Weekly Diaspora: Autumn Holiday Edition
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
Ed. Note: This week's Diaspora is short because of the holidays. We'll be back to full-length next week.
Weekly Mulch: Countdown to Copenhagen
By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger
On Wednesday, President Obama pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions "in the range of" 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama also confirmed that he will attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen next month, as Aaron Wiener notes for the Washington Independent. But here's the catch: It's a one-day deal. Obama is only planning to stop by Copenhagen on Dec. 9 before flying to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. The climate talks, on the other hand, span Dec. 7 to Dec. 18.
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Weekly Pulse: Crunch Time in the Senate
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is determined to get a health care bill passed in the Senate by Christmas.
This is a momentous time, as John Nichols writes in The Nation:
...Harry Reid has a health-care reform bill, and it is advancing. Indeed, with Saturday night's 60-39 Senate vote to open a historic debate on the measure, the movement humanize America's healthcare system -- which began almost 70 years ago -- is closer to a congressional breakthrough than at any time in its history.
It won't be a cakewalk, though. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has famously threatened to torpedo the bill if it includes a public option. This week he tried to rewrite history. "This is a kind of 11th hour addition to a debate that's gone on for decades," Lieberman told reporters that "Nobody's ever talked about a public option before. Not even in the presidential campaign last year." Brian Beutler sets the record straight at Talking Points Memo: In fact the Obama campaign's health policy white paper explicitly called for the creation of a public option.
According to Mike Lillis in RH Reality Check, progressive senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is feeling optimistic about the public option's prospects.
Also in RH Reality Check, reproductive health policy analyst Jessica Arons reports that the merged Senate bill does not call for the much-debated abortion restrictions encoded in the Stupak amendment to the House bill.
In the Progressive, Ruth Conniff takes a closer look at the controversy over the latest mammogram guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a commission appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Compared to the old guidelines, the new recommendations suggest that women start getting regular mammograms later and wait longer in between screenings.
Liberals and conservatives are accusing the federal government of cheating women out of preventative care to save money. But as Conniff explains, more mammograms aren't necessarily better. There's just not much statistical evidence that screening women in their forties saves lives. In this age group, regular mammograms are more likely to generate hair-raising false alarms than lifesaving discoveries. Furthermore, mammograms use x-rays, which are inherently carcinogenic. That doesn't mean that mammograms are dangerous, just that unnecessary exposure should be avoided. Conniff writes:
...[O]verscreening and overtreatment are as much of a plague in the U.S. medical system as cost-cutting measures. And looking at breast cancer screening rationally, as the federal panel has done, makes a lot of sense.
Speaking of public health, as I report for Working In These Times, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration has published new guidelines to help retailers reduce the risk of crowd stampedes and trampling deaths at Black Friday sales. Have a safe and happy holiday and good luck standing in line for that $99 Blu-Ray player.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: Unemployment Fueling Political Storm
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Unemployment figures in the U.S. are staggering: The official rate stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. A broader measure that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for work is at 17.5%. That's a full-blown economic emergency.
But, as Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, President Barack Obama's response to the unemployment crisis has not matched the urgency of his response to the crisis on Wall Street. This isn't just unfair, it's bad economics.
"It's important to understand that the economic crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a function of a shaky financial system but of a crash in consumption that's come along with the evaporation of $14 trillion worth of the wealth of American families," Holland writes.
Widespread joblessness can be every bit as damaging to the economic structure as a financial crisis. When people are out of work, they buckle down on household expenses. When several million people cut back at the same time, the economic machine grinds to a halt. If people are not buying and selling stuff, the economy isn't working.
As Mary Kane explains for The Washington Independent, about 40% of families don't have enough money to cover expenses through a three-month stretch of unemployment--even if one member of the household is receiving unemployment benefits. Kane highlights a Brandeis University study that reveals the haggard state of the American household and the unfair distribution of wealth along racial lines. A full 66% of African-American and Latino families can't afford three months without work. At a time when 5.6 million workers have been jobless for at least six months, the study highlights just how dire finances have become for many households.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses potential labor market remedies with economist Dean Baker and The Nation's John Nichols. Baker suggests a work-share arrangement, in which employers cut back on their workers' hours to allow more people to work. To prevent losses for households, the government would step in and pay for the shortfall in hours. Employers would have more part-time jobs available, but the government would make sure everyone was paid as if they were working full-time. Baker also endorses a public jobs program, which he says could be especially useful in cities like Detroit and Cleveland that have been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn.
Nichols highlights the political consequences of failing to fix the unemployment mess. Unemployment directly affects the lives of voters. If widespread joblessness persists through November 2010, Democrats will net huge Congressional losses. If Obama thinks it's hard to garner bipartisan support for his legislative priorities now, imagine a few dozen more Republican obstructionists.
It's not that Obama failed to respond to the unemployment crisis. He did. That's what the stimulus package was all about. Today's 10.2% unemployment is a catastrophe, but it would be more like 12% without the stimulus package. But, given the seriousness of the issue, Obama is not giving unemployment enough attention.
In fact, Obama's economic priorities are a mirror-image of his campaign promises, as Robert Scheer argues in both a column for TruthDig and an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! After talking tough about reining in recklessness on Wall Street and making the financial system more accountable, Obama has hired many of the very policy makers who pushed through the deregulatory agenda back in the 1990s. Top Obama administration officials like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Gary Gensler and Neal Wolin helped make this mess in the first place.
"This is not a minor criticism," Scheer says. "I think the guy is betraying his own presidency."
Obama's timid efforts to rein in Wall Street and heal the ailing job market are setting the stage for a political disaster. If Obama and Congressional Democrats can't take strong action to fix the economy, they will find themselves with much narrower majorities next November. The economy, and the public institutions that support it, are supposed to work for everyone, not just the financial elite.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: No Treaty in Copenhagen?
By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger
Last weekend in Singapore, President Barack Obama acknowledged that a comprehensive international climate deal will not be reached during the climate change summit in Copenhagen. While many might view this as a letdown, lowering expectations might actually be a good thing, as Matthew Yglesias notes for the American Prospect. According to Yglesias, the conference can now be framed as a relative success whatever happens, and that will keep the momentum for climate action going after Copenhagen.
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Weekly Diaspora: Fort Hood, Pundits and Immigration Reform
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
First it was immigrants from Mexico, now Muslims in the armed services. After the tragic shootings at Fort Hood, conservative pundits are verbally attacking Muslims and Arab-Americans, much like they have vilified the immigrant community. The complexities of Islamic faith are being glossed over and "Muslim Terrorist" is stamped upon any act of violence involving their community. As a result, nuanced voices are buried in favor of suspicion and violence.
Weekly Pulse: Bachmann Fan Threatens to Shoot Up Newspaper
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
A Michigan woman threatened a Minnesota newspaper with mass murder for criticizing Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)'s anti-health reform rally, reports Paul Schmelzer in the Minnesota Independent:
...A woman in Michigan, angered over a newspaper editorial criticizing Bachmann's event, threatened to take a gun to the paper and "do what they did at Fort Hood" in response.
How pro-life.
David Corn of Mother Jones reports that Bachmann (R-MN) may also face an ethics investigation for using her taxpayer-funded website to promote the Tea Pary-Superbowl of Freedom, a partisan political rally to defeat health care reform. The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit political watchdog, alleges that Bachmann violated a House rule against using official websites for "grassroots lobbying or [to] solicit support for a Member's position." She literally told her supporters to come to Washington on Nov 5 and tell their representatives to vote against health reform. That's textbook grassroots lobbying and a clear no-no for a taxpayer-funded website.
Speaking of pesky rules and regulations, Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-MI) C Street residence is no-longer tax exempt. Stupak, who became famous for inserting a radical and far-reaching abortion funding ban into the House health reform bill, lives with several other lawmakers at a house on C Street. The house is owned by a secretive fundamentalist sect known as The Family. For years, C Street avoided paying property taxes by claiming to be a church. All that's over now. Ed Brayton of the Michigan Messenger reports that the IRS has finally figured out that C Street is a dorm.
Alex Koppelman reports in Salon that Stupak is reiterating his threat to kill health care reform if his language is stripped from the final bill:
"They're not going to take it out," Stupak said of Senate Democrats during an appearance on "Fox and Friends" Tuesday morning. "If they do, healthcare will not move forward ... At least 10 to 15 to 20 of us will not vote for it."
At Feministing, Jos Truit
discusses the Hyde Amendment, a piece of 1976 legislation that bans the
use of federal funds for abortions. The Hyde Amendment is back in the
news because Stupak is falsely claiming that his amendment merely
applies Hyde principles to health insurance.
Does he know that 45,000 born people die every year because they don't have health insurance?
The fight over abortion coverage in a reformed health care system is far from over. It's unlikely that Reid wrote Stupak language into his version of the bill, and it's equally unlikely that anti-choicers have the 60 votes to add it back in as an amendment. (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate is much more pro-choice than the House.) Anti-choice Dems Sens. Ben Nelson and Bob Casey seem to be walking back from their earlier threats to vote against a bill without Stupak language.
Harry Reid announced that Democrats would meet today to preview the Senate's version of the health care bill. The first procedural vote on the Senate bill could come before Thanksgiving.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: Saying 'No' to Corporate America
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
By proposing financial reforms that won't curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don't demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers instead of simply boosting corporate profits, the economic downturn will last for several more years and leave the economy vulnerable to another bank-induced meltdown.
The banks have unbelievable lobbying clout. In an interview with Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, Heather Booth, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, describes how one-sided the Wall Street reform fight has been. Despite broad public support for a fundamental financial overhaul, going up against the bank lobby is, as Booth describes, "a David and Goliath fight." It's basically Americans for Financial Reform against every major corporation in the U.S.
Booth notes that the Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $100 million on a campaign to defend the "so-called free enterprise system"--you know, the "free market"--in which corporate lobbyists spend millions of dollars to write the rules of the economic game. Just seven financial lobby groups have spent a massive $147 million peddling influence over the past two years.
In fact, as Janine Wedel observes for Salon, the U.S. economic system is starting to look an awful lot like the clannish systems of government that looted Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Today, the public good takes a backseat to the narrow interests of powerful corporations.
With the Obama administration working with advisers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, we're not just watching Wall Street write its own regulations. We're watching the financial sector re-write the official role of the government in the economy. In this new role, the government's top priority is securing profits for corporate America.
"The intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market," Wedel writes.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders echoes this theme in an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and journalist Russ Baker. Lobbyists have so thoroughly hijacked the U.S. economy, Perkins argues, that the nation's government now resembles those of Latin American nations he worked with in the 1980s and 1990s.
"I don't think the U.S. president has much power these days, to be honest with you. . . . It's the big corporate executives who call the shots today, and let's face it, they financed Obama's campaign," Perkins says.
The very efforts the government deployed to save the financial system are being perverted to create another disaster. In a five-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, Jane D'Arista, an influential economist and author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance, explains how Wall Street destroyed itself over the past decade. By borrowing massive amounts of money, Wall Street was able to place bigger bets in the capital markets casino, resulting in huge profits when those bets paid off. But when the bets backfired, the losses were just as massive. Companies couldn't pay them off, so the government stepped in to support them.
One of those support mechanisms came from the Federal Reserve, which began making incredibly cheap loans to firms that engaged predominantly in speculative trading. The Fed used to lend exclusively to commercial banks, which used the money to make loans that helped grow the real economy. But now those loans are being used to support risky securities trading, so we're seeing big profits in the financial sector, without much help for workers and consumers. This is a major long-term problem--if the economy can't keep pace with the Wall Street casino, those speculative trades are going to backfire and we'll be right back to the chaos of September 2008, only with an even weaker economy.
All hope is not lost. As Perkins and Baker emphasize in their interview with Flanders, citizens have to demand corporate accountability and a government that actually serves the public good. For much of the past decade in Latin America, governments have been elected that stood up to major corporations and demanded that they stop pillaging their nation's resources at the people's expense.
In addition to demanding much stronger reforms for the financial sector, we have to demand that the government respond seriously to problems facing workers. With the unemployment rate at 10.2% and expected to go still higher, we need jobs. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama's economic stimulus package helped stave off total economic devastation. What we need now is another stimulus to get people back to work, not just slow the pace of job losses.
"A bold, ambitious jobs bill can make a huge difference--the stimulus got us out of the ditch, a new effort can get us going in the right direction again," Benen writes.
And the only argument against this plan is that we "can't afford it." That is--the government's fiscal deficit is too high, and we just can't spend money to help people in real economic trouble.
But as Christopher Hayes writes for The Nation, the deficit excuse is pretty pathetic. Economic stimulus bolsters economic growth, thus improving tax returns for the government in the future. And any spending on any project can be taken out of the budget from other measures. Hayes notes that our massive military spending is almost never included in discussions about "fiscal responsibility." If we were really worried about how much it would cost to fix the economy, we could stop spending so much money killing people.
"Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else," Hayes writes. "Most often, when someone in Washington says they're concerned about the deficit, what they're really saying is, 'I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up.'"
The government has to start saying 'no' to corporate America. Corporate profits are not the same thing as a strong economy. We need to demand an economic policy that answers to workers, not just bank balance sheets.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: Progress for Baucus, Setbacks for Graham
By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger
For weeks, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has opposed climate change legislation. In the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, he openly voiced his doubts and was the only Democrat to refrain from voting for the bill's passage. Now that the bill is in the Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, many worry that the bill is doomed. However, it looks like Baucus might have outwitted us all.
Weekly Diaspora: Deporting Dobbs
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
After 30 years, commentator Lou Dobbs--infamous for his tirades against undocumented immigrants--has left CNN, as TPM reports. Dobbs employed disturbing, dangerous, and dated language to slur immigrants, often equating them with disease and infection. There is a connection between this type of demagoguery and violence.
Weekly Pulse: The Stupak Setback
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
A clique of anti-choice Democrats in Congress joined forces with Republicans to write abortion access out of the House's health care reform bill last Saturday. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) wants to force women to choose between affordable health insurance and abortion coverage, even if they pay for abortion coverage with their own money.
Pro-choice Democrats and women's health activists are up in arms over the eleventh hour deal. Ellie Smeal of Ms. Magazine denounces the Stupak amendment as a betrayal of women:
Millions of poor and middle-class women would be denied abortion coverage and millions more would lose the coverage they already have, since 85 percent of private plans now cover abortion. Far from being abortion-neutral, the Stupak amendment is a giant step backward for women. It's unacceptable. In the compromise to get the bill passed, women and their health-care rights were thrown under the bus.
Yesterday, The Pulse interviewed Jodi Jacobson, political director of RH Reality Check, about the implications of the Stupak amendment for reproductive choice in America. Jacobson explained that, if language from the Stupak amendment finds its way into the final health care bill, insurance companies would be forced to eliminate all abortion coverage if they wanted to participate in any aspect of the health care reform plan. Listen to the full interview here. (Note: there's a slight delay before the audio starts.)
Jacobson calls the Stupak language a "monumental setback." If an insurance plan accepts customers who take government subsidies, then nobody on that plan could have abortion coverage--not even those who were paying their whole premium out of pocket. In effect, the Stupak amendment would be "a total ban on public and private money for abortion coverage," Jacobson said.
In TAPPED, Michelle Goldberg accuses the Democrats of "leaving women behind" in their rush to pass health care reform at any cost. Goldberg warns that if the amendment becomes law, Democrats will have handed the anti-abortion lobby its biggest victory since the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act.
In the Nation, Eyal Press argues that the Stupak amendment would be an especially cruel blow to poor women:
If this highly regressive amendment makes its way into the legislation that Barack Obama eventually signs, millions of less affluent women who obtain access to affordable health insurance will thus join the ranks of low-income women on Medicaid, most of whom live in states that don't cover abortion procedures. The two-tiered system that dictates who in America has "choice" (more privileged women do, less affluent women do not) will be further entrenched.
Robin Marty of RH Reality Check wonders whether the Stupak amendment would apply to miscarriages as well as elective abortions. Sometimes, when a fetus dies in utero, doctors must surgically remove it. It's the same procedure as an elective termination and it has the same name: Abortion. Last month, Marty lost a much-wanted pregnancy. Doctors laid out her options: a $1500 surgery, a $40 chemical abortion, or an interminable wait to expel the dead fetus naturally. Marty chose the surgery. She worries that the Stupak amendment would take that choice away from other women.
The House bill is not yet the law of the land. There is still time to strip the Stupak language out in conference (the merging process whereby the House bill is combined with whatever comes out of the Senate).
But will it actually get stripped out in the senate? Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) announced that "If it isn't clear that government money is not to be used to fund abortions, I won't vote for it."
On a conference call yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) told The Pulse that he was optimistic that a compromise could be worked out. "Ben Nelson said he wasn't going to support a bill if it isn't clear that government money won't be used to fund abortions," Specter said, "Well, we can make it clear that if someone wants to buy abortion coverage with her own money, she can do it."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: The Unemployment Epidemic
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
On Friday, we learned that the U.S. unemployment rate officially broke 10% for the first time since the early Reagan years. This is about as bad as it gets for a modern, developed economy. No economic force takes a heavier toll on a society than rampant joblessness, and few personal setbacks take a deeper psychological toll than being out of a job for months on end. If Congress and President Obama don't do something to create jobs fast, both are going to pay a hefty political price when next year's mid-term elections roll around.
So how bad is it? In October, the economy shed 190,000 jobs and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.8% to 10.2%. That percentage is the most optimistic reading of the labor market in Friday's report. If you take people who want full-time jobs but are settling for part-time work, then add those who have simply given up on finding a job, the rate is a massive 17.5%.
The problem is not that either Obama or Congress have failed to act on the problem, but rather that they have not done enough. When Congress was moving on Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package back in February, we were shedding upwards of 700,000 jobs a month. So the stimulus package has worked--it's probably helped keep unemployment from jumping to 12% or 13%. But this is cold comfort to the nation's 15.7 million unemployed, 5.6 million of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.
As Robert Reich notes for Salon, Obama's economic advisers dramatically underestimated how bad things would get when they crafted the stimulus package. As a result, the package was too small and unemployment has remained high. Obama needs to go back to Congress and demand more economic relief funding. Republicans will continue to whine about government spending to excuse their obstructionism, of course, and conservative Democrats will probably start sweating, too--Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) helped cut back the original stimulus bill in February to help boost his "centrist" credentials. This of course had nothing to do with economics or policy. Government spending is what saves the economy in a recession. In a downturn as severe as this one, it takes a lot of spending to turn things around.
But as Reich notes, Nelson and his cohorts will have a lot more to worry about in the 2010 elections if the economy doesn't actually improve over the next year. And few economists think it will. The Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a conservative economist named Douglas Elmendorf, projects an average unemployment rate of over 10% in 2010. That's worse than this year. Democrats from swing districts need to support economic relief packages. Continued economic malaise will severely hurt them at the polls.
Congress finally took some action on joblessness on Thursday, voting to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks. If we want the economy to recover, we need people to spend money, but if people aren't working, they don't have any money to spend. So the government cuts people checks to help them get by and stimulate a demand for goods and services. Even most conservative economists thinks this is a good idea.
But as Kevin Drum notes for Mother Jones, the soundness of the policy did nothing to prevent Republicans from fighting the effort to extend benefits tooth-and-nail. The bill had to overcome three--that's right, three--filibusters in the Senate from Republicans, who held up the bill for weeks for no apparent reason. In a blog post for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen explains the economic cost of this obstructionism: In the weeks of delay, 200,000 people looking for work stopped receiving benefits.
But extending unemployment benefits will not solve our economic woes. The total program is just $2.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government put up to salvage Wall Street. $2.4 billion is not enough to reverse the unemployment trend. Cutting the checks certainly helps, but as Matthew Rothschild emphasizes for The Progressive, we need an economic policy that actually puts people back to work. We've known for months that the stimulus was too small and watched the labor market continue to deteriorate. We need more than tweaks at the economic margins, we need a robust job creation plan.
As Stephen Franklin notes for Working In These Times, we already know that the recession has created a significant jump in the nation's poverty rate. According to official government statistics, the rate climbed from 12.5% to 13.2% in 2008, the largest increase since 1991. But the National Academy of Science thinks the government statistics are misleading, as they account for rising costs associated with medical care, transportation, child care and different regional living standards, as Franklin notes. Taking these factors into account, the National Academy of Sciences calculates the actual poverty rate to be 15.8%. That's an additional 7 million people living in poverty, for a total of over 47 million. That's more than the entire population of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas combined. What's worse, we don't have poverty statistics for this year, when the most severe economic damage was been dealt.
Workers are facing tough economic prospects around the world. Writing for The Nation, Kristina Rizga details Latvia's economic turmoil. Just like the US, overexcited bankers in Latvia inflated a massive real estate bubble that took down the entire economy when it burst. But with the bubble burst, much of the country is now out of a job and stuck with a mortgage worth far less than what they paid for it. It's almost exactly the same story we've seen at home.
No domestic economic problem is more pressing than our epic levels of unemployment. We need another round of stimulus to get people working again. If not, we'll see the same public unrest here as in Eastern Europe.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: The Grown Ups are Back in Charge
By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger
Senate Democrats in the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) finally squelched Republican boycotts and passed a version of the climate bill yesterday morning. Last week, Republican Senators refused to show up to committee hearings in an attempt to stall the bill. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that EPW has now set "the stage for other panels to amend the legislation."
Weekly Diaspora: Immigration Impacts Everything
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
While many pundits and political analysts are musing about what Tuesday's mixed bag election results mean for Obama administration, New America Media reports that "there's another trend to watch; the surprising prominence of immigration politics."
Weekly Pulse: Problems for the Public Option
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The House released a final version of the health reform bill. It has a public option all right, but not the robust version progressives were hoping for. The public plan would only cover 2% of Americans and premiums will cost more than anticipated.
Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) continued to threaten to join a Republican filibuster of a health care bill with a public option. A lot of people still think he's bluffing. Realistically, the public option probably faces more serious threats from inside the Democratic caucus. It's been whittled down at an alarming rate.
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones asks "What now for the public option?"
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that public option premiums will actually be higher than the premiums for private plans on the health insurance exchanges. That doesn't mean it's going to cost the government more money--the public option is paid for by premiums, not taxes; it actually cuts the deficit. But it will be more expensive than some private plans. Wasn't part of the point of the public option to prove that a government-run program could compete successfully with privately-run plans? Well, yes, but here's the problem: that was all based on the idea that the public option would pay health care providers at Medicare rates.
Baumann predicts that insurers will do everything they can to drive the sick people off private insurance onto the public plan, a phenomenon known as "adverse selection." Hopefully some of the proposed insurance reforms will curb their worst excesses, like kicking people off the rolls for misspelling their preexisting conditions on their application forms.
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that the House health care bill would eliminate the popular and cost-effective Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and shift its low-income beneficiaries onto private health insurance exchanges.
This looks like a stealthy preemptive strike on the prospect of single-payer health care. CHIP is a single-payer program that progressive health policy types envisioned as a prototype for a future single-payer system for all kids, or even eventually for everyone.
As Lillis points out, abolishing CHIP is also a gimme to insurance companies. Generally speaking, kids are cheap to insure because they're healthy. Private insurers would love to stock their risk pools with kids on federal subsidies. It's like getting paid to stock your pond with delicious trout. We worry about adverse selection making the public plan more expensive. Well, CHIP is the reverse of that because this public program is keeping the good risks for itself.
Suzy Khimm argues at TAPPED that killing CHIP could be a good thing, provided the kids continue to enjoy the same legal protections that they get under the public plan. Khimm suggests that moving low-risk kids into insurance exchanges could help keep costs down for everyone by making the risk pool healthier on average:
That being said, if CHIP's dismantling ended up moving more folks into the health-insurance exchange, it wouldn't simply be a boon for "the insurance lobby and moderate Democrats." It could strengthen one of the most fundamental parts of the Democratic reform package -- a robust insurance exchange with a pool of participants that's large enough to drive down costs precisely because insurance companies have an incentive to jump in and compete for customers. Moreover, folding CHIP into the exchange would add a younger, healthier pool of participants to the exchange, offsetting its potential of becoming a dumping ground for the sick and elderly. Finally, CHIP has always suffered from under enrollment -- about 6 million children aren't insured in the program who should be -- and by bringing whole families in under the same plan, more children will be covered.
That's a nice idea, but it seems foolish to scrap one a popular and successful social program in favor of an untested insurance exchange system.
The frustrating thing about so-called health care reform is that legislators don't really want to change the system. They want to make the system work better while catering to all the established interests that made it suck in the first place.
Politicians aren't the only ones to balk at fundamental change. The Real News Network interviews Sam Gindin (video below), a former assistant to the Canadian Auto Workers Union, now a professor at York University. Gindin says that, over the years, labor conceded too much on health care and thereby failed to reestablish itself as a leading force for progressive change in the United States. Helping elect Barack Obama was a step in the right direction for labor, he maintains, but it's not nearly enough.
As John Nichols of the Nation put it, when the House finally wrote the bill, the compromise was even more compromised than expected.
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