republican is part of the problem. If you can't vote for someone who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, would you at least stay home to avoid making a bad situation worse and to avoid making a fool of yourself?

The above was in response to this article where Doctor of Philosophy Drew Westen reads President Obama the Riot Act.
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The Future of Haiti

2010-01-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

For anyone thinking that Haiti will be made better than before by being developed by the international corporations of the global economic system (and this would include Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) I am afraid that this is simply not going to happen.

Some have pointed out that the Dominican Republic is much better off than Haiti, so they have asked: "Why can't Haiti develop exactly like the D.R. has?" First, it should be noted that the Dominican Republic outside of Santo Domingo, Santiago and a small number of other towns is only marginally less poor than Haiti. The international corporations have preferred to invest (sweatshops and tourism mostly) in Santo Domingo and a few other select spots in D.R. because the D.R. has been much more politically stable than Haiti, and secondarily in some cases for racist reasons. Obviously, in the aftermath of the catastrophe, those corporations are not going to be suddenly more willing to "take a political risk with Haiti." They will be less willing if anything.

When the corporations and the US government make an already volatile Haiti worse by doing such things as demanding the dismantling of tariffs, by then dumping food on a lush tropical country that does not need to import food, and by overthrowing Aristide, and so forth, the resulting economic and political damage serves to intimidate all but the most fearless corporations and small investors from investing in Haiti.

For those who want to invest in a black Caribbean country, Jamaica has been overwhelmingly favored over Haiti, mainly because Jamaica has stubbornly resisted total dismantling of its government and total control by the US and by international corporations. Thus, when people think of going on vacation in an exotic Caribbean country, far, far more think of Jamaica (or Puerto Rico or Dominican Republic) than Haiti. To be blunt, although Haiti might be able to draw more tourists than it has in the past, it will not be able to effectively compete with those established tourist destinations.

The bottom line is that just as some workers in the US end up unemployed indefinitely due to the global economy, some countries indefinitely end up with the short end of the stick in terms of international investment. Obviously, there are many other countries besides Haiti that the international corporations are not rushing into to invest in. In case you have not noticed, not a few people and countries are ruined by this picking and choosing aspect of right wing economics.

So Haiti will have to develop without private international investment even more so than up until now. But Haiti can only do so effectively and efficiently with a non-right wing government that is not subservient to the United States. If they maintain the US dominated government, they will remain at least as dirt poor as up until now.

If this were 200, 100 or even 60 years ago, it would be all but certain or at least quite likely that the Preval government would fall completely, or that at least it would be effectively limited to Port-au-Prince and vicinity, and a new Haitian government based in the north of the country would form. The new government would simply disavow all debts and most other contracts made with foreign entities.

However, since this kind of response is inhibited indirectly by the current global power structure and by certain other features of modern life, it is simply unknown at this time what will happen politically in Haiti. Suffice it to say that Haiti is in uncharted waters in more ways than one.

For a detailed spreadsheet which shows foreign direct investment by country and by year, click here.

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Why and how Creation of a Viable Third Party Needs to be in the Mix

2010-01-19T13:24:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

ezeflyer January 19th, 2010 8:16 pm
"This whole episode proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Democrats need to be replaced by a new party."

What do you do when somebody comes and takes over your house, your family, your belongings and your dog? Do you abandon them or do you fight to get them back?

Why then would you abandon your party when conservatives come and take it over?

UNITY PROGRESS
To add to what I said earlier, non-right people can do both things at once: they can fight to retake the Democratic Party from the conservatives as you call them and they can help create a new party. There is no law you can't have allegiance to two parties at once. You don't know for sure that a new party is going to be viable until actual elections start taking place.

Then, after it is determined whether the new party is viable or not, each person can decide whether to remain in the Democratic Party or switch.

Even in the US system which is inflexible and biased in favor of the majority party, there would obviously be substantial beneficial effects from the interplay between the two parties. The new party would at least presumably prevent the Democrats from again making the blunder they made in 2009: thinking they could settle all the time for laws that make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.

As the NDP party shows in Canada, even a party that never achieves top dog status has continuing, substantial, and beneficial influence on laws and on the economy and so forth. The other two political parties in Canada are always wary of having the NDP call them out if they go too far against ordinary Canadians. They think of the NDP as a dangerous dog that you don't want to have chewing on your leg.

I'm not trying to be all high and mighty about the new party thing at all; we can and must all work together to stop the right wingers from continuing to bring everything to ruination: die hard Democrats, Greens, independents, new party enthusiasts, everyone. If we just agree that we will work together and become unified then the institutional and political stuff will work itself out automatically as time goes by. If we don't agree to unify then we will continue to flounder and continue to be considered inconsequential by the powers that be.

GUEST COMMENT

Naturally January 20th, 2010 5:09 am
I'm to the Left of both parties, and I'm with a solid majority of Americans.

That's the realization I think we must all come to.

According to polls, solid majorities want to get out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce military spending, roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, implement single-payer health care, and protect the environment at all costs. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican party wants any of these things.

Corporate media imposes a near black-out of the majority opinion on all these issues. They pretend the Left/Majority doesn't exist. Instead, they say that those unaffiliated-with-either-party independents are "centrists," for whom the Republicans are too far right, and Democrats are too far left. That's crap.

Case in point, they are now painting the Democratic loss in Massachusetts as a sea change for the Republicans. No, media monkeys, the Democrats lost because the Left/Majority had no one to vote for, so many of them didn't vote. Others held their noses and voted for the Republican specifically to kill Obama's health deform.

So, yes, there's a natural constituency for a progressive-populist party, and there should be such a party. We should be voting for progressive populists (whether they call themselves Independents, Greens or something else) whenever there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Dem and Repub candidates. (I voted for Ralph Nader the last three times, and if a few more of us had done so we would have a solid voting block pulling Obama and the corporate Dems to the Left today.)

UNITY PROGRESS
My party doesn't exist in the US and that is the problem. I want my party to be created and I know for a fact that it could be created and be viable from the get go if it was done right. The Democrats are way too far to the right for me, even though I am in the mainstream by European and other standards. In Europe, I would (and I am more or less guessing because it's impossible to imagine exactly what my positions would be if I was in a much different political landscape) be regarded as basically left in economics but with odd Canadian and American-type overlays.

If you want to fight for the Democrats go for it; I gave up on that a long time ago. I've seen polling showing that about 25% of Democrats are voting for Brown because Obama and the Democrats have provided them with nothing but fear that things will get even worse. Roughly 75% of independents are apparently voting for Brown versus 25% for Coakley.

GUEST COMMENT

independentminded January 19th, 2010 10:46 pm
Bill Maher said that there are presently two political parties here in the United States:

The Conservative Party and the Batsh*t Insane Party.

He's right, imho.

Progressive Blues: An Endless Flow of Rosy Scenarios that Never Come True

2010-01-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: This was written on January 19, just before the returns form the Massachusetts special senate election came in.]

No offense, Jane Hamsher, and I love your site, but don't you and your most popular bloggers ever get tired of coming up with rosy scenarios, none of which ever play out? I mean, get real. And you have been doing this over and over and over again, as the proposals actually on the table have become more and more worse than doing nothing.

Again, no offense, but the scenario in this article seems totally ridiculous to me. It seems to me that the Democrats already fired every bit of deal making ammunition they have just to get the razor thin margins they needed to arrive at the present proposals. They can't do your scenario unless every single one of the legislators who swore they would draw the line somewhere decide to renege on whatever issue they said they would draw the line on: public option, abortion, excise tax, subsidies, what have you.

That despite Obama's chronic right wing proclivities, despite his base-abandoning approach, and despite his general political incompetence the health deform the right wing Democrats really want has gotten as close as it has to passing is a small miracle for them.

It will also be a small miracle for the Democrats if their health insurance deform is lost due to the Republicans' capture of the Kennedy seat, because starting over with a ground up, piece by piece approach is now the only thing the Democrats can do to cut their November losses, which at the moment look to be massive.

This whole episode proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Democrats need to be replaced by a new party. Now I'm off to watch the Massachusetts returns live, with the side benefit that I can get my mind off Haiti for a while. The main benefit is that I get to see my warnings about Obama being way too far to the right that started many months ago validated.

GUEST COMMENT

aremagen January 19th, 2010 10:40 pm
I notice the same "apologist" attitude at FDL. I just left their site and "Scarecrow" earlier this afternoon said it was a "no-brainer" voting for Coakley. Really?

It would be better to vote for someone who will vote for a deformed bill which many on FDL have consistently agreed is a bad bill?

It would be better to stay the course on issues that so many many Democrats and Independents reject?

The "no-brainer" was that this turned out to be an excellent opportunity for Democrats and Independents to do what has been needed for a long time. To fire a shot not across the bow but into the bow.

I eagerly await Captain Obama's much anticipated assessment of damage to his bi-partisan ship.

UNITY PROGRESS
Among dozens of things he should do, firing Rahm Emanuel and any similar advisors would be a wonderful start for President Obama. Emanuel has been proven to be completely and totally wrong about present day politics.

GUEST COMMENT

aremagen January 19th, 2010 11:39 pm
Unfortunately, Emanuel does the work of Obama's contributors while "the great impostor" himself remains under a cloak created by the same Madison Ave. that sells us deodorants that makes us smell nice if we vote for their candidate.

Far Right Haitian Government is Irrelevant and Helpless After the big Quake

2010-01-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

Thousands more are dying long after the quake due to untreated injuries and infections.

After the quake struck the fact that the Haitian government was nothing more than a paper tiger puppet of the US and of the international corporations was exposed more than before. This government was the enemy of the poor prior to the quake, which means it was the enemy of the great majority of the population.

So is it any wonder that the Haitian government is unable to coordinate assistance for the poor after the earthquake? Short of waving a magic wand and creating ministries and/or public agencies that have real capabilities out of thin air, there was no way the far right Haitian government was ever going to be able to coordinate much of anything other than police brutality.

He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

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Haiti: Our Hearts Have Broken for you and we Wish you Sweet Victory

2010-01-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

Free in spirit Haitians, here is your assignment should you choose wisely, proudly, and courageously to accept it:

1. Leave Port-au-Prince and what was pre-earthquake already a dead end economy run by right wing, greedy foreigners and a few local uber rich oligarchs.

2. Stand up a new government in North Haiti with Aristide's party or a brand new party.

3. Declare independence for "New Haiti," make plans for a constitution to be established by the end of 2010.

4. All foreign debts and contracts are cancelled.

5. New Haiti shall be a non-right wing country free of international domination.

A boy can dream, especially since #1 has already come to pass. Haitians are responding to Bill and Hillary Clinton's promises of aid and a better Haiti for all by leaving Port-au-Prince, an obvious and deserved embarrassment for the former President and his wife.

Any American who in the 1990's decided to leave America rather than stay for the aftermath of Clinton's orgy of program cuts and subservience to globalism is today considered to be a genius. I, for one, am hoping that the Haitians leaving Port-au-Prince today will eventually be considered to be geniuses.

Our hearts have broken for you and we wish you sweet victory.

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An Unauthorized Discussion Four Days Before Ted Kennedy's Seat was Lost

2010-01-17T13:36:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: The following was written on January 15, four days before the Massachusetts special senate election.]

UNITY PROGRESS

You never know, stranger things have happened. A better bill and system would eventually result if the Democrat loses this Mass. race. Both parties are corrupt failures that are now generally doing more harm than good.

GUEST COMMENT ONE

Pitch Fork January 15th, 2010 2:36 pm
Exactly. Even the title of this article denies reality: Massachusetts Vote Could Threaten Health Reform

How could a vote threaten what the Obama Party has already killed? There is no healthCARE (title couldn't decide to use insurance or care so they left it out all together) reform. No more than there is banking reform, but rather an institutionalization of bailouts. There has certainly been no reform of World War Permanent, as there has been no reform of spying, torture, elections, or of the Washington-K Street looting spree in even any minor detail. Nada reform to be seen anywhere.

I will pay the 2% tax, which won't amount to much based on income - since I make waaay less than $250K a year O'Promises, promises, and continue to live without health insurance. Thanks for the hope, change, I could believe in and so on and so forth.

GUEST COMMENT TWO

charlesthegreen January 15th, 2010 3:03 pm
Don't Pay the Tax.

Don't buy the insurance, don't pay the penalty. Make them collect it.

Mass Resistance!

You point out another grim reality: the "Mandate" is really a surtax FOR BEING TOO POOR TO BUY MEDICAL INSURANCE, because the penalty is less than the cost of the insurance. Talk about a stab in the back!

UNITY PROGRESS
It is the ultimate regressive tax, probably never before seen in the World outside of slavery and quasi slavery contexts.

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Why the Democrats may Actually be even Worse than the Republicans

2010-01-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: The following was written on January 17, which was two days before the Massachusetts special senate election.]

This senate race in Massachusetts is a scrap between two right wing parties. You have on the one side the Republicans, an ultra right fundamentalist party which truly worships the free market and which wants to maintain right wing economics at all costs, except that since they have demonized the government for decades, they can not fully accept the idea of using the government to implement right wing policies and can not accept the idea at all when it's the Democrats doing the implementing.

On the other side you have the Democrats, who became a true right wing party during the 1980's, which started with Jimmy Carter losing reelection to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and was marked also by Mondale being demolished by Reagan in 1984. The Democrats, who after Mondale's loss became a full scale corporatist, right wing party, today want to implement right wing policies (or at least a mixture of right wing and center-right policies) partly by using the power of government, which means of course that they are flirting with fascism.

Since both parties fundamentally agree that the rich should get richer even if the poor and the middle class have to get poorer as a result, the scrap in Massachusetts is fundamentally about which techniques to use for implementing and maintaining a right wing economy, one that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer for as far as the eye can see. But since the techniques themselves can sometimes seem to be end results, and since the techniques are in fact very different, an illusion is created among the general public that the argument is about results. But when all is said and done, both the Republicans and the Democrats want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, which mathematically means that both of them want the middle class to shrink.

So it is no surprise that Republicans and conservatives who speak of Democrats being "left wing" have, as is so often the case, completely missed the boat. The Democrats are not to my knowledge implementing or trying to implement a single solitary non-right policy that could be described as sweeping or national in scope.

Although there are a few progressive elements that should be passed by themselves, the health insurance laws the Democrats are promoting are, overall, right wing and regressive in character and in effect. It simply is absurd to say "there are a few good things" so we have to put up with the fact that on balance this new health insurance law will make the rich richer and the poor poorer, despite the fact the economy is already ruined due to the rich already being too rich and the poor already being too poor.

Not to mention that there will be more than 50 million without health insurance once again, by 2025 at the latest, even if this law is implemented. All the law does is buy about 15 years of lower uninsured numbers, a gain remarkably small compared with all the costs to achieve it.

Again, what is fooling the public and especially the conservatives is that the Democrats want to use mechanisms that are used in all modern, successful countries for implementing non-right policies to implement right wing policies. Thus, the Democrats are guilty of using powers that are supposed to be used for progressive ends for ultimate objectives that are very right wing indeed.

Requiring the purchase of private health insurance contracts without real cost control and without real regulation is the right wing policy in the bright lights at the moment, but the Democrats have been busy implementing other right wing policies while not being shy about using the powers of government to do so. For example, there are the endless subsidies and other rewards to huge banks, investment houses, and other huge corporations under the guise that those beneficiaries of taxpayer money are too big to fail. (News flash: most non-right people are not opposed to even large private companies going bankrupt when they ruin the economy on a greed binge.) There is also the continued support by Democrats for privatized utilities, schools, media outlets, and more.

In case it isn’t already obvious, I say unequivocally that using the government for implementing right wing policies and for achieving right wing objectives is even worse than going for those objectives while mostly refraining from using the powers of government to insure them. If I lived in Mass. and I was forced to vote for one of the two main parties, I'd vote for Brown on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, non-right people don't really have a dog in this fight; we can only look on as outsiders. The best hope for the non-right at the moment is that gridlock be established between the two right wing parties. Then maybe the non-right can get serious about getting a marketable party going and winning some federal elections.

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Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the International Corporations

2010-01-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

The fact that US progressives are considered as inconsequential little flies on the fringe of the political system is roughly the same thing as the fact that in countries like Haiti only right wing pro international corporation politicians are allowed to govern without being assassinated or deposed (thus for example the Aristide episode). Never think that what goes on in "that dirt poor country" has no corollary in much wealthier countries.

In one of my numerous Internet travels I within the last year stumbled on a Jamaican forum which was dominated by right wing, well off Jamaicans. One thread I looked at was where the right wingers were making light of and belittling Michael Manley, who in the first of his two terms as Jamaican Prime Minister (separated by an interim) during the 1970's dabbled with policies that would rein in the corporations somewhat in favor of ordinary Jamaicans. About 30 years later, all these right wingers could do was make petty fun of Manley's efforts toward and belief in protecting the common people from the ravages of international corporations.

Ha ha ha, that's really funny, someone wanting to help ordinary people, only a small fraction of which in Jamaica (or Haiti) have ever benefitted from the huge corporations that make the right wingers well off. That’s very, very amusing.

Today, the main reasons why Jamaica is somewhat better off than Haiti are:

(a) International corporations (and of course small business people looking for an exotic place to invest) prefer English speaking countries with half way decent infrastructure to a Creole French speaking country with bad infrastructure, so Haiti has simply not gotten all that much investment by the corporations even though financial and trade policies were rammed through in their favor. It seems that the corporations reserve the right to say: "Thanks, but no thanks." And

(b) Jamaica has stubbornly retained a small but functioning public sector which prevents the corporations that operate in Jamaica from achieving total control and domination over the Jamaican government and the Jamaican people. The corporations and the international organizations that do their bidding have to settle for relative control in Jamaica because total control is denied to them there. This prevents Jamaicans from being as dirt poor as Haitians.

The trend over the last 50 years is clear: generally speaking, the more control corporations have over a country, the poorer it is, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, in Cuba, probably the most important long term result of the Revolution of all was that the international corporations have been for over 50 years now very restricted there. Ironically today, corporations are itching to operate without restrictions in Cuba because Cuba has a reasonably good infrastructure and a well educated population. Corporations can only benefit so much from dirt poor wages alone, thus their hesitation with respect to Haiti and other dirt poor countries with poor infrastructure.

Comparing on the one hand the huge corporations' relative reluctance to invest in dirt poor Haiti despite there being no restrictions on their doing so to on the other hand their licking their chops at the thought of investing in Cuba if and when they ever are allowed to, it seems that corporations don't know what is good for them. They would be better off in the long run if they refrained from crushing indigenous governments and industries by pressuring international organizations like the IMF to in turn pressure countries to pass anti people and pro corporate policies.

To see a detailed spreadsheet showing international investment by country, click here.

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It's Definitely Not Your Grandfather's China Anymore

2010-01-16T14:16:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: The following was written on January 14, two days after the massive Haiti Quake.]

GUEST COMMENT ONE

OleManRiver January 14th, 2010 10:10 pm
Okay, I've read through all the postings here so far, and while several mention Cuba for historical comparison, nobody seems to wonder whether they have announced an intention to send in their vaunted medical corps the way they did immediately after Katrina AND WERE TURNED AWAY.

I've been watching all the news available, including World Focus (which DID have a piece this evening on the imperialist history of Haiti and the slave revolt and the reparations), but not a word on potential Cuban aid to Haiti. My bet is that one reason the U.S. is sending in big military ships is to keep the Cubans out.

Of course it's all for our "caring" for our needy neighbors to the south, whom we will not abandon, and besides, them damned Cubans don't speak French!

Won't surprise me one bit if our presence there compounds the disaster. No large-vessel functioning port, an airport with a single functioning strip, roads in the city intended for foot traffic and half of them clogged by fallen debris. No water. No electricity. Hospitals rubble. Why hasn't Nestle arranged an air drop of their fancy bottled water?

Before this is over Haitians will be blamed by the likes of Pat Robertson for cannibalism. But Christian NGO Humanitarian Mercenaries were able to save some. (CUT, to appealing-looking white couple talking to the camera about their experience helping those poor people...)

To paraphrase from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, "Hell, the stench'l probably kill ya."

UNITY PROGRESS
Well according to the official Cuban news (granma.cu) there were about 350 Cuban medical people already in Haiti when the quake struck and more will be sent but how many had apparently not been decided as of late Wednesday or early Thursday.

How many medics and how many countries they are in I don't know but it is fairly well known that Cuba has medical people in many third world countries.

It's so nice to see that other small countries like Iceland and Sweden have flown in assistance very quickly.

GUEST COMMENT TWO

nobodyknown January 14th, 2010 10:28 pm
Cuba sent in medical aid YESTERDAY. It was one of the countries mentioned on Rachael Maddow. China had it's team mobilized within two hours, (don't know if they've actually arrived yet), and even Venezuela beat the US, being second only to the Dominican Republic.....

You are right, this will be used as a political chess game by the time things are finished with, but hopefully the people of Haiti will get the required relief...

BTW, if my memory serves me, the entire Mogadishu issue started when the fine CHRISTIAN people refused to feed the hungry children in Somalia unless they converted from their native religion, even though they had ample food in their compound. The christian compound was stormed and the food taken and the missionaries then asked for US support....

UNITY PROGRESS
I saw that China arrived in 24 hours or less; it's definitely not your grandfather's China anymore.

GUEST COMMENT THREE
DJM January 15th, 2010 2:23 am
I would like to point out what I felt was a very subtle piece of propaganda which I heard numerous times in the coverage of Haiti's trouble..... "Even China is sending a contingent." It was the word "EVEN" that caught my attention, as if it is such a surprise that they would. Yes, the American coverage managed to put a little seed of doubt about China's desire or ability to do something humanitarian (after their own earth quake disaster such a short time ago,I would expect them to understand what is needed). Maybe the talking heads on CBS didn't even realize how condescending it sounded, but my ears have become very sensitized.

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Globalism is a net Loss for Countries Such as Haiti

2010-01-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

Countries such as Haiti are a reminder that the global economy is a failure for the great majority of people in 3rd world countries. Haitians who lived in the 1800's (after slavery ended but long before international corporations started infiltrating) were overall at least as well off as those who lived there since 1970. The lack of electricity and the lack of a few other amenities that had not been invented yet was offset by food and shelter (crude though it was) being virtually free and by everyone being able to easily get employment (mostly in agriculture but there were a few other options).

Fast forward to today, and we see that the global economy as run by the massively rich corporations is all about extracting marginal profit in just the right places and times, but obviously it does not care about people as a whole or about national economies as a whole. So in Haiti for example the international corporations might open a few factories employing 1% of the population, but the other 99% of the population not only does not get the income from the factories but faces higher prices and lesser employment opportunities due to the displacement of domestic agriculture and the displacement of other indigenous industries due to encroachment by those same global corporations. Globalism is a net loss for countries such as Haiti.

GUEST COMMENT

phoenix20 January 14th, 2010 12:17 pm
tremaine: Well said. Ghandighost above spoke (a la Klein's disaster capitalism thesis) of how disasters create extraordinary opportunities for exploitation by the vultures who go to the scenes of disasters. And so they do, and I expect the birds are already circling in search of carrion. But comments like yours are useful in reminding us that there is another opportunity that uniquely occurs with disaster: the opportunity to focus our ever-distracted attention on the real conditions of human beings in this world. I recall many post-Katrina commentaries that found as a "bright spot" in all this tragedy that it laid bare the structural racism in our society in a way that not any number of lectures by learned professors of sociology could do. We had, in other words, a brief shining "learning moment" in which we learned, among other things, that the right wing assault on "government" had succeeded so well that there was no effective government ready at any level (city, state, national) to deal with a human disaster. (Given the "tax revolt" component of the currently popular tea-baggers, I doubt we made the best use of that moment).

Now we have another "opportunity": to see through a new focus on Haiti as a virtual poster child for the neo-liberal destruction of the world an awareness of what-the-hell we having been doing to the rest of the world. I'm not too optimistic that we will do much better with this opportunity than we did with the New Orleans one. But the appearance today of this article and the companion one by Peter Hallward encourages me to "hope" at least that a vigilant and courageous alternative press can pound on the heads of our consciousness to produce some semblance of awakeness.

Cubans in Haiti

2010-01-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the huge Haiti Quake, someone was a little confused about just what Cuban resources were deployed in Haiti and when...
GUEST COMMENT

WTF January 15th, 2010 11:23 am
"...the reality that Cuba already had over 400 doctors posted to Haiti.."

This is wrong, so please do not perpetuate this lie - it makes Progressives look stupid.

The reality is that Cuba had over 400 "emergency workers" in Haiti before the first US C130 landed, as I reported yesterday in another thread.

These workers are doctors, EMTs, crisis workers and S&R dog teams. They are NOT all doctors.

UNITY PROGRESS
Judging from the following, Lindorff is largely but not exactly accurate.

"In that context, he clarified that there are currently "403 Cuban cooperative personnel, 334 of whom are working in the heath sector as doctors and paramedics," in the devastated country."

SOURCE

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Ted Kennedy is Mocked by the Obama-Favored Senate Health Insurance Bill

2010-01-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: The following was written on January 15, which was four days before the Massachusetts special senate election.]

Laugh out loud that Obama is so far to the right and has screwed up so badly that the Massachusetts Senate race is even competitive.

Equally amusing is the mere existence of the theoretical possibility that Obama himself could lose to Sarah Palin in 2012. Mitt Romney, though, is far more likely to be nominated than is Palin and the most likely thing for 2012 is that Romney cruises to a relatively easy win.

I am going to have a major party at my place if Obama loses Ted Kennedy's seat, because Obama's health insurance law is a fraud, makes a mockery of Ted Kennedy and all non-right wing people, and would do much more harm than good.

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Unity Progress Likes the British and Canadian Health Systems More than the German One, and the Death of Utilities

2010-01-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

bernice January 16th, 2010 10:48 am
I think that Massachusetts citizens "praise" for their new system covers only the fact that it's easier to become insured, as well as mandated.

The plan itself, however, is running hundreds of millions of dollars over budget each year. The state has become so strapped that it cut off, I believe, 30,000 LEGAL immigrants from access to the exchange. It is also being sued by one of Boston's largest hospitals because the state's payments to it are so inadequate that it may soon have to stop accepting poor/indigent patients for care, which has been one of its main missions.

The problem with both the MassPlan and the Senate plan is that they were based on a European system (Norway, Switzerland, others) of private insurance that is also employer based and mandated. HOWEVER, those countries consider health care a human right and a common good and treat insurance much as we treat a public utility like an electricity producer. All insurers are non-profits, the government reviews health care costs each year and tells the companies how much they can charge in premiums, it pays premiums for the poor, and forbids all the abuses Americans have suffered from their insurers for decades.

This is why their systems provide universality and a common benefit set (rich and poor all get the same care) while costing at least 40 percent less per capita than we spend while leaving 45 million Americans out of the system.

If our country is so in love with privatization of the common good, it could at least emulate the Norwegians instead of market fundamentalists who have no conception of the public good.

UNITY PROGRESS
As Bernice says, health care is supposed to be like a utility. Whereas in the US, even electricity has in the last 30 years become a profit center rather than a public utility. There are barely any public utilities at all left in the US after 30 years of extreme right wing government.

Prior to right wing dominance of US politics, the concept of "utility" automatically meant a heavily regulated public utility. Today the word "utility" survives, but it doesn't mean what it used to. Today, the word utility refers to just another kind of private enterprise, one that used to be publicly controlled but is now just lightly regulated and can maximize profits partly free of government interference on bahalf of lower income consumers.

I used to be neutral and it is still a debate mostly for wonks and perfectionists, but during the course of my fixation on the "health debate" in the US in 2009 I decided to favor the Canadian-UK model over the Germany model for health care. This is because I have realized (and this theme has been repeated over and over again over the years) that the US is even more screwed up than I thought it was before.

The very concept of insurance does not serve health care well at all, because health care is something that is virtually inevitable and because of the need for ongoing preventitive care, whereas insurance is supposed to be just for disasters and catastrophes.

True, the countries that have private insurance companies make sure those companies don't make any profit on the required policies, and they make sure the policies are fairly good, and they make sure that the insurance companies pay all the claims they are supposed to. But why have a facade of insurance at all?

More and more I think the British, as their empire and as World War 2 came to a close, developed the system most close to perfect. The British in 1948 said: "screw all the window dressing and all the dead end side streets and all the unnecessary bells and whistles: let's just declare health care to be a major utility and as in all modern, reputable countries where major public utilities are provided publicly and available to all citizens, that's the way health care will be in Britain."

Over 60 years later, the British mostly like their system. No one with a truly serious problem waits for health care unless there is a rare foul-up (most of which are caused by the patient). Many English people not only like their system but they actually love their system. No politician in the UK can win an election if he or she talks about dismantling that system. The UK health system is so good that it substantially offsets much more negative aspects of UK society and makes the UK overall a nice place to live.

Given how bad the US system is and how inappropriate the concept of insurance is for health care, I have decided that having the government directly provide the health care as in the UK or at least having it mandate the health care but having it provided by private physicians as in Canada is slightly better than having highly regulated, non-profit insurance companies.

I think that technically, by the way, France is a hybrid between those two approaches.

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Quick Summary of Obama's Failings

2010-01-16T11:34:00.000-08:00

Just to name a small fraction of his failings, Obama has abandoned his supporters, lied about everything with respect to health insurance, is promoting a health overhaul that will do more harm than good (http://www.unity-progress.blogspot.com and http://www.firedoglake.com) has jagged to the right at every single juncture, and has failed to produce more than a trivial number of jobs.

Hell, even George W. Bush once in a blue moon jagged to the left and he did, after all, become very upset when the job market went to hell, whereas with Obama the job market and the collapse of it are just little side things that "responsible people" can circumvent around.

I for one refuse to be fooled, deceived, or made to feel guilty about anything by Obama, who is now on his knees for Massachussetts votes.

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Gridlock is Good When Right Wing is the Only Game in Town

2010-01-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

Sioux Rose

Well, if it plays out the way the writer suggests, and this Republican win means the bill freezes, as the still-born abomination that it is, then I'd say Divine Order has stepped in to attempt to balance the scales. Our leaders have little by little taken meaningful laws and foreclosed on them, while taking what OUGHT be ILLEGAL and rendered it legal under the figleaf endorsement of political whores for hire. When the game gets this bad and ugly, surprise moves, foul balls, and anything to impede alleged "progress," or contining in the current direction may well prove beneficial.

UNITY PROGRESS
Right. Logically, if you have two parties and neither of them are doing much good, the best short term thing is for there to be a gridlock between them so that no more bad laws get passed.

Then the non-right can finally get serious and get a new party started that will be marketable. I personally don't think the Green party is marketable because it is considered by many millions to be mostly a one issue party not fully equipped to govern, but who knows, when people start starving to death, I guess they would vote Green as a last resort.

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Haiti has been Cheated Compared with Even Jamaica and the Dominican Republic

2010-01-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

The Dominican Republic outside of Santo Domingo and perhaps Santiago and a tiny number of other towns is virtually as poor as Haiti has been. The international corporations have preferred to invest (sweatshops and tourism mostly) in Santo Domingo and a few other locations in the Dominican Republic because that country has been much more politically stable than Haiti, and secondarily in some cases for racist reasons. When the US makes an already volatile Haiti worse by intervening and by overthrowing Aristide and so forth, it serves to intimidate all but the most fearless corporations and small investors from investing in Haiti.

For those who want to invest in a black Caribbean country, Jamaica has been overwhelmingly favored over Haiti, mainly because Jamaica has stubbornly resisted total dismantling of its government and total control by the US and by international corporations. Thus, when people think of going on vacation in an exotic Caribbean country, far, far more think of Jamaica (or Puerto Rico or Dominican Republic) than Haiti. To be blunt, although Haiti can draw more tourists than it has in the past, it will not be able to compete with those established tourist destinations.

So Haiti will most likely have to develop without private international investment even more so than up until now. They can only do so with a non-right wing government that is not subservient to the United States. If they maintain that government, they will remain at least as dirt poor as up until now.

See this spreadsheet for a complete country by country breakdown of foreign direct investment. This will prove to you that Haiti has been shortchanged even compared with the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, let alone in comparison with other, far richer countries.

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A Dream Where Haiti is Born Again

2010-01-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

I saw the very first trickle on Thursday and I said to myself that if the Haitians leave Port-au-Prince it will be very good for them and bad for the giant international corporations (otherwise known as giant leaches). If you look at history, migration is one of the most important things that change the future.

Haiti was historically an agricultural country with most people living in the country and in towns and in very small cities. As has already been reported in Common Dreams comments (thanks, folks) the population of Port-au-Prince was artificially ballooned in the last few decades as a result of the huge international corporations forcing (at gunpoint, basically) the Haitians to lower their import tariffs on sugar cane, coffee, and on other agricultural and other goods. After the tariffs were cut to shreds, the local farmers could no longer compete with the huge international agricultural conglomerates which dumped large quantities of food and other items onto the island, so many of those farmers then moved to Port-au-Prince, where a relatively small subset of them obtained employment in sweatshops and where the majority of them became unemployed and dirt poor.

The interesting thing about devastation is that it completely changes both the physical and the economic landscapes. The massive international corporations are now going to be even more reluctant than they already were to invest in the "poorest country in the Western Hemisphere," In fact, they aren't going to be willing to invest much of anything at all for several years.

At the same time, Haitians are going to be even more poor than they already were (yes, poverty can always get worse) and a much greater percentage of them than before will not be able to afford imported food. When you combine the fact that they are moving back to the country with the changed economic reality, you can deduce that the Haitians will reestablish small farms and then simply use them to feed themselves and their immediate neighbors, thus removing themselves from having to buy imported food.

It is in fact absurd for people in a lush tropical country to have to pay money for imported food, and of course it is absurd for anyone to work in a sweatshop, so a silver lining in this catastrophe is that Haitians who now live away from the corporate and Western-dominated Port-au-Prince will enjoy better lives than before.

Finally, it should be noted that both the Cuban Revolution and the original Haitian Revolution, objectively and obviously speaking two of the most successful revolutions in history, were successfully generated from the rural countryside as opposed to from the main towns which were under foreign control to one extent or another. Since history often does repeat itself, this means that there is a distinct possibility that in the coming years Haitians living outside of Port-au-Prince will form a real resistance to the control of Port-au-Prince by international corporations and by right wing foreigners.

It is interesting to note that shortly after the Revolution in the early 1800’s, Haiti was divided into two: north and south. The north was all country and very small towns. In south Haiti, even after the Revolution, there were political and even small military conflicts between those in control of the small city of Port-au-Prince and those living outside of that destined to be destroyed city.

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Bringing Democracy Back: The Formula Used World Wide

2010-01-15T16:57:00.000-08:00

New rule: whenever someone is diagnosing the loss of democracy in the US, would they please also mention the most promising solution: all the big fish in the little ponds shall go into alliance with one another, forming an ocean filled with non-right wing fish. Then that umbrella organization will evolve into a new political party that is too large to be denied ballot access and is too large to be considered a fringe or just a one issue party.

That's not some hypothetical process that might or might not work. That is exactly the process that most non-right parties used to develop into parties that eventually would and still to this day govern in various provinces, states, prefectures, and countries around the world. As one example, right on your border, you have the New Democratic Party in Canada, which in 1961 emerged from a series of unifications of non-right entities. This was the party that brought affordable health care to all Canadian residents.

It can be argued that those who merely write articles, no matter how wonderful they are, but fail to advocate unification, are falling short of the mark. Non-right Americans seem to be in bred not to unify, which will eventually be the death of them.

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Could There be a new Haitian Revolution?

2010-01-15T16:24:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't be surprised if there is another Haitian Revolution resulting from this within the next 20 years. Maybe one or more of the escaped inmates will lead it. Certainly, this is what would happen in centuries gone by, before most everyone became lulled into a false sense of security by the neocons and by the marvels of modern technology.

Here is interesting information about the first one that I have been reading:

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/revolution/revolution.htm

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How Google is Preserving the 1990's Internet Status Quo

2010-01-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

EDITORIAL NOTE: Despite the shortcoming claimed below, Google is overall a very good company that obviously has contributed greatly and outstandingly to the Internet and to the economy as a whole. The Google blogging platform, of which this site is a part, is by a good margin the best such platform in existence. Google Blogger will host your blog for free, and yet the customization and publishing capabilities are second to none. Google Blogger is both the most powerful and the easiest to use blogging system.

I think that in general Google is virtually a perfect company, with this search engine flaw described below (which has only relatively recently become a significant problem) the only substantial flaw I am aware of. Moreover, due to the sheer number of sites, it may not be possible for Google to solve the problem described below without creating new problems for the huge number of people who depend on or who prefer the older, high traffic sites.

If changing the main search engine is impossible, what I would most like to see is for Google to develop an alternative search engine where newer sites with great content but with few links to them would come up high in the search results.

Someone was very dubious about an article at Common Dreams (link at the bottom)....

GUEST COMMENT

katsteevns January 14th, 2010 6:49 pm
"the vast majority of American's are totally clueless, including the author of this article"

Does Common Dreams let just anyone publish? How does that work?

UNITY PROGRESS
The internet and all neighborhoods in it (including the progressive hood) is basically one giant, multi-division good old boy network. Most of the sites which get significant traffic are ones that started in the 1990's. Back then, everyone used to link to everyone else.

Today the 1990's sites generally do not link to new sites although there are a few exceptions. For one thing, the sheer explosion of sites since 2000 make it impractical for the high traffic, established 1990's sites to link to newer sites without hopelessly cluttering their page. Moreover, why should the established sites make it easier for new sites to encroach on their traffic by linking to them? They would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did link to newer sites.

Google decided back then (and has never changed) to use number of links to a site as the primary determinant of how high in search results a site will be. Sites started since 2000 and especially since 2005 don't get a competitive number of links to them, so they generally do not appear anywhere in the first few pages of search results. So then they don't get much traffic (unless the author is very well known).

Google’s search engine results have become stale because year after year they primarily preserve the traffic status quo. Every year, mostly the same 1990's vintage sites appear on the first page of search results, whereas sites started after 2000 do not. With the Google system, every year it becomes closer and closer to impossible for a brand new site to gain traffic, unless the authors of it are very well known.

What all this means is that mostly authors connected with sites started in the 1990's are published at Common Dreams (along with famous authors not necessarily connected with any single site). The universe of authors in this category is ultimately limited. Authors connected with newer sites and/or with sites with little traffic are not published by most progressive sites. The most notable exception is opednews.com, which will publish authors who are not published elsewhere.

GUEST COMMENT TWO

qatzelok January 15th, 2010 10:23 am
Thank you for explaining how this pollyannish article made it onto Common Dreams.

How is it possible to write an article about "How America can help" when its military is still there fighting against socialism?

GUEST COMMENT THREE (SAME AUTHOR AS GUEST COMMENT ONE)

katsteevns January 14th, 2010 9:17 pm
Thank you for that ! I thought searches were brought up according to the date they were posted, but maybe I am wrong.

UNITY PROGRESS
Google recently installed options for search results, but they are misleading and don't do what you might think they do. If after you do a search you then click "show options" and then you click "latest," you get only one page of results: just 10 items. It seems virtually inevitable that even in those mimimal listings there is again heavy bias toward the 1990's sites, although technically the bias would be a little less due to the strict time ordering.

But new sites and sites that don't get much traffic most likely don't ever appear even on the latest results search, although I am going to investigate that.

If within the time options you click "last 24 hours" or one of the other short time frames, the results are indeed postings from the last 24 hours and there are multiple pages, but (a) they are not in time order but are in "Google priority order" and (b) there is definitely the same heavy bias toward the 1990's vintage sites that you see in the ordinary results.

There is a separate Google blog search where you can order results by time and where there is far less bias toward older sites. But the Google blog search is limited to true blogs only, and for that reason and because it is not shown on the main Google page it is used by only a very, very small fraction of those who use the regular search.

Someone needs to make a search engine that is biased toward new sites to offer a real alternative to the increasingly stale Google results.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

Will Some of the Corporations Reduce Operations in Haiti?

2010-01-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

medina January 14th, 2010 8:40 pm
I would like to add: Do NOT remove the children with the Operation Peter Pan idea Catholic Charities would like to use. This is abusive to the children to take them from their culture, community, and families and give their island away to capitalism!

UNITY PROGRESS
Maybe the devastation will be so bad that many of the corporations will close up shop and then Haiti will be allowed to reestablish their own industries and agriculture. Unlike countries subject to drought, Haiti is lush and could reestablish very profitable agriculture for export if they could raise import tariffs and slip the noose of the controlling international agricultural corporations and return to small farming. There was one report today that some Hatians were literally walking away from Port-au-Prince and back to the countryside.

GUEST COMMENT

I believe Hatian economy existed by subsistance farming and small local business. It was farming for export that depleted thier resources and to a very large extent thier way of life.

UNITY PROGRESS
Yes, you are right, and that Haiti needs to return to small farms as opposed to corporate mega farms was what I meant.

The export aspect is optional and I mean small scale exporting done by Haitian companies that have taken back control of agriculture from international corporations, which are only interested in large scale exporting. Having international corporations in charge of agriculture in Haiti and deciding how much will be exported (way too much) is what caused and will continue to cause the damage if those corporations stick it out despite the devastation, something which at the moment is in at least a little bit of doubt.

As an example of huge corporations closing up shop when times get tough, consider that after the financial collapse that they themselves caused, the international financial corporations pulled out of Iceland in favor of less devastated environs.

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The Entire Obama Presidency Summed up in one Short Sentence

2010-01-15T10:34:00.000-08:00

"Instead, what Mr. Obama offered was a bait-and-switch."

The entire presidency of Obama summed up in a short sentence.

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The Root Cause of Haiti's Poverty and of US Problems is one and the Same

2010-01-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

Get closer to the root cause of Haiti being dirt poor, which is that huge international corporations want everything set up according to exactly what they need for their profit making convenience in countries such as Haiti. Huge corporations don't want to have to "get their hands dirty" by competing in a free market with indigenous industries in countries like Haiti. They want those indigenous industries hammered and brought to heel if they are going to set up factories and other operations in countries such as Haiti.

Only on the surface have international trade and financial policies kept Haiti dirt poor. But those policies are dictated by the huge international corporations to the World Bank and the like and to the governments of wealthy countries. These corporations, in turn, are dictatorially run by obscenely compensated executives. So actually, the real, primary root cause of Haiti being dirt poor is the out of control greed of corporate executives of huge corporations with international reach and that of large shareholders of those corporations.

Similarly, these parties are the primary root cause of the failure of the US employment market and of the failure of the US health system. It's a small world after all.

The above was in response to this article.

The Six O'Clock Express to the Depths of Hell

2010-01-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich correctly and completely explains why Obama's tax is bad to say the least.

Lord Obama is a dream for those who want the US to be routed in the international competition (fostered by the huge corporate players in the global economy) for scarce resources and for economic status and prestige. Obama is apparently moving up the day when the dollar loses its status as international reserve currency, although the greenback may nevertheless hang on for a few more decades even with the damage wrought by Obama and his cronies at the Fed and in the banking industry. But be warned that exactly how many decades remains completely unknown: it could be as few as two more decades or as many as six more decades.

But thanks in part to Obama's insistence on the most right wing economic policy possible at every juncture, the prospects of countries like China, Germany, Japan, and even Brazil are looking fairly strong. Are there any major countries that have worse prospects than the US anymore?

It really seems that everything Obama pushes for is economically inferior to the alternative. Think of Obama as the 6 o'clock express to the depths of economic hell.

For those who at this point want the health insurance deform to be considered a total failure as soon as possible, and to absolutely, positively guarantee that it eventually will be considered a total failure, we do have allies in Lord Obama and his sidekick, Lord Emanuel.

The above was in response to this article.

An Unauthorized Discussion of Economics and Economics Statistics

2010-01-12T16:45:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT NUMBER ONE

drosera January 11th, 2010 12:49 pm
What's "money multiplier"? What's "MZM money supply"? What's the "Case-Shiller Index"? "Core PCE"? Somebody step forward and translate this jargon, please!

GUEST NUMBER TWO

squidd January 11th, 2010 2:14 pm
"money multiplier" - a $1 of spending... will produce more than $1 in the economy... if i give you $1... you go to the 7-11 and buy coffee... 7-11 pays it's employees who rang it up... the 7-11 suppliers sold 7-11 coffee... cups... filters... then the 7-11 and coffee suppliers employees go out an buy something... and that original $1 gets 'recycled' several times... right now... i think the "multiplier" effect is $1.75... in the real economy... that's why in recession/deprssions... govt spending... the only ones who can print money... each $1 spent actually spends more than $1... now... taxes come back to the govt... and govt services can be provided... that's a simplistic explanation

"Case-Shiller" is the gold standard of housing trends...

you need to try tor read more... like Thom Hartmann... Matt Tabbai... Mike Whitney... Pam Martens... Dean Baker... they all have articles around the web... Dean Baker writes at http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press...

and these folks educate as they expose... you have to get motivated... these terms are deliberately being used to bamboozle people...

like the "U6" unemployment rate... back in the 80's and 90's reagan AND clinton "jiggered" the numbers to remove underemployed and people unemployed more than a year... to make the real unemployment numbers look better... so unemployment will "go down"... just by the number of people unemployed more than a year dropping off the rolls every month... they can look good by DOING NOTHING...

NO ONE is going to explain this FOR you... and that's what they count on... it'll be a little confusing at first... but you'll pick it up in no time...

there was a time... i didn't know what "points" on a mortgage were... today... i can explain CDO's... MBS's... and several other obscure acronyms that caused 1/2 my housing value to go poof...

GUEST NUMBER THREE

drosera January 11th, 2010 8:30 pm
Thanks, Squidd, for your explanation of the "multiplier effect." I guess the multiplier effect goes under 1.00 if the government is buying "toxic assets." What they buy isn't worth what they are paying. And that, I suppose, is why bailing out the banks isn't as good as getting money to people directly. That money--what goes to people--gets recycled. Thanks for the lesson.

GUEST NUMBER FOUR
AGG January 11th, 2010 8:40 pm

Well said.
And let's not forget the CPI. Williams at Shadow statistics has shown how the Consumer Price Index was gamed to under represent inflation for the past 30 years or more. This threw a wrench in all the labor contracts that adjusted wages using the CPI, not to mention pensions and social security. Finally the effect on the government's poverty line amount was to move it lower and lower (even as the figure gradually rises in nominal dollars) due to the gamed CPI. Rather than correct this crap, they are allowing poverty level "multiples" to qualify for certain programs. It's just one lie after another.

The main culprit here is the master criminal, Alan Greenspan.

UNITY-PROGRESS COMMENT
Don't waste your time with wildly inaccurate US unemployment numbers. Use the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers and the latest population numbers of your choice and figure out for yourself and according to your standards what the real unemployment rate is.

GUEST COMMENT NUMBER FIVE

TheProf January 12th, 2010 1:43 am
According to TrimTabs the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects the most reliable number but doesn't use it, that is the withholding from salaries submitted to the IRS and reported daily. Its been on a continually decline since the Depression started.

GUEST COMMENT NUMBER SIX

squidd January 16th, 2010 12:18 pm
Thanks! "professor"... too simple... like duh... that makes perfect sense... daily tracking of witholding...

Ross Perot would say often.. a strong vibrant economy is millions and millions of workers and their tax dollars going into the treasury...

guess the "new pardigm" turns that whole thing on it's head... now that labor can be arbitraged... and they've perfected raiding the worker classes' assets... pensions... bennys... 401(k)'s... housing... health care costs... hmmm... what's left?

oops... forgot about those pesky socialist programs... social security and medicare...

ahhhh... but the night's still young...

The above frightfully rebellious discussion of economics was in response to this article.

Obama's Goals and Pledges Were no Where to be Found in the Proposed Health Insurance Reform

2010-01-12T15:55:00.000-08:00

GREAT AND ON POINT GUEST COMMENTARY

raydelcamino January 12th, 2010 11:02 am
Walker needs to make his thesis more explicit by stating that not only does the Senate Bill not advance health care beyond the most recent step forward (Medicare in 1965), the Senate Bill launches health care "reform" on a trajectory that prevents it from ever moving forward (unless your definition of forward is increased insurance and drug company profits), or achieving any of the eight goals Obama articulated when he took office.

The Senate Bill fails to meet ANY of Obama's eight health care "reform" goals:

1) Guarantee Choice
2) Make insurance affordable
3) Protect families' financial health
4) Invest in prevention and wellness
5) Aim for universality
6) provide portabality of coverage
7) Improve patient safety and quality care
8) Maintain long term fiscal sustainability

UNITY-PROGRESS COMMENT
Plus it violates his no new taxes for those earning less than $200,000 pledge.

GREAT AND ON POINT GUEST COMMENTARY

The huge new sin taxes on tobacco already did that.Tobacco was taxed at I believe $25.00 a pound on rolling tobacco,the effect doubled the price.Brilliant!let the poorest addicts in society pay for S-Chip and other unfunded child health care.If no one can afford to smoke a huge public health menace is nipped in the bud.
cough wheeze gasp@#$%! peace

The above was in response to this article.

The Looting Class and the Imploding Class

2010-01-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

There is no need for speculation on what would happen if the US imploded, because it obviously has imploded as far as the great majority of the population is concerned. True, some of the elites have implemented a vigorous looting program for themselves, by for example paying themselves massive salaries and bonuses even after the financial collapse and as another example by refusing to lend to credit-worthy businesses even after receiving huge public bailouts. And elites can pretend that the US has not imploded if they ignore the bottom 90% of the population. But unless you are in the looting class you are in the imploding class.

Meanwhile, Europe's far more sophisticated and humane political and economic systems have to one extent or another insulated their common man populations from being devastated by the financial collapse and from the ongoing looting. For example, many European countries have unemployment rates that are less than half the real unemployment rate in the States, not to mention that the involuntarily unemployed in Europe get subsistence so that they are living in ordinary houses and apartments rather than in shelters, cars, tents, and under bridges.

The above was in response to this article.

Good News From Europe

2010-01-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

FROM A GUEST

Not this lame "Europeans aren't having any babies meme" again. It varies a lot from country to country, but most of Europe is doing fine. Sweden, France and Germany have all experienced major increases in fertility over the past few years, in part thanks to pro-family programs that don't penalize couples for having kids and that make health care and education affordable. (You don't need a trust fund to send a kid to university in Germany-- the tuition is mostly taken care of if a student is qualified enough.) Although Italy, Poland and Spain indeed have rock-bottom fertility, most of the rest of the Continent has stabilized at a higher rate.

No, they're not at replacement fertility, but Europe's managed to stabilize its population anyway simply by importing co-ethnic Europeans from other countries, especially from Russia and the new eastern EU states (i.e., Eastern Europe demographically subsidizing Western Europe). There are also plenty of South Americans, North Americans (lots of USAers especially to Germany) and Australians who move to Europe every year if they have e.g. Italian-American or German-American roots, which also helps to maintain the population. Besides, world population has to stabilize at some point, and Europe is smart enough to hover at the decent level they're currently at, and thus avoid this idiotic growth-at-all-costs fallacy that's overwhelming the infrastructure and housing in US cities.

And no, there isn't any "Muslim takeover" in Europe. I worked for 4 years in Europe (mostly France and Belgium) and just returned to the States in late 2009, and when actual professionals do the surveys in places like France (even allowing for self-reporting, where a Muslim can profess a Muslim faith even without actively practicing it), the Muslim population is much lower than the scaremongers always bleat about-- more like 2-3% at most (probably lower) than 9-10%.

What the-sky-is-falling crowd always seems to forget, is that an immigrant to France from Algeria, Syria or Lebanon is NOT necessarily a Muslim. Those countries historically have had millions of Christians and Jews, and so millions of the North Africans and Middle Easterners coming to France have been Christian and Jewish (often even ethnic French themselves who'd settled there in the 1800's). Same with Germany-- Turkey used to have millions of (usually Orthodox) Christians, but that number has dwindled so much in recent decades in part because so many hundreds of thousands have come to settle in Germany. (And the Turks are dwarfed by the Poles and Russians anyway, who come in much higher numbers.) Same with the Egyptian Copts going to France and Germany. The problem is that some fool looked at the immigration numbers from North Africa and the Mideast to France, and just assumed that 6 million Muslims had poured into the Paris suburbs. They didn't even bother to check if those immigrants were actually Muslim to begin with.

The one exception is Britain, which really is undergoing a massive demographic transformation due to the flood of Middle Easterners (from e.g. Yemen), South Asians (Pakistan) and Africans from the ex-Commonwealth and other nations, millions of whom have indeed been Muslim. But this is not true for the rest of Europe. Americans too often stupidly project our own demographic change onto the rest of the Western world, but it's just not the case. The USA, it's true, will be majority non-White by about 2030-2040 or so, with the massive influx of mainly Latinos (not to mention our own large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants, like Britain). Same with Australia and their Indonesian/Pakistani/Sudanese influxes, and of course with Britain as pointed out. But these three countries are the marked exceptions in the Western world-- most of the West including all of Europe outside the UK, is very much stabilizing their population and staying European in terms of their people.

UNITY PROGRESS
Thanks for that valuable and useful information.

The above was in response to this article about Europe.

Looting Like There is no Tomorrow

2010-01-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

Historically there has always been a lot of looting by the "lords of the manor" just before, during, and just after economies collapse. After these looting parties, all there is left is the hard reality of the collapse, including the economic miseries and the sheer lack of economic opportunities the collapse entails.

Since the elitists know the post collapse economic void is coming, they enthusiastically loot as much as possible until the system is "looted out". There is a lot to loot in the States. Looting is what the Goldman Sachs and other elite crews are doing now: in fact they are looting like there is no tomorrow.

They say there is some logic behind almost all crime. The looting going on now is logical because the alternative for the elites is trying to make do without a lot of loot in the post collapse dark age, when loot will be at a big premium.

The above was in response to this article.

Obama Thinks His Voters Will be Satisfied with Cake so he tells them to eat it

2010-01-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

What about liberal angst about no jobs in 10+ years and about one and a half million people filing bankruptcy every year and about the millions living in shelters, cars, tents, and under bridges? Does Obama think that angst about all of that will fade away too? Is he really that much of a "let them eat cake," out of touch, right wing kind of guy?

Why yes, I do believe he is.

The above was in response to this article.

The Main Purpose of the "Free Market" Economy is to "Connect Greedy Rich People to Other People's Money"

2010-01-08T07:41:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

Why not? Because unregulated "free" market capitalism is extremely efficient.

Extremely efficient at connecting greedy rich people to other people's money.

What it's not so efficient at is connecting people who are willing to work with jobs that need to be done.

This is because "free" market capitalism can't easily put a dollar value on helping sick people or cleaning up the environment or educating children or any other social good. Since the value of these things is difficult to measure in dollars, the business jerks take the lazy way out and give them a value of zero.

They pose as Captains of Industry, Vigilant Stewards of Wealth and Wise Forecasters of the Market, but all they really are is IN THE WAY.

UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTARY
Very true and well stated.

Until you realize that the "free market" is never really free, and works only in limited ways and in limited circumstances, your economy is never going to amount to much by 21st century standards.

The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment in response were in response to this article at Common Dreams.

An Alternative to Slash and Burn Medicine

2010-01-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

Thinking outside the box, this idea came to me. If anyone would like to add feedback, it would be appreciated.

Years ago when I read, "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans" the book made clear that people with about $100,000 in assets could start their own savings and loans knowing it would be federally insured. (Lots of unscrupulous sorts in fact did so and that led to the S & L Debacle.)

My question is what makes for a legitimate insurance company? What parameters must be hypothetically met?

The reason I raise that question is, what is to stop a large group of conscientious persons from creating their own insurance company/pool?

Today I enjoyed the once-a-month massage I treat myself to as part of MY health care plan. I've always felt that not smoking, eating a light diet with fish and no meat, getting exercise would constitute MY health plan. I know there are thousands, if not millions, who work to maintain good health and would NOT want the types of options this FORCED insurance would entail.

So the next thought that came to me was could some kind of umbrella group form consisting of: massage therapists, acupuncturists, nutritional therapists (particularly those oriented towards whole foods), natural-cure oriented doctors, chiropractors, etc and FOUND a holistic INSURANCE company. People would pay monthly dues and receive reduced costs on regularly scheduled "tune-ups." And then perhaps their insurance would also include an OPTIONAL tier that paid for catastrophic events.

I wonder if thousands or maybe millions would be interested in such a plan, more or less one that was based on "preventative strategies" with benefits? And I wonder what would make it a legitimate "insurer," one that offered treatment options outside the typical slash and burn that defines much of modern medicine as practiced in America today (given it also follows the Mars rules orientation).

I read that there were thousands of health insurance companies, and I also read that many people would be forced to purchase policies through them that would be essentially worthless. Is the government going to monitor each one and stamp it for viability or quality control in a business environment that already chases profit at the expense of allocating legitimate access to medical treatments for far too many?

There is a sizable portion of the US population that shops at holistic markets, eat organic/whole foods, takes preventative health care very seriously, and probably could constitute a large enough pool for such a creative, cutting edge form of insurance.

Anyone have any ideas? Heck, maybe OUR forum could provide the launch pad...

UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTARY
Well it’s a very good idea and I myself am very afraid of the slash and burn health treatments as you called them. There are bad incentives in the system for doctors to over test, over treat, and over medicate their patients.

Think of how great your idea would be in conjunction with single payer that you would automatically have as a citizen if we could defeat both the corporate Republicans and the corporate Democrats.

This is what the rest of the world enjoys: some variation of single payer basic coverage for everyone is the foundation, and then people are completely free to add on to that whatever else they want from the private profit making and the private non-profit sectors. And they are free within the foundation system to seek practitioners who forswear slash and burn medicine. And they are free to never see a doctor if they so choose. This is part of the good life that has been achieved only recently, historically speaking, in many countries throughout the world.

The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment in response were motivated by this article at Common Dreams.

Several Reports About Physicians Refusing to be Slaves of the Health Insurance Industry

2010-01-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Obama has lied about just about everything in the deform. Even for a politician, the number of lies Obama and his spokesmen tell is staggering.

Look what I found just now by sheer accident: an article reporting that physicians are more and more quitting and/or closing their private practices and instead becoming salaried physicians working directly for the government. The article reports that they are doing so due to too many hassles from the insurance companies and due to excessive malpractice insurance premiums (it seems that they are victims of a "one-two knockout punch" by the insurance industry as a whole.):

So whether or not these doctors are too right wing to understand that single payer is the only way to go, at least they are smart enough to remove themselves from the huge burdens imposed on them by the useless insurance industry.

Other articles with similar themes at CNN:

Doctors quitting the profession completely:

Doctors refusing to accept insurance payments:

(The related article website application is a nice one, isn't it?)

Finally, there is this one warning about how Medicare cuts could be devastating in 2010:

You know, actually it is an overstatement to say that the mainstream media never has anything useful to read.

The above was in response to this article.

Even the Government Thinks the Mandate will Very Possibly go the way of the Dodo Bird

2010-01-06T07:32:00.000-08:00

I'm just glad there is at least one non-right wing place on the internet where there is overwhelming opposition to the mandate, which without public control of health care is quite literally fascism. The opposition at other non-right places is more nuanced and less overwhelming. But both the right and the hard right are furious, and overall opinion against the mandate is surprisingly high, in excess of 60%.

All of those in favor of the law are (I assume unwittingly) showing their ignorance of both macroeconomics and microeconomics. A book could be written to explain why and how this law violates laws of economics and why and how it will make things worse.

True, some people (besides the insurance company and health industry stakeholders) will benefit to a limited extent, but many more will be harmed by the new laws, which among their dozens of faults do NOT actually create a national health insurance or a national health care system or program.

With the little time I have here I want to mention a curious and very disturbing fact that I discovered which has flown under the radar: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has officially predicted that only about 45-50% of those without insurance now and who will still not be eligible for Medicaid will comply with the mandate and buy the insurance. The rest will still be without insurance.

Thinking that CBO might be unrealistically high on their compliance estimate, I was actually surprised when I crunched numbers to deduce what the CBO compliance estimate actually is based on their publicly revealed still uninsured even after "reform" number, which is about 22 million one year after "reform" takes affect (2015). (I do not have the time these days to actually slog through CBO reports and I half thought they would not openly have what I was after in their reports anyway, so I simply did a quick economics projection and deduced what they are saying about compliance.)

So another reason this is an unprecedentedly bad law is that the government knows in advance that there will be mass non-compliance. I was thinking the government would be predicting a higher compliance percentage than me, but this is apparently not the case. It seems that roughly half of people who are supposed to comply with the mandate are not going to, according to the government itself. I mean come on, you have to do better than that, Democrats, if you want to with a straight face say you even tried to provide health care to the masses.

With sky high non-compliance numbers like those, the whole thing looks like it will devolve into an episode similar to what happened with prohibition. Whether the Republicans will actually repeal the mandate within the next 5-10 years, however, can not at the moment be predicted with any confidence one way or the other. But it does seem certain that the mandate with no "public option" at all and with totally lacking and ineffective cost controls and regulation will go the way of the dodo bird in 15-20 years and within 25 years at the very most. Within that time, the mandate will be dead either officially or, at the very least, unofficially, from any combination of numerous and obvious threats to it, just as prohibition was dead before the amendment was officially repealed.

The above was in response to this article.

Armed with the new Health Insurance Laws, the Rich Look Forward to Siphoning the Resources of the Non-Rich

2010-01-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

Yes, the Hendrik Hertzberg article is snobbish, lame and irrelevant. It really is an embarrassment to journalists. It was published at a notorious redoubt of "old money": no one at "The New Yorker" really cares about lower income working (or unemployed) people.

Here are just a few clues (among dozens that exist) that the new health insurance laws are little more than a way for rich insurance executives, employees, and lobbyists to siphon the meager resources of poor people (which they are motivated to do given the largely collapsed economy):

--The net result is opposite in many respects to what Obama and the Democrats campaigned on.

--The Democrats failed to get one single Republican vote (unlike with Social Security, Medicare, etc.)

--Most of the new laws don't take effect until 2014 and the strong negative reactions to it won't happen until 2015-2017. 5-7 years is a very long time politically; this amount of time allows those who passed it to somewhat remove themselves from having to take responsibility for the failures. Some of those who passed the bad laws won't even be in office when the bills for it come due and when those negatively affected and those who thought they would benefit but who find out they don't benefit start crying the blues.

As I said these clues that the new laws are a sham and a racket for the insurance companies are just the tip of the iceberg, but even by themselves they tell you that there is something very, very wrong here.

There are some good aspects, like Medicaid expansion and a few new regulations on insurance that should have existed since the 1950's or so, but the law as a whole does more harm than good. Anyone who says the law does more good than harm does not understand macroeconomics or microeconomics (or does not think they are important). Both macro and micro economics tell you, after you study the laws and apply those disciplines, that the new laws will do more harm than good. Economics may not be perfect but what we are talking about are very basic, irrefutably important and long established as valid economics principles that are trashed by the new laws.

This whole episode is a textbook example of how way too many elite Americans are too greedy and too right wing to resist the temptation to trash the laws of economics in favor of laws that keep the rich rich and make the poor poorer. Europeans used to commonly have shortcomings like this: many decades or some centuries ago!

The above was in response to this article.

Laugh out Loud at Those Saying the new Health Insurance law is a Net Gain

2010-01-06T07:09:00.000-08:00

In fact, this whole episode is a very disturbing revelation of how Americans who support these new laws are very, very ignorant of economics. I was just reading some comments at talkingpointsmemo.com. Here is a real gem:

ACTUAL COMMENT AT TALKING POINTS MEMO
"This is not true. First the exchanges guarantee competition and downward price pressure by incorporating insurance companies and nonprofit into competitive pools. Second from what level have the subsidies been lowered?
Making young and healthy people buy insurance will also drive down the cost. The fact that so many do not buy insurance now is one of the reasons it is so expensive, but I will not go into that right now."

Laugh out loud!

The insurance companies have to be "incorporated into competitive pools".

Laugh out loud extra big!

"Making young and healthy people buy insurance will also drive down the cost"

Laugh out loud extra big!

And the ultimate laugh out loud:

"The fact that so many do not buy insurance now is one of the reasons it is so expensive, but I will not go into that right now."

I mean seriously that was one of the funniest things I have seen in years. (Why couldn't this person not "go into it" right now? Maybe because what he said was bat squeeze crazy?)

But what is very, very disturbing is that the kind of rank and humorous economics ignorance shown by these comments to a large degree underlies the new laws themselves as well as the debate about them. I mean, the comments are seldom this ignorant and humorous, but every single pro law comment and article is ignoring or is ignorant of the laws of economics to one extent or another.

Americans think they are immune from the laws of economics, that they don't, for example, have to worry about things like percentage of the GDP sucked up by health care. ("Only the little countries worry about such things and only the little people pay taxes," laugh out loud.) But I am afraid that no one and nothing is immune from the laws of economics, and that Americans will continue to find out the hard way that they are not. In fact, anyone rooting for the American economy to collapse even more so than it already has should be in favor of the new health insurance laws.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

Unify or Become Fish Kill as Big Fishes in Small Ponds

2010-01-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

GUEST COMMENT

Excellent article. But now what can I as an individual do? I've already written congressmen, the president, etc. I'm on Medicare; my wife is younger, healthy, unemployed and uninsured, so our problem is not as onerous as many other Americans'. What can I do to avoid writing a check to a private healthcare provider?

What method of tax resistance can I practice? What mode of civil disobedience would be effective? I've already clashed with many "authorities" who are part of what Amster points out as the American modus operandi:

"it is beyond peradventure that you cannot force people to be free, or liberate them at the point of a smart bomb, or impose democracy upon them. You can't turn people good by deploying practices of torture and punishment as a matter of standing policy. Enlightenment doesn't come from enslavement, and "arbeit macht frei" is nothing more than a cruel joke. Likewise, the health of the people will not be improved by forcing us to work for insurance companies that will continue their essential monopoly over our access to medical treatment."

The short list of suggestions doesn't take into account the tremendous effort I and people like me have already done in the way of community organization, street demonstrations, letter writing, etc. Amster's list, community-building, local organizing, people power, self-sufficiency, civil disobedience, nonviolent praxis, opting out, do-it-yourself ethics, mutual aid, positive thinking, holding a vision, creative interruption, highlighting exemplars, is all about difficult, time-consuming efforts. What can an individual do?

UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTS
An individual can't do squat in my honest opinion. That's why I keep wishing that non-right wing people can "un-niche" themselves from a zillion web sites and movements and organizations and unify into an umbrella political party / organization that could be marketed on a level playing field with the Democrats and Republicans. Like Solidarity in Poland or like New Democratic Party in Canada and so on and so forth.

In Europe, everyone knows it's all about unity, but not so in the US.

I mean, you can still be into those individual sites and organizations and little parties, you can still be that big fish in a small pond, but if you don't also unify with the millions of others, you aren't going to get very far at all in the big picture.

To oversimplify a little, the unification process is that an umbrella organization is founded and then the call goes out for the zillions of existing and futile organizations to pledge allegiance and support to the umbrella.

Unity equals progress, thus the name of my micro spec on the net:

The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment was in response to this excellent article.

One of the Very Best Articles of the Year

2010-01-05T07:20:00.000-08:00

This will undoubtedly be one of the best articles of the year, made even better by all the nice links.

Enjoy this one because, within a couple of months, the health insurance thing will be considered a fait accompli, so articles about it will dry up. This "fade from view" has happened time and time again in the last 30 years as one bad law after another is passed. Once the bad law is passed, people are supposed to go on as if everything is fine and dandy, and many of them do.

I'm not leaving the topic for a minute, though.

You can't vote Democrat or Republican anymore, you need to start a new party, or at least settle for the Greens (who admittedly will never win a federal election due to being tagged as one issue, but it's better than nothing.)

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

What the Net Increase in Jobs per Month and per Year Needs to be

2010-01-02T07:01:00.000-08:00

Yes, there is most definitely some propaganda between the lines here.

A main message is: "Oh, the first decade of the 21st century was a strange accident that we will be researching for years and years". No, it was not an accident, but instead it was a deliberate series of errors and actions of extreme greed that was sooner or later going to crash the system. Even Alan Greenspan admitted he made errors. And the Goldman Sachs people etc. knew full well that what they were doing would eventually lead to a system crash, although it is true that they didn't know when it would happen and they were hoping that it would not happen until they were dead.

Also notable is this Herbert Hoover like announcement:

"The financial crisis is, for all practical purposes, over, and forecasters are now generally expecting the job market to turn around early in 2010 and begin creating jobs."

The financial crisis is never going to be really over for everyone except that top 1%. For 99%, the "financial crisis" goes on. For the bottom third or so, crisis is too light a word to describe their economic predicament.

Credit is still not reliably available even to established businesses with good credit histories, so how are a large number of jobs going to be created?

More than 7 million jobs are lost and more than 3 million have not been created but should have been over about the last 27 months. So the total job deficit is close to 11 million. It takes at least a 175,000 net increase in jobs for jobs to be available to those who desperately need a job. The US is not Europe where anyone who can't get a job can get basic subsistence grants. In the US, the unemployed often end up living in tents or cars.

But that 175,000 number is still pretty lame. It will take 220,000 jobs per month during the new decade to achieve a 20% growth in jobs for the decade, the minimum percentage growth in jobs standard that was achieved in all recent decades except for the one just ended.

Finally, in order to make up by 2020 for the 11 million lost jobs, it would take slightly more than 300,000 jobs per month during the entire decade, or 3.7 million jobs per year, or 37 million jobs for the decade: 26 million constituting a 20% increase plus the 11 million.

The bottom line is that if and when you see jobs going up by anything less than 175,000 per month, the job market is still depressed. Anything from 175,000 to 220,000 per month is slightly depressed. Anything from 220,000 to 300,000 per month means that the job market is no longer in recession currently, but is not restoring all of the 11 million lost. You would have to see numbers greater than 300,000 per month if most of the people who have lost their jobs are going to get them back in their lifetimes.

So if (and it is definitely if) some jobs are created in 2010, there has to be at least 2.1 million jobs created (175,000 per month) during the year or the job depression technically continues on. Moreover, there would have to be at least 4 million jobs created in 2010 or 2011 at the latest (via a "rebound") which is 333,000 per month, for there to be any chance to recover the 11 million lost jobs within the new decade.

Does anyone seriously think that 4 million jobs are going to be created in 2010 or any other year in the 2nd decade of the 21st century?

About the only way the US could possibly have created the potential for 4 million jobs a year would be large scale government investing in green technology. Obama created a fantasy in people's minds with his airy rhetoric that this would happen, but obviously it was just another falsehood from him.

The above was in response to this article.