Saturday, September 19, 2009

WHAT'S this? You try to ask your health insurance office a question and you get arrested — while on your cell phone to their customer service? Only in America? Or maybe also in Communist China, the right wing's favorite "market economy"?

Friday, September 18, 2009

THE first decade of the new century was the decade of the plutocrat, writes Timothy Egan at his Outposts blog. A quotation:

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target. ...

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the last Congress — majority Democrat, by the way — into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism?

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

Addendum ...

Ah, listen: Susan Boyle singing "Wild Horses":

Thursday, September 17, 2009

ADDED an interesting blog down in "Favorite Places." It's called little green footballs and it takes on some of the craziest of the crazies.

And Gail Collins and David Brooks want to argue about whether West and Swift mean we're a country in decline.

Addendum ...

AH, yes, of course, to quote Tom Friedman: "...if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China." Is it possible any longer to wonder how dumb we can be?

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

THE New England Journal of Medicine recently published an interesting survey of doctors and how they view a public health insurance option and an expansion of Medicare. I know which doctors I would want to see or have see my family members.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

ANDREW writes about the U.S. health care debate for British readers of the Times.

PERHAPS I've mentioned this, but it took Western Europe (which doesn't include Britain) about 2,000 years to become more or less civilized and it may take this country about the same number of years.

an untitled monotype

Addendum ...

"YOU lie, boy!" Maureen Dowd does have a way with words. And she let's South Carolina's Rep. Jim Clyburn enlighten us.

Monday, September 14, 2009

FRANK Rich says that President Obama wasted the summer by staying out of the fray while the inmates took over the asylum. A quotation:

...when we gain some perspective on the summer of 2009, the health care debate, like the crazed town-hall sideshows surrounding it, may seem very small in the history of this presidency — ... .

The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.

No less unsettling is the first-anniversary snapshot of 9/15: a rebound for Wall Street but not for the 26-million-plus Americans who are unemployed, no longer looking for jobs, or forced to settle for part-time work. Some 40 million Americans are living in poverty. While these economic body counts keep rising, tough regulatory reform for reckless financial institutions, too-big-to-fail and otherwise, seems more remote by the day. Last Sunday, Jenny Anderson of The Times exposed an example of Wall Street’s unashamed recidivism that takes gallows humor to a new high — or would were it in The Onion, not The Times. Some of the same banks that gambled their (and our) way to ruin by concocting exotic mortgage-backed securities now hope to bundle individual Americans’ life insurance policies into a new high-risk financial product built on this sure-fire algorithm: “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.”

MEANWHILE, the ignorant seem to be getting dumber by the minute. Yes, we are the "empire of illusion," as Chris Hedges termed it.