1/ It sometimes seems Paul Krugman is the only Times columnist saying anything real about politics or the economy, or "speaking truth to power"....maybe the rest have been muzzled......
Here he takes on the banks and wonders why Obama is pursuing exactly the same policies as the Bush administration.......Mr. Krugman, it's because the banks own Washington, both parties......
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Letting Bankers Walk
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 17, 2011
Ever since the current economic crisis began, it has seemed that five words sum up the central principle of United States financial policy: go easy on the bankers.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Related
Times Topic: Economy
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This principle was on display during the final months of the Bush administration, when a huge lifeline for the banks was made available with few strings attached. It was equally on display in the early months of the Obama administration, when President Obama reneged on his campaign pledge to “change our bankruptcy laws to make it easier for families to stay in their homes.” And the principle is still operating right now, as federal officials press state attorneys general to accept a very modest settlement from banks that engaged in abusive mortgage practices.
Why the kid-gloves treatment? Money and influence no doubt play their part; Wall Street is a huge source of campaign donations, and agencies that are supposed to regulate banks often end up serving them instead. But officials have also argued at each point of the process that letting banks off the hook serves the interests of the economy as a whole.
It doesn’t. The failure to seek real mortgage relief early in the Obama administration is one reason we still have 9 percent unemployment. And right now, the arguments that officials are reportedly making for a quick, bank-friendly settlement of the mortgage-abuse scandal don’t make sense.
Before I get to that, a word about the current state of the mortgage mess.
2/ Rachael Maddow talks about the debt limit fight and the fledgling Consumer Finance bureau, and interviews perhaps the last hope for the American consumer, Elizabeth Warren. She clearly, passionately and concisely explains the role of the new agency and the opposition to it by the Republicans.
Excellent interview, and I certainly hope Warren runs for something.....President would be good.....11 minutes of intelligent discussion......
3/ Long but fascinating article about American medicine and how our present system is unsustainable.....
All of the horror stories coming from the politicians are true - Medicare and medical insurance will break the country, but a large part of the problem is you - yes, you. You are telling the politicians you want "everything possible" at the end of your life, and screech about "Death Panels" if anyone tries to tell you aggressive end-of-life treatment is a waste of time and money......so then you get an often agonising "Death By Hospital".......
I have copied some highlights below, but the full article is well worth a look.....
The Quagmire
How American medicine is destroying itself.
- Daniel Callahan and
Sherwin B. Nuland
- May 19, 2011 | 12:00 am
- 46 comments
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
In 1959, the great biologist René Dubos wrote a book called Mirage of Health, in which he pointed out that “complete and lasting freedom from disease is but a dream remembered from imaginings of a Garden of Eden.” But, in the intervening decades, his admonition has largely been ignored by both doctors and society as a whole. For nearly a century, but especially since the end of World War II, the medical profession has been waging an unrelenting war against disease—most notably cancer, heart disease, and stroke. The ongoing campaign has led to a steady and rarely questioned increase in the disease-research budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It has also led to a sea change in the way Americans think about medicine in their own lives:We now view all diseases as things to be conquered. Underlying these changes have been several assumptions: that medical advances are essentially unlimited; that none of the major lethal diseases is in theory incurable; and that progress is economically affordable if well managed.
But what if all this turns out not to be true? What if there are no imminent, much less foreseeable cures to some of the most common and most lethal diseases? What if, in individual cases, not all diseases should be fought? What if we are refusing to confront the painful likelihood that our biological nature is not nearly as resilient or open to endless improvement as we have long believed?
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It might also be said that there is no reason to believe that cures for infectious and chronic diseases cannot eventually be found; it is just taking longer than expected and the necessary knowledge for breakthroughs seems to be slowly accumulating. Or it might be said that more people living longer, though sick, is a not inconsiderable triumph.
These advances, however, should be balanced against another factor: the insupportable, unsustainable economic cost of this sort of success. Twenty years from now, the maturation of the baby boom generation will be at flood tide. We will have gone from 40 million Americans over the age of 65 in 2009 to 70 million in 2030. This will put enormous pressure on the health care system, regardless of whether Obama’s reform efforts, or even Paul Ryan’s, prove successful. The chronic diseases of the elderly will be the front line. Because we cannot cure those diseases at present, nor reasonably hope for cures over the next few decades, the best we will be able to do in many cases, especially those of the elderly and frail, is extend people’s lives for a relatively short period of time—at considerable expense and often while causing serious suffering to the person in question.
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n a 2006 article, Harvard economist David Cutler and colleagues wrote, “Analyses focused on spending and on the increase in life expectancy beginning at 65 years of age showed that the incremental cost of an additional year of life rose from $46,800 in the 1970s to $145,000 in the 1990s. ... If this trend continues in the elderly, the cost-effectiveness of medical care will continue to decrease at older ages.” Emory professor Kenneth Thorpe and colleagues, summing up some Medicare data, note that “more than half of beneficiaries are treated for five or more chronic conditions each year.”
In the war against disease, we have unwittingly created a kind of medicine that is barely affordable now and forbiddingly unaffordable in the long run. The Affordable Care Act might ease the burden, but it will not eliminate it. Ours is now a medicine that may doom most of us to an old age that will end badly: with our declining bodies falling apart as they always have but devilishly—and expensively—stretching out the suffering and decay. Can we conceptualize something better?
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The problems we are describing are, of course, hardly the only flaws within the U.S. medical system. Among the spheres of concern most commonly cited for major criticism are: the perception of significant deterioration in the doctor-patient relationship; the state of care at the end of life; maldistribution of health care availability among geographic locations; malpractice and tort law; physician entrepreneurship; emphasis on profit motive by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries; duplication of resources among competing health facilities; multiple tiers of access and care, largely determined by income; wasting of money, resources, and personnel within the system; and costly overspecialization.
Sometimes—at all times, actually—the problems seem overwhelming. Not only does the complexity of the issues make them appear insoluble, but so does the way in which each seems to intertwine with all the others, inevitably to exacerbate the whole. The entire web of interconnected, complicating factors has long since reached the bewildering point where no issue can be addressed, or so much as approached, in isolation. The complexities are enough to make every stakeholder in American medicine—namely all of us—throw up our hands in desperation.
4/ Very funny skit titled "Her First Period"......4 minutes.....it builds on you......
5/ Allrighty then.......the only coal plant in the US trying to filter out CO2 from it's emissions has stopped the trial project - partly on financial grounds, but mostly because of the political climate and Republican opposition to any action on climate change.....
We [and the planet] are so screwed.....
WASHINGTON — A major American utility is shelving the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming.
Related
Green Blog: Scattered Attempts at Carbon Capture(July 14, 2011)
Times Topic: Carbon Dioxide
Kevin Riddell for The New York Times
At the Mountaineer plant, the pumping station for the injection of carbon dioxide underground, and out of the atmosphere.
Readers’ Comments
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American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer, a 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, where the company has successfully captured and buried carbon dioxide in a small pilot program for two years.
The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.
Company officials, who plan an announcement on Thursday, said they were dropping the larger, $668 million project because they did not believe state regulators would let the company recover its costs by charging customers, thus leaving it no compelling regulatory or business reason to continue the program.
The federal Department of Energy had pledged to cover half the cost, but A.E.P. said it was unwilling to spend the remainder in a political climate that had changed strikingly since it began the project.
“We are placing the project on hold until economic and policy conditions create a viable path forward,” said Michael G. Morris, chairman of American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest operators of coal-fired generating plants in the United States. He said his company and other coal-burning utilities were caught in a quandary: they need to develop carbon-capture technology to meet any future greenhouse-gas emissions rules, but they cannot afford the projects without federal standards that will require them to act and will persuade the states to allow reimbursement.
The decision could set back for years efforts to learn how best to capture carbon emissions that result from burning fossil fuels and then inject them deep under-ground to keep them from accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet.
6/ And speaking of climate change - this kind of extreme weather in the article below is being caused by the tens of thousands of coal plants across the world......
We are in Toronto for a month to get away from the Florida heat and humidity, but it's almost as hot up here....
Just remember this wonderful phrase...."you may not believe in Global Warming, but Global Warming believes in you".......
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Sizzle Factor for a Restless Climate
By HEIDI CULLEN
Published: July 19, 2011
ENJOYING the heat wave?
Stephen Savage
Related
Times Topic: Global Warming
Related in Opinion
Editorial: Blame Congress(July 20, 2011)
The answer is probably no if you live in Abilene, Tex., where temperatures have been at or above 100 degrees for 40 days this summer. It’s been a little cooler in Savannah, Ga., where the mercury hit 90 or more for 56 days in a row. Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma are coping with their driest nine-month stretch since 1895.
Yes, it has been a very hot summer after one of the most extreme-weather springs on record. It’s time to face the fact that the weather isn’t what it used to be.
Every 10 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recalculates what it calls climate “normals,” 30-year averages of temperature and precipitation for about 7,500 locations across the United States. The latest numbers, released earlier this month, show that the climate of the last 10 years was about 1.5 degrees warmer than the climate of the 1970s, and the warmest since the first decade of the last century. Temperatures were, on average, 0.5 degrees warmer from 1981 to 2010 than they were from 1971 to 2000, and the average annual temperatures for all of the lower 48 states have gone up.
For climate geeks like me, the new normals offer a fascinating and disturbing snapshot of a restless climate. The numbers don’t take sides or point fingers. They acknowledge both powerful natural climate fluctuations as well as the steady drumbeat of warming caused by roughly seven billion people trying to live and prosper on a small planet, emitting heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the process.
Even this seemingly modest shift in climate can mean a big change in weather. Shifting weather patterns influence energy demand, affect crop productivity and lead to weather-related disasters. In the United States, in any given year, routine weather events like a hot day or a heavy downpour can cost the economy as much as $485 billion in crop losses, construction delays and travel disruptions, a recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research found. In other words, that extra 1.5 degrees might be more than we can afford.
And while the new normals don’t point to a cause, climate science does.
7/ A DDD favourite
BT - "The Emergency"....I love this music video for a number of reasons....
- You can choose 1080p HD
- It's ultra widescreen
- The girl's face has the most stunning profile
- The setting sun scene towards the end had to be shot in about 5 minutes - the sun goes down fast over Lake Dora!
- It's a really good song
8/ I am sure you have read about the troubles at Fox, and Murdoch is certainly one nasty little oligarch, but he has had help. Here is a listing of 12 of his accomplices in the phone hacking scandal.....
Sometimes the bad guys really do lose. For News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, a very bad guy who, until recently, enjoyed a long winning streak, the losing days have begun to be counted in weeks. Since the latest incarnation of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal erupted a bit more than a week ago (with the revelation that now-defunct British tabloid News of the World tampered with the voice mail of teenage murder victim Milly Fowler), each day has brought devastating revelations that implicate a handful of top executives at News Corp. and News International, the division that comprises the company’s British newspapers. (News Corp. is a U.S.-based company that also owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well as the Fox movie and entertainment companies.)
9/ And are Fox News reporting on the scandal?
Now they are, after being ridiculed in the alternative press and shows like Jon Stewart, but look what they did when Murdoch was testifying before a British Parliamentary committee.....evil bastards......
The pie attack may have been the best thing that happened to Fox News on Tuesday.
A protester accosted Rupert Murdoch with a shaving cream pie as Mr. Murdoch was appearing before a British parliamentary committee. And that disruption was a welcome diversion for Fox News anchors struggling to cover their boss as he struggled to prop up the reputation of his troubled media empire.
All the cable news networks covered the parliamentary hearing live on Tuesday. So did Fox News, though its producers didn’t have much of a choice — the scandal that has engulfed the channel’s parent company, the News Corporation, is too big to ignore. Or examine too closely.
Moments after the pie incident, the pool camera in the committee room abruptly cut away. Fox turned the newscast over to Sky News, its sister network inBritain (also owned by Mr. Murdoch), and let British colleagues report on the commotion. (They showed lots of slow-motion replays of Mr. Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, smacking the intruder.) When other cable news programs moved on to critique what Mr. Murdoch and his son James had said, Fox News stayed with the pie until the hearing resumed.
After Mr. Murdoch and his son were excused, the Fox anchor Bill Hemmer gave a brief, stilted summary, then segued to a bit of good news, noting that News Corporation shares “went up 5 percent” during the testimony.
And that gingerly restraint was all the more noticeable at a channel known for its brio and lack of nuance. Perhaps accordingly, rival cable shows gleefully reveled in the News Corporation’s fall from grace: a Bloomberg News analyst on CNN likened Mr. Murdoch to King Lear; on Current TV, Keith Olbermann, who once worked at Fox Sports, said Mr. Murdoch was closer to the evil Emperor Palpatine in the “Star Wars” films.
10/ The beach walker. A Dutch artist with some incredible plastic walking machines.....I can't describe them, you have to see it on this BBC clip.....2 minutes......
11/ The US Open champion Rory Mcillroy has an amazing back yard behind his house.....a mini golf course with bunkers, greens and a fairway.....wow.....
Watch him get out of a bunker....three times......2 minutes....
12/ The excellent Lauren Ritchie writes about one of our favourite organisations [not!], the St. Johns Water Management District which has been gutted by the disgusting pond scum we have as Governor - I have to confess I'm conflicted on this [as is Ritchie], because bad as they were at protecting our water supply Scott's alternative is much worse.
I love the St. Johns River Water Management District. I hate the St. Johns River Water Management District.
Bring on the shrinks! I'm a little conflicted.
Three years ago, the district was on the hot seat.
The assault on water resources during the building boom was still rippling through the community in the form of decreased water levels, and the district was looking for something its officials called "alternative water resources." As if there were hidden stashes of water that nobody yet had found.
The St. Johns saw its mission as finding enough water to supply any number of people who want to move here.By contrast, folks already living here were told they couldn't water their lawns more than twice a week.
13/ Bumper stickers......some parodies for you....I like #7 and #8.......
14/ Perky Pam Bondi, Florida's Attorney General, behaving exactly as we expected - it didn't take long for her to become as corrupt as the rest of the crooks you elected....
A few months ago, two of Florida's assistant attorneys general were blowing the lid off foreclosure fraud in this state.
They were turning up evidence of bogus paperwork, exposing the law firms and lenders at fault — and making them pay.
They were turning up evidence of bogus paperwork, exposing the law firms and lenders at fault — and making them pay.
If the world of investigatory accounting had rock stars, Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson were Beyonce andLady Gaga.
Right up until they were ousted, anyway
At the height of their popularity, when Edwards and Clarkson were generating national headlines — and making profiteers nervous — Attorney General Pam Bondi's office asked them to leave.
So said Edwards, who recalled: "Our director called us in at 3:30 one Friday afternoon and said: 'You can either resign today, or you're going to be fired.'"
The news came on the heels of a performance review filled with praise.
"Obviously we did our job too well," Edwards said. "We were making too much noise."
Bondi's office won't say why the two were ousted — or even confirm that they were. Instead, the office stresses that the two attorneys "resigned."
Right up until they were ousted, anyway
At the height of their popularity, when Edwards and Clarkson were generating national headlines — and making profiteers nervous — Attorney General Pam Bondi's office asked them to leave.
So said Edwards, who recalled: "Our director called us in at 3:30 one Friday afternoon and said: 'You can either resign today, or you're going to be fired.'"
The news came on the heels of a performance review filled with praise.
"Obviously we did our job too well," Edwards said. "We were making too much noise."
Bondi's office won't say why the two were ousted — or even confirm that they were. Instead, the office stresses that the two attorneys "resigned."
Todays video - a classic from Monty Python...."The Parrot"
Todays old fart joke
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