PAUL KRUGMAN
America Is Not Yet Lost

The way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government, and senators should change the rules to end obstructionism.

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic



What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland



A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.
Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

more;

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/opinion/...

If a society wants to progress, and increase the quality of life for its citizens, it must invest in the following areas:

1. Education and job training.

2. Infrastructure, including roads, transportation systems, power, communications,etc.

3. Research and development, to keep abreast of other countries

4. Public health, anything to have a healthy populace

To make these investments, taxes are required, and we should support taxes to pay for them.


It should also have a neutral (or positive) balance-of-payments with other countries. When a country has a negative B.O.P.,its wealth is being transferred to foreigners, and the country becomes poorer as a result. The last time we had a neutral B.O.P. was during the Carter Administration.

By January, he will have accomplished more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt.
By Jacob Weisberg

Posted Saturday, Nov. 28, 2009, at 8:13 AM ET


About one thing, left and right seem to agree these days: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's "dithering." Newsweek recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled, "Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)." The sarcasm brigade thinks it's finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accomplishments. "When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it," Obama stand-in Fred Armisen recently riffed on Saturday Night Live. "It's chow time," Jon Stewart asserts, for a president who hasn't followed through on his promises.

This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year isn't just premature—it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

The case for Obama's successful freshman year rests above all on the health care legislation now awaiting action in the Senate. Democrats have been trying to pass national health insurance for 60 years. Past presidents who tried to make it happen and failed include Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Through the summer, Obama caught flak for letting Congress lead the process, as opposed to setting out his own proposal. Now his political strategy is being vindicated. The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways—weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed.


more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2236708/?from=rss


comment: I hope he's right--I was getting discouraged

If the health insurance bill does not pass due to a few legislators obstructing it, we should consider modifying the Constitution to ensure a more efficient method of passing legislation. I would propose the following steps:

1.For major legislation, the president would appoint a body of experts to draft the bill. All members of this body would be required to be approved by Congress. This bill would then be submitted to Congress for a reading. They would then propose amendments and return the bill to the experts, who would consider them and return the bill to Congress for a vote.

2.If Congress fails to pass the legislation, the President would then submit the bill to the country for a national referendum.

3.To become law, the bill would have to have the approval of a majority of voters in at least half of the states, plus an absolute majority in the entire country.

4. Congress would still be able to enact minor legislation. This needs to be defined further, as to what is major and what is minor. Minor appropriation bills could be enacted, also bills naming .post offices and other government building.


Canada has something similar, but if the legislation is defeated, they call for new elections. A referendum would be simpler, and less costly. A disadvantage is that if a reactionary President was elected, he would try proposing reactionary laws. This is what happened when Thatcher was elected in England. However, she was replaced with a Labor Government afterwards. What do you think would happen if a reactionary President tried to eliminate Social Security or Medicaid? I believe if we adopted the system I suggest, after a few presidential terms, we would have a efficiently functioning government, with universal health insurance, a more progressive income tax, etc.

The paradox of US healthcare
By Andrew Kennis

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/10...

snip>
In the meantime, the US continues to be the country with the highest proportion of uninsured people in the developed world. It also has the distinction of spending a greater portion of its total economic output on healthcare than any other developed country - just over 17 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) last year.

On average, the US spends twice as much as other developed countries on healthcare.

But even though US citizens pay more for healthcare, they get less of it, resulting in a lowly 37th place ranking among healthcare systems in the world, according to a study by the World Health Organization based on quality and fairness.

In terms of the infant mortality rate, a common marker for the overall state of healthcare systems, the US was outranked by all of the following countries according to the CIA's World Factbook: Sweden (3rd), Japan (4th), France (7th), Norway (10th), Germany (14th), Israel (17th), Denmark (21st), United Kingdom (31st), Canada (35th), Taiwan (39th), Italy (41st) and even a few underdeveloped countries, including Cuba (43rd).

How can this paradox of the US spending the most and getting the least for its healthcare occur in the country with the world's largest economic output?

Claudia Schaufan, an Argentine physician and professor of comparative health policies at the University of California in Santa Cruz, explains that the common characteristics of healthcare systems in the developed world have to do with the universality of coverage and the lack of for-profit entities.

The key behind each of these systems is that they all outperform the US in terms of their infant mortality rates, administrative costs, the extent of population with coverage and the proportion of GDP spent on healthcare.

Furthermore, there are no documented instances of citizens going bankrupt because of medical care in these systems while, conversely, some studies have shown as many as 700,000 Americans suffer that fate annually.

'Making a buck


One grouping of healthcare systems can be described as socially insured and multi-payer (Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Israel, Belgium and Austria), another as socially insured and single-payer (Taiwan and Canada), and a third as nationally insured and delivered (United Kingdom, Spain, all of Scandinavia, Italy and Iceland).

Socially insured and multi-payer systems feature health insurance delivered by non-profit insurers. Those who are unemployed or cannot afford to pay for the insurance, receive governmental assistance so that universal coverage is achieved.

Certain multi-payer countries have a wide choice of insurance programmes, as is the case in Germany. When you choose a private, non-profit insurer - Germany has 240 of them - the government pays a portion of the costs based on your income.

Developed countries with one national insurer that is funded publicly - often described as single-payer - have a healthcare system that is delivered by either private (as is the case in Canada) or publicly-run institutions (as is the case in all of Scandinavia).

While these systems differ in their specific characteristics, the similarities are more important, according to Schaufan.

"Everyone has health insurance and there is no significant for-profit aspect in any part of the medical sector ... nobody in these systems 'makes a buck' at the expense of the health of patients," she says.

Learning from others

Taiwan, which spends three times less than the US on healthcare, developed its current healthcare system in the mid-1990s, when the majority of citizens were uninsured and policymakers collectively decided the health system needed to be radically overhauled. However, the Taiwanese looked to other countries to forge their own system.
Asked what the proposed US reforms show in terms of learning from other examples, Naoki Ikegami, a leading Japanese healthcare economics professor, says simply: "Not much, because there has to be a willingness to learn and if anything, US leaders have isolated themselves from learning about other healthcare systems."

Professor Ikegami's co-author on numerous scholarly publications, John Campbell, an American-born political science professor, says: "The reforms being proposed in the US simply do not fix or get at the heart of the problem, which is price containment and unsustainable healthcare costs.

"The US would stand to gain a lot from going to a single-payer system, where costs could easily be contained and controlled."


more:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/10...

How Poland and Hungary Led the Way in 1989

By Walter Mayr, Christian Neef and Jan Puhl

Everyone remembers the iconic images from the dramatic breaching of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. But the groundwork was laid elsewhere. The fate of Germany and the rest of Europe was decided in Warsaw, Budapest and Moscow.

By that evening of Nov. 10, 1989, Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyayev had been meticulously keeping a diary for 20 years. Every day, after coming home to his apartment on Deneshny Pereulok from the party headquarters on the Old Square or from the Kremlin, he had sat down at his desk to write in his diary.

After gazing out the window at the Foreign Ministry building, a Socialist Classicist monstrosity built shortly before Stalin's death in the neighborhood where Moscow's coin makers traditionally had their shops, he would write a detailed account of his daily experiences. He focused, in particular, on the thoughts that he could not express at work, where he was surrounded by fellow party comrades: his futile hopes, frustrations and disappointments.



Chernyayev, a close associate of then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, made a short and laconic entry into his diary on Nov. 10: "The Berlin Wall has collapsed. An epoch in the history of the 'socialist system' is coming to an end," the advisor to the president and party chairman wrote on that Friday evening. "Following the Polish and the Hungarian workers' parties, Honecker has now fallen, and today there was news of Shivkov's departure. All we have left now are our 'closest friends': Castro, Ceausescu and Kim Il Sung. All people who hate us."

His tone was not one of bitterness but of deep sarcasm. Chernyayev had seen this day coming for a long time. "It's the end of Yalta and the Stalinist legacy," he concluded.

Let History Pass it By

The motto "Workers of the world, unite!" was still emblazoned on the front page of Pravda, the party-controlled newspaper, lying on the table next to him. A top headline, on that Nov. 10, read "Today is the day of the Soviet police." Pravda had let history pass it by.

t was a completely different story elsewhere in Europe, where people were celebrating with abandon, almost overwhelmed by the images from Berlin showing East and West Germans in each others' arms. "Germany weeps with joy. Berlin is Berlin once again!" wrote the tabloid BZ. The news that Berlin, divided for 28 years, was united had even traveled as far as the remote reaches of the Australian West Coast. German film director Wim Wenders, was on a visit to the region at the time ("I couldn't have been farther away from Berlin than I was at that moment," he said), encountered a hermit living in a cave. "It was early in the morning, and he was dead drunk. He was a Lithuanian and he spoke a little German. He kept drinking toasts to Berlin, speaking in a loud voice in an attempt to drown out the Wagner music blaring from his ghetto blaster. 'No more walls! No more walls! No more walls anyplace in the world!'"

1989 went down in the history books as the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of peaceful revolution in East Germany. That, at least, is the way the Germans like to see it. It was also the way then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl saw it from the beginning. "We are writing a chapter in world history, once again, it must be said," the chancellor said on Nov. 9, in an emotional speech during a state visit to neighboring Poland.But why did it take so long for the Wall to come down? And who actually destroyed it?


Lots more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiege...

I just heard the review of this book on NPR. It is really fascinating. Reagan just played a bit part. The real heroes were communists who were able to see that it didn't work.

The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Hardcover)
by Michael Meyer
Michael Meyer (Author)



›From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Gerard DeGroot

Friedrich Nietzsche once described an argument about history. "I have done that," claims memory. "I cannot have done that," pride retorts. Or, to put it differently: The past is what happened, history what we decide to remember. We mine the past for myths to buttress our present. The good historian is a myth-buster. Michael Meyer is a very good historian. As Newsweek's bureau chief for Eastern Europe in 1989, he watched the world turn on a dime. The myth he busts in this book concerns the contribution the United States made to the collapse of communist regimes that year. Some Americans want to believe that those regimes crumbled because of White House manipulation -- clever diplomacy backed by raw power. In fact, American meddling was rather benign and, during that fateful year, conspicuously ill conceived. The preferred myth begins with Ronald Reagan speaking at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. "We hear from Moscow about a new openness," he sneered, demanding proof. "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" According to the myth, the wall came tumbling down because Reagan, like some benevolent wizard, shouted "open sesame!" The moral drawn is that evil, dictatorial regimes crumble when confronted by righteous indignation. Cue Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush, who idolized Reagan, tried to emulate his hero. His distortion of the past inspired tragedy in the present. The real story, minus the comic book hero, is more complicated -- and interesting. Reagan still plays a role, but as diplomat, not Rambo. His contribution came in accommodation; his willingness to talk to Gorbachev gave the Soviet leader the confidence to break molds. Gorbachev, furthermore, did not tear down the wall; he merely suggested that change would be tolerated. The events themselves were played out by a cast of thousands in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Bucharest. There was no script; this was an improvisational drama conceived by Camus, with help from Kafka and Moličre. The Soviet Union came to the realization that its empire was no longer affordable. Like other imperial powers, it cut and ran, leaving colonial subjects to sort things out for themselves. Chaos naturally resulted. Hidden deep in this brilliant book is the perfect phrase: Events were shaped by "the logic of human messiness." The regimes in Eastern Europe were destroyed not by monolithic force, but by myriad human beings reacting impulsively to the freedom of possibility. Watching from afar, we saw what seemed like neat little dominoes falling. In fact, what happened was as capricious, and messy, as a tornado. Chance played a huge part. Meyer points out, for instance, that the "fall" of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, was an accident. It all started when Hungary unilaterally decided to open its border with Austria, thus offering East Germans an opportunity to join their cousins in the West by taking the long way around. Tens of thousands departed every day. With his country bleeding to death, East German leader Egon Krenz recklessly decided to grant freedom of travel, the logic being that if movement was not forbidden, his people would return. The policy was to be implemented "ab sofort" -- "immediately." Krenz's "immediately" meant the next day, in controlled fashion. The East German people took "sofort" to mean "now." They converged on Checkpoint Charlie that night. A frightened border guard, lacking guidance, waited a few hours and then opened the sluice gates to a torrent of humanity. In an instant the wall fell, and so, too, did the logic of East Germany. What was supposed to have been managed reform became instead a chaotic revolution of people walking. Krenz, who had hoped to salvage some elements of socialism, lost control of events when Easterners crossed to the other side. History pivoted on the misinterpretation of a word. Krenz called it a "botch." "Our leaders all wear a uniform mask and declare identical phrases," the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel told Meyer in October 1989. "Perhaps at the moment of history, the masks will fall, and it is only at that moment that we know who is who. . . . We may be surprised to find that the masks concealed an intelligent face." Meyer unmasks some intelligent faces, unlikely heroes who, at the moment of history, acted wisely. Chief among them was Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, a communist who decided that communism did not work and quietly conspired to destroy it. In contrast to Czechoslovakia and East Germany, Hungary's revolution was a coup carried out by a few sensible men. My students would call this a "friendly" book. Meyer recounts momentous events in an accessible, engaging and intensely dramatic way. I had occasionally to remind myself that I was reading nonfiction; history is seldom written with such verve. The book is a two-for-one deal: a fine piece of analysis and a fascinating personal memoir. Added as a bonus are some poignant lessons: Dialogue often beats force, and heroes are sometimes quiet.

Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.


http://www.amazon.com/Year-that-Changed-Wo...

http://www.courant.com/business/hc-cigna-p...

Former CIGNA Exec Has Stinging Words For Health Insurers



By DIANE LEVICK The Hartford Courant

June 25, 2009




A former media relations executive from CIGNA turned dramatically against health insurers at a Senate committee hearing Wednesday, calling the industry an "untrustworthy" partner for its customers and "duplicitous" in blocking meaningful health care reform.

"They confuse their customers and dump the sick — all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors," said Wendell Potter, who retired as CIGNA's vice president of corporate communications last year. He spent nearly 15 years at the company and four years at Humana.

He spoke at a Washington hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation along with others who lambasted health insurers for making their policies and claim-paying methods hard to understand.

Potter urged health care reform that includes a public health plan to compete with private insurers, and told senators the industry is using the kind of fear tactics that they employed to sink reform during the Clinton administration.

He said he was not speaking out because of any grudge against CIGNA. The company treated him well with "lots of bonuses" over the years and persuaded him to stay longer than he'd planned, he said.

But he said he has had a growing feeling in recent years "that the health insurance industry was taking the country in the wrong direction and was directly contributing to the problem of the uninsured and under-insured in the country." The industry, he said, "is not part of the solution as they want us to believe; they are part of the problem."


Potter, for instance, recalled a trip on a corporate jet from Philadelphia, where CIGNA is headquartered, to Connecticut, where the company's health insurance business is based in Bloomfield. During the flight, he was served lunch on gold-rimmed china with a gold-plated knife and fork.

"I realized for the first time that someone's insurance premiums were paying for me to travel in such luxury," he said on his blog.

Potter, 57, is now a senior fellow — a paid consultant — at the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit organization describing its mission as "exposing corporate spin and government propaganda."

Although Potter revealed no new "smoking guns" Wednesday, he lashed out at insurance practices that have surfaced over the years but may not be well-known to the public.

He condemned insurers' efforts to get rid of unprofitable customers, sell policies that can mislead consumers and offer very limited coverage, and pay out as small a portion of premiums as possible for claims in order to boost profits and please Wall Street.

"Insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and they make it nearly impossible to understand — or even to obtain — information we need," Potter's written testimony said.

Also testifying at the hearing was Nancy Metcalf of West Hartford, senior program editor for Consumer Reports magazine and a former Hartford Courant reporter and editor. She spoke about the dangers of limited health insurance plans.

Potter described in written testimony how insurers use "purging" — unrealistic rate increases — to drive off less profitable employers. Citing a USA Today report, he recalled how CIGNA boosted rates in 2006 for the Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust so much that for some family plans, premiums would have topped $44,000 a year.

He also recalled how Aetna in the 1990s spent more than $20 million to overhaul computer systems to help the company better identify unprofitable accounts and drop them.
CIGNA, responding to Potter's testimony, said Wednesday, "Although we respect that there are different opinions on the solutions, we strongly disagree with the suggestion that, motivated by profits, the insurance industry has deliberately attempted to confuse or unfairly treat covered individuals."

CIGNA said it advocates for "the importance of information transparency and simplicity" and that it is "working actively and constructively with the administration, Congress and key stakeholders to develop solutions that will increase the access to and quality of health care — and at the same time reduce costs for all."

The trade group America's Health Insurance Plans responded, "We continue to be focused on advancing comprehensive health care reform that addresses the health-care concerns we heard from the American people." Insurers, the group said, have proposed "overhauling the market rules and enacting new consumer protections so nobody is left out, simplifying health care choices for individuals and small businesses, and reforming the delivery system to improve the quality and affordability of health care coverage."

However, Potter warned senators that the industry's "charm offensive — which is the most visible part of duplicitous and well-financed PR and lobbying campaigns — may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans."

Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant

He is also the co-author (with Chuck Hagel) of a bill to establish a National Infrastructure Bank, whereby States and local governments can borrow money at favorable interest rates to refurbish and improve their roads, bridges, water and sewage systems, etc. without going to the private sector or waiting for a grant from Congress. This method has a lot of merit. It was one of the planks in the Democratic party platform. Dodd is an expert in this area. It would be a loss to the country if he is not reelected.

By ROGER COHEN
Published: April 19, 2009

NEW YORK — When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, the return of the capital from Bonn to the scene of the crime, Berlin, prompted agonizing over how to memorialize the Holocaust. Germans thirsted for a “Schlussstrich” — closure with Hitler — even as they acknowledged its impossibility.


A large Holocaust memorial was built in Berlin, but not before a leading writer, Martin Walser, had prompted outrage by railing against “the permanent presentation of our shame” and use of Auschwitz as “a moral stick.”

Closure on the Nazi mass murder is of course impossible. There is no such thing as inherited guilt, but inherited responsibility endures. Germans, through responsibility, have built one of the world’s most successful democracies, a wonder from the ashes.

In the German mirror stands Israel, another vibrant democracy birthed from the crime, albeit one, unlike Germany, that has not found peaceful coexistence. Israel, too, craves closure on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation.

As Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, has written, Israel was supposed not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” In this, 61 years after its creation, Israel has fallen short.

Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber. Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood.

I’ve been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program.

Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.”

But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?

Yes, Israel is small — all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland — and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”

Not only that, Israel has a formidable nuclear arsenal; it has made peace with Egypt and Jordan; it has a cast-iron security guarantee from the United States; it has walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked the roughly 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness; its enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, only declared victory in recent wars by preventing their own destruction.

Israel has the most dynamic and creative society in the region, one that does not convict American journalists in shameful secret trials, as Iran has just done with Roxana Saberi; it has never fought a war with Iran; and it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.

Some of this, no doubt, Lerman has told his daughter. It should reassure her. Fear is the worst of foundations.

Far from Iran, and the tired Nazi analogies misleadingly attached to it, there is another threat. As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: “The biggest risk to Israel is Israel.”

A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.

As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”

That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.




*

Health Care's Year

:

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Monday, April 6, 2009; Page A15

Yes, this is the year Congress will finally give every American access to health insurance.

Getting there won't be pretty. But for the first time since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s, the forces favoring action on health-care reform are stronger than the forces of cynicism and obstruction.

Feel free to be skeptical. Since Bill and Hillary Clinton's reform efforts foundered in 1994, predicting the death of any comparable venture has been the safest bet in Washington.

But this conclusion misses almost everything that has been happening. It's not just that the public (including business) is frustrated with the status quo. And it has little to do with the details that policy wonks are necessarily hashing over.

What matters is that members of Congress have quietly been preparing the ground for reform since the Democrats took over two years ago. And the competing interest groups seem more inclined to get what they can out of reform than to stop the enterprise altogether.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has been training (through hearings and studies) as if for a prizefight. In an interview, he said that his self-education has included time with Hillary Clinton to discuss why her initiative failed 15 years ago.

She told him that one of the things she didn't foresee was how jurisdictional battles in
Congress could overwhelm all other concerns. If the heads of committees were fighting each other for influence, they were in no position to fight together for a bill.

This time, the bulls are pulling in the same direction. Baucus has been working with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), for whom health-care reform is a sacred cause, and has brought together senators in both parties who are likely to be part of a solution. He calls them a "board of directors."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the House's resident health-care mavens, has been working closely with two other committee chairs, Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.).

One largely unheralded change is that health-care reformers have made peace with each other. In the past, groups advocating competing proposals were more interested in establishing their dominance than in passing a bill.

"People who advocated health coverage for all Americans wanted it their way, and the second choice was nothing," Waxman told me. This time, he said, reformers want to get to universal coverage by whatever route is open.

Indeed, the reformers are broadly focused on the same set of ideas, a mixture of subsidies for those who can't afford insurance, reform of insurance markets so sick people can't be denied coverage, and serious efforts at cost containment and efficiency.

Though only some of the players will say so now, the plan will ultimately include a mandate requiring everyone to have insurance, quelling opposition from the insurance companies. They hope that having a bigger market will compensate them for whatever they might lose from regulatoIn any event, business groups committed to reform will check the power of their colleagues in the insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical companies are willing to cut a deal because they know the current health-care gravy train is destined to end.

And those with coverage will be able to keep what they have and may profit from improvements in cost and quality. This time, said one influential House staffer, advocates of reform are paying far closer attention than they did 15 years ago to the views of Americans who already have insurance.

There are still obstacles: Most Democrats think that one of the options consumers should have is a government-run insurance program, but many Republicans see that as a pathway to "socialized medicine." Yet the momentum for reform is such that compromises regarding the public plan are already proliferating.

True, Congress will have to pay for all this. But a little-noticed provision in the Senate budget resolution assumes that health-care reform will cost money upfront but produce savings later. It would give the government a decade to get costs and expenditures in line, opening some fiscal space for a deal.

Oh, yes, and there happens to be a rather popular person in the White House passionately committed to the cause -- so dedicated, in fact, that he is willing to let Congress write the bill. When the Clintons created their own plan, it arrived on Capitol Hill an orphan. Obama's will have many parents.

The president has invested too much in health-care reform to lose this fight. So he won't.

ejdionne@washpost.com



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: Friday, November 5, 1999

Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another's businesses.

The measure, considered by many the most important banking legislation in 66 years, was approved in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 8 and in the House tonight by 362 to 57. The bill will now be sent to the president, who is expected to sign it, aides said. It would become one of the most significant achievements this year by the White House and the Republicans leading the 106th Congress.

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression.
Today's action followed a rich Congressional debate about the history of finance in America in this century, the causes of the banking crisis of the 1930's, the globalization of banking and the future of the nation's economy.

Administration officials and many Republicans and Democrats said the measure would save consumers billions of dollars and was necessary to keep up with trends in both domestic and international banking. Some institutions, like Citigroup, already have banking, insurance and securities arms but could have been forced to divest their insurance underwriting under existing law. Many foreign banks already enjoy the ability to enter the securities and insurance industries.

''The world changes, and we have to change with it,'' said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who wrote the law that will bear his name along with the two other main Republican sponsors, Representative Jim Leach of Iowa and Representative Thomas J. Bliley Jr. of Virginia. ''We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.''
In the House debate, Mr. Leach said, ''This is a historic day. The landscape for delivery of financial services will now surely shift.''

But consumer groups and civil rights advocates criticized the legislation for being a sop to the nation's biggest financial institutions. They say that it fails to protect the privacy interests of consumers and community lending standards for the disadvantaged and that it will create more problems than it solves.

The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.
''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ''I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''
Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ''seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.''

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
Supporters of the legislation rejected those arguments. They responded that historians and economists have concluded that the Glass-Steagall Act was not the correct response to the banking crisis because it was the failure of the Federal Reserve in carrying out monetary policy, not speculation in the stock market, that caused the collapse of 11,000 banks. If anything, the supporters said, the new law will give financial companies the ability to diversify and therefore reduce their risks. The new law, they said, will also give regulators new tools to supervise shaky institutions.

''The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,'' said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.
Others said the legislation was essential for the future leadership of the American banking system.
''If we don't pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the world,'' said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. ''There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.''

But other lawmakers criticized the provisions of the legislation aimed at discouraging community groups from pressing banks to make more loans to the disadvantaged. Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said during the House debate that the legislation was ''mean-spirited in the way it had tried to undermine the Community Reinvestment Act.'' And Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, said it was ironic that while the legislation was deregulating financial services, it had begun a new system of onerous regulation on community advocates.

Many experts predict that, even though the legislation has been trailing market trends that have begun to see the cross-ownership of banks, securities firms and insurers, the new law is certain to lead to a wave of large financial mergers.
The White House has estimated the legislation could save consumers as much as $18 billion a year as new financial conglomerates gain economies of scale and cut costs.
Other experts have disputed those estimates as overly optimistic, and said that the bulk of any profits seen from the deregulation of financial services would be returned not to customers but to shareholders.

These are some of the key provisions of the legislation:
*Banks will be able to affiliate with insurance companies and securities concerns with far fewer restrictions than in the past.
*The legislation preserves the regulatory structure in Washington and gives the Federal Reserve and the Office of Comptroller of the Currency roles in regulating new financial conglomerates. The Securities and Exchange Commission will oversee securities operations at any bank, and the states will continue to regulate insurance.
*It will be more difficult for industrial companies to control a bank. The measure closes a loophole that had permitted a number of commercial enterprises to open savings associations known as unitary thrifts.

One Republican Senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted against the legislation. He was joined by seven Democrats: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard H. Bryan of Nevada, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wellstone.

In the House, 155 Democrats and 207 Republicans voted for the measure, while 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans and 1 independent opposed it. Fifteen members did not vote.
Tucked away in the legislation is a provision that some experts today warned could cost insurance policyholders as much as $50 billion. The provision would allow mutual insurance companies to move to other states to avoid payments they would otherwise owe policyholders as they reorganize their corporate structure. Many states, including New York and New Jersey, do not allow such relocations without the consent of the insurer's domicile state. But the legislation before Congress would pre-empt the states.

Both the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company are in the midst of reorganizing into stock-based corporations that are requiring them to pay billions of dollars to policyholders from years of accumulated surplus. In exchange, the policyholders give up their ownership in the mutual insurance company.
The legislation would permit any mutual insurance company to avoid making surplus payments to policyholders by simply moving to states with more permissive laws and setting up a hybrid corporate structure known as a mutual holding company.

The provision was inserted by Representative Bliley at the urging of a trade association. It attracted little opposition because it was attached to a provision that forbids insurers from discriminating against domestic-violence victims.

In a letter sent to Congress this week, Mr. Summers said that the provision ''could allow insurance companies to avoid state law protecting policyholders, enriching insiders at the expense of consumers.''





http://timespeople.nytimes.com/home/about/

Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (From a Former Republican)


Dear Republican Leaders: The Republican Party has become the party dedicated to sabotaging the American future. Check out the sermon I just delivered about the Republican Party on CNN when being interviewed by D.L. Hughley -- and/or read on.You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.

I used to be one of you. As recently as 2000 I worked to get Senator McCain elected in that year's primary. (McCain and Gen. Tommy Franks wrote glowing endorsements regarding my book about military service, AWOL.). I have a file of handwritten thank you notes from Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and II. In the 1970s and early 80s I hung out with Jack Kemp and bought into his "supply side" myth and even wrote a book he endorsed pushing his ideas.) There's more, but take it from me; my parents (evangelical leaders Francis and Edith Schaeffer) and I were about as tight with -- and useful to -- the Republican Party as anyone. We played a big part creating the Religious Right.

In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America's "moral decline." Soon after McCain lost in 2000 I re-registered as an independent in disgust with W. Bush. But I still respected many Republicans. Not today.

How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson's and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!

With people like Limbaugh as the loudmouth image of the Republican Party -- you need no enemies. But something far more serious has happened than an image problem: the Republican Party has become the party of obstruction at just the time when all Americans should be pulling together for the good of our country. Instead, Republicans are today's fifth column sabotaging American renewal.

President Obama has been in office barely 45 days and the Republican Party has the nerve to blame him for the economic and military cataclysm he inherited. I say economic and military cataclysm because without the needless war in Iraq you all backed we would not be in the economic mess we're in today. If that money had been spent here at home on renovating our infrastructure, taking us toward a green economy, putting our health-care system in order we'd be a very different situation.

As the father of a Marine who served in George W. Bush's misbegotten wars let me say this: if President Obama's strategy to repair our economy, infrastructure and healthcare fails that will put our troops at far greater risk because the world will become a far more dangerous place. So for all you flag-waving Republicans who are trying to undermine the President at home -- if you succeed more of our troops will be killed abroad.

When your new leader Rush Limbaugh calls for President Obama to fail he's calling for more flag-draped coffins. Limbaugh is the new "Hanoi Jane."

For the party that created our crisis's of misbegotten war, mismanaged economy, the lack of regulation of our banking industry, handing our country to rich crooks... to obstruct the one person who is trying to repair the damage is obscene.

Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters -- "the rube base" who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh -- had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed.

After Obama was elected, you Republican leaders had a unique last chance to send a patriotic message of unity to the world -- and to all Americans. You could have backed our president's economic recovery plan. Since we all know that half of our problem is one of lost confidence and perception, nothing would have done more to calm the markets and project resolve and confidence than if you had been big enough to take Obama's offered hand and had work with him -- even if you disagreed ideologically. You had the chance to put our country first. You utterly failed to rise to the occasion.

The worsening economic situation is your fault and your fault alone. The Republicans created this mess through 8 years of backing the worst president in our history and now, because you put partisan ideology ahead of the good of our country, you have blown your last chance to redeem yourselves. You deserve the banishment to the political wilderness that awaits all traitors.

Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back Now in paperback.

(video at link)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaef...

President Obama: Go for It

M.J.Rosenberg


It is impossible to get Mumbai out of my mind. I keep thinking about two-year-old, Moshe, sitting in his parents' blood, crying out to a mother and father who are gone forever.
It is hard to imagine how anyone can justify terror against children, but many people do. In fact, fanatics of virtually every faith and nationality justify killing kids or leaving them orphans. It is sickening. Until humanity comes to the understanding that there is no justification -- none, whatsoever -- for killing children or making them orphans, we remain uncivilized.

Since the early twentieth century, the slaughter of innocents has been considered a legitimate military tactic or, not much better, unavoidable collateral damage. The Arab-Israeli conflict has not yet fully descended into mass carnage (with the awful exceptions of the Hamas suicide bombings and massacres like Baruch Goldstein's Hebron slaughter) but, no doubt, that is where we are heading unless we begin treating the Arab-Israeli conflict with the urgency it warrants.

So far that hasn't happened. Here in Washington, otherwise intelligent people say that immediate action to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict might be nice, but isn't critical. Invariably, the people who make this case are strongly attached to Israel and believe that the certainties of the status quo are less threatening to Israel's future than the uncertainties of negotiation.

They could not be more wrong. The status quo is destroying Israel.
A few hundred thousand settlers are holding the entire country hostage. The once universally respected Israeli army is now treated with scorn by rightists who view them as symbols of the government of Israel, the legitimacy of which they reject. Settlers abuse and humiliate Palestinians, steal their homes, and destroy their livelihood. They are on a continuous rampage -- grabbing Palestinian homes in Hebron, terrorizing olive farmers and destroying their crops, poisoning the land so that sheep and goats cannot graze, and snatching territory in the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem.



more:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg...

A proposal to upgrade the country's infrastructure


OVERVIEW

The Dodd-Hagel National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007 is a bipartisan measure that addresses the critical needs of our nation’s major infrastructure systems. The legislation
establishes a new method through which the Federal government can finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional or national significance more effectively with public and private
capital.

THE PROBLEM
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the current condition of our nation’s major infrastructure systems earns a grade point average of D and jeopardizes the prosperity
and quality of life of all Americans.

According to the Federal Transit Administration, $21.8 billion is needed annually over the next 20 years to maintain and improve the operational capacity of transit systems.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are 1.2 million units of public housing with critical capital needs totaling $18 billion.

According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the average traveler is delayed 51.5 hours annually due to traffic and infrastructure-related congestion in the nation’s 20 largest
metropolitan areas. The delays range from 93 hours in Los Angeles to 14 hours in Pittsburgh. Combined, these delays waste 1.78 billion gallons of fuel each year and waste almost $50.3 billion in congestion costs. Furthermore, the average delay in these metropolitan areas has increased by almost 35.3 hours since 1982.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, $131.7 billion and
$9.4 billion is needed respectively every year over the next 20 years to repair deficient roads and bridges. The average age of bridges is 40 years.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, $151 billion and $390 billion is needed respectively every year over the next 20 years to repair obsolete drinking water and wastewater systems. Drinking water and wastewater systems range in age from 50 to 100
years in age.

Current Federal financing methods do not adequately distribute funding based on an infrastructure project’s size, location, cost, usage, or economic benefit to a region or the entire nation.


THE DODD-HAGEL SOLUTION

The Dodd-Hagel legislation establishes the National Infrastructure Bank, which as an independent entity of the government is tasked with evaluating and financing capacity-building infrastructure projects of substantial regional and national significance. Infrastructure projects that come under the Bank’s consideration are publicly-owned mass transit systems, housing properties, roads, bridges, drinking water systems, and wastewater systems.

Modeled after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Bank is led by a five member Board of Directors, each whom are appointed by the President and confirmed by the
Senate.

The Bank’s Board has flexibility to develop an organization of professional civil service staff to carry out the Bank’s authorized activities. An Inspector General oversees the Bank’s
daily operations and reports on those operations to Congress.
Infrastructure projects with a potential Federal investment of at least $75 million are brought to the Bank’s attention by a project sponsor (state, locality, tribe, infrastructure agency
(e.g. transit agency), or a consortium of these entities.

To determine a level of Federal investment, the Bank uses a sliding scale method that incorporates conditions such as the type of infrastructure system or systems, project location,
project cost, current and projected usage, non-Federal revenue, regional or national significance, promotion of economic growth and community development, reduction in traffic congestion, environmental benefits, land use policies that promote smart growth, and mobility improvements.

Once a level of investment is determined for a project, the Bank develops a financing package with full faith and credit from the government. The financing package could include direct subsidies, direct loan guarantees, long-term tax-credit general purpose bonds, and long-term tax-credit infrastructure project specific bonds. The initial ceiling to issue bonds is $60 billion.

The Bank is tasked to report annually to Congress on the projects it reviews and finances. A public database is created to catalog what projects were funded and what financing packages were provided. The Bank is also tasked to report every three years on the economic efficacy and transparency of all current Federal infrastructure financing methods, and how those methods could be improved. After five years, the Government Accountability Office would be tasked with evaluating the Bank’s operations and efficacy.

The Bank does not displace existing formula grants and earmarks for infrastructure. It targets specifically large capacity-building projects that are not adequately served by current
financing mechanisms.

http://dodd.senate.gov/multimedia/2007/080...