Potter on DN

With regards to single payer, I think the President made a big blunder. I think he should have said, when he was inaugurated or soon—as soon as this debate began, that—you know, let’s look at what would be the best solution for this country. And why not consider a single-payer system? Let’s have that debate in Congress. It may not wind up that that is what this Congress enacts, but that debate should have happened. It will happen ultimately. And I think these protests are an important thing in our country.

I think it will eventually take a social movement to get the kind of healthcare that we need in this country—healthcare reform.

Wendell Potter, former top executive at CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest for-profit health insurance companies. Up until last year, Wendell Potter served as head of corporate communications at CIGNA and as CIGNA’s chief corporate spokesperson. He also once headed communications at Humana, another large for-profit health insurer. Wendell Potter is now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy and has become one of the industry’s most prominent whistleblowers.

ecrasez l'infame

Media critics, who so often less than fruitfully take issue with what bogus channels like Fox are saying, might consider looking more carefully into what, and whose existence, such channels do not, under any circumstances, acknowledge.

For example, she-whom-the-NewYorkTimes-will-never-do-a-story-about*, Amy Goodman, has Andrea Juhasz, lead author of the True Cost of Chevron report, updating what Bill Keller's dad's old oil buddies are up to.

The interview comes on the eve of Chevron's annual shareholder meeting.



*Apparently also the case at NPR news.

Markets generate conversations

David Korten on Democracy Now:

. . . our system is built on driving increased consumption, but particularly it is driving the most destructive and wasteful forms of consumption, of course, starting with war, moving on to automobile dependence, and which is not just about the energy issue, but it’s about the fragmentation of society, as we move out into the suburbs. It’s about the breakdown of the family, as we put more and more stress on the family.

One interesting specific mentioned by Korten: People have ten times more conversations in farmers' markets than they have in the supermarket. If markets "are" conversations, we can say some conversations generate more conversations than others. And different sorts of exchanges. Korten is author of Agenda for a New Economy.

This is a crucial point -- tieing to what Doc Searls has been getting at forever. 

But the nuance matters. Some markets tend to dumb down conversations, or produce fake ones. Other markets generate talk with more matter. The nature of markets and the conversations they generate differs materially according to context, culture, etc. 

In places where open markets reside in town squares (Latin America, eg) the rich public and historical context - this place where people have spent their days every day for centuries - generates richer conversations - more hooks, more relations, more life content.

The whole interview with Korten is worthwhile. His notion of phantom vs. real wealth is very much on the money.

And in the spirit of phantom wealth, IMproPRieTies introduces its new, Amazon Affiliate linkthingage:

If we make $10 this year, we'll share half with you  in the spirit of phantom wealth aggregator proprietorship.

Update: Phil at Gifthub on Korten and Catherine Austin Fitts, and material differences between them.

news hole

One day David Brody of Christian Broadcasting Network shows up on Meet the Press, but Amy Goodman of Democracy Now never does.

Just one snip from a very rich pressthink post by Jay Rosen.

Evaporation Nation

—through all these different crises, what you see is, the government wasn’t there at a time when it was supposed to be there.

There are different reasons in all those cases. In Iraq, certainly there was a lot of violence. Certainly, it was difficult to get people to go over to Iraq and pay attention. With Madoff, we’ll see what the Securities and Exchange Commission has to say about why they weren’t adequately regulating that issue. But time and again, the issue is, we’ve had a government which has been really shrunk and hollowed out in terms of its ability to oversee and regulate private businesses, private corporations and what it is they’re doing. And that is the function of government, is to make sure that everybody plays fair. They’re referees. And if there’s not enough referees around, the game gets ugly. T. Christian Miller on DN

"Now I call him Milton"

...the appeal of these ideas, I think, to politicians who are actually in over their head on economics—and, by the way, this goes for military dictators, too, like Pinochet—who get control over a country and are totally clueless about how to run an economy, is that it lets them off the hook completely. It says government is the problem, not the solution. Leave it to the market. Laissez-faire. Don’t do anything. Just undo. Get out of the way. Leave it to us. link

Poser for a poseur

This crisis is complicated by innovative financial instruments that Wall Street created and distributed. They're making it harder for officials and Wall Street executives to know where the next set of risks are hiding and also spreading the fault lines of the crisis.

The latest trouble spot is an area called credit-default swaps, which are private contracts that let firms trade bets on whether a borrower is going to default. When a default occurs, one party pays off the other. The value of the swaps rise and fall as market reassesses the risk that a company won't be able to honor its obligations. Firms use these instruments both as insurance -- to hedge their exposures to risk -- and to wager on the health of other companies. There are now credit-default swaps on more than $62 trillion in debt -- up from about $144 million a decade ago.

One of the big new players in the swaps game was AIG, the world's largest insurer and a major seller of credit-default swaps to financial institutions and companies. When the credit markets were booming, many firms bought this insurance from AIG, believing the insurance giant's strong credit ratings and large balance sheet could protect them from bond and loan defaults. AIG, which collected generous premiums for the swaps, believed the risk of default was low on many securities it insured.

As of June 30, an AIG unit had written credit-default swaps on more than $446 billion in credit assets, including mortgage securities, corporate loans and complex structured products. Last year, when rising subprime mortgage delinquencies damaged the value of many securities AIG had insured, the firm was forced to book large write-downs on its derivative positions. That spooked investors, who reacted by dumping its shares, making it harder for AIG to raise the capital it increasingly needed.

Few financial crises have been sorted out in modern times without massive government intervention. Increasingly, officials are coming to the conclusion that even more might be needed. WSJ

Let's ask the experts. What would Sarah do?

Statesmanlike Custody of the Assets

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you also detail in your book the same kind of flimflam going on with the soldiers who are recruited into the military, a bonus pay that they get that then, if they happen to be injured too soon when they get on the battlefield, they then have to pay back?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah. I found that just absolutely astounding. You know, you’re doing this research, and you find things that—I say, “Linda, are you sure? This can’t be!” But they said—you know, the view is, they signed a contract to serve for three years. The fact that they get blown up after one month means they haven’t fulfilled their contract.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happens?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: They have to pay back the money. Demo Now

Bend it like Bunkum

Government has left the building -

FEMA Suppressed Warnings on Toxic Gas in Evacuee Trailers
Newly-released documents show top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials have suppressed internal warnings about dangerous levels of toxic chemicals in trailers inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Several emails show FEMA field workers warned the evacuees were living amidst levels of potentially cancerous formaldehyde gas that was seventy-five times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers. As many as one hundred twenty thousand families lived in the suspected trailers. Hundreds have complained of health effects. But the emails show FEMA officials were only concerned with avoiding any legal liability for the evacuees’ potential health problems. Three months after the complaints surfaced publicly, a FEMA official wrote agency lawyers had advised against carrying out tests because doing so : “would imply FEMA’s ownership of this issue.” On June 15, 2006, FEMA lawyer Patrick Preston wrote: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.” Eleven days later, an evacuee who had complained about the chemicals was found dead in his trailer. In a subsequent conference call, FEMA attorneys rejected calls for an independent investigation into his death and wider trailer tests.

More here. It is a measure of the success of the efforts of Bushians that we no longer even notice stories of this sort. Not too long ago this might have been news even on corporate-owned networks. Now it barely makes Democracy Now. Soon there will be no memory of "the news" at all. Like gas lamps -- a former utility, supplanted by moodia.

Bush league Gore

[Al]Gore's speech at the Kyoto Conference in 1997 was one of the most disgraceful pieces of international diplomacy I’ve ever come across. George Bush could have made that speech. It was just full of deliberate confusions and evasions and elisions about what needed to be done about climate change. George Monbiot.