The Torturers’ Manifesto

This is an eye opening article by the NYT's editorial board. I completely agree that until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. To read more, click here.

Obama's Weekly Address--April 18th

It is essential to our democracy that we keep up with the recent changes taking place in Washington and to make sure our leaders are following through with what they were elected for--health, education, diplomacy, moral leadership, and a sustainable economic agenda, etc.. In line with that goal, here is Obama's weekly address. With the process of going through the budget line by line in full swing, the President uses his Weekly Address to give some examples, big and small, of how the Administration is working to cut costs and eliminate waste. The President also announces two new key appointments, Jeffrey Zients as Chief Performance Officer and Aneesh Chopra as Chief Technology Officer, who will be invaluable in streamlining the way government functions through efficiency and innovation. April 18, 2009. For more information, click here.

FRONTLINE: Sick Around America

Last night I watched an investigative documentary by FRONTLINE on the current state of the American health care system. I was completely shocked and saddened to find out that America is neglecting its citizens and treating them as if they are a liability. A few questions that come to mind--Where has the Federal Government been for so long? How can the leaders running our country stand for this? Are they so blinded by lobbyists, self interests, free markets, and a philosophy of self reliance? Why aren't the poor and middle class coming together to form a movement for change? Now that change has arrived with the Obama administration, is it possible for America to finally get a comprehensive and affordable health care system for all Americans? This report suggests some helpful solutions and opens our eyes to the difficulties we face ahead. Additionally, FRONTLINE has produced another report called Sick Around the World--for those interested in solutions other developed countries in the world have found. Enjoy and I look forward to any comments or debate.

Statistics on American Health Care System-
How under-65 Americans are insured:
* + 60.9% -- get health insurance through their employer
* + 11.8% -- through Medicaid/SCHIP
* + 5.5% -- buy private health coverage (self-employed; those who retire at 55 and won't be working for the next 10 years until qualifying for Medicare; those between jobs/coverage due to divorce, being widowed, laid off, etc.)
* + 17.2% -- have no insurance
* + 1.3% -- covered through Medicare (65 or older; some disabled people under age 65; or all who have end-stage renal disease)
* + 1.2% -- covered through the military

America's various government health care systems:
* + one for people over 65
* + one for veterans
* + one for active military
* + one for members of Congress
* + one for Native Americans
* + one for under-16 people with 120 percent of poverty income
* + one for people with 200 percent of poverty income

Sick Around America

As the worsening economy leads to massive job losses—potentially forcing millions more Americans to go without health insurance—FRONTLINE travels the country examining the nation's broken health care system and explores the need for a fundamental overhaul. Veteran FRONTLINE producer Jon Palfreman dissects the private insurance system, a system that not only fails to cover 46 million Americans but also leaves millions more underinsured and at risk of bankruptcy.

At its best, American health care can be very good. For Microsoft employee Mark Murray and his wife, Melinda, their employee health plan paid for eight years of fertility treatments and covered all the costs of a very complicated pregnancy. "If it wasn't for our health insurance," Murray says, "we wouldn't have a baby boy right now." The Murrays' medical bills totaled between $500,000 and $1 million, and their plan covered every penny.

But beyond large, high-wage employers like Microsoft, FRONTLINE learns that available, affordable, adequate insurance is becoming hard to find. Small businesses face a very bleak outlook for finding and keeping coverage. Coverage is becoming more expensive and less comprehensive, with high deductibles, co-pays and coverage limits. Georgetown University Research Professor Karen Pollitz explains that for many people, the current system is "like having an airbag in your car that's made out of tissue paper: I'm so glad that it's there, but if I ever get in a crash, it's not going to protect me."

Outside of employer-based health care plans, matters are even worse. Americans seeking insurance in the individual market must submit to "medical underwriting," and if they have a pre-existing condition, they will likely be denied. Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO George Halverson says frankly: "I could not get insurance. I've had heart surgery, and so I am completely uninsurable in the private market. So it's important that I keep my job."

Around the world, other developed democracies offer universal health care, requiring insurance companies to cover everyone. People are mandated to buy it; insurance for the poor is subsidized; and governments control prices by setting the cost of everything from doctors' salaries and hospital rooms to drugs and MRIs. But efforts to implement similar policies in the U.S. have proven unsuccessful. In 2006, Massachusetts implemented reforms mandating everyone be covered by health insurance, but there are still problems of affordability. FRONTLINE profiles the Abramses, a Massachusetts family of four earning $63,000 annually, who found that although they were too prosperous to receive a health care subsidy, they could not afford to buy a health care insurance policy at around $12,000 a year. "What we're finding out in Massachusetts," says veteran insurance industry executive and consultant Robert Laszewski, "you can mandate that people have health insurance, but if it costs more than they can afford, it doesn't matter."

As President Obama launches his plan for reforming health care, Kaiser Family Foundation President Drew Altman tells FRONTLINE: "This is the first big opportunity for health reform since ... [the] early 1990s. And a question is again, pointedly, whether we will blow the opportunity again this time or [whether] we will actually get it all done or get something significant done." But consultant Laszewski wonders if Americans have the will to make it happen. "Every doctor I meet says he's underpaid. I've yet to meet a hospital executive who thinks he or she can operate on less. I have yet to meet a patient who is willing to sacrifice care. So we have this $2.2 trillion system, and I haven't met anybody in any of the stakeholders that's willing to take less. And until we're willing to have that conversation, we're just sort of nibbling around the edges."

The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic (May 2009)

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and MIT professor, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. This disturbing similarity between the U.S. and emerging markets centers around the elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—that played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

The Quiet Coup
by Simon Johnson

One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.....(more)

Why We Think It's OK to Cheat and Steal (Sometimes)

In light of one of the worst economic and financial crisis in modern history, it is important to evaluate the fundamental assumptions, intuitions, and reasoning behind our human behavior and institutions. In this talk, Dan Ariely--a behavioral economist at MIT--attempts to uncover one particular behavior that may have played a significant role--Cheating. What is cheating, how does it manifest itself in economic behavior, and what are the implications of cheating for the larger economic system? Ariely's experimental studies suggest that their are bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational--and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp. That is, human behavior is often driven by irrational forces such as social norms, visions of morality, intuitions, and social groups, which are themselves predictable. Enjoy the talk!

Capitalism Beyond the Crisis

The New York Review of Books has an excellent article by Amartya Sen--Lamont University Professor at Harvard and 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics--that addresses the nature of capitalism and whether it needs to be changed. Some defenders of unfettered capitalism who resist change are convinced that capitalism is being blamed too much for short-term economic problems—problems they variously attribute to bad governance (for example by the Bush administration) and the bad behavior of some individuals (or what John McCain described during the presidential campaign as "the greed of Wall Street"). Others do, however, see truly serious defects in the existing economic arrangements and want to reform them, looking for an alternative approach that is increasingly being called "new capitalism."

What are the special characteristics that make a system indubitably capitalist—old or new? If the present capitalist economic system is to be reformed, what would make the end result a new capitalism, rather than something else? It seems to be generally assumed that relying on markets for economic transactions is a necessary condition for an economy to be identified as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive and on individual rewards based on private ownership are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist?

All affluent countries in the world—those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and others—have, for quite some time now, depended partly on transactions and other payments that occur largely outside markets. These include unemployment benefits, public pensions, other features of social security, and the provision of education, health care, and a variety of other services distributed through nonmarket arrangements. The economic entitlements connected with such services are not based on private ownership and property rights.

Also, the market economy has depended for its own working not only on maximizing profits but also on many other activities, such as maintaining public security and supplying public services—some of which have taken people well beyond an economy driven only by profit. The creditable performance of the so-called capitalist system, when things moved forward, drew on a combination of institutions—publicly funded education, medical care, and mass transportation are just a few of many—that went much beyond relying only on a profit-maximizing market economy and on personal entitlements confined to private ownership.

Read More

Rand Illusion

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Rand Illusion

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

On a lighter note, this is a great clip from the Colbert Report that has a little fun with the new found supporters of the novelist Ayn Rand. Specifically, with all this economic turmoil of late, not to mention a suspected socialist in the White House, right-wing pundits like femmebot Michelle Malkin and fellow Fox-friendly cretin Glenn Beck are looking to “author, philosopher and female comb-over pioneer” Ayn Rand for guidance. Stephen Colbert thinks they should move to an island all their own, where less work gets done on purpose.

On a more serious note, how can a novel that depicts a non-existent world, rallies the darker side of humanity, and intensifies the inequalities in society be held up as a model for American?

NYT: The Geography of a Recession

Over at the Grey Lady, they have created an excellent visual depiction of the geography of the recession. In particular, the map illustrates that job losses have been the most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing, and those that already had the highest unemployment rates. To see more click here.

Synopsis-

What does the worst recession in a generation look like? It is both deep and broad. Every state in the country, with the exception of a band stretching from the Dakotas down to Texas, is now shedding jobs at a rapid pace. And even that band has recently begun to suffer, because of the sharp fall in both oil and crop prices.

Unlike the last two recessions — earlier this decade and in the early 1990s — this one is causing much more job loss among the less educated than among college graduates. Those earlier recessions introduced the country to the concept of mass white-collar layoffs. The brunt of the layoffs in this recession is falling on construction workers, hotel workers, retail workers and others without a four-year degree.
The Great Recession of 2008 (and beyond) is hurting men more than women. It is hurting homeowners and investors more than renters or retirees who rely on Social Security checks. It is hurting Latinos more than any other ethnic group. A year ago, a greater share of Latinos held jobs than whites. Today, the two have switched places.

The President Addresses Joint Session of Congress

President Obama lays out his comprehensive approach to addressing both the economic and fiscal crises facing the nation, and stresses the need to end the era of profound irresponsibility that has brought us to where we are today. In my opinion, Obama's first address to the joint session of Congress was excellent--he set a progressive and inclusive vision for our government, focused on the specifics of energy/healthcare/education, and emphasized the necessity for transparency, accountability, and personal responsibility.

Similarly, I am in agreement with the February 27th Editorial in the NYT, which states that "President Obama’s first budget recognizes what most of Washington has been too scared or ideologically blind to admit: to recover from George W. Bush’s reckless economic policies, taxes must go up... A credible pledge to reduce the deficit is imperative. Without it, foreign lenders — who financed the Bush-era deficits and are now paying for the stimulus and bailouts — could lose faith in the nation’s ability or willingness to repay in anything other than rapidly depreciating dollars. That would send interest rates up and the economy down, the worst-case scenario. Controlling the deficit is also necessary to sustain a recovery — when it comes."

The Corporation

This is a thought provoking documentary on the rise of the most dominant institution of our time. Winner of 26 international awards. Including, 10 Audience Choice Awards--2004 Sundance Film Festival.

Since the late 18th century American legal decision, the corporate organizational model has been given the legal equivalency of a person and has become a dominant economic, political, and social force around the world. This film takes an in-depth historical and psychological examination of the organizational behavior of the corporation. What this examination illustrates is that if the corporation were a person, then its behavior would be considered dangerously destructive and border on psychopathic. Furthermore, this film argues that the corporation's behavior has the ability to profoundly threaten our world and our future. However, the film leaves the viewer with hope--people with courage, intelligence, and determination can reorganize society and influence the political system in a positive way. The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics - including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.