Project Censored, 2010

Along with the pleasure of nature's excessive beauty, October brings the newest edition of Project Censored: Top 25 Censored Stories.

The compilation is a year-long project of Sonoma State University, managed by students of the School of Social Sciences who submit news which they think has been underreported, ignored, misrepresented or otherwise censored by the US corporate news outlets. These stories are then judged by a panel who presently or in the past has included Noam Chomsky, Susan Faludi, Howard Zinn, Erna Smith, until a final 25 stories are selected for publication.

Because of our recent discussions here at AMERICAblog about dangerous and even lethal Chinese products now flooding our markets, #5 on the list, an article titled Europe Blocks US Toxic Products, jumped out at me:

Hundreds of companies located in the US produce or import hundreds of chemicals designated as dangerous by the European Union. Large amounts of these chemicals are being produced in thirty-seven states, in as many as eighty-seven sites per state, according to biochemist Richard Denison of Environmental Defense Fund, author of the report “Across the Pond: Assessing REACH’s First Big Impact on US Companies and Chemicals.”


Of the 267 chemicals on the potential REACH list, compiled by the International Chemical Secretariat in Sweden, only one third have ever been tested by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and only two are regulated in any form under US law.

Industry’s evisceration of the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and a host of regulatory agencies, has placed US firms in a position of unaccountability.

As a result of the contrast between US deregulation and the spreading European model of regulation, the US has become the dumping ground for toxic toys, electronics and cosmetics. We produce and consume the toxic materials, from which other countries around the world are protected.

Read the rest of this post...

Are Egyptian women fighting for the right to be subjugated?

Hard to see this any other way:

A recent declaration by a leading Egyptian cleric that women will not be allowed to wear the niqab in university areas frequented only by women has sparked demonstrations by female students in Cairo determined to wear the all-encompassing veil wherever they go....

In Europe, wearing the niqab has become a controversial issue too. Recently, French President Nicolas Sarkozy banned it from French classrooms. And British Justice Minister Jack Straw also recently asked women to remove them in his consituency office.

I'm not a woman. And I'm not a fundamentalist Muslim. So I don't pretend to understand. But is it just me, or does that outfit just reek of self-inflicted subjugation? Especially when it's 120 degrees out, the women are dressed like this, and their husbands are running around in blue jeans and the latest Air Jordans. Or, is this simply a "cultural difference"? Or...

I posted this on my Facebook page, and got a number of very interesting, and illuminating, responses I'd like to share.

From Gloria Feldt:

The burqa makes women invisible. In a culture where being a visible woman can mean death or rape, it is understandable that some women regard wearing it as a free choice. But that doesn't make them empowered. It means we have a good deal of consciousness raising yet to do.

And this from Alex Nicholson:

Many Egyptian women feel that rising sexual harassment levels in Egypt over the past 5 years necessitate covering up more these days. It used to be that the hijab was seen as sufficient, but when I lived there more and more women were wanting to wear the full naqqab for their own comfort in public.

Read the rest of this post...

"Even greedier than we imagined"

Robert Reich on how the insurance industry tipped its hand yesterday, by saying they'll have to increase the price of everyone's insurance plans if health care reform is passed:

[T]hey've now hoisted themselves on their own insured petard. They've exposed themselves. If they had to compete with a public insurance plan, they couldn't get away with this threat. They couldn't pass on the extra costs. They'd have to compete with a public insurance option that forced them to give consumers the best deals possible.

Now's the time for Congress and the White House to say to the insurance industry: You want to play hardball? Okay. We'll play it, too. You didn't want a public insurance option. That was one of your conditions for supporting the bill. You wanted gigantic profits from having thirty million new paying customers and the market to yourself. The Senate Finance Committee and the White House agreed because they wanted your support and were afraid of the negative ads and hurricane of opposition you could finance. But you're even greedier than we imagined. And now you've demonstrated that greed to the American people. They don't want to turn over even more of their hard-earned money to you. So, insurance companies, we've got news for you. We're going to make sure Americans have the freedom to choose a public insurance option that's cheaper and better, and you're going to have to work hard to keep them your customers.

Read the rest of this post...

Helen Thomas says Obama "lacks courage"

As I've said before, I think having this accusation come from friends on the left does not position Obama to the middle, as some in the White House might hope. No president is helped when pundits start, and keep, discussing whether or not he's afraid to do his job. Read the rest of this post...

Unions to oppose Baucus bill unless it's improved on Senate floor

Good. It's about time actual Democrats demanded that their views be included. And I repeat again: Baucus' bill is ONE of the five health care reform proposals that Congress is considering. Why is everyone treating it - the most Republican-leaning of any of the bills - as "the" bill? With a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, comfortable control of the House, the presidency, and an opposition party in disarray and sinking in the polls, can't we do better than this? The country is only "closely divided" in the minds of those desperately seeking an excuse for refusing, or fearing, to lead. Read the rest of this post...

NY boy, 12, arrested in fatal shooting of brother

Jesus. And while I'm a big fan of gun control, how screwed up can people be? Read the rest of this post...

MoneyBomb for Maine: Help us hit $1.1 million on ActBlue by Oct. 15th

Gang, we've been raising money furiously for the marriage effort in Maine. As you probably already know, the same religious right groups who passed Prop 8 in California, along with their friends in the Catholic Church, have launched an all-out effort to repeal marriage equality in Maine. Joe, who is from Maine, has really taken the lead online, early on, to get all of us involved in this effort. We've already raised $33,000 for Maine on our blog (thank you, everyone, for donating), and online all together, the Maine effort has raised over $1 million. That's a lot of organizing and PR in a state the size of Maine.

But we need more. And we need it by October 15th, just two days from now.

One of the problems with the Prop 8 fight was that a lot of much-needed money came in at the very end. Which, honestly, is too late. The campaign needs to know how much money it will have in the final weeks, so they can budget the media, and all their other efforts, accordingly. If you're going to help out, if you're going to help out again, please do it now rather than in three weeks, right before the election.

Joe can explain far better than I why all of this matters, and he does so here. So please, if you can, click on the thermometer above and help us reach our goal of $50,000. Here is Joe at a Maine fundraiser this weekend here in DC:

Read the rest of this post...

Is the Federal Reserve evil?

Recently I have seen a lot of talk about how evil the Federal Reserve is, and how Ben Bernanke is some sort of villain operating behind a curtain somewhere. I think most of this talk really misses the point of who is to blame for our predicament, and where our anger should really be aimed.

It is important to remember that the huge bailout bill (the "TARP") passed a year ago is not run by the Federal Reserve. It is being run by the Treasury and the taxpayers are on the hook for the money. I have a lot of problems with how that was done but the Treasury and the Fed are two separate things, the first being part of the executive branch and the second being an independent institution. As far as Ben Bernanke is concerned, I think he is about as good a guy as you could ever expect a Republican to nominate - he has spent his entire adult life studying monetary policy, and while he is too conservative for my taste he is a competent man, unlike some other Bush appointees we could name.

First, lets debunk one huge red herring. In a recent HuffPost post, Alan Grayson (who I love for all the obvious reasons) takes a page from Ron Paul's playbook and says we should tell our Senators to "vote NO on Ben Bernanke's confirmation until the Federal Reserve comes clean on what it has done with OUR money.

Not quite. This is not "our" money in the same sense that tax money is our money (or used to be, before the federal government withheld it). The money that the Fed is lending out isn't taken from somewhere else. The Fed is in charge of creating it in the first place. That is, the Federal Reserve is in business to decide how big the money supply should be. When they decide it should be bigger, they buy government bonds, which leaves the public holding more money and fewer bonds. Voila! A bigger money supply! When they want to shrink the money supply they can sell the bonds back again, and the public then has less money in their hands. None of this is tax dollars, nor do any of these transactions go through the Treasury.

So why did the Fed flood the system with huge amounts of money last fall, including going so far as to do it by buying up non-standard bonds such as mortgage backed assets? Because they were fulfilling the core mission for which they were invented a hundred years ago: to maintain the stability of the financial system by preventing our major financial institutions from melting down. Most folks don't really have any idea about this, but last fall we REALLY WERE on the brink of a COMPLETE AND TOTAL financial meltdown. That would have meant we would have seen widespread bank failures, corporate bankruptcies, layoffs and unemployment that would make the current situation look like heaven.

I don't fault the Fed for doing whatever it had to in order to avoid that. It is easy for people now to pretend it was no big deal, and there was no reason to get so excited, but they are just plain wrong. Ben Bernanke helped avoid a true disaster, and I am willing to accept a little sloppiness in the execution if he managed to succeed in his primary goal.

So what can we legitimately complain about?

First, about Ben B. What he is in charge of is deciding how big the money supply is, and his only tool is to create more money or less money. If he creates too much there will be inflation, which will impose a tax on everyone by raising prices. If this happens we can legitimately criticize him for it, but so far there is little sign of inflation - the figures have been bouncing around quite a bit, but that is more because of oil prices than anything Bernanke did.

But should we worry about inflation in the future? After all, we HAVE had a massive increase in the money supply, which a naive view of the economy would tell us is a sure sign of inflation to come. The answer is no, and for two good reasons:

1. The amount of money that was created is indeed huge by any standard. But what the Inflation Chicken Littles don't take into account is that this amount of money is far, far smaller than the asset destruction caused by the stock market collapse and various corporate failures of the past year or so. In fact, it is far less than the loss in value in the financial sector alone. In "normal" times, piling more cash on top of existing financial assets does indeed cause inflation. When the existing financial assets are shrinking before our eyes, not only is the additional cash just limiting the depth of the hole in our portfolios, it is actually giving people what they want. I certainly am happier holding more cash right now than I was a couple of years ago, aren't you?

2. If inflation picks up later on, it is something we have a great deal of latitude to deal with. Interest rates are near zero right now, so the Fed can sell a lot of those bonds it bought, and soak up a lot of cash by doing it, if inflation ever seems like a problem. In short, just as it can create money, it can "uncreate" it just as easily.

This brings up the big question - Is inflation the thing we should fear most? If so, then Ben B should shrink the money supply, resulting in higher interest rates now. Or is choking off the recovery a bigger danger? If so, then Ben B. should refrain from tightening money supply and let the monetary expansion continue for a while. It used to be that Republicans always worried more about inflation and Democrats always worried more about jobs. Being a Democrat, I am far more worried about the unemployed people than I am about inflation, which is so low it is a marvel that anyone is seriously worried right now.

And as for what Ben B says in public, don't sweat it. His predecessor, Alan Greenspan, made a career of opaque impenetrable statements that people would pick over like Kremlinologists studying who stood next to who at the Moscow May Day parade. Ben B isn't quite as good as Alan G at making opaque statements but he is getting there. Bottom line - the reason his statements sound vague and unintelligible is because he trying not to say anything at all. What people read into his statements says more about whoever is divining his meaning than it does about Ben B because usually there isn't much meaning there in the first place.

But I have a far bigger problem with all of this. Basically, it is that the brain trust in the White House seemed to only see the financial crisis as a top-down problem. Fix the big banks and all is well as far as the administration is concerned. I have no problem with fixing the big banks, but what about help for the people who are really in trouble? Sure, we passed a stimulus bill, but it was pretty small compared to what we really need, and about a third of it was in the form of tax cuts, which aren't much help to unemployed people who haven't lost any income to tax. Banks and credit card companies are furiously regrouping, but are doing so at the expense of consumers who are suddenly being denied loans and seeing ridiculous increases in interest rates.

Comparisons to FDR are pretty routine but there is one thing Roosevelt never forgot - who voted him into office in the first place, and who he wanted to vote for him in the next election. He made damn sure to butter the bread the little guys were eating, because without them he wouldn't have kept getting reelected, nor would he have bequeathed a 50 year dominance to his party. He didn't do it with bipartisan support either.

Roosevelt's major economic accomplishments for the little guys (e.g., Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance) were done over intense Republican opposition, and lots of claims that he was a socialist or a communist. That didn't make him compromise. It made him twist arms all the harder. And when the little guys still needed jobs he didn't cower in the face of Republican accusations - he went out and created a program that gave them jobs (the WPA). Was it socialism? Of course. Was it a good idea? If you wonder about that ask any of the 15 million people who are unemployed right now what they would think if the government offered them a job doing anything at all useful. Then ask yourself who they will vote for in the next election. Read the rest of this post...

Insurance industry says Baucus bill will lower premiums as compared to current law

Whenever I see people pontificating about "growth rates" and "cumulative increases," I am always suspicious. Even more so right now, with the heated health care debates, and yesterday's insurance company broadside against reform. The insurance industry cites some pretty scary numbers. But one thing they trained me to do when I became an economist was how to use a calculator. In short, I can do arithmetic, unlike some of the people in press and, apparently, some of the people in the health insurance industry. (Though in an industry like insurance, which relies so totally on statistics, one has to wonder whether the problem is on the arithmetic side or the honesty side.)

Point one: When the Washington Post reports that "cumulative increases" in your insurance premiums over the 2010-2019 period (a decade) amount to an extra $20,700 under the Baucus plan, it sounds bad. But the average annual increase is one tenth as much. That's still an increase, but it doesnt sound nearly so shocking. A general rule for evaluating ANY of these numbers is to always use a constant yardstick. The standard yardstick for most people is annual cost and/or annual growth rate. In fact, that is what federal law requires lenders to disclose when you do something like sign a mortgage or a car loan.

Point two: So let's go ahead and let our calculator tell us what those annual rates are. If we take the word of the National Coalition on Health Care, that the average cost of an employer-based family-of-four's policy is $13,400 right now (and there is no reason to doubt this - they are non-partisan, and their estimates are in line with other independent observers) - then we can easily calculate some growth rates based on the numbers cited in the scary insurance company report.

The insurance companies say that under the current system the same policy that costs $13,400 today will cost $15,500 in 2013, for a four year annual average growth rate of 3.7%. Contrast that with what would allegedly happen if the Baucus bill passes - a cost of $17,200 for an average annual growth rate of 6.4%. After the jump, I'll explain why, in fact, the insurance industry's own analysis shows that we do better under the Baucus bill than the status quo.

The insurance companies also give some numbers for 10 years out in 2019 - when they say a policy for a family will cost $21,900 under current law and $25,900 if the bill passes, for annual average growth rates of 5% if we do nothing and 6.8% if we pass the bill.

So this led me to a natural question: How fast have these same premia been growing over the PAST ten years under the current system? Answer - 8.7% per year. That's actually less of an increase than what the insurance industry claims you would see under the Baucus bill. (And in all fairness, it is to the insurance industry's advantage to overestimate the amount of increase caused by the Baucus bill - so even in their worst case scenarios, passing health care reform legislation would still cut your premia as compared to doing nothing.)

If we take only the past five years, the annual average growth rate is 6.1%. And it is important to remember that these are rates for an average family of four in an employer sponsored plan - anyone who is buying insurance as an individual has seen far far higher rates, not just growing by double digits annually, but often by more than 20% in a year. (NOTE FROM JOHN: My rates go up around 25% a year.)

Am I the only one to think they are just pulling numbers out of their asses?  One thing I DO believe - the insurance industry is going to keep raising the cost of health insurance at a healthy clip (for them) unless we do something to hold them back.

(NB... Here is a fun math trick. If you want to know approximately how many years it will be until your premiums double, just take the annual average growth rate and divide it into 72. (Dont ask me why this works - I dont know). So, if your insurance premia are growing by 20% a year, divide 72 by 20 and get 3.6, and in 3.6 years your premia will have doubled. If they grow by 7% each year they will double in a little over a decade (72/7=10.3 years). And John's rates, which go up around 25% a year, will double in under three years.) Read the rest of this post...

The GOP has no future

According to its own new website, the GOP has no future. Read the rest of this post...

Snowe will vote for Baucus bill

The most important Senator in the history of the Senate, Olympia Snowe, just announced that she's voting to report the Baucus bill out of committee.

Seriously, she might as well just give up her GOP card. They're not going to want her in the club anymore.

Oh, and as a reminder to the White House, there are 60 Democrats in the Senate. That should be a filibuster-proof majority. And, this should NOT mean "triggers" in the final Senate Bill. Read the rest of this post...

What will the next decade hold?

Reader Zac wants to know:

After a decade of activism, a lot of people of conscience in the 1970's turned inward, and it became the "me decade" marked by a shift toward "new age" stuff and just people tuning out of politics and just trying to live their lives and not worrying so much about the outside world, and more about the inside world.

Is there any indication of what activists seem to be doing as this decade of american militarism (2001-2009) comes to an end, and we move on to the 2010's? Are activists burnt out from being hyper political and all the marches and campaigns and energy put into these things, has the movement gone inward, and is this a new me decade, or conversely are activists as political and rage filled and engaged as they have been since Sept 11 happened?

Read the rest of this post...

Repercussions face Snowe if she votes with Dems. But, no consequences for Dems. who undermine Obama health insurance reform agenda.

Check out Adam Green's diary at DailyKos, titled "Weak = Senate Dem Leaders."

Here's the gist: If Olympia Snowe votes for health insurance reform, her GOP colleagues will punish her by taking away her seniority on a key committee. On the flip side, if Democrats vote against the top priority of their party and their president, there are no repercussions. None. And, that includes Joe Lieberman who campaigned against Obama but still has a chairmanship. He won't rule out supporting the GOP filibuster of reform. Let's not forget, Lieberman was kept his position thanks, in part, to Obama. That turning the other cheek doesn't work so well on Capitol Hill.

Of course, in a Politico.com article, "Dem Leaders brush off the left," we get a quote from another unnamed Senate Democratic aide, dismissing accountability and trashing the activists:

"This is a silly and unnecessary distraction that is not going to happen — period," added a Senate Democratic leadership aide.

Silly activists. Imagine expecting Democrats to be Democrats. We just all need to shut up and just do all the election work to make sure all the Democratic Senate aides get to keep their jobs.

Keep in mind, all we're asking is that Democrats deliver on the campaign promises made by Democrats. Read the rest of this post...

Insurance industry's top lobbyist makes case for public option

Today's New York Times has an article about the back-and-forth between the insurance industry and Democrats over the industry's report attacking the Baucus health care reform bill. The Obama administration and Baucus had worked hard to get the insurance industry's support. Too hard.

The last paragraph of the article is most telling. The leader of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Karen Ignangi, spilled the beans. In doing so, she laid out the case for why we need a public option. Her industry doesn't want to insure people with "health problems":

Ms. Ignagni said her biggest concern was that the bill would require insurers to accept all applicants for several years before the government had any meaningful way to enforce a requirement for people to have insurance. In that gap, Ms. Ignagni predicted, many people with health problems are likely to enter the market.

Imagine that. Her biggest concern is insuring people with health problems. And, as we know, the insurance industry has a very, very broad definition of "health problems." If insurers don't want all those people -- and Ignangi said they don't -- we really need a public option.

Last night, I posted a video of Rep. Anthony Weiner explaining how the insurance industry report on the Baucus bill made the case for the public option, too. Ignangi and her crew might have just outsmarted themselves. Read the rest of this post...

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is in Washington today. He's having lunch with Obama at the White House. Zapatero was elected in 2004 and one of his first acts was to take Spain out of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. For that, he was ignored by the Bush administration. But, he's back in the fold now.

Today, the Senate Finance Committee will vote on the Baucus health care reform bill. There will be a lot of chatter and speculation about Olympia Snowe's vote. For some reason that defies rational thinking, the Obama administration has turned her into the most important Senator on health care. I guess that's because there are only 60 Democrats.

Eleven years ago, Matthew Shepard died. He was 21. The brutality of his murder shocked all of us. This week, the Senate will pass the Defense bill, which includes the hate crimes legislation. The passage of that bill is due in large part to the tireless work of Matthew's mother, Judy. Here's a video I got of Judy in July. She was at the Capitol working with Senator Reid on the bill:

Let's get started.. Read the rest of this post...