Jim Hightower's Take on Congress' Own Socialized Medicine

Jim Hightower via Common Dreams

. . . Right under the Capitol dome, conveniently situated between the Senate and House chamber, is the Office of the Attending Physician. Inside are more than a dozen navy doctors, nurses, medical technicians, pharmacists and other health professionals, all employed by the government solely to attend to a select clientele: the 535 members of Congress.

Let's say that, after giving a fiery speech on the floor assailing the evils of government-run health care, a lawmaker gets gaseous or has a tongue cramp. He or she can pop right into the OAP for — yes! — some government-run health care. No appointment needed, no pesky insurance forms to fill out, no co-pay — just care.

For this, members pay a flat fee of $503 a year. A year! You and I are taxed to cover the real costs of this elite service. And that's not the end of public health benefits for lawmakers — if they need a specialist, an operation, therapy, rehab or other pricey procedure, it's all free at the government's Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval hospitals.

If it's good enough for them, why not us? The public deserves what the Congress has, and any member who opposes extending it to us should automatically be stripped of their privileges.

For a model of integrity, they might look to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rep. Steve Kagen, D-Wis. — both of whom have rejected taking congressional coverage until everyone in America has coverage of equal quality. I don't think the noisy naysayers are looking for integrity, however — not as long as they can get away with their abominable hypocrisy.

Copyright 2009 Creators.com

Want to Change Congress?

Change Campaign Finance Laws to return Power to the People !!

Change Congress co-founder Lawrence Lessig keynotes Brennan Center campaign finance reform conference. (May 8, 2009)

12 Failures and Schemes that Lead to Current Multi Trillion $$ Bush Depression

Hat tip to: AlterNet

While somewhat lengthy for this pithy-striving blog, this IS WELL WORTH THE READ.


Thanks, Tadpole for calling my attention to this analysis!


$5 billion in lobbying to Congress got the finance industry lucrative legislative favors that paved the way for Wall Street's devastating collapse.


What can $5Billion buy in Washington?


Quite a lot.


Over the 1998-2008 period, the financial sector spent more than $5 billion on U.S. federal campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.
This extraordinary investment paid off fabulously. Congress and executive agencies rolled back long-standing regulatory restraints, refused to impose new regulations on rapidly evolving and mushrooming areas of finance, and shunned calls to enforce rules still in place.

"Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," a report released by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation (and which I co-authored), details a dozen crucial deregulatory moves over the last decade -- each a direct response to heavy lobbying from Wall Street and the broader financial sector, as the report details. (The report is available at: www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm.) Combined, these deregulatory moves helped pave the way for the current financial meltdown.

Here are 12 deregulatory steps to financial meltdown:

1. The repeal of Glass-Steagall

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 formally repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and related rules, which prohibited banks from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. In 1998, Citibank and Travelers Group merged on the expectation that Glass-Steagall would be repealed. Then they set out, successfully, to make it so. The subsequent result was the infusion of the investment bank speculative culture into the world of commercial banking. The 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall helped create the conditions in which banks invested monies from checking and savings accounts into creative financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, investment gambles that led many of the banks to ruin and rocked the financial markets in 2008.

2. Off-the-books accounting for banks

Holding assets off the balance sheet generally allows companies to avoid disclosing “toxic” or money-losing assets to investors in order to make the company appear more valuable than it is. Accounting rules -- lobbied for by big banks -- permitted the accounting fictions that continue to obscure banks' actual condition.

3. CFTC blocked from regulating derivatives

Financial derivatives are unregulated. By all accounts this has been a disaster, as Warren Buffett's warning that they represent "weapons of mass financial destruction" has proven prescient -- they have amplified the financial crisis far beyond the unavoidable troubles connected to the popping of the housing bubble. During the Clinton administration, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sought to exert regulatory control over financial derivatives, but the agency was quashed by opposition from Robert Rubin and Fed Chair Alan Greenspan.

4. Formal financial derivative deregulation: the Commodities Futures Modernization Act

The deregulation -- or non-regulation -- of financial derivatives was sealed in 2000, with the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. Its passage orchestrated by the industry-friendly Senator Phil Gramm, the Act prohibits the CFTC from regulating financial derivatives. 5. SEC removes capital limits on investment banks and the voluntary regulation regime

In 1975, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) promulgated a rule requiring investment banks to maintain a debt to-net capital ratio of less than 15 to 1. In simpler terms, this limited the amount of borrowed money the investment banks could use. In 2004, however, the SEC succumbed to a push from the big investment banks -- led by Goldman Sachs, and its then-chair, Henry Paulson -- and authorized investment banks to develop net capital requirements based on their own risk assessment models. With this new freedom, investment banks pushed ratios to as high as 40 to 1. This super-leverage not only made the investment banks more vulnerable when the housing bubble popped, it enabled the banks to create a more tangled mess of derivative investments -- so that their individual failures, or the potential of failure, became systemic crises.

6. Basel II weakening of capital reserve requirements for banks

Rules adopted by global bank regulators -- known as Basel II, and heavily influenced by the banks themselves -- would let commercial banks rely on their own internal risk-assessment models (exactly the same approach as the SEC took for investment banks). Luckily, technical challenges and intra-industry disputes about Basel II have delayed implementation -- hopefully permanently -- of the regulatory scheme.

7. No predatory lending enforcement

Even in a deregulated environment, the banking regulators retained authority to crack down on predatory lending abuses. Such enforcement activity would have protected homeowners, and lessened though not prevented the current financial crisis. But the regulators sat on their hands. The Federal Reserve took three formal actions against subprime lenders from 2002 to 2007. The Office of Comptroller of the Currency, which has authority over almost 1,800 banks, took three consumer-protection enforcement actions from 2004 to 2006.

8. Federal preemption of state enforcement against predatory lending

When the states sought to fill the vacuum created by federal non-enforcement of consumer protection laws against predatory lenders, the Feds -- responding to commercial bank petitions -- jumped to attention to stop them. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision each prohibited states from enforcing consumer protection rules against nationally chartered banks.

9. Blocking the courthouse doors: Assignee Liability Escape

Under the doctrine of “assignee liability,” anyone profiting from predatory lending practices should be held financially accountable, including Wall Street investors who bought bundles of mortgages (even if the investors had no role in abuses committed by mortgage originators). With some limited exceptions, however, assignee liability does not apply to mortgage loans, however. Representative Bob Ney -- a great friend of financial interests, and who subsequently went to prison in connection with the Abramoff scandal -- worked hard, and successfully, to ensure this effective immunity was maintained.

10. Fannie and Freddie enter subprime

. . .Fannie and Freddie are not responsible for the financial crisis. They are responsible for their own demise, and the resultant massive taxpayer liability. . . . In fact, the motivation was the for-profit nature of the institutions and their particular executive incentive schemes. . . . .Massive lobbying -- including especially but not only of Democratic friends of the institutions -- enabled them to divert from their traditional exclusive focus on prime loans.

11. Merger mania

The effective abandonment of antitrust and related regulatory principles over the last two decades has enabled a remarkable concentration in the banking sector, even in advance of recent moves to combine firms as a means to preserve the functioning of the financial system. The megabanks achieved too-big-to-fail status. While this should have meant they be treated as public utilities requiring heightened regulation and risk control, other deregulatory maneuvers (including repeal of Glass-Steagall) enabled them to combine size, explicit and implicit federal guarantees, and reckless high-risk investments.

12. Credit rating agency failure

With Wall Street packaging mortgage loans into pools of securitized assets and then slicing them into tranches, the resultant financial instruments were attractive to many buyers because they promised high returns. But pension funds and other investors could only enter the game if the securities were highly rated.

The credit rating agencies enabled these investors to enter the game, by attaching high ratings to securities that actually were high risk -- as subsequent events have revealed. The credit rating agencies have a bias to offering favorable ratings to new instruments because of their complex relationships with issuers, and their desire to maintain and obtain other business dealings with issuers.

This institutional failure and conflict of interest might and should have been forestalled by the SEC, but the Credit Rating Agencies Reform Act of 2006 gave the SEC insufficient oversight authority. In fact, the SEC must give an approval rating to credit ratings agencies if they are adhering to their own standards -- even if the SEC knows those standards to be flawed.


From a financial regulatory standpoint, what should be done going forward? The first step is certainly to undo what Wall Street has wrought. More in future columns on an affirmative agenda to restrain the financial sector. None of this will be easy, however. Wall Street may be disgraced, but it is not prostrate. Financial sector lobbyists continue to roam the halls of Congress, former Wall Street executives have high positions in the Obama administration, and financial sector propagandists continue to warn of the dangers of interfering with "financial innovation."

Special Tip of the Hat to My Friend Joey

My Friend, Joey, says that Milton Friedman, in his view, is still the foremost economist of our times.

I respectfully and vehemently disagree. Keynesian economics are being proven correct everyday, and adapting those principles to the current world-wide meltdown is the only hope we have.

I know for certain nothing good has come of the unbridled greed Milton Friedman and his disciples unleashed on the world. Google Pinochet and The Chicago School of Economics. Read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which details the worldwide effects of violent "revolutions" launched by Friedman's minions--with the ardent cheerleading of most every neo conservative voice in America in the past 40 years.

The 20+ year old clip of Friedman appearing on Phil Donahue's show (below) merely underscores the utter folly of following the economic philosophy of the greed-driven egomaniac Friedman. He snidely and condescendingly touts GREED to Donahue as though it is intrinsically good, using only "everybody does it" as a rationale.

Its very possible to be a traditonal fiscal, economic and monetary conservative without channelling Friendman's rapacious greed.

Thanks for sending the clip, Joey. It illustrates well why American hegemony is decried all over the civilized world.

H/T to FromtheLeft:

What a concept? An American president who tells the lobbyists they can go to hell while reminding them he works for the American people.

That’s exactly what President Barack Obama said in his weekly radio and video address.

The president challenged the nation’s vested interests to a legislative duel, saying he will fight to change health care, energy and education in dramatic ways that will upset the status quo.

“The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long. But I don’t. I work for the American people.”

Obama said his ambitious budget plan, unveiled Thursday, will help millions of Americans, but only if Congress overcomes resistance from deep-pocket lobbies.

“I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight. My message to them is this: So am I.”

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Republicon Implosion Continues

Commentator
Paul Jenkins
has a thorough analysis of how inept Rebublicans are seeming this week. Herewith, an excerpt:

With the sweet smell of defeat lingering in Republican Washington, three of the party's biggest losers are back. Tom DeLay, run out of the capital because even by its standards he was woefully corrupt, called Obama's Congressional address "the most irresponsible, hypocritical speech I have ever witnessed." This from the man who blamed the Columbine shootings on "school systems [teaching] our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud." Speaking of irresponsible, hypocritical, primordial and muddy, Newt Gingrich is also back and you will be stunned to hear that he is "disappointed" with Obama's performance so far. Mitt "Who Let The Dogs Out" Romney, who drained $100 million on a creepy presidential campaign, this week decided to come to the financial rescue of embattled Republicans who are "standing up for fiscal responsibility and saying no to spending abuse" (ie, the stimulus package). Yes, that's right, the man who spent $400,000 per delegate in the Republican primary is proudly lecturing others about fiscal responsibility. Any moment now, we expect Rudy Giuliani, who outdid Romney by spending $59 million for just one delegate, to share some of his own financial wisdom, probably spicing it up with his usual light-handed touch of 9/11 doomsday.

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Bailout Blues--Where'd the $$ Go?

$800 Billion BAILOUT

or is it really $2 Trillion??

Meet freshman Congressman Alan Grayson D Fla





and visit his campaign site for more vids here

Many are calling him "Bulldog."
Crapaud says: Welcome back Harry Truman!

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----Matthew Yglesias @ THINK PROGRESS ---- A Lazy Monday Guestatorial

The Gingrich Doctrine and the 21st Century

My colleague Satyam Khanna notes some of the broader context for the revelation that Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) is explicitly modeling his tactics on Newt Gingrich’s obstructionism in 1993-94.

In Washington, coverage of politics is dominated by politics rather than the policy consequences of politics. Thus, because of the outcome of the 1994 elections, Gingrich’s 93-94 tactics are held to have been a great success. But it’s important to be clear—those tactics included lockstep opposition to a Clinton economic program whose opponents set it would wreck the economy, but in fact laid the groundwork for years of prosperity. Gingrich’s success in blocking health care reform has been a small but persistent drag on the economy whose negative impact has compounded each and every year for the past fifteen years and has led to the preventable deaths of thousands and thousands of people at a minimum. Politics is politics and I understand that, but anyone who looks to that era as something to be emulated is dangerously indifferent to the real-world implications of congressional behavior.

Meanwhile, the political contexts of the two eras strike me as different in a number of ways. Bill Clinton’s 43 percent share of the popular vote in the 1992 election made it plausible to believe that the center of public opinion was amenable to the idea that the President’s agenda needed curtailing. What’s more, the Democrats gained zero Senate seats and actually lost nine House seats. Under the circumstances, you can see why conservative felt emboldened. And their political strategy had a clear logic to it—a large number of Democrats in congress were representing constituencies that had pretty consistently been trending to the right in presidential politics since the 1960s. With a Democrat in the White House, the chance existed for a spirit of feisty opposition to force the voters in such constituencies to align their congressional preferences with their presidential ones.

That’s simply not the case this year. Not only did Obama have a more decisive win (obviously the absence of a third-party candidate is important here) but the Democratic caucus is more compact and includes many fewer outlier members whose constituencies are dramatically more conservative than the national electorate that backed Obama in November.

Of course, nobody can know what the results of all this will be, and objective occurrences in the world will have a large impact completely independently of the quality of Rep. Cantor’s tactical decisionmaking. But it does seem worth noting that the Virginia Republican Party, of which Cantor is a part, has not been a huge font of electoral success in recent years. Instead, the right-wing of the VA party has, with incredible speed and efficiency, turned one of the most solidly Republican states in the country into one with a decidedly blueish hue. When Mark Warner was elected governor in 2001, it was seen as a stroke of political genius to be able to carry the state. Then came Tim Kaine in 2005 and Jim Webb in 2006. In 2008, Democrats went from a 3-8 split of the state’s House seats to a 6-5 split. Warner became the state’s second Democratic Senator in a race that nobody paid any attention to because the state party had essentially thrown the election months earlier by driving their potentially electable candidate out of the race and throwing the nomination to a guy everyone knew would get his ass kicked.

In other words, though Gingrichism was politically successful in the mid-1990s, the record of Cantorism in the 21st century has been much weaker.

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Editorial Cartoon from MSNBC

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Guest Blogatorial from Average Bro

Why I Voted For Obama In The First Place.

Here's why. Because even though the guy's already in office, taking his lumps, and surrounding himself with people who hardly scream "change", he still does things from time to time to show he's not your typical "politician".

Case in point.





"I screwed up."

Ask yourself this: when is the last time you heard a President say those words?

We've heard Presidents say "I screwed... her."

We've heard Vice Presidents say "Screw you!"

We've heard Presidents say "Screw... what's a screw?"

When Presidents say "I'm sorry", they usually mean "I'm just sorry I got caught"[1], or "F*ck you, I ain't sorry for sh*t", or "You've seen my wife's cankles! What would you do?"

But falling on the sword, manning up, admitting your mistake, explaining your original rationale for a decision that's backfired, and promising to do better? Well, that my friends is indeed change. Does it atone for some of the odd Cabinet choices he's made? No. But it does tell me that he understands he's being held accountable by the American people.

Would Mr. Obama have come out with this missive had Daschle been confirmed by the Senate? Prolly not. But by telling Daschle and Nancy Killefer to kick rocks (no way in hell either "voluntarily stepped down"), it's clear to me that Obama realizes the error of his ways. I think dude start getting high on his own supply after November 4th, and forgot who the real bosses were: the folks who voted him in. When you campaign on being high and mighty, folks expect you to follow through.

By saying a figurative "my bad", Obama tells me he's got some level of self awareness and cares about following through on his promises.

Well done.

Question: Does Obama earn any points for coming out and freely admitting his mistake? When's the last time a President issued a sincere apology?

Crapaud says: Amen to Average Bro. His take on things is most often right on the mark.

Most other recent presidential "apologies" were never "personal." Examples: Clinton's landmark apology for the horrors of the Tuskegee Experiments were "easy" because he himself was not responsible. Lil' Bush's disingenuous deflecting about the horror at Walter Reed, blamed others for that and he did not "man up" to the fact that the "buck" for that one was squarely in his chain of command.

Refreshing indeed, refreshing indeed!

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Hissy Fit Republican “Bipartisanship”

Sick and Tired of Obstructionist Republicons

Webster defines bi·par·ti·san: adjective “of, relating to, or involving members of two parties ; specifically : marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties”

Webster, conversely defines par-ti-san: noun or adjective “a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person ; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance”

Crapaud can't describe the current state

of the minority in Congress any more succinctly than

John Amato recently did in his Blog, Crooks and Liars:

“No matter what harm has been caused by the Republican party to our country and applies especially when they have been voted out of office because of that harm, any piece of Democratic legislation being discussed may be attacked with the intent of watering it down or destroying it completely (voided) at any time as long as one conservative in Congress has a hissy fit.

The traditional media must immediately validate their hissy fit by repeating said hissy fit talking points over and over again in print, on the Internets, on radio and on TV as many times as necessary to accomplish said goal of compromising the legislation that the hissy fit is applicable to.

False information is also allowed to be transmitted by the hissy fitter and the media in an effort to implement the Conservative Hissy Fit exception. An alternative name that may be used is the Republican Hissy Fit exception. “

Well, while we Crapauds are not known for being succinct, we are rather direct. So let's try this: Obstreperous obstructionist Republicans in the House are so uncannily unprincipled, they fawn publicly over the President's bipartisan outreach, then unilaterally and unanimously vote against the very concessions they extorted from him. Crapaud says take off the gloves, exercise your mandate and save this country. Well, that's why no Crapaud will ever be elected president.

Crapaud also recommends what Mother Jones

says on the current state of "unilateral" bipartisanship.

And Stephen Colbert's Take--PRICELESS

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

The Word - The Audacity of Nope

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Paul McCartney Appearance

Funny Political Videos
More Funny Videos

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