Posts by Jon Talton

"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." — Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina

You didn't think the best Supreme Court that money can buy was going to let Obamacare go into law, did you? From the questions asked of lawyers and the dismal performance of President Hoover's Solicitor General, it doesn't seem likely. Now the question is not merely whether the court will strike down the individual mandate but also use this as a springboard to go after more, beginning with Medicaid. Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas have waited their careers for this moment. Anthony Kennedy is a Reagan appointee. The Federalist Society and the entire right-wing infrastructure have built themselves for it. Now we will get another lesson in why it has been a calamity to have 30 years of mostly Republican presidents packing the federal judiciary. Activist judges? You ain't seen nothing yet.

The so-called Affordable Care Act has been a trainwreck from the beginning. Mr. Obama didn't make it a centerpiece of his campaign, so he had no mandate to do it. Most Americans don't understand it. Like the Dodd-Frank financial "re-regulation" legislation, it is compromised to appease the plutocrats, in this case the insurance industry. About the only clear benefit I can parse is the prohibition against denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

Worse, he wasted a precious year on "health care reform" that should have been spent in very obvious and effective measures to save an economy in free fall (and loudly claim credit). To address the worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression and reset the economy for a prosperous, sustainable future. "Never let a crisis go to waste," my ass. Instead, Mr. Obama chose health care. Here his constant template was revealed, alternately passive and ineffective, helped along by a spineless Democratic majority in Congress. The result: The triumph of the Tea Party in the 2010 election shellacking. He would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer? Were he not running against Willard Romney, he would be consigned to the Jimmy Carter dustbin — and he might yet be, for the Republican, whose health-care program in Massachusetts became Obamacare, has unlimited money.

There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, "it’s the prices, stupid." As it’s difficult to get good data on prices, that paper blamed prices largely by eliminating the other possible culprits. They authors considered, for instance, the idea that Americans were simply using more health-care services, but on close inspection, found that Americans don’t see the doctor more often or stay longer in the hospital than residents of other countries. Quite the opposite, actually. We spend less time in the hospital than Germans and see the doctor less often than the Canadians. "The United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do," they concluded. "This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services." On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-an-mri-costs-1080-in-america-and-280-in-france/2011/08/25/gIQAVHztoR_blog.html?tid=pm_pop

The surprise is not that an American soldier walked off his base and murdered 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, but that it hasn't happened more often, including in the United States. This is what happens when we keep our armed forces at war for an astounding 10 years. No wonder Gen. George Marshall was so eager to finish the Second World War, fearing that a democracy couldn't survive a war that went past five years. And no wonder Americans who now "support the troops" have historically been wary of a standing army and unimpressed by a chest-full of medals.

This is what happens when our wars have no front lines and no conventional armies as enemies. The war is everywhere and nowhere. Combatants are hidden in a civilian population already tired of our occupation, our disrespect for their customs and religion, and willing to supply information to the enemy. Soldiers in these circumstances learn to despise and dehumanize the ungrateful civilians they are supposed to be protecting. Even conventional wars coarsen nations, destroy young people, encourage atrocities.

This happens when Americans have slipped norms of decency, abandoned books in favor of homicidal video games, dress (and act) like adolescents, joined the military because the union blue-collar jobs they once could count on have moved to Asia, and found themselves defrauded and lied to by every institution in our national life. And guns, guns, guns everywhere.

Now is the time when all good progressives and people with brains are supposed to line up behind President Hoover. After all, where else can we go? The Republican theocrats and plutocrats have made their dangerous irrelevance clear through an endless series of "debates," and Willard Romney still can't close the deal with his own party. Washington Monthly tries to rehabilitate Mr. Obama in an article that contains this paragraph:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

And if you missed it, "he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him." Another Washington Monthly piece lists the president's top 50 accomplishments. Yet each one requires an asterisk.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based." Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance. The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power. The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues. When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

It is starting to dawn on America's press corps that the Arab Spring is not going to usher in Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East. The upheaval in Egypt, for example, has not led to rule by educated young Arabs, secularism, women's rights and peaceful pluralism. We find the same military control that has marked the country for decades along with the danger of an Islamic state inimical to Western values, as well as to stability in the region. Nineteen Americans face murky criminal charges. And so it goes. A world with way too many unemployed young men, a world facing scarcity, will fall back on the tribal, brutal and nationalistic.

In America, we await breathlessly the next phase of Occupy. Meanwhile, the super PACs and plutocrats continue to have their way. I return to a periodic theme: What happens here? What happens next? Jim Kunstler thinks we are ripe for a "John Brown moment." Some very smart Rogue readers expect big trouble at the Democratic and Republican conventions this year. And there is endless faith placed in Facebook and Twitter as tools to empower the powerless to overthrow the plutocracy.

I am skeptical but persuadable.