AIG settles lawsuit for $725 million

It must be settlement season. They were wrong and should settle but paying back the taxpayers just became a bit more difficult. Tell me again why we saved AIG?

AIG would pay $175 million within 10 days of preliminary court approval of the settlement with a class of shareholders. The company may fund the remaining $550 million through one or more common stock offerings.

The litigation, which began in October 2004, involved allegations that AIG engaged in accounting fraud, bid-rigging and stock price manipulation, said Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, who represented the Ohio funds.

The settlement resolves allegations of AIG's wide-ranging fraud from October 1999 to April 2005 and brings the expected recovery for AIG shareholders to about $1 billion, Cordray said.

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Poll: 68% of Americans say political class doesn't care about what they think

Only 68%?

The frustration that voters are expressing in 2010 goes much deeper than specific policies. At a more fundamental level, voters just don’t believe politicians are interested in the opinions of ordinary Americans.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 68% believe the nation’s Political Class doesn’t “care what most Americans think.” Only 15% believe the Political Class is interested in the views of those they are supposed to serve. Another 17% are not sure.

Skepticism about the Political Class interest in voters is found across just about all demographic and partisan groups. However, self-identified liberals are evenly divided on the question. Eighty-eight percent (88%) of conservatives and 64% of moderates reject the notion that the Political Class cares.

Adults over 40 are more skeptical than younger adults about the Political Class. But even among voters under 30, nearly half (47%) don’t think the Political Class cares what most Americans think. Only 18% of these younger voters think the Political Class does care, while 35% are not sure.

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Obama & the Embeds (Liz Fowler edition)

We might as well call it "self-inflicted edition," though this is no accident.

John caught this a few days ago. According to David Sirota and Marcy Wheeler, Team Less Change Than You Wanted has hired former WellPoint VP Liz Fowler to run the "consumer oversight" aspect of the new health care bill. Marcy:

I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to learn that WellPoint’s former VP will be in charge of consumer issues and oversight as our country implements the WellPoint/Liz Fowler health insurance bill. (h/t Glenn Greenwald)

But let's see. Fowler . . . Fowler . . . Where have we heard that name before? Oh yes, from the Billings Gazette (h/t David Sirota):

Liz Fowler, a key staffer for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus who helped draft the federal health reform bill enacted in March, is joining the Obama administration to help implement the new law. . .

Fowler headed up a team of 20-some Senate Finance Committee staffers who helped draft the bill in the Senate. She was Baucus' top health care aide from 2001-2005 and left that job in 2006 to become an executive at WellPoint, the nation's largest private insurer. She was vice president of public policy at WellPoint, helping develop public-policy positions for the company. In 2008, she rejoined Baucus to work on health reform legislation.

(The Billings Gazette? Seriously? Don't they have papers in DC?)

So if you ever needed proof that the Rahm-designed 2009 deal to hand big money to Big Money (in this case, Big Health Care Companies) in exchange for 2010 campaign favors (Dems only, natch), this was it.

Fowler went from Baucus aide, to WellPoint VP, to Baucus aide in charge of drafting the Rahm-approved Senate HC bill. (The House bill was always for show — to keep the base at bay while the real deal went down.)

Is there any question that Fowler was the bridge between the Obama campaign (Rahm edition), Senate Movement Conservatives (Dems edition), and Big Money (Soak-the-Sick edition)? Didn't think so.

But wait . . . WellPoint . . . Weren't they also in the news lately? Not WellPoint, but WellCare:

Three crisp hundreds on the nightstand:

Remember WellCare, the Tampa-based insurer that was accused of “bilking taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars by using fraudulent practices that were integral to the company’s profit-making,” says a St. Petersburg Times editorial? “ . . . [T]he Justice Department has announced a preliminary settlement of a paltry $137.5 million to satisfy its whistle-blower claims.” . . .

WellCare’s PAC stopped making political contributions in the fall of 2007, after the Justice Department raided its headquarters. But now WellCare’s PAC is back in business, sending $2,500 to the Freedom Project, House Minority Leader John Boehner’s personal “Leadership PAC.”

I wonder what the guys at the DoJ got?

More on this ruling from the St. Petersburg Times (h/t Ken Silverstein):

Wellcare Health Plans Inc. is not fully paying for its sins. The Tampa-based insurer has been accused of bilking taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars by using fraudulent practices that were integral to the company's profit-making. But rather than recover every misappropriated dime and then triple the damages, as the law allows, the Justice Department has announced a preliminary settlement of a paltry $137.5 million to satisfy its whistle-blower claims. If WellCare keeps any of its ill-gotten gains and avoids a significant fine, the message to other health insurers will be loud and clear: fraud pays.

This would all make sense if WellPoint were WellCare. Health Care Bigs cut deal with Obama (let's not pretend it's not his administration); Bigs get fed-financed millions from mandated new customers; Obama gets money for next campaign; Bigs get an ex-VP to run compliance — and WellCare gets a slap on the wrist?

Oh. Guess what . . . from the pay-per-view business press:

Merger and Acquisition Scenario
WellPoint, Inc. (WLP) and WellCare Health Plans, Inc. (WCG)
Date: Jul 17, 2010
Format: HTML
Price: $250.00

Abstract
Revere Data's Merger & Acquisition Scenario Report offers independent, objective and insightful analysis into a hypothetical combination of WellPoint, Inc. (WLP) with WellCare Health Plans, Inc. (WCG). The Revere report begins by identifying WellPoint, Inc. products that are either complementary or overlapping to WellCare Health Plans, Inc. products. . . .

Voilà — just one Big happy family. ("Small people" need not apply.)

A la Résistance,

Gaius Read More......

Krugman finally gets it right — The Republicans as crisis-creators

I don't mean Krugman finally "gets it right" about economics; he's done that many times over. Paul Krugman finally calls the Republican playbook correctly, in terms of its real goals.

It's one thing to say the talk doesn't match the walk, something he's been saying a lot lately. It's another to say why — and make sense. In the Friday column he says why, and makes sense. Finally.

First, Krugman on the problem — the Republicans want policies that will increase the deficit:

For a while, leading Republicans posed as stern foes of federal red ink. Two weeks ago, in the official G.O.P. response to President Obama’s weekly radio address, Senator Saxby Chambliss devoted his entire time to the evils of government debt, “one of the most dangerous threats confronting America today.” . . .

But this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count. [my emphasis]

Then the false why — innocent but wrong-headed belief in voodoo economics, despite the potential for crisis:

But we’re talking about voodoo economics here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that belief in the magical powers of tax cuts is a zombie doctrine: no matter how many times you kill it with facts, it just keeps coming back. And despite repeated failure in practice, it is, more than ever, the official view of the G.O.P.

Now the real why — the crisis is the plan:

Of course, flirting with crisis is arguably part of the plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Let's linger here — Krugman is finally saying that the Republicans are deliberately creating a fiscal crisis to push through unpopular policies.

The crisis is the plan.

Rule #2 — Be clear-eyed to the point of madness; this is not your daddy's conservative movement. Thank you, Professor, for finally saying the whole truth — and perhaps for reading your own book.

GP Read More......

What happens when you give money to the rich

They keep it and you never get it back. These charts tell the tale, from Paul Krugman recently. The first chart shows lost revenue from the Bush tax cuts:

[A]s for revenue: we have a growing economy, which means that revenue tends, other things equal, to rise over time. But here’s what real federal revenue looked like since 1992:


Rapid, steady growth in the Clinton years; much less thereafter, even if you stop the clock just before the housing bubble burst [i.e., at the peak in 2008].

The first eight years are Clinton's revenue. The next eight are Bush's. Measure Bush to the second peak — the start of the economic crisis. Heck of a job, George.

The second chart is even worse — for the argument that tax cuts pay for themselves. It shows the effect of the Reagan tax cut.

The blue line is real federal revenue. The red line is the revenue trend starting at the first Reagan tax cut. Notice that the blue line never again catches up to the red one — contrary to conservative promises that it would. That's lost revenue for every year after:

Here’s real federal revenue, in 2005 dollars, from 1970 to 1990. I’ve plotted the log, because it’s easier to look at trends:

First, the Carter years, contrary to legend, were not a period of economic stagnation and falling revenue . . . [O]verall growth was respectable and revenue growth reasonably high.

Second, the revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend.

This is exactly what you would expect to see if supply-side economics were just plain wrong[.]

This is just for fun, of course, an exercise on a mint-julip day. They're lying, those conservatives, when they talk about the goodness of tax cuts, and they know it. It's our job to also know they're lying — and to act like it.

When you give money to the rich, they keep it and never give it back. It's one way you get to be rich.

GP Read More......

Report: BP buying up scientists along Gulf Coast

This is to be expected from BP. What is more troubling is that the scientists are willingly going along with it. Now would be a good time for someone in Washington to step in and straighten out this obvious conflict of interest. CBS:

BP has been trying to hire marine scientists from universities around the Gulf Coast in an apparent move to bolster the company's legal defense against anticipated lawsuits related to the Gulf oil spill, according to a report from The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala.

Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M; have reportedly accepted BP's offer, according to the paper.

The federal government is expected to file a massive Natural Resources Damage Assessment lawsuit against BP, and it'll have to draw on large amounts of scientific research to build its case.

Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs lawyer who specializes in environmental law, said BP is in effect denying the government access to valuable information by hiring the scientists and adding them to its legal team. "It also buys silence," Wiygul told the Press-Register, "thanks to confidentiality clauses in the contracts."

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June 2010 was the hottest June ever recorded

Thanks to right wing (including Big Oil) smears, we all know climate change isn't an issue though. And besides, wasn't February in some parts (but not others) of the US really cold? Problem solved so let's move on and keep pretending as though it's not an issue. The Guardian:

Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide and the fourth consecutive month that the combined global land and sea temperature records have been broken, according to the US government's climate data centre.

The figures released last night by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggest that 2010 is now on course to be the warmest year since records began in 1880.

The trend to a warmer world is now incontrovertible. According to NOAA, June was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface temperature above the 20th-century average. The last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. Each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last 15 years with the previous warmest first half of a year in 1998.

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Amy Winehouse - Tears dry on their own

This is a really nice recording from a few years ago. I love her voice and think she looks great at this time. It's a pity to see her (or anyone with so much talent) struggling with so many personal issues.

We're back to decent weather again here in Paris. It looks like temperatures will only be in the mid-70s today and just over 80F tomorrow so I am keen to get in a few long rides. I have one week to go before I hit the hills of southern Spain and I'm still wondering how I'm going to do when I start climbing the hills on my bike. After a solid year of riding on a very regular basis this will be a huge test for me. Between the more intense riding schedule and the heat I hope to be able to come back a bit lighter and in better overall condition after my vacation. Read More......

Privatization in UK will pay handsomely, to the select few

Here's a country that is on the wrong track. The excessive austerity program is going to tip the economy back under and as they throw public services overboard to make finances look better there are a few lucky businesses that are about to cash in and strike gold. It's hard to imagine anyone there can honestly believe that private industry is going to improve the National Health Service (NHS) without driving up costs. What part of the American health care failure have they missed in recent decades? This is nothing other than a giant shell game and the UK is being had.

A government efficiency drive aimed at slashing spending in town halls and boosting productivity in the health service is likely to deliver billions of pounds of new business for private companies, the Guardian has learned.

Outsourcing firms are preparing for a bonanza of local authority contracts to provide everything from bin men to back office bureaucrats and have reported a doubling in the number of deals on offer this year. Private health companies are also expecting to earn billions of pounds from the planned overhaul of the NHS in which GPs would take over responsibility for spending £70bn.

Executives at Capita, the UK's largest outsourcing firm, said the number of opportunities for local authority contracts has already doubled this year and they see the healthcare market as "vast and potentially lucrative".

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