Monday, December 24, 2018
GOP Shows Its Stripes On Healthcare:
Dean Baker: Trump Succeeds in Making Insurance for People With Health Problems Unaffordable
"...The point of the insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act was to create a single pool where both people in good health and people with health conditions would pay the same premium. This makes insurance affordable for people in bad health, but raises the price for people in good health. Trump and the Republicans came up with the brilliant idea of making it so that people can buy “temporary” plans outside of the exchanges that don’t meet the rules required of plans in the exchanges. These temporary plans, which can be in effect for as long as three years, are not required to cover many of the conditions required for plans in the insurance exchanges. More importantly, they are allowed to discriminate based on preexisting conditions. This means that they can tell people with heart disease, cancer survivors, multiple sclerosis and other health conditions to go away. Healthier people will be able to save money with these plans – the great Trump-Republican victory — but less healthy people are out of luck. We are now finding out how out of luck these people are. Insurers in Maryland are requesting rate increases averaging 36 percent for 2019. Insurance companies in Washington State are requesting 19 percent rate hikes. Patients got somewhat good news in Florida where rates are only projected to rise by 5 percent in 2019, but that is after a 45 percent rate hike in 2018. According to calculations by the AARP, the Trump changes will push the cost of an exchange plan for an older pre-Medicare age worker to more than $15,000 in several states. In the most costly states the premium will exceed $20,000 a year. And this is only for the middling silver plans that are designed to cover 70 percent of health care costs. More comprehensive insurance would cost even more. While more moderate-income households can still get subsidies under Obamacare that will make insurance more affordable, middle-income couples will be out of luck thanks to the “reforms” put in place by Trump and the Republicans. For example, a couple earning $65,000 a year could easily find themselves paying more than half of their after-tax income for insurance premiums. And, they could still find themselves liable for thousands of dollars in health care expenses. Apparently Trump and the Republicans are very proud of the high health care costs that they have imposed on millions of people. We should all hope that they put these high costs at the center of their 2018 election platform..."
Wayne O'Leary: The Woman Who Would Kill Health Care
"...To fully appreciate what’s going on here, it’s necessary to look beyond the mere providing of health care for low-income Americans. Seema Verma and like-minded GOP staffers infiltrating the CMMS under Donald Trump view their true mission as a righteous moral crusade to inculcate conservative social values. On her first day in office, Verma formally urged the nation’s governors to impose insurance premiums on Medicaid, charge recipients for emergency room visits, and pressure those recipients to get jobs. The stated goal is to convert Medicaid from a form of guaranteed social insurance into a vehicle for ending “government dependence” and demonstrating “the potential for consumer-driven health care as an alternative to the traditional Medicaid model” by encouraging the use of only the health care beneficiaries can personally afford. There’s also an ulterior motive, now that the federal government is no longer providing a “perverse incentive” by exclusively funding the program’s expansion. That is to save conservative states money by arbitrarily forcing people off Medicaid rolls (through such means as lowering the maximum income qualification and banning “able-bodied adults of working age”); lower enrollments mean, of course, lower state taxes. Arkansas plans to eliminate 60,000 beneficiaries in this manner, thereby fulfilling what Verma calls Medicaid’s “higher purpose.” But why stop with Medicaid? Seema Verma’s crusade against government-run health care has also targeted Medicare, which (if Republicans retain both houses of Congress in November), will be in the crosshairs come 2019. To start the ball rolling, Verma has trotted out that old, familiar standby: Medicare is unsustainable and will go bust (by 2026 at the latest) unless it’s reformed. In a Wall Street Journal article late last year, the CMMS administrator announced her agency’s Innovation Center would present ideas to address the program’s imaginary fiscal crisis. These would include giving recipients “incentives to be cost conscious,” interpreted by some as a call to implement Paul Ryan’s long-standing “premium support,” or voucher, proposal..."
Dean Baker: Trump Succeeds in Making Insurance for People With Health Problems Unaffordable
"...The point of the insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act was to create a single pool where both people in good health and people with health conditions would pay the same premium. This makes insurance affordable for people in bad health, but raises the price for people in good health. Trump and the Republicans came up with the brilliant idea of making it so that people can buy “temporary” plans outside of the exchanges that don’t meet the rules required of plans in the exchanges. These temporary plans, which can be in effect for as long as three years, are not required to cover many of the conditions required for plans in the insurance exchanges. More importantly, they are allowed to discriminate based on preexisting conditions. This means that they can tell people with heart disease, cancer survivors, multiple sclerosis and other health conditions to go away. Healthier people will be able to save money with these plans – the great Trump-Republican victory — but less healthy people are out of luck. We are now finding out how out of luck these people are. Insurers in Maryland are requesting rate increases averaging 36 percent for 2019. Insurance companies in Washington State are requesting 19 percent rate hikes. Patients got somewhat good news in Florida where rates are only projected to rise by 5 percent in 2019, but that is after a 45 percent rate hike in 2018. According to calculations by the AARP, the Trump changes will push the cost of an exchange plan for an older pre-Medicare age worker to more than $15,000 in several states. In the most costly states the premium will exceed $20,000 a year. And this is only for the middling silver plans that are designed to cover 70 percent of health care costs. More comprehensive insurance would cost even more. While more moderate-income households can still get subsidies under Obamacare that will make insurance more affordable, middle-income couples will be out of luck thanks to the “reforms” put in place by Trump and the Republicans. For example, a couple earning $65,000 a year could easily find themselves paying more than half of their after-tax income for insurance premiums. And, they could still find themselves liable for thousands of dollars in health care expenses. Apparently Trump and the Republicans are very proud of the high health care costs that they have imposed on millions of people. We should all hope that they put these high costs at the center of their 2018 election platform..."
Wayne O'Leary: The Woman Who Would Kill Health Care
"...To fully appreciate what’s going on here, it’s necessary to look beyond the mere providing of health care for low-income Americans. Seema Verma and like-minded GOP staffers infiltrating the CMMS under Donald Trump view their true mission as a righteous moral crusade to inculcate conservative social values. On her first day in office, Verma formally urged the nation’s governors to impose insurance premiums on Medicaid, charge recipients for emergency room visits, and pressure those recipients to get jobs. The stated goal is to convert Medicaid from a form of guaranteed social insurance into a vehicle for ending “government dependence” and demonstrating “the potential for consumer-driven health care as an alternative to the traditional Medicaid model” by encouraging the use of only the health care beneficiaries can personally afford. There’s also an ulterior motive, now that the federal government is no longer providing a “perverse incentive” by exclusively funding the program’s expansion. That is to save conservative states money by arbitrarily forcing people off Medicaid rolls (through such means as lowering the maximum income qualification and banning “able-bodied adults of working age”); lower enrollments mean, of course, lower state taxes. Arkansas plans to eliminate 60,000 beneficiaries in this manner, thereby fulfilling what Verma calls Medicaid’s “higher purpose.” But why stop with Medicaid? Seema Verma’s crusade against government-run health care has also targeted Medicare, which (if Republicans retain both houses of Congress in November), will be in the crosshairs come 2019. To start the ball rolling, Verma has trotted out that old, familiar standby: Medicare is unsustainable and will go bust (by 2026 at the latest) unless it’s reformed. In a Wall Street Journal article late last year, the CMMS administrator announced her agency’s Innovation Center would present ideas to address the program’s imaginary fiscal crisis. These would include giving recipients “incentives to be cost conscious,” interpreted by some as a call to implement Paul Ryan’s long-standing “premium support,” or voucher, proposal..."
Tuesday, December 04, 2018
Information Warfare:
Juan Cole: Cambridge Analytica as the Matrix: Information Dominance and the Next Level of Fake News
"...“The Matrix” appears inadvertently to have predicted the rise of the data mining firm, Cambridge Analytica, founded by white nationalist billionaire Robert Mercer (a perfect Bond villain) and for a while having as its vice president the neo-Fascist pooh-bah Steve Bannon (who went on to chair the Trump campaign and to serve as White House chief strategist, and who has expressed admiration for Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini–whose army killed or wounded 300,000 US and British troops). Although much of the current brouhaha over CA has to do with its predatory use of the predatory Facebook, the big scandal should be that mainstream US politicians were willing to hire a firm founded by people with a very smelly ideology that reeks of Mein Kampf. Cambridge Analytica staffers have been caught on tape admitting to using dirty tricks to discredit rival politicians, including providing them with “Ukrainian girls” or offering them bribes and videotaping the response. The company has been employed by political campaigns in dozens of countries around the world. Those techniques aren’t new. What’s new is that the firm used techniques like a Facebook app (invented by a Russian scientist) that offered psychologically to profile you and which scooped up all your friends’ information as well, creating a database of 50 million individuals. That data told CA whether a person was a liberal or a conservative, an extravert or an introvert, and allowed a relatively thick profile to be created. The firm then used the characteristics of the internet, according to AP, where one click leads to another click, to surround individuals with a false reality. The Matrix. The way this works is that say you know that someone is an unemployed auto worker and you make up phony internet placards misrepresenting Bill and Hillary Clinton as anti-labor. And you set it up so that once the person clicks on one such piece of propaganda, they are presented with several more links of the same ilk. And then so are all their Facebook friends. So you create a Matrix world in which auto workers should give Trump a chance because the Democratic Establishment has failed them (which, even if the second part of this proposition is true, is a non sequitur). And you set it up so that that is what people in Detroit and Flint and Ypsilanti are talking about with one another, on line and off line, what they are liking on Facebook, what they are sharing on their timeline. And then Trump wins Michigan. AP notes that Chris Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica co-founder, told NBC, “This is based on an idea called ‘informational dominance,’ which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening.” He called it “fake news to the next level,”..."
Financial Regulation:
Wayne O'Leary: The Banksters are Back
"...Since the 1970s, a time when most bank investment went toward providing loans for needed business expansion on “Main Street,” banking’s focus has become the stock market and its bottom-line demands. Today, a New York Times analysis concludes, 85% of all discretionary bank money goes for higher-return deals-making or inside trading — the institutional buying and selling of stocks, bonds, and real estate. The uncomplicated goal is increasing profit margins, and thereby stock values, to enrich the one-fifth of the population that owns four-fifths of all bank assets. One way to reach the desired goal is through a tax cut of the sort we’ve just had, which Goldman Sachs researchers say will increase the earnings-per-share of the largest financial firms an average of 13%. Another is the installation of a Federal Reserve chairman partial to eased bank regulations; the prospect of such an appointment (fulfilled by Trump’s selection of Jerome H. Powell) caused bank stocks to shoot up 15% in 2017. But the most direct approach has been to deploy swarms of lobbyists to influence or frustrate the financial rule-making processes of the various federal agencies charged with implementing the details of enacted bank regulation — in this case, the Dodd-Frank reform law. Wall Street has been using this tactic successfully, in combination with verbal sniping and calls for deregulation, since Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010. The securities investment industry, led by Wall Street’s biggest lobby, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, employed a total of 704 registered lobbyists for this purpose during the first nine months of 2014 alone at a cost of $74 million. The financial industry’s guerilla war against Dodd-Frank has been applied nowhere with more energy than in the realm of derivatives trading, one of big banking’s most lucrative, if transcendently dangerous, pursuits. It’s the industry’s dirtiest little secret that, despite 2008, its love affair with risky derivatives never ended and, in fact, intensified immediately after the bailouts. In 2010, the year of Dodd-Frank, US banks retained $218 trillion in derivatives holdings and made $100 billion in speculative trades. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase, Wall Street’s largest bank, lost $6.2 billion betting illegally on credit-default swaps tied to corporate debt; it expected a hefty federal fine, said the New York Times, but with $2.4 trillion in total assets, that likelihood was less than daunting. JPMorgan’s object lesson proved no deterrent. By 2014, US banks carried $280 trillion worth of derivatives on their books and made some of their biggest profits on them. Investigators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a regulator, determined the following year (2015) that 95% of US derivatives trading originated with five elite and federally insured Wall Street banks, whose in-house gambles were no longer banned now that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s swaps “push-out” rule (rescinded in 2014) no longer applied. [See “Enablers of Financial Catastrophe,” 4/1/18 TPP.] The banksters even funded a lobbying arm, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, to campaign for lighter regulation of their favorite activity. Finally, in 2015, subprime loans, the poisonous ingredient in toxic derivatives, made their reappearance through the mortgage subsidiary of private-equity giant Lone Star Funds, where they soon accounted for a fifth of the company’s mortgages. Nothing, it seemed, had been learned from banking’s recent near-death experience; it was déjà vu all over again. That’s where we stand as the bankster-friendly GOP Congress prepares, with the aid of a Senate cadre of traitorous “bipartisan” Democrats, to dismantle what’s left of the modest Dodd-Frank reforms. As always, the watchword is “freedom.” Senate Republicans would give banks of less than $250 billion in assets (including 25 of the 38 largest) the freedom to avoid federal stress tests and capital/liquidity requirements, and those of less than $50 billion in assets freedom from the Volcker Rule’s ban on proprietary trading and risky private-equity investments. House Republicans would extend those dubious freedoms to the biggest Wall Street banks and free them from the investigatory oversight of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The ship of state could shortly be taking on water, so get those deck chairs rearranged and spend your tax cut judiciously. The money may have to last."
Pushing War With Iran, On Behalf of Israel:
Jefferson Morley: Bush Is Gone, but the Neocons Are Back
"...Founded by a “group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers who understood the threat facing America, Israel and the West,” the [Foundation for Defense of Democracies]'s advisers include former Sen. Joe Lieberman, columnists Bret Stephens and Charles Krauthammer, and neoconservative guru William Kristol. Even before the invasion of Iraq, the foundation’s ideologues were dreaming of invading Iran. “Everyone talks about going to Baghdad,” said one British official of the neoconservatives. "Real men talk about going to Tehran." The personnel has changed—Kristol is now a Never Trump conservative—but the song of “regime change” in Iran remains the same. “The potential for a democratic transition exists in Iran, where such aspirations have been growing for over 100 years,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, senior fellow at the foundation, wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal. “As regime-shaking street protests have repeatedly revealed, the country is a volcano. We want it to erupt. For the U.S. and the Middle East, sooner is better than later.” The ostensible goal of reaching a better agreement with Iran cannot conceal a larger ambition. In 2016, Pompeo said, “Congress must act to change Iranian behavior, and ultimately, the Iranian regime." Pompeo, much more than Tillerson, identifies with Israel, which has sought to kill the Iran agreement even while it was being negotiated. He was much more energetic than Tillerson in cultivating the Persian Gulf oil states that feel most threatened by Iran. Jim Lobe notes that Pompeo met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia in December to promote an anti-Iran coalition of Israel and the Gulf Arab states. The Jerusalem-Riyadh axis wants to enlist the United States in their campaign to confront and disrupt Iran..."
Juan Cole: Cambridge Analytica as the Matrix: Information Dominance and the Next Level of Fake News
"...“The Matrix” appears inadvertently to have predicted the rise of the data mining firm, Cambridge Analytica, founded by white nationalist billionaire Robert Mercer (a perfect Bond villain) and for a while having as its vice president the neo-Fascist pooh-bah Steve Bannon (who went on to chair the Trump campaign and to serve as White House chief strategist, and who has expressed admiration for Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini–whose army killed or wounded 300,000 US and British troops). Although much of the current brouhaha over CA has to do with its predatory use of the predatory Facebook, the big scandal should be that mainstream US politicians were willing to hire a firm founded by people with a very smelly ideology that reeks of Mein Kampf. Cambridge Analytica staffers have been caught on tape admitting to using dirty tricks to discredit rival politicians, including providing them with “Ukrainian girls” or offering them bribes and videotaping the response. The company has been employed by political campaigns in dozens of countries around the world. Those techniques aren’t new. What’s new is that the firm used techniques like a Facebook app (invented by a Russian scientist) that offered psychologically to profile you and which scooped up all your friends’ information as well, creating a database of 50 million individuals. That data told CA whether a person was a liberal or a conservative, an extravert or an introvert, and allowed a relatively thick profile to be created. The firm then used the characteristics of the internet, according to AP, where one click leads to another click, to surround individuals with a false reality. The Matrix. The way this works is that say you know that someone is an unemployed auto worker and you make up phony internet placards misrepresenting Bill and Hillary Clinton as anti-labor. And you set it up so that once the person clicks on one such piece of propaganda, they are presented with several more links of the same ilk. And then so are all their Facebook friends. So you create a Matrix world in which auto workers should give Trump a chance because the Democratic Establishment has failed them (which, even if the second part of this proposition is true, is a non sequitur). And you set it up so that that is what people in Detroit and Flint and Ypsilanti are talking about with one another, on line and off line, what they are liking on Facebook, what they are sharing on their timeline. And then Trump wins Michigan. AP notes that Chris Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica co-founder, told NBC, “This is based on an idea called ‘informational dominance,’ which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening.” He called it “fake news to the next level,”..."
Financial Regulation:
Wayne O'Leary: The Banksters are Back
"...Since the 1970s, a time when most bank investment went toward providing loans for needed business expansion on “Main Street,” banking’s focus has become the stock market and its bottom-line demands. Today, a New York Times analysis concludes, 85% of all discretionary bank money goes for higher-return deals-making or inside trading — the institutional buying and selling of stocks, bonds, and real estate. The uncomplicated goal is increasing profit margins, and thereby stock values, to enrich the one-fifth of the population that owns four-fifths of all bank assets. One way to reach the desired goal is through a tax cut of the sort we’ve just had, which Goldman Sachs researchers say will increase the earnings-per-share of the largest financial firms an average of 13%. Another is the installation of a Federal Reserve chairman partial to eased bank regulations; the prospect of such an appointment (fulfilled by Trump’s selection of Jerome H. Powell) caused bank stocks to shoot up 15% in 2017. But the most direct approach has been to deploy swarms of lobbyists to influence or frustrate the financial rule-making processes of the various federal agencies charged with implementing the details of enacted bank regulation — in this case, the Dodd-Frank reform law. Wall Street has been using this tactic successfully, in combination with verbal sniping and calls for deregulation, since Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010. The securities investment industry, led by Wall Street’s biggest lobby, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, employed a total of 704 registered lobbyists for this purpose during the first nine months of 2014 alone at a cost of $74 million. The financial industry’s guerilla war against Dodd-Frank has been applied nowhere with more energy than in the realm of derivatives trading, one of big banking’s most lucrative, if transcendently dangerous, pursuits. It’s the industry’s dirtiest little secret that, despite 2008, its love affair with risky derivatives never ended and, in fact, intensified immediately after the bailouts. In 2010, the year of Dodd-Frank, US banks retained $218 trillion in derivatives holdings and made $100 billion in speculative trades. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase, Wall Street’s largest bank, lost $6.2 billion betting illegally on credit-default swaps tied to corporate debt; it expected a hefty federal fine, said the New York Times, but with $2.4 trillion in total assets, that likelihood was less than daunting. JPMorgan’s object lesson proved no deterrent. By 2014, US banks carried $280 trillion worth of derivatives on their books and made some of their biggest profits on them. Investigators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a regulator, determined the following year (2015) that 95% of US derivatives trading originated with five elite and federally insured Wall Street banks, whose in-house gambles were no longer banned now that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s swaps “push-out” rule (rescinded in 2014) no longer applied. [See “Enablers of Financial Catastrophe,” 4/1/18 TPP.] The banksters even funded a lobbying arm, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, to campaign for lighter regulation of their favorite activity. Finally, in 2015, subprime loans, the poisonous ingredient in toxic derivatives, made their reappearance through the mortgage subsidiary of private-equity giant Lone Star Funds, where they soon accounted for a fifth of the company’s mortgages. Nothing, it seemed, had been learned from banking’s recent near-death experience; it was déjà vu all over again. That’s where we stand as the bankster-friendly GOP Congress prepares, with the aid of a Senate cadre of traitorous “bipartisan” Democrats, to dismantle what’s left of the modest Dodd-Frank reforms. As always, the watchword is “freedom.” Senate Republicans would give banks of less than $250 billion in assets (including 25 of the 38 largest) the freedom to avoid federal stress tests and capital/liquidity requirements, and those of less than $50 billion in assets freedom from the Volcker Rule’s ban on proprietary trading and risky private-equity investments. House Republicans would extend those dubious freedoms to the biggest Wall Street banks and free them from the investigatory oversight of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The ship of state could shortly be taking on water, so get those deck chairs rearranged and spend your tax cut judiciously. The money may have to last."
Pushing War With Iran, On Behalf of Israel:
Jefferson Morley: Bush Is Gone, but the Neocons Are Back
"...Founded by a “group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers who understood the threat facing America, Israel and the West,” the [Foundation for Defense of Democracies]'s advisers include former Sen. Joe Lieberman, columnists Bret Stephens and Charles Krauthammer, and neoconservative guru William Kristol. Even before the invasion of Iraq, the foundation’s ideologues were dreaming of invading Iran. “Everyone talks about going to Baghdad,” said one British official of the neoconservatives. "Real men talk about going to Tehran." The personnel has changed—Kristol is now a Never Trump conservative—but the song of “regime change” in Iran remains the same. “The potential for a democratic transition exists in Iran, where such aspirations have been growing for over 100 years,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, senior fellow at the foundation, wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal. “As regime-shaking street protests have repeatedly revealed, the country is a volcano. We want it to erupt. For the U.S. and the Middle East, sooner is better than later.” The ostensible goal of reaching a better agreement with Iran cannot conceal a larger ambition. In 2016, Pompeo said, “Congress must act to change Iranian behavior, and ultimately, the Iranian regime." Pompeo, much more than Tillerson, identifies with Israel, which has sought to kill the Iran agreement even while it was being negotiated. He was much more energetic than Tillerson in cultivating the Persian Gulf oil states that feel most threatened by Iran. Jim Lobe notes that Pompeo met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia in December to promote an anti-Iran coalition of Israel and the Gulf Arab states. The Jerusalem-Riyadh axis wants to enlist the United States in their campaign to confront and disrupt Iran..."
