Lots of crying amongst women about how their abortion rights are being sold down the line to get this lousy health care bill passed.
I’ll say publicly what I have said privately: start a serious Draft Clinton movement, start it now. (Her denials of interest won’t matter).
Nothing will change unless Obama personally thinks his own reelection is on the line. Sitting president’s don’t survive serious challenges from within their own party.
And Kucinich caves and agrees to vote on HCR. Kucinich’s email is a piece of work:
I know I have to make a decision, not on the bill as I would like to see it, but the bill as it is. My criticisms of the legislation have been well reported. I do not retract them. I incorporate them in this statement. They still stand as legitimate and cautionary. I still have doubts about the bill. I do not think it is a first step toward anything I have supported in the past. This is not the bill I wanted to support, even as I continue efforts until the last minute to modify the bill.
Basically, he seems to have gotten nothing for his vote. Nothing. And he can’t even find a good reason to vote for it.
Obama is proving, again, that he is very good at arm bending. What I am hearing is that threats are being made to cut off all Democratic party support for many Reps who vote against the bill. Some blue dogs will be allowed to vote against, but progressives as a group, and even some conservative Dems are expected to bite the bullet, vote for the bill, and suck up the consequences.
This is the moment when Obama flexes his muscle, proves he has control of the party, and that he will use that control against those who stand in his way. It’s what he has to do, and progressives should take note, because this sort of hardball politics is what they’ll have to do if they ever get in power.
This is the second time Obama has really bent arms. The first time was the bailout bill, before he was even president, which would not have passed without his intervention, an intervention which I have been told was extremely heavy handed.
It’s a pity that Obama is only good at strong arming Democrats, prefers to strong-arm progressives instead of conservative democrats, strong arms for conservative bills which are giveaways to corporate interests and appears completely incapable of playing any sort of hardball with Republicans, but this is the President that Democrats wanted.
(Full text of Kucinich’s letter after the jump)
The White House is telling people that if they don’t pass this bill, it will be a disaster for Democrats in the fall. That’s abject nonsense — their “fallback plan” for health care doesn’t have the toxic mandate that makes the IRS the collection agency for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, or any of the abortion issues that inflame both pro- and anti-choice groups. It’s a better bill on the merits anyway, and most of the country wouldn’t know the difference over a bill that doesn’t kick in until 2014 anyway.
Kill the health care bill, pass the fixes that can be put through, minus the mandate and abortion restrictions. Sounds like a win to me.
The hand wringing about how Obama isn’t using his opportunity to push through liberal judges (or even many judges at all) misses the point.
If he couldn’t even be bothered to replace the majority of the Justice Department’s USA’s, men and women chosen by Bush for their partisan credentials, which is completely within his purview and not subject to Republican filibustering, why would anyone think that he wants to push the courts to the left?
At this point Obama has
1) not stopped the Bush era raids against Hispanics which is totally at his discretion;
2) not lived up to his promises to gays, and he can stop DADT any time he bloody well wants to;
3) not been willing to protect women’s abortion rights
4) not shown any intention of passing EFCA (a bill helping unions organize)
Unions, women, latinos, gays…
Who does he bloody well think is going to support him in 2012?
Dean Baker has up a good post on credit default swaps (CDSs). He notes that CDSs transfer risk from the party best able to understand it to those who don’t understand it and that CDSs often don’t, actually, provide useful information on default risk.
Credit default swaps, at the end of the day are just insurance. They insure against loss of money due to default. Thus, they should be regulated like insurance.
Ae standard rule of insurance underwriting is that someone buying insurance must NEVER be better off if the event occurs than if it doesn’t. Ideally, they should always take a loss, the insurance should not make them completely whole.
This means, if you want to keep CDSs (and I’m fine with banning them outright), that:
1) no naked CDS’s should be written. ie. you can’t bet on a company going under unless you have loaned money to that company. You can’t sell a CDS to someone who doesn’t have that risk.
2) you cannot have a CDS whose value equals the value of your loans, otherwise you will want the business to fail. I would suggest an absolute maximum of 80% of the value of the loans. There’s a case for less.
I used to work in life insurance. In life insurance there are many studies which show that people who are worth more dead than alive, tend to die more often than they should. I am entirely confident the same is true of companies and government debt defaults. Since companies defaulting when they could survive is not in the public interest, credit default swaps need to be regulated so that it isn’t in the interest of holders of CDSs to put a knife into companies which would otherwise live, or to yawn and say “nope, not making a deal, we’re better of with you dead. Too bad what happens to the unsecured creditors, workers, stockholders and everyone else.”
Let me get this straight, Kos wants to primary one of the most reliable and principled progressives in Congress (perhaps the most principled one) because Kucinich doesn’t want to vote for a bill which will force Americans to buy crappy health insurance from private companies?
First they came for Massa, and now, not being able to find any dirt on Kucinich, they’re putting the pressure on, and Kos is going along with it?
Because, lord knows, what progressives should spend their time and money is primarying someone like Kucinich. What they should do is start an left wing fucking civil war so that Obama, Hoyer and Rahm Emmanuel can sit back and laugh as the left wing tears itself apart over a bill which, whether you want it passed or not, no one who is on the left wing should think is better than mediocre.
Be very clear, if “progressives” like Kos want to primary Kucinich, many other progressives will defend him and fight for him. So, instead of picking up new seats, we’ll be wasting time and money fighting over a seat already held by a progressive.
Those who want to go after Kucinich are acting as Obama and Rahm’s heavies. Acting as enforcers for a President who believes in indefinite detention without trial, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan, gutted civil rights and who wants to force every American to buy health insurance from private companies.
It’s time for Kos’s 15 minutes to end. The man’s stupidity, hubris and willingness to be used by a president who is objectively a conservative means he is now doing more damage to the left than good.
(I am informed that it’s too late to primary Kucinich in 2010. Thank goodness. Still a stupid threat in most ways.)
So, there’s a push on for a vote, now that Massa has been forced out and the kneecappers have made clear what happens to progressives who won’t play ball on HCR.
The bottom line is that health care reform is a giveaway to special interests, funded by cuts from Medicare and forcing people to buy insurance or pay or a fine. There’s some decent stuff in it, but less than folks think (for example, old folks can be charged multiple times what young folks are).
I’m still opposed. I don’t think the good outweighs the bad. This is not a case of “we can get better if it fails”, this is a case of “this is worse than nothing.”
Whatever the problem, the solutions are always the same:
This austerity plan aims at saving some € 4.8 billion at the expense of the Greek population, for the purpose of repaying creditors. The money saved will also be used to pay the fees of Goldman Sachs, a bank which we now know helped the government conceal part of its debt. Among the measures to be taken:
a freeze on recruitment and reduction of civil servants’ salaries (heavily reduced 13th and 14th months, reduced bonuses, coming after a 10 % decrease in salaries decided in January);
Somehow progressive tax increases never seem to occur. Somehow a pan-European Tobin tax never happens.
The interesting question though is this: how many European governments played the exact same games Greece did? How many are concealing their true fiscal picture, which is much worse than people think?
The answer, dear friends, is most of them. Including the Germans, who have been acting very high and mighty.
The only people in the world even stupider about financial engineering than the US were the Europeans, who bought toxic waste by the boatload.
They forgot what Americans forgot. There’s no free lunch.
Ever.
I can’t say how grateful I am that I didn’t spend the last year working for a blog where my job would have been to report in the minutaie of health care “reform” like it mattered.
Really.
That’s what keeps going through my head. Most of the entire year was spent on Kabuki, we now know for a fact what was obvious by the summer, Obama never wanted a public option, never wanted a good bill, and was putting together a bill whose fundamental structure was created by cutting deals with pharma, insurance companies and various other health care providers. It was always intended to be a dog’s breakfast.
I suppose somebody has to be part of the left wing noise machine, however much it amounts to pushing the same boulder up the hill over and over again, then being bitchslapped by your “friends”. I’ll pass.
The end result of all the fuss is that some people got paychecks, some progressive legislators got donations, and if a lousy bill passes, it will be no more to the left than Obama originally intended. In fact, it will amount to a right wing bill intended as a huge giveaway to various powerful interests.
The only good thing which could be said, I suppose, is that for most of a year, various people have been given an education in healthcare economics. Unfortunately, when you get out into the general population, most of what they heard was lies and liberal blog readers already knew that single payer was the way to go.
Clinton was the “spin” presidency. Bush was the “big lie” presidency. Obama is the “Kabuki” president—there’s lots of bullshit pretense at consultation and process, but the end result they want is predetermined, and it’s almost always conservative.
