Tag: obama

Body temperature and the stimulus/jobs package

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Ninety eight point six?  Body temperature?  Yes: it is also the percentage  – 98.6  – of working tax filers who are impacted positively by tax cuts in the stimulus package.

From fivethirityeight.com: “the tax reductions in the stimulus – which collectively made up $288 billion, or about 37 percent of the package. Most of those tax cuts are targeted at individuals. And while the they aren’t terribly deep, they are impressively broad.

The broadest tax cut in the stimulus package is the “Making Work Pay” tax credit, worth about $116.2 billion (see the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center for this and other figures) and applicable to the vast majority of working Americans. Indeed, all single filers making less than $95,000 and all joint filers making less than $190,000 are eligible for this tax cut. Most of them, in fact, are already receiving it in the form of lower withholding on their paychecks.The well-to-do are benefiting too – or at least they will once it comes time to file their taxes next April. That’s because, as part of the stimulus, the government extended the alternative minimum tax (AMT) “patch”, which reduces the tax burden for some 24-26 million Americans who would be subject to the AMT. Most people who would be hit by the AMT are doing pretty well. The median income among people who would be subject to the AMT is about $130,000, and the average is about $165,000. This has the convenient property, though, of starting to kick in right where the “Making Work Pay” credit phases out, meaning that a great number of Americans who won’t benefit from former program will benefit from the latter one.

Finally, there are a number of smaller tax rebates and credits that are more highly targeted – to buyers of new cars and new homes, to small businesses, to low-income families with children, to the unemployed, and so forth. We’ll focus principally on one of these, which is the credit for new car purchases. ..  The automobile purchase credit operates by allowing taxpayers who buy new vehicles to deduct state and local sales taxes from the amount they owe to the IRS – something they ordinarily can’t do.”

see http://www.fivethirityeight.com

The Brownshirts are back – where is HUAC when we need it?

insurance industry funded fascism.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Perhaps HUAC should come back and investigate these folks…

Insurance industry funded fascism, from Frank Schaeffer, alternet: ” The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama’s election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him  to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to  intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform.  They are using my old shock troops — given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized “tea parties” fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect  the profits of the insurance business. Armey’s FreedomWorks is  organizing against health care reform. Armey’s lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey’s lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry.  FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. (They are also fans of fossil fuels. Armey’s lobbying firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE, on energy related issues.)…I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.

The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson)  “broke their brains.” What else could explain their embrace of intimidation — rather than discourse — over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they’d just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?…Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they’ve wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people —  and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can’t win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!…A barrage of outright lies, wherein the Democrats are being accused of wanting to launch a massive euthanasia program against the elderly, free abortions for everyone, and “a government takeover” of health-care is now being combined with physical intimidation that in several cases has required police escorts to protect pro health-care reform speakers… It’s time that this whole shabby (and insane) business be exposed, vilified in run out of town on a rail by whatever responsible Republicans — if any — that are still in the party and who want to see the fortunes of their party revived. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money via lobbying firms and using it to organize what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but thrown out of the public debate forever.  They should become absolute pariahs.

It’s time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.”

N.B.: Frank Schaeffer – and his father Francis – was a right wing “pro life”zealot”.

Emphasis mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141833/right-wing_turncoat_gives_the_inside_scoop_on_why_conservatives_are_rampaging_town_halls/



Government Health Insurance

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Paul Krugman, in the NY Times: At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend…most Americans do have health insurance, and are reasonably satisfied with it. How is that possible, when insurance markets work so badly? The answer is government intervention…So here’s the bottom line: if you currently have decent health insurance, thank the government..

Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that President Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will. To the extent we have a working health care system at all right now it’s only because the government covers the elderly, while a combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage.

Now Mr. Obama basically proposes using additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opinion/31krugman.html?scp=6&sq=krugman&st=cse

AMA vs. Public option

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From Truthout: “Yesterday the American Medical Association came out against a public option for health care. And yesterday the President reaffirmed his support for it. The next weeks will show what Obama is made of – whether he’s willing and able to take on the most formidable lobbying coalition he has faced so far on an issue that will define his presidency.

And make no mistake: A public option large enough to have bargaining leverage to drive down drug prices and private-insurance premiums is the defining issue of universal health care. It’s the only way to make health care affordable. It’s the only way to prevent Medicare and Medicaid from eating up future federal budgets. An ersatz public option – whether Kent Conrad’s non-profit cooperatives, Olympia Snowe’s “trigger,” or regulated state-run plans – won’t do squat.

The last president to successfully take on the giant health care lobbies was LBJ. He got Medicare and Medicaid enacted because he weighed into the details, twisted congressional arms, threatened and cajoled, drew lines in the sand, and went to war against the AMA and the other giant lobbyists standing in the way. The question now is how much LBJ is in Barack Obama.

The big guns are out and they’re firing. All major lobbying firms in Washington – many of them brimming with ex-members of Congress – are now crawling all over the Hill. Lots of money is on the table. AMA’s political action committee has contributed $9.8 million to congressional candidates since 2000, and its lobbying arm is one of the most formidable on the Hill. Meanwhile, Big Insurance and Big Pharma are increasing their firepower. . The five largest private insurers and their trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans spent a total of $6.4 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year, up more than $1 million from the first quarter last year, and are spending even more now.

Some congressional Democrats are willing and able to stand up to this barrage. Many are not. They need cover from the White House.

The President can’t do this alone. You must weigh in and get everyone you know to weigh in, too. Bombard your senators and representatives. Organize and mobilize others. And let the White House know how strongly you feel. This is one of those battles that define a presidency. But more importantly, it’s one of those battles that define the state of American democracy.

Emphasis mine.

see: http://www.truthout.org/061409A

Elections Matter!

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Alternet:

Change: “…he also spoke of a knowledge deficit about Islam in the U.S. and the West, and said that “we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.”
Obama intends to DISTANCE himself from the policies of his predecessor, the wildly UNPOPULAR George W. Bush, and present a new image to the Muslim and Arab worlds. 

SEE: http://www.alternet.org/world/140444/bush_left_america’s_standing_in_the_mideast_at_rock_bottom_–_can_obama_turn_it_around_in_cairo/

From McClatchy:

CAIRO — President Barack Obama, courting Muslims internationally, said Thursday that the United States does not accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory and that “just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.”

In a speech he conceived well before his election last November, aimed at repositioning U.S. standing in the Middle East in the wake of the Iraq war, and drafted with the help of prominent Muslim-Americans, Obama told an audience at Cairo University that “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

The relationship, he said, should be founded on mutual interests and respect and “the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”

see: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/

Differed Gratification

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Having been politically active from 1963 on, I saw the GOP recover, over many years, from the party out of control to the one in: listening to the advocates of the new minority party today, some of them think that it will be a short road back – lets hope not!

How do we stay on top?

o Deliver solutions, not problems.

o Set reasonable expectations.

o Stay on message

o Use teachable moments to demonstrate what has failed, why it failed, and how we are going to repair.

The Political Brain and Obama

SACRIFICING the American taxpayer at the altar of their free-market extremism.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Drew Westen, author of  “The Political Brain”, writes in HuffPost:”President Obama’s APPROVAL  ratings have continued to break records, and with good reason. In less than 3 months, he has already proven himself remarkably CAPABLE as a leader, in getting a STIMULUS  package passed (while learning some hard lessons about splitting the difference in policy with the people who created the mess); steadfastly REFUSING TO JETTISON health care, energy, and education reform from his budget in tough economic times; beginning to HEAL the deep wounds left by his predecessor in the U.S.’s relationship with the rest of the world through both his mastery of foreign affairs and his emotional intelligence as diplomat-in-chief; and even signaling his intention to take on comprehensive IMMIGRATION REFORM. All of this has happened as Republicans have seemed increasingly impotent, ideologically inflexible, and oppositional, NONE of which endears them to anyone but the 30% who still THINK Bush was a great president (and apparently remain off their medication).Yet at the same time, something else is happening under the radar: the fortunes of Democrats more generally are starting to wane…how could it be that President Obama’s standing in the polls is holding steady or improving while Democrats’ standing in the polls is FALLING? And does it matter, so long as he is able to get his agenda passed through a heavily Democratic House and Senate?…Let’s start with the second question first. It does matter. The President’s ability to stay on the path he has charted REQUIRES not only Democrats holding or increasing their majorities in 2010 but on their holding onto public SUPPORT  for sweeping change. It also requires moderate Democrats and those from conservative states and districts to feel comfortable voting for new spending, and likely a second stimulus package, knowing that they will be ATTACKED in the next election with the familiar refrains of big-government tax-and-spend liberals (if not socialists).

And as for the first question, the paradoxical popularity of the new President while the fortunes of his party are waning, not only makes sense but is predictable from an understanding of the psychology of public opinion and “branding.” Any marketing executive will tell you that a good product is certainly a big help for sales, … the situation we have now in American politics, where the Democrats are PRODUCING solutions where Republicans MANUFACTURED problems, and where the Republicans are now trying to re-sell “pre-owned” ideological vehicles that have a bad habit of running into ditches.In politics, you DON’T WIN on ideas ALONE. Comprehensive energy reform was a no-brainer after OPEC began embargoing oil 35 years ago, but the percent of our energy we are importing from overseas has only SKYROCKED since then, and Americans were buying Hummers until gas hit $4.00 a gallon. Health care REFORM made good sense in 1993, but last I looked, it hasn’t happened. Successful branding requires TWO things: CREATING positive associations to your own brand, and DIFFERENTIATING it from competing brands. In POLITICS, that means offering voters a clear, memorable, emotionally compelling narrative about your party’s core principles, while presenting them with an equally clear, memorable, and evocative story about the other party that would not make anyone want to be associated with it. If there were ever a time Democrats could offer both stories, this is it.

But the FAILURE of Democrats to brand themselves has been a perennial problem since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition in the 1970s, and it remains a major problem today,leaving Republicans the OPPORTUNITY, once they get their ideological chops back, to start branding both parties again, as they have for the better part of thirty years. Democrats stand for spending our way out of a looming Depression–a sound policy when no one else has the money or chutzpa to spend or invest–but how does that differ from the fiscal irresponsibility with which Ronald Reagan branded the party of “tax and spend” 30 years ago? Democrats stand for shifting to clean, safe 21st century sources of energy rather than relying on the fossil fuels of the last two centuries, but then why is the Secretary of the Interior waxing poetic about expanded offshore drilling?

It’s hard for people to hear your message when you aren’t speaking…PERHAPS President Obama will succeed where Adams and Jefferson could not, and America WILL BECOMEnot only a post-racial society but a post-partisan one. But if he does not succeed in turning a broken economy around substantially by the summer of 2010 and REMINDING the American people on a regular basis (REPETITION is essential psychologically, neurologically, and empirically to branding) that he and his fellow Democrats are trying to PULL the nation OUT of the ditch the Republicans left us in by the side of the road, his administration will gradually become associated in voters’ minds with the economic crisis he inherited, and he will find himself working with a Congress far LESS friendly to progressive reforms in two years.

Under similar circumstances, FDR trumpeted the failures of the Republican leadership and ideology that created the Great Depression while still managing to unite a terrified nation around not only his own charismatic presence but around New Deal reforms–reforms he could never have enacted if he had not contrasted the failed ideology that had led the nation over the economic cliff with the radically different solutions he and his party were offering. Roosevelt’s consistent branding of the Republicans as inflexible ideologues at the same time as he showed what progressive, pragmatic action and Democratic leadership could offer led to a political realignment that lasted 40 years.

That is not President Obama’s style. … the REALITY is that millions of Americans are out of work, and most hard working Americans have LOST nearly half of their wealth, and many their HOMES, because of the way George W. Bush and the radical Republican ideologues who enabled him ran the government–and ran it into the ground. The reality is that we had a SURPLUS when Bill Clinton left office, and the only reason President Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion deficit that now constrains him is that George W. Bush and the radical Republicans believed in handing out suitcases full of cash to their wealthy friends with no strings attached and no transparency… I think it particularly BEARS SAYING every time those same Republicans preach fiscal discipline, heap scorn on government “bailouts” they BOTH necessitated and engineered, or offer their quasi-religious answer of “the free market” to every problem the market has created or failed to solve, from the crisis in the housing industry and the lack of regulations on Wall Street that took down our economy (and the world economy along with it) to the fact that most working Americans are now afraid of changing jobs for fear of losing their health insurance. Republican politicians would certainly be a LITTLE LESS QUICK to step up to the microphone if they knew that EVERY time they talked about fiscal discipline, a Democrat would be there to remind them that they were the ones who went on a 6-year spending spree with our children’s money and then handed the better part of a trillion dollars out to Wall Street bankers and speculators, SACRIFICING the American taxpayer at the altar of their free-market extremism. ..That’s a lesson we should have learned a long time ago.

In politics, there is nothing so deadly as silence. ”  (EMPHASIS MINE)

SEE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/why-the-democrats-are-los_b_186047.html

How can the President Fire the GM CEO?

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Good question!  How does  ‘the government’ have the authority to do this? 

Answer: From Tom Krishner, AP: ” The lender will always come in and push levers of corporate control,” said Douglas Baird, a professor who SPECIALIZES  in BANKRUPTCY at the University of Chicago Law School.

“It will basically say: ‘You want me to lend money. But there are these kind of targets you have to hit.’ PRIVATE lenders do it all the time,” Baird added.

President Barack Obama, in detailing his plans for the industry Monday, said the government has no interest in running GM. But at the same time, the White House has specifically rejected a restructuring plan turned in by GM and ordered it to make deeper cuts.

“What we are interested in is giving GM an opportunity to finally make those much-needed changes that will let them emerge from this crisis a stronger and more competitive company,” Obama said.

GM and Chrysler are alive today only because of $17.4 billion in government loans.”

Or, in other words: he who loans the money calls the plays…

see:http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/business-12/1238488404322180.xml&coll=2