CatherineRhodes.com

Tough enough to take on Wall Street?

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard economics professor and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, is a leading advocate for accountability and transparency. As such, she advocates creation of new consumer financial protection agency, which of course is getting resistance from the Republicans. Here’s what she said:

My first choice is a strong consumer agency. My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.

Here’s Ms. Warren’s op-ed from Politico entitled “Banking on Hypocrisy.”

Go Liz!

I love high fructose corn syrup!

Reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is a disturbing account of the prevalence of corn in the food supply. Corn is now a “welfare queen” because it is heavily subsidized by the government. Farmers have financial incentive to grow corn, which gets fed to cattle whose stomachs are designed for grass. When the bovines get sick because they cannot tolerate their corn diet, they are shot full of antibiotics. This follows being doped up with hormones to make them bulk up faster or produce more milk. The problem is complex, but what author Michael Pollan concludes is that a McDonald’s hamburger is only cheap because the true cost of growing that pound of beef is not accounted for.

The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost — to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne ilnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution) …. If not for this sort of blind-man’s accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does.

1854 Pres. Pierce vetoes a national health bill saying it would be unconstitutional to regard health as anything but a private matter.

1912 Teddy Roosevelt campaigns on a platform calling for a single national health service. He is defeated.

The Brits have had universal healthcare since the 1930s

1939 A proposal by Pres. Franklin Roosevelt for national health insurance fails as Southern Democrats align with Republicans.

1948 Pres. Truman’s plan for government-run healthcare fails after the AMA criticizes it and Republicans compare it to communism.

1954 Pres. Eisenhower proposes a $25M plan to provide healthcare to uninsured Americans. Congress rejects it.

1971 Sen. Edward Kennedy offers his national health insurance plan calling for a single payer.

1974 Pres. Nixon’s proposal for universal coverage dies in Congress.

1979 Pres. Carter proposes expansion of health insurance for the poor and a “public option.” It dies in Congress.

1993 Pres. Clinton proposes healthcare overhaul. It dies in Congress.

2009 President Obama proposes universal healthcare, setting off more than a year of debate, with Republicans universally resistant.

March 21, 2010 Yes we can!

I’ve always admired Kucinich for his stand on universal coverage, but now he realizes it’s “crunch time” for Obama’s healthcare reform plan and the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good. In other words, he’s become a pragmatist.  God, let’s get the votes and get ‘er done.

Yes, that's really his wife

From my hero Markos of the Daily Kos writing in The Hill:

Republicans are spitting mad. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called it a “brazen affront to the plain language of the Constitution.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told a crowd, “They want us to pay for this? Because we don’t have to. We don’t have to. We don’t have to follow a bill that isn’t law.” Rush Limbaugh claimed Democrats were employing a “twisted scheme” to “bend the rules,” while prominent conservative blog Hot Air ridiculously claimed Democrats were using the procedure “for the first time in U.S. history.”

Republicans have made far more use of these procedures to “ram through” their agenda when in power, and the rules certainly gave them the luxury to do so. Yet they apparently believe that Democrats should use a different, far more restrictive rulebook. What’s good for the GOP becomes unacceptable, unprecedented and unconstitutional when it involves Democrats.

Campaign workers called him the "black messiah"

Reading Game Change, which is a guilty pleasure, made all the more pleasurable by the fact that I was there through all the twists and turns of the race, working on the campaigns, checking out poll numbers. The book gives the back story to the events we saw on TV only after the candidate’s smiles were pasted on. Was talking with my friend Garth at Patina last night about it before the symphony, about how we were both so mesmerized by the election that we watched the primary returns from each state. In years past I may have watched the returns from California or maybe Iowa, but certainly not New Hampshire, South Carolina and split screens on Super Tuesday.

In this section of the book, Bill Clinton has just released his memoir for which he was given an advance of close to $10 million. Overscheduled, he arrived late to an Obama fundraiser in Chicago “exhausted, cranky and feeling every bit his age” but then rebounded to offer newcomer Barack Obama an introduction.

Clinton gave a juicily Clintonian introduction for Obama, praising his potential to the heavens. When Clinton was done, Obama stepped up and responded with a self-deprecating reference to his meager income relative to the piles of dough that Clinton’s book was hauling in: “My life would probably be a lot better if I was just finishing up this book tour,” Obama deadpanned.

Clinton laughed and then, being Clinton, reclaimed the floor.

“Sonny,” he declared, “I’d trade places with you any day of the week.”

A month later Barack Obama gave the triumphal keynote address at the Democratic National Convention and Bill Clinton had a heart attack.

She's fabulous

Cover story in Cosmo about that ultra fabulous Lady Gaga. I was puzzled by this snippet:

We offer her a cocktail, but she has a soldout concert in a few hours, and she doesn’t want to drink before the show.

WTF? She doesn’t want to have a cocktail hours before a show? I’m wondering what happened to the spirit of rock n’ roll where the crowd waited hours for Axl Rose to sober up enough to be pushed onstage for a Guns n’ Roses show. This millenial generation is so careful, so tofu, so condom. I suppose it’s progress, but there’s a piece missing.

You're a commie

Robert Reich on “This Week” mentioned that people love their Medicare, and are afraid their Medicare will be cut by the health reform act, but seem to forget the facts: Medicare is socialized medicine run by the government. Wake up, people! The death panels are the insurance companies who give bonuses to executives for denying treatments.  The nearby photo shows President Johnson signing the medicare program into law, July 30, 1965. Shown with the president are Mrs. Johnson, former president Harry Truman, VP Hubert Humphrey and Mrs. Truman.

Interesting interview in the NY Times magazine on Sunday with Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos in which he says the SEC is a “bunch of idiots” and the agency is “poisoned by lawyers.”

The five commissioners of the S.E.C. are securities lawyers. Securities lawyers never understand finance. They don’t have the math background. If you can’t do math and if you can’t take apart the investment products of the 21st century backward and forward and put them together in your sleep, you’ll never find the frauds on Wall Street.

The good news is that Markopolous thinks Robert Khuzami, the new head of the enforcement division, has “got fire in his belly.”

This is what we need — a march and a button that identifies and unifies our cause

Last week, MoveOn sponsored a Virtual March on Washington in support of healthcare reform. I would have preferred a real protest rally down the Mall, but this may be as good as we get. The purpose for  the virtual march was to get the message to our spineless leaders that there is voter support for health reform, especially the public option. (In case you forgot, it’s an election year. The politicians need cover.) Last Sunday on “This Week” Arianna Hufffington said Nate Silver showed 70 percent approval of the public option — Nate Silver of 538, the polling organization that accurately predicted the majority of 2008 election returns.

I guess the question of whether people support healthcare reform comes down the poll questions asked, as anything could be phrased to derive the answer intended. For example: “Do you support the government takeover of our healthcare system that would establish death panels for seniors?” The wingnuts over at Fox News don’t seem to understand that the true death panels are the insurance companies, where staffers get bonuses to deny life-saving procedures.