Category: The World

It’s been a long time since I wrote this:

One of the most striking things is that at least once a day, some character [of Clavell’s historical fiction novel, Whirlwind] said that “soon things would get back to normal.” Oh the Shah is gone, things will be back to normal in a few days. Oh Khomeni has arrived, surely things will be back to normal soon. Oh the military has stood down, that means things will be ok soon. A cow farted, things will be back to normal. Talking to people who were adults in this era confirms that this kind of thinking was prevalent in real life in the United States, too. This is but one example of the striking naivety that seemed to afflict all Westerners in the book. Non-natives were consistently caught off-guard by the idea that “progressive” reforms could be rolled back, that a theocracy could be erected, that Sharia could be enforced, that assets owned jointly with foreign entities could be nationalized.

The reason I bring this up today is that we still don’t understand Iran.

As interesting and exciting as current events in Iran are, we would be well served to remember how clueless the West has been about this fundamentally Persian nation in the past. I am very distrustful of anybody’s analysis of what is going on, and even more distrustful of anybody’s prediction of what is likely to happen next. See also.

The interesting thing is how we are learning about what’s really going on. Hint, it’s not the mainstream media. Sure, you’ll get stories on the big news sites, but after many people already know.

Internet veterans remember following important but under-reported events on Usenet — newsgroups online that predate most “web sites”. Then people followed news while in chatrooms or in IRC channels. Then it was blogs. Now it’s Youtube and Twitter.

News media is dying, crushed under the weight of having to overproduce mountains of drivel every day, scooped by everyday people with cell phone cameras and internet connections.

A few short health reform items: a summary of the viable, proposed plans; of all things, a commentator from the Financial Times thinks Medicare For All would be an improvement over what we have; I’ve said that true universal healthcare would help small businesses, and now CNN says that health care costs are “choking” small businesses; ivory tower intellectual says the problem is that we groundlings only pay part of our health expenses, ignores people who have to decide which prescriptions they can afford to fill (his ideas had some validity a decade ago so cut him slack); poll says we need “major change” but not an “overhaul” (hint, mandatory coverage is not a major change); the President shows the AMA a carrot (malpractice caps) and a stick (“If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of GM — paying more, getting less and going broke.”).

In Closing: Republican “activist” needs a new sense of humor; Wolf Sanctuary; JP urges us to put blame where it belongs; Regulators Vs Bankers in the fight of the year; Wired on gadgets that were a waste of money; Truth in Comics; and Giant Robot! (Ok, a life-sized Gundam. But still.)

In this great nation, we had over 6,000 bankruptcy filings a day, every business day in May for a total of more than 120,000.  We are potentially on track for between 1,393,000 and 1,487,000 filings in 2009. Talk about trends everyone hopes will be broken. And the data seems to indicate that we’re nowhere near the end of this “recession.”

And remember, it’s harder to declare bankruptcy now than it was a few years ago thanks to “reform.” It makes you wonder how bad things might otherwise be.

Further, a follow-up study of 2007 bankruptcies shows that matters are even worse than they were in 2001. In 62.1% of bankruptcies, medical bills were a major factor (a rise of 49% since the original report in 2001). In 1981, only 8% of bankruptcies involved an illness. More:

Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage. Most of the medically bankrupt were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit. Two-thirds were homeowners and three-fifths had gone to college. In many cases, high medical bills coincided with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance.

Even apparently well-insured families often faced high out-of-pocket medical costs for co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services. Medically bankrupt families with private insurance reported medical bills that averaged $17,749 vs. $26,971 for the uninsured. High costs – averaging $22,568 – were incurred by those who initially had private coverage but lost it in the course of their illness.

For review, almost 2 out of every 3 bankruptcies is due to medical debt, over 3 out of 4 of those people had health insurance, and they still reported medical bills totalling more than the cost a brand new, decent sedan. That means most of us are one serious illness away from our own personal bankruptcy. We’ve got many people who can’t afford to fill prescriptions. It’s getting harder to get in to see a doctor, at all (go ahead, call your local doc and ask when you can come in for a routine checkup). People are falling for scams that they think are health insurance, but are in fact nothing more than an expensive coupon club. And insurers have taken some time out for self-examination. How meditative.

What stands out in this chart of the age of uninsured individuals? Could it be the fact that almost nobody over 65 is uninsured? Do you think that’s a coincidence? Or just maybe is it because there is a government program to ensure that they are insured.

Yet the last thing in the world the insurance industry wants is for the rest of us to have access to a plan like Medicare. They want to saddle it with “triggers“, a term that coincidentally gives us insight into what they really want — to kill the plan or any chance it has at success. Even the President has offered us a mandatory insurance plan instead of the true universal plan We The People want and need.

The private health insurance system has failed. It can reinvent itself as an industry that provides supplemental coverages. This is not the time for half-baked compromises that benefit insurance companies over human beings. A true single payer system is the only way to stop medical bankruptcies, truly control costs, and move forward. It will even create jobs and boost the economy.

In know it’s only sort of related, but I want to make sure nobody forgets about Anti-Abortion Terrorists: *itch PhD on the reporting; the ever cautious and relatively unbiased Christian Science Monitor on the terrorist’s suspected extremist ties; Incertus on the importance of access to abortion; CNN on the charges, which don’t (yet?) include terrorism; many people have pointed out that if local law enforcement had done something radical like enforce the law, this guy would have already been in jail instead of committing acts of terrorism; how quickly some people forget that “abortion doctors” are also “obstetricians”, and how traditional to attempt to stone a perceived “slut”; be on the lookout next year for more violence on May 31; more stories that should make you cry; are the terrorists the mainstream in the so-called-pro-life movement?; is the manufacture of terrorists the goal?; Make no mistake, this is part of a Global War Against Women. No, I’m not being overly dramatic. This is serious stuff.

In Closing: Fun with Science; if a company in India thinks they can sell a 4 seat, 65 MPG car in the United States for less than any car currently in our market, what exactly is the Big 3’s excuse?; funny how this peice on lobbyists getting Congress to change the financial rules arrived the same day as a mailing form Public Citizen, concerned that corporations were writing their own rules in Congress; the ex CEO of Countrywide will be charged by the SEC for insider trading and fraud; Elvis Bin Laden; two bits of Japanfilter, it’s the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway and 100 books for understanding contemporary Japan; and judges are also at risk from right-wing domestic terrorists.

More than flowers adorn the graves in Section 60. Visitors of all faiths have picked up the ancient Jewish tradition of leaving a small stone on the headstones to show that a visitor had been to the grave. In most cases these are pebbles found near the grave. But some people have taken to leaving colored glass beads or elaborately painted stones with shamrocks or words like “hero.”

Some mementos leave one to wonder about the story behind them. Like the headstone topped by a tiny bottle of Tabasco hot sauce. Or a set of dog tags with a name that didn’t match the name on the headstone.

 There is another topped by a small Lego toy, perhaps left by a child whose father died in a far-off land before they even knew each other. Or the grave adorned with an empty bottle of Bud Light, a rubber duck and a candle.

Nearby an empty Wild Turkey bottle is the lone addition to the grave of a soldier who died in a country where drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden.

The two best Memorial Day items I’ve read come courtesy of an Ambulance Driver and Jurrasic Pork. 

In closing: Job search ID theft scam; looks like I accidentally got in front of the “how are faceless health insurance bureaucrats better than government bureaucrats” logic; health care and the employer tax exclusion; oh, let’s keep with this health care theme; and it turns out that last week’s “terror plot” — while a little more plausible than the Fort Dix 6 — was poorly planned, completely FBI supervised, and had its roots in our broken health care system; I’ll take my bourbon in a bourbon flavor, please; “reducing abortions” doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does; vaccinations are a good thing; and the unemployment/foreclosure feedback loop.

It would have been easy to miss the fact that it’s Earth Day. It doesn’t get much attention anyway, and that’s a shame. If there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s that we live on Earth.

But as we live in a world where our atmosphere is increasingly out of whack, where coyotes and cougars are more commonly seen in suburban neighborhoods, where there are cities so polluted they literally shorten the lives of the inhabitants, where the water isn’t doing much better than the land, where we are forced to buy expensive fuels that foul our air from nations that don’t like us very much (and yet some complain that somehow it would hurt the economy to change that), we probably ought to pay more attention.

Today, the President told us that we can improve our environment and our economy at the same time by converting to renewable energy. Yesterday, conservative hot-spot South Dakota approved a $700 million wind farm. Around the world, millions of people are celebrating Earth Day, even if most Americans wouldn’t know it.

Whether you respect our planet as the creation of God, or merely a place we humans cannot live without, give a thought for Earth Day.

In Closing: Why is anybody shocked that the President wants to see to it that laws are followed?; on black swans and not black swans; if waterboarding works, how come we had to do it to one guy over 180 times in one month?; Business Week asks how much we’ll lose on TARP, but the answer is most of it; 5 tips for applying for an SBA loan, but all you need is #5 (be prepared to put up the house); how Canadian banks avoided the worst of our problems; universal health as a stimulus plan; loan modification plans as a bank windfall; believe it or not the rate of Chapter 13 bankruptcy is down; our “conservative” Supreme Court limits the rights of cops to search cars on  pure traffic stops; note the huge gap between top quintile income and top 1% income and then tell me how taxing the top earners is bad (boohoo, get a tax shelter); credit card fee reforms might actually happen (and benefit consumers); and last, our thoughts go to the family of David Kellermann, who took the coward’s resignation from Freddie Mac last night.

What I am going to say today is not likely to make me many friends. 

Not only are there no “good guys” in the Israel vs. Gaza thing, not only is the Israeli reaction way over the top, but I am sick and tired of anybody who says anything bad about Israel being called an anti-semite!

FIne, I concede that it was not a good thing for whatever party is responsible to fire rockets into Israel. 

You know what else was not a good thing? A blockade for a year against the legally and democratically elected government, preventing goods such as medical supplies from getting in. Oh, you didn’t know that Hamas was elected to power? I guess we’re only for democracy when we like the outcome!  

And what else was not a good thing?  “We don’t think you are keeping enough law and order so we’re going to bomb your civilian police and your prisons and completely take away your ability to provide law and order! Yeah, let’s take out the TV station and a place of worship too. We’ll even take out the private residences of some of the people we consider to be in charge. And if a few hundred innocent men and women and little kids get hurt, that’s show-biz.” Never mind that when you do things like that, you give the survivors a perfectly good reason to hate your guts.  What, you think the citizenry are going to turn around and say “Oh, well I guess it’s a good thing that we’ve been bombed back to bricks! Truly the Isrealis are our friends for showing us the error of our ways!” 

Frankly, the only way Israel’s actions make sense is if the actual goal is genocide. 

But you know what else is not a good thing? Calling everyone who doesn’t automatically think everything Israel does is wonderful an “anti-semite.”  We can’t even have a discussion of right and wrong when every attempt to bring it up is effectively Godwinned. Heck, when Ezra Klien is accused of being an anti-semite, things have gotten way, way out of control!

Hamas are no saints.  But Israel isn’t blameless either. That’s not anti-semitism; that’s a fact.

Update: Firedoglake translates AP coverage; Ezra speaks out on the false binary of “Israel can do no wrong or you are anti-Israel” (and remember, therefore anti-Semite and maybe even a Nazi too); and the ArchCrone on remembering the humanity.  These are truly must-read items.

In closing:  21 dumbest moments in business for 2008;  virginity pledges still don’t work, they just make young people less likely to use contraceptives; an African priest in America; counterfieting on the rise (so much for John Snow’s “strong currency” theory); our economy is so bad that fewer people are sneaking into the country than at any time since 1976; cheap and nutritious; the WaMu empire was built on shaky loans; and the “Case” Against Christopher Handley is based entirely on a few drawings in books of fiction. If this man is convicted, anybody with a copy of “Lolita” on their bookshelf might be convicted too.

In the last two days, we have had the opportunity to hear two remarkable speeches from two remarkable women.  And despite the fact that these women probably agree on a lot of issues, despite the fact that they are both members of the same political party, both grew up in Illinois, both went to prestigious schools on the East Coast, both got high-powered law degrees, both married up-and-coming young lawyers on the road to incredible political careers, they are so different.  One of these women is the Senator from New York and the wife of our 42nd President, Hillary Rodham Clinton.  The other is the wife of the Senator from Illinois and candidate to become our 44th President, Michelle Robinson Obama.

Wait — that sounds funny, doesn’t it?  Michelle doesn’t need to remind people about the family of her birth.  Michelle doesn’t need to hyphenate. The fact is that the feminism of women born in the 60s and 70s is very different from the feminism of women born in the 40s and 50s. While some of the issues remain the same, the context is changed and our reaction is different.  Brilliant Jill tells us a little about that old school feminism:

I remember early feminism. I remember the feminism of the affluent suburbs during the early 1970’s, when women whose husbands had high-powered jobs or had inherited money, who in the stately colonials of Westfield, New Jersey, held consciousness-raising groups about how oppressed they were. Early-stage feminism had little common cause with the women slinging eggs over easy at the diner, or cleaning the bedpans in the hospitals and nursing homes, or the ones teaching their children. It was about restrictive country clubs and examining their own vaginas. You could almost understand this in the early stages of a movement. Those who need it the most are too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and don’t have time for activism.

When Hillary was in college, the Supreme Court had to make birth control pills legal;  it would be years until Roe v. Wade made abortion legal. Michelle has always lived in a world where women could control when (and if) they wanted to have children.

As Hillary herself pointed out, NASA wouldn’t even talk to her about being an astronaut because she was a girl. Today women may still only make $0.77 for every $1 earned by a man, but women at least have the opportunity to enter almost any profession.

Hillary wears pantsuits to show us all she is just as good as any man.  Chelsea wore a suit with a skirt, and looked as if she needed no man’s approval to begin the board meeting. Much has already been made of Michelle’s fashion choices.  She doesn’t need to dress like a man to show her authority in the office, the courtroom, or the home.

Hillary’s generation worked hard to achieve, to make it known that a woman could achieve. Michelle can do whatever she wants:  stay at home mom; career at a top law firm; charitable work in our communities.  She can do this because we already take it as fact that women can.

It was appropriate to mark yesterday as the 88th anniversary of women getting to vote. My grandmother was not quite born yet.  Hillary’s grandmother very likely remembered the day and cherished her first Election Day as a voter.

Hillary noted the start of the women’s rights movement going back to 1848 in a place called Seneca Falls. I prefer to take it back to Abigail Adams entreating John Adams to remember the ladies and “Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the husbands” as Mr. Adams helped write the Declaration of Independence.  Don’t forget that Abigail was wife to one President and mother to another.

The torch is being passed from our feminist predecessors to a new, “third wave” or “post-feminist” generation.  We hope to take it gracefully and without being burned. The unique issues facing women today are different than the ones our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers faced. And if we greet those challenges on higher ground, it is because we are lifted on the shoulders of those mothers and grandmothers.  And if those mothers and grandmothers do not understand that we don’t have to wear pants or don’t like the way we choose to balance our careers and families, so be it.  We will still thank them for having been there.

In closing:  Learning styles are bunk; if “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop”, then it’s important that almost half of Iraqi adults are unemployed (gee, maybe people with jobs don’t have time to make IEDs, eh?); Business Week on the Enron Legacy; the Winners of the Bad Boss Contest have been announced; problems at a controversial prison?  Just move all the staff and prisoners to a nice clean new prison!  What could possibly go wrong?; business travelers switching to chartered jets has revealed a little deregulation problem; 30 years of Lego mini-figures; Carrie on immigrant round-ups (funny how they didn’t arrest any of the bosses who hired those thousand illegal immigrants); Unbossed on arbitration agreements; you go, Dennis!; and finally, Blue Bees.

By the way, there have been some updates in the Links. You might want to check out the new stuff.

If you have been reading my work for very long, you know I am not what anybody would consider a rabid feminist. Yet, I do most vehemently believe that women have the same inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as men.

We live in sad and pathetic times for women in this world.

The Taliban are still executing women in Afghanistan. At this rate, they will have committed self-genocide within a generation and a half. In fact, I am utterly amazed they still have women to murder. (Warning! That link does include pictures and video!)

Darfur is still a terrifying mess of rape and murder, and there is little hope the man in charge will be brought to justice.

France has decided you can’t be both French and a devout Muslim woman.

Honor killings are news in the United States, but pathetically common in some areas of the world.

The Republican candidate for President voted against a bill that would allow women to actually sue when they find they aren’t getting paid as well for the same work a man does.

And now, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has decided that they know better than actual doctors, and is attempting to redefine pregnancy in such a way as to magically turn the use of hormonal birth control into an “abortion.” This would of course free up pharmacists and doctors to refuse allow women to get it on “moral” grounds. It would also effectively prevent any public health system from dispensing birth control. This, ironically, will raise the number of unwanted pregnancies, which will in turn raise the numbers of abortions out there. Bizarro Government.

There’s just no using logic with some people.

In closing: couldn’t everyone use a patient advocate; I need a Hello Kitty Disaster Kit; Look who got mentioned in The Week Daily; 5 reasons $4 gas might not be all bad; inflation at its worst level since the Original Bush Adminstration; Jill could use a job; and finally, another stupid approach to “universal” health care. The first nail in the coffin is that it still involves primary care being paid for by for-profit insurance companies. Second, it involves a VAT. Third, it assumes — and concedes it might not work out that way — that employers will pass on the savings of not buying insurance policies by giving everybody a huge raise. Can I have a ticket to his fantasy-land? It sounds like a better place than here for a the-center-is-progressive lady like myself.

Over the weekend, Fed Head Ben Bernanke went on the record as saying we had a health care problem in this country. Here’s Reuter’s and BBC coverage, but if you would rather read the actual statement, it’s here, with footnotes.

It is worth pointing out that the three factors Bernanke singles out are — in this order — access, quality, and cost. Since by “access” he means “insurance coverage,” in many ways it boils down to “how are we going to pay for it” and “are we getting what we need at a reasonable price”. Some will correctly point out that just because you have insurance doesn’t mean you are getting the right health care, or that the bills are paid.

Because he is an economist, it should be no surprise that his focus is heavily tilted towards the money involved. And in the end, another notable economist by the name of Greg Mankiw summarized it: “Ben’s talk is, however, very sensible–a good overview of the issues without saying anything sufficiently interesting that it might prove controversial.”

Elsewhere, the American Medical Association is meeting this week. They issued their first “report card” on insurers Monday. It rates insurers on accuracy and timeliness. You can read it for yourself using the links here.  If you think people should be promptly paid fair earnings for the work they actually do, this is an issue of critical importance.

Although this article is about doctor dissatisfaction in general, it brings several interesting facts to our discussion:  lots of paperwork that has little to do with providing medical care (driving costs up); “perceived…  loss of professional autonomy” as they are second-guessed by insurance company clerks miles away, who never even went to medical school; denied payments with short appeal windows (in an environment where the insurance company has months to decide if they are paying anything at all); concerns about malpractice suits that may or may not have merit; concerns over the rising cost of insurance to cover said malpractice suits; declining revenues, even before taking into account that Medicare reimbursement will drop by 10.6% on the first of the month; and a “looming shortage of doctors, especially in primary care, which has the lowest reimbursement of all the medical specialties and probably has the most dissatisfied practitioners….”

These problems must be addressed as part of any serious “reforms”, because the one thing we have really learned from the Massachusetts plan is that when people have the means to pay for a doctor, they see one.  Or at least they try.   Mr. Bernanke tells us 16% of our population is uninsured currently.  Insure them and they will want medical care.  When demand rises sharply with no parallel rise in supply, any economist can tell you what will happen next.

Perhaps if we can do something about all the non-medical stuff a typical doctor has to deal with, they can increase capacity?

In closing:  what idiot thought this was appropriate?; Dyre said what needs saying about the Associated Press; if you need a chart to figure out how to nap, you are probably in desperate need of one; congrats to George and Brad; I didn’t even know Tom Colicchio had a blog, let alone that he had thought seriously about the issues of working mothers; I predict that this will cost so much money that it will be used as an excuse to dismantle the Americans with Disabilities Act; time to cave in on spying on innocent Americans without any freakin warrants again; and about the President’s plan for offshore drilling?  There’s not enough boats to do the job! But I’ll let Dave Johnson dismantle the rest of the rhetoric.

On Mothers’ Day you will find both the ShortWoman and the ArchCrone at the head of a parade. This parade is a protest to another procession, that one a publicity stunt designed to bring attention to the babies fetuses and embryos killed involved in a terminated pregnancy. Although I encourage you to read it all, here’s a choice quote from the ArchCrone herself:

Never do you see the crosses and funeral processions for the WOMEN that DIED from forced pregnancies (coerced through legislation and/or misinformation or lack of abortion providers). Never do you see crosses and funeral processions for the mothers and infants that die from their mother’s lack of adequate health care.

[snip]

What should have happened is that women who died from pregnancy should be honored on Mother’s Day. It’s a damn shame that these people refuse to help the living.

Well, comments ensued, and it has been resolved that we will honor the women who died from pregnancy. We will honor the lives ruined or outright ended by forced pregnancy. We will honor the children brought into this world to unwilling or unable parents.

They have chosen to honor those who only had the potential of life; we will instead honor the living and the women who died unnecessarily.

Any blogger who wants to join the parade, please leave your email and url in comments or use the ArchCrone’s contact page, which is private. Comments here are moderated, so it won’t be going to the general public if you haven’t posted here before. Although some general posts will be needed, we absolutely need posts that focus on a specific sub-issue, such as Darfur or South Dakota or parental consent laws or the availability of physicians (a list of suggestions is in the works, and it can be emailed to you). We will publish a parade roster a few days before the event.

Yes, the Iraq War turns *This Many* today.

Mr. Bush admits the war costs more than it should have. More on that at Econbrowser.

The American people aren’t happy. It’s been called a war of lies. 7 out of 10 people blame the war for out current economic problems.

Things are a mess in Iraq, both politically and in terms of security.

Almost 4000 American soldiers are dead, along with several hundred more from other nations. CNN can tell you about each and every one of them; many pictures are included. Nobody really knows how many Iraqis have been killed, creating widows and orphans in a society where women cannot hold honorable employment and adoption by non-relatives is almost unheard of.

It is a human tragedy, top to bottom.