Unsilent Generation

Entries categorized as ‘Obama Administration’

Conservative Agenda Plays Out Through Health Care Reform

July 20, 2010 · 2 Comments

Conservatives may complain bitterly about “Obamacare,” but they “are winning more than even they may realize in the current health care equation.” That’s the point made by Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, in a recent column.

[F]or all of the frustration and even anger within the conservative movement about where health care is headed, the fact of the matter is that they are winning more than even they may realize in the current health care equation. That’s because the nature of health insurance itself is being redefined and moving gradually but seemingly inexorably in the direction conservatives have long advocated: more consumer “skin in the game” through higher patient deductibles.

Item: In our recent survey of people in the non-group insurance market, we found that the average deductible for an individual policy is now $2,498, and for families it’s $5,149. These are very high thresholds by any standard. Consider, for example, that a family with median income facing such a deductible would be spending almost 10% of their annual income just for their deductible before their insurance kicked in.

Item: The percentage of workers facing high deductibles — $1,000 or more for single coverage –  has been growing rapidly. It doubled from 10 percent to 22 percent between 2006 and 2009, and increased from 16 percent to 40 percent in small firms.

Item: Indications are that the share of workers with high deductibles is continuing to grow, a trend I expect our 2010 employer survey to confirm when we release it in September as we have every year for more than a decade now. And a substantial number of these high deductible plans are paired with tax-advantaged savings accounts, which conservatives have long advocated. Facing cost pressures without alternative answers, employers are moving to plans with less comprehensive coverage to reduce their expenses for employee benefits.

Item: Health reform is unlikely to reverse these trends. Large employers will continue to look for ways to address the rising cost of health care. And, for the basic “bronze” insurance plan that people will be required to buy, deductibles could run several thousand dollars for individuals and double that for families. To be sure, other aspects of health reform cut the other way. For example, there will be no cost sharing for preventive services in newly-purchased plans, and insurers will be required to cap consumer out-of-pocket costs at defined levels. And, of course, there are substantial subsidies to reduce premium and out-of-pocket costs for lower-income people. But, for the first time, the government will be defining the threshold that decent insurance must meet, and that minimum coverage will have the kind of high deductibles that conservatives favor.

There’s still another facet to all of this: While many of the effects of health care reform may actually suit a conservative agenda, Republicans will use this self-same health care reform as a “socialistic” bogeyman to help them win the 2010 Congressional elections.

Categories: 2010 elections · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · financial crisis / recession · health care · health insurance industry · right wing
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Blame It On the Geezers: Matt Bai’s Generational Theory of Politics

July 18, 2010 · 8 Comments

In Sunday’s New York Times, Matt Bai argues that it’s old people who are disproportionately driving the Tea Party Movement, and especially its anti-government venom and its strong racist element. “According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 — and 29 percent of voters 65 and older — say they agree with the movement’s philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously,” he writes. ”A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.”
 
Based on this data, and on the history of the last 70-odd years, Bai constructs a theory that divides American politics largely along generational lines:  
[A] sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys…
 
In other words, we are living at an unusual moment when the rate of progress has been dizzying from one generation to the next, such that Americans older than 60, say, are rooted in a radically different sense of society from those younger than 40. And this generational tension — perhaps even more than race or wealth or demography — tends to fracture our politics.
 
These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations, but they are more indicative of how young and old Americans approach the issues of the day, generally. Older Americans now — no longer the New Deal generation, but the generation that remembers Vietnam, gas lines and court-ordered busing — are less enamored of expansive government than their parents were. They fear changes to their entitlement programs, even as they denounce the explosion in federal spending. They are less optimistic about the high-tech economy, more fearful of the impact of immigration and free trade.
So what’s wrong with this picture? Mostly, what’s wrong with it is what’s left out. Bai (who is 41) mentions that todays old folks ”lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s.” But who, exactly, does he think was carrying out the marches and riots? The exact same age group, of course–made up of my own generation and that of the Baby Boomers.
 
These people are today, for the most part, over the age of 60–the precise age that places our roots, Bai says, in a “radically different society.” Despite these apparently rotten roots, the generations that Bai criticizes (with a hint of oh-so-condescending compassion) managed to accomplish the following:
 
1. Launched and fought the Civil Right Movement, in which several dozen African Americans and a handful of white lost their lives, and hundreds more were beaten and arrested. Compared to this, the accomplishment of younger generations–voting for a black president–was a cakewalk.
 
2. Protested against and eventually shortened the Vietnam war. These protests were large, fierce, and widespread, and went on for years. Unless I somehow missed it, I’ve yet to see a comparable antiwar movement mounted today, among the young people Bai celebrates.
 
3. Supported the War on Poverty–not only with our rhetoric, but with our paychecks. (The top marginal tax rate in 1965 was 70 percent; now it’s 35 percent). In contrast, today’s Democratic party, starting with Clinton and continuing through Obama, has pretty much abandoned the poor to their fate. So today’s bourgeoise youth can declare themselves “progressive” without having to give up a thing.
 
The gist of Bai’s article is that our society will improve as we bigoted old geezers to die off, and make way for more broad-minded generations. But I wonder: Are there any among the younger generations who are going to fight the kind of fights we fought in this brave new world? If there are, they’d better stand up now. 

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Categories: Baby Boomers · Obama Administration · Silent Generation · age discrimination · budget / tax policy · generations / intergenerational issues · media · radical geezers
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On Bastille Day, No Mercy for Prisoners from Sarkozy or Obama

July 14, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Charles Thévenin, "La prise de la Bastille," 1793. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

 The following Bastille Day Post appeared this morning on Sara Mayeux’s Prison Law Blog:  

On this day 221 years ago, revolutionaries stormed a prison and, as they say in History 101, the modern world began…  

Traditionally, the French president would grant a mass pardon every July 14, but President Sarkozy has discontinued the practice. In that respect, he is not dissimilar from his American counterpart. Although historically most U.S. presidents have used their executive clemency powers within 100 days of their inauguration, Obama recently reached his 536th day in office without granting a single pardon or commutation — surpassing John Adams and catapulting into third place on the list of presidents who have waited the longest. Nos. 1 and 2 are George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.  

Sarkozy’s motivations are a mystery to me (as they apparently are to many French people). But why has Obama been so reluctant to issue pardons–or even commutations to a few of the thousands of prisoners serving absurdly long sentences, as a result of national trends of the past 30 years? Is he simply following the lead of other recent presidents? Or, as the first African American president–and one who is constantly facing (absurd) charges of radicalism and reverse racism–is he afraid of appearing soft on crime?  

If the latter is true, it’s not excusable, but it is understandable. Conservative media figures are already bent upon depicting Eric Holder’s Justice Department as having a pro-black bias; the phony “scandal” involving the Department of Justice’s decision not to prosecute the New Black Panther Party has lately been called a “21st-Century Willie Horton” ploy.  And this is only the latest and stickiest of countless accusations of favoritism toward African Americans. Last month, Iowa Congressman Steve King said that he “knew of no instance where Obama’s racial favoritism wasn’t a factor in his decision making.” The right-wing National Legal and Policy Center even managed to find “racial favoritism” in the financial regulation bill passed by the House earlier this month. This kind of race-baiting would be sure to kick in big time if Obama pardoned or commuted the sentence of someone who happened to be black.  

Nonetheless, for the thousands of people who may be undeservedly languishing in America’s prisons, it will be small comfort to know that the president is once again allowing his actions to be shaped by a right-wing agenda.

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Categories: Bush Administration · Obama Administration · legal issues · media · prisons / criminal justice · right wing
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Meet the Real Death Panels: The Truth About Age-Based Health Care Rationing

July 12, 2010 · 3 Comments

The latest issue of Mother Jones includes an article by me about the controversy over age-based health care rationing, which got transformed by the right into government “death panels.” Unfortunately, liberals have fallen into a different trap, because they refuse to take on the real enemies of affordable health care for all: the insurance companies, drug manufacturers, and other profiteers of our private health care system.

As a result, old people are being asked if we would be willing to give up some expensive, life-sustaining treatment so that our grandchildren can have health care. This is a bogus question, and a bogus “choice.” The real question, as I say in the article, is whether we should give up the treatment “so some WellPoint executive can take another expensive vacation, so Pfizer can book $3 billion in annual profits instead of $2 billion, or so private hospitals can make another campaign contribution to some gutless politician.”

It’s a long article, and I’m including just the opening here, with a link at the end to continue reading at the Mother Jones web site. Or you can read the whole thing at MotherJones.com by clicking here. And if you’re one of those geezers who still likes reading print and turning pages, the July/August issue is on newsstands now.

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From Mother Jones, July/August 2010

There’s a certain age at which you cease to regard your own death as a distant hypothetical and start to view it as a coming event. For me, it was 67—the age at which my father died. For many Americans, I suspect it’s 70—the age that puts you within striking distance of our average national life expectancy of 78.1 years. Even if you still feel pretty spry, you suddenly find that your roster of doctor’s appointments has expanded, along with your collection of daily medications. You grow accustomed to hearing that yet another person you once knew has dropped off the twig. And you feel more and more like a walking ghost yourself, invisible to the younger people who push past you on the subway escalator. Like it or not, death becomes something you think about, often on a daily basis.

Actually, you don’t think about death, per se, as much as you do about dying—about when and where and especially how you’re going to die. Will you have to deal with a long illness? With pain, immobility, or dementia? Will you be able to get the care you need, and will you have enough money to pay for it? Most of all, will you lose control over what life you have left, as well as over the circumstances of your death?

These are precisely the preoccupations that the right so cynically exploited in the debate over health care reform, with that ominous talk of Washington bean counters deciding who lives and dies. It was all nonsense, of course—the worst kind of political scare tactic. But at the same time, supporters of health care reform seemed to me too quick to dismiss old people’s fears as just so much paranoid foolishness. There are reasons why the death-panel myth found fertile ground—and those reasons go beyond the gullibility of half-senile old farts.

While politicians of all stripes shun the idea of health care rationing as the political third rail that it is, most of them accept a premise that leads, one way or another, to that end. Here’s what I mean: Nearly every other industrialized country recognizes health care as a human right, whose costs and benefits are shared among all citizens. But in the United States, the leaders of both political parties along with most of the “experts” persist in treating health care as a commodity that is purchased, in one way or another, by those who can afford it. Conservatives embrace this notion as the perfect expression of the all-powerful market; though they make a great show of recoiling from the term, in practice they are endorsing rationing on the basis of wealth. Liberals, including supporters of President Obama’s health care reform, advocate subsidies, regulation, and other modest measures to give the less fortunate a little more buying power. But as long as health care is viewed as a product to be bought and sold, even the most well-intentioned reformers will someday soon have to come to grips with health care rationing, if not by wealth then by some other criteria.

In a country that already spends more than 16 percent of each GDP dollar on health care (PDF), it’s easy to see why so many people believe there’s simply not enough of it to go around. But keep in mind that the rest of the industrialized world manages to spend between 20 and 90 percent less per capita and still rank higher than the US in overall health care performance. In 2004, a team of researchers including Princeton’s Uwe Reinhardt, one of the nation’s best known experts on health economics, found that while the US spends 134 percent more than the median of the world’s most developed nations, we get less for our money—fewer physician visits and hospital days per capita, for example—than our counterparts in countries like Germany, Canada, and Australia. (We do, however, have more MRI machines and more cesarean sections.)

Where does the money go instead? By some estimates, administration and insurance profits alone eat up at least 30 percent of our total health care bill (and most of that is in the private sector—Medicare’s overhead is around 2 percent). In other words, we don’t have too little to go around—we overpay for what we get, and we don’t allocate our spending where it does us the most good. “In most [medical] resources we have a surplus,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program. “People get large amounts of care that don’t do them any good and might cause them harm [while] others don’t get the necessary amount.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s pretty safe to say that with an efficient health care system, we could spend a little less than we do now and provide all Americans with the most spectacular care the world has ever known. But in the absence of any serious challenge to the health-care-as-commodity system, we are doomed to a battlefield scenario where Americans must fight to secure their share of a “scarce” resource in a life-and-death struggle that pits the rich against the poor, the insured against the uninsured—and increasingly, the old against the young.

For years, any push to improve the nation’s finances—balance the budget, pay for the bailout, or help stimulate the economy—has been accompanied by rumblings about the greedy geezers who resist entitlement “reforms” (read: cuts) with their unconscionable demands for basic health care and a hedge against destitution. So, too, today: Already, President Obama’s newly convened deficit commission looks to be blaming the nation’s fiscal woes not on tax cuts, wars, or bank bailouts, but on the burden of Social Security and Medicare. (The commission’s co-chair, former Republican senator Alan Simpson, has declared, “This country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements.”)

Old people’s anxiety in the face of such hostile attitudes has provided fertile ground for Republican disinformation and fearmongering. But so has the vacuum left by Democratic reformers. Too often, in their zeal to prove themselves tough on “waste,” they’ve allowed connections to be drawn between two things that, to my mind, should never be spoken of in the same breath: death and cost.

Click here to the rest at MotherJones.com.

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Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · corporations · death / end of life care and choices · drug industry · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry · lobbying · media · right wing
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Petition to Stop the Entitlement-Cutting “Catfood Commission”

July 12, 2010 · 5 Comments

Readers of Unsilent Generation may be interested in a new online petition directed at members of Congress, concerning the work of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility of Reform, which I’ve written about here many times before. Here is the introduction to the petition, which was started by Alternet. You can read the text of the petition, and sign it, here at Change.org. 

Right-Wing “Deficit Hawks” and their enablers are on a march to destroy the social safety net we built for our seniors and retirees. Shockingly, some of the most notorious advocates are actually in charge of the presidential commission that will soon determine the future of Social Security and Medicare. We need to stop them in their tracks! Join us in calling on Congress to Stop the Catfood Commission.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has been dubbed by progressives the “Catfood Commission” because its goal appears to be cutting benefits so drastically that retirees will only be able to afford to eat pet food. It’s hard to tell exactly what the commission is planning because its meetings are closed to the public and the press. Based on past statements and the background of its members the proposals are likely to include raising the retirement age to 70, turning large portions of Social Security over to Wall Street, and cutting Medicare benefits.

The commission’s co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, has stated he believes the founders of the Social Security program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. “People just died,” he has said. “Social Security was never [for] retirement.” Erskine Bowles, the other co-chairman, negotiated a secret but ultimately unsuccessful deal between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security benefits. Any chances that the commission would make cuts to the US defense budget in its pursuit of fiscal responsibility seem slim owing to the fact that the CEO of Honeywell, a major defense contractor, is a member of the panel.

We can’t sit back and count on a Democratic-controlled Congress to protect our social safety net. Just a day before the July 4th holiday weekend, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would guarantee an up-or-down vote on the Catfood Commission’s recommendations in the current session of Congress if they pass the Senate. With this measure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi relinquished her power to prevent the vote from coming to the floor.

Your representatives need to hear from you NOW.  Let’s stop the Catfood Commission from raiding the Social Security trust fund and slashing medical benefits for current and future retirees.

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Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · age discrimination · budget / tax policy · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · poverty · right wing
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Congress’s Oil Industry “Reforms” = Election-Year Greenwashing

July 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

This morning’s Washington Post reports on efforts in Congress to strengthen regulation of oil companies. 

Two key Senate committees approved legislation Wednesday that would change the way the federal government regulates offshore oil drilling and penalizes companies for oil spills…Both measures passed on bipartisan voice votes. One approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee would raise the civil and criminal penalties for a spill, require more safety equipment redundancies, boost the number of federal safety inspectors and demand additional precautions for deep-water drilling. The other, passed by the Environment and Public Works Committee, would remove oil companies’ $75 million liability limit and retroactively remove the liability cap for BP and the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

The Post says that these measures ”demonstrat[e] lawmakers’ eagerness to respond to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.” They might more accurately say that the measures demonstrate lawmakers eagerness to look like they are responding to the disaster. In the real world, the proposed measures will serve mostly as election-year greenwashing, with little genuine impact.

Just about everyone at this point knows that liability awards will be determined not in the hallowed halls of Congress, but by knock-down, drag-out court fights. More safety precautions can gradually be rolled back or ignored, just as the current safety regulations were in the years leading up to the BP spill.  And none of this goes to the basic dilemma of whether drilling at these depths should be allowed at all, when the dangers are so great and the stakes so high. Members of Congress can see the heat the White House has gotten for daring (in an uncharacteristic move) to impose even a partial moratorium on deepwater drilling: a federal judge declared the move illegal, while right-wingers attacked it as something just short of a Communistic plot to destroy the nation’s economy. As long as Congress tinkers around the edges of the issue, they can avoid the explosive core. As a character in a famous Italian political novel once said, “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.”

Let’s talk about the overriding fact that no one, apparently, sees fit to mention: The great bulk of our domestic oil lies in public domain territory along the outer-continental shelf of the United States. Since it is already owned by the public, and is supposed to be held in trust for our well-being, the threat of “nationalizing” oil is nothing more than a strawman. Oil is already nationalized in the United States–it is owned by the nation, and by the people. But we have basically turned over this huge asset  to the energy industry, especially the oil and gas companies. We have done this through a huge system of undervalued, underregulated leases that give companies a free hand to exploit the wealth of the public domain. And we have placed the disposition and oversight of this valuable resource in the hands of the federal Interior Department, with its long history of connivance with the extractive industries.

In sum, the citizens of the United States have given over the greatest natural resource wealth of our nation to private business interests–who naturally run it for their own profit, rather than for the public good. In return, we have demanded virtually nothing. And the little we have demanded–the most basic of safety precautions, the most modest of demands for fair pricing–have been ignored and derided by companies that regularly top the Global 500 list for profitability.

Keep in mind that these are not the mythological “Main Street” American business interests, the scrappy entrepreneurial spirits so beloved by conservatives and libertarians alike. These are not hundreds and thousands of little companies duking it out in the free market. They’re a few big multinational companies, whose hold on the world’s energy resources dates back a hundred years or more. They operate in secret through cartels to determine how these resources are parceled out, priced, and used.

One of many obstacles to any real change in this system is the absence of transparency and reliable information. For example, the oil companies, not the government, have been tasked with mapping oil and gas reserves on the public domain. This stands in the way of any real public scrutiny, and any impartial scientific judgement on how to administer the public trust. It also serves to obscure from view the massive ripoff that constitutes the leasing system. Historically, disagreements over this system—over whether reserves are over- or under-estimated, details of environmental impacts, disputes over fair costs–all have come down to information.

In the last energy crisis in the 1970s, I wrote a book called New Energy together with Bettina Conner, a colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. At that time, there was a move in Congress to make knowledge of oil  reserves transparent. My book includes an excerpt from the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress in its investigation of the energy crisis in 1974. That report said: 

The lack of accurate,well-analyzed data regarding energy sources and uses has placed the United States government in a ludicrous position.When those officials directly charged with administering energy policy are unable to determine accurately the extent of the present fuel shortage or to estimate reliably its potential impact on the economy.  Nor can they determine fuel production costs with anything approaching the degree of accuracy necessary to administer the price control program.The government knows almost nothing about the extent of the vast mineral fuel resources contained in public lands.  Tax policy formulation is hampered by the lack of analysis of existing special tax provisos for mineral fuel extraction  and consequent ignorance of their impact.

William Simon, Nixon’s administrator  of the Federal Energy Office, acknowledged the situation before the joint economic committee in January 1974 when he declared, “Let me say right at the outset that there has never been in existence an adequate energy data  system…Today and in the years ahead we need better data on everything from reserves to refinery operations to inventories…Data we can check, verify, and cross check.’’

Despite all the study and debate, the Congress never did anything to remedy the situation. The late Wisconsin Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson introduced legislation to create independent public libraries of basic information. Under his bill, failure to make public such details would make officials liable to prison sentences and fines. The legislation was bottled up in committee and died a silent death at the hands of powerful energy interests in Congress.

Then there was a move to establish a Federal Energy Corporation to conduct research on alternative energy and new uses of fossil fuels. This Federal Energy Corporation would have been empowered to gather and decipher data on oil and gas holdings, and even produce a limited amount of oil and gas itself, for our strategic reserve. The government would control no more than 20 percent of total oil from public territories offered for leasing, and would be a supplier of last resort. In effect,it would act as a yardstick against which to measure the private petroleum industry. It would be a hedge against the unrestrained power of this industry, which periodically gouges the American public at the pump, even though the public owns the very oil and gas it is buying from these companies. Needless to say, that initiative, too, died a sudden death.

In the 1970s these measures may have failed; today they would never even be proposed. Set against the national debate that took place four decades ago, the current discussion in Congress and the proposed remedies, the passive stance of Obama and his administration, are extraordinary. It seems like our members of Congress don’t know recent American history–or, when it comes to the older members, even remember it. But they seem to know, by instinct, well that adage from the Italian novel: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.”

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · corporations · energy · environment · legal issues · right wing
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After BP’s Disaster and Obama’s “Malaise,” Coal Is the Big Winner

June 21, 2010 · 3 Comments

No sooner had Obama made his Oval Office energy speech last week  than the pundits were comparing him to Jimmy Carter, saying his Debby Downer message was just like the so-called ”malaise speech” in which Carter tried to wise up the populace to the energy mess. The Sunday morning pontificators were falling over each other to make the comparison yesterday, and even Der Spiegel ran an article asking “Will Obama Be the ‘Jimmy Carter of the 21st Century’?”

I’m not even going to try to weigh in on that question. But I am old enough to remember the “malaise speech,” which was not quite the speech that’s now being depicted by the pundits. Carter’s speech in July 1979 decried American reliance on foreign oil and proposed fresh departures into alternative energy. One of its main points was to seek creation of a new energy corporation to back alternatives fuels. There were some nods to solar energy and other renewable sources, but the real push was toward the oxymoronic “clean coal” in the form of coal gasification and liquefaction, along with the mining of oil shale, which is one of the most environmentally destructive energy extraction methods ever invented.

Carter’s speech followed the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and as much as anything else was occasioned by the pressure he was under from the public outcry which followed that near-catastrophe. In addition, the OPEC oil embargo of the early 1970s was still a not-too-distant memory. So nuclear energy was effectively shelved, oil held more or less steady, and the biggest winner was the cheap and plentiful homegrown energy source: coal. Once scorned for its destructive strip-mining and filthy emissions, coal suddenly didn’t look so bad when compared with the risk of radiation poisoning–especially if it could be greenwashed and rebranded as a “clean” energy source.

The upshot of it all was hardly an energy “malaise’,” nor did it result in a major change in energy policy. Instead, it was a slight shift in strategy–a reshuffling of the cards. And in the end, it was the same old same old: The fossil fuel solution in a slightly different package. 

There, most likely, is where we’ll see a real parallel between Carter and Obama: If the BP spill is Obama’s Three Mile Island and the Iraq War his OPEC embargo, his reaction to these crises will probably echo Carter’s: coal, coal, and more coal. The president has long declared himself a fan of  coal, and back in February–before BP’s well exploded–he issued a presidential memorandum ordering a special task force to move forward with the questionable technologies that are supposed to render coal ”clean.” As David Sassoon wrote at the time on SolveClimate:

Obama’s executive office memorandum looks like a big victory for the coal industry, which was already handed $3.8 billion in last year’s stimulus act for carbon capture and storage (CCS) research and development and deployment. He did not simultaneously order a similar plan for a big roll-out of solar or wind energy to level the playing field.

Making good on campaign promises, the president is throwing the full weight of his administration behind a moonshot effort to make coal the “clean” energy technology of choice and open a federal pathway to a profitable future for one of the nation’s most polluting industries.

Three factors have cemented Obama’s support for carbon capture and sequestration technology: political necessity, economic opportunity and the backing of some of the most powerful mainstream environmental organizations operating inside the Beltway.

If Obama’s support for coal was “cemented” before the BP disaster, I’d be willing to bet he loves it even more after spending some time with the dead birds and tar balls on the Gulf Coast.

Categories: Obama Administration · corporations · economy · energy · environment · media · public safety
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New Orleans Jail Makes Room for BP Execs

June 15, 2010 · Leave a Comment

OK, not quite. It’s true that New Orleans is floating plans to expand its local jail, the notorious Orleans Parish Prison, even though it already has the largest number of jail beds, per capita, of any city in the nation. It’s also true that most of us would like to see some BP executives there, languishing in pre-trial detention along with the hundreds of poor New Orleanians who can’t make bail after committing minor offenses. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to see this happen. But its good to know that there will be plenty of room for Tony Hayward and his entourage if it does.

Yesterday, the ACLU of Louisiana issued the following statement:

The ACLU of Louisiana calls on the New Orleans City Council to reject Sheriff Marlin Gusman’s plan to expand Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) to 5,832 beds, large enough for 1 bed for every 60 residents. OPP, currently being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, is already the largest per capita jail in the nation and the City’s own Planning Commission has recommended a smaller sized jail. The Sheriff’s request is scheduled to be heard by the Council this week…

[T]he Sheriff has been unable or unwilling to reveal what types of crimes people in his jail are charged with. “The scary thing is that he can’t even tell us who he is housing in the jail. Public drunkenness? Marijuana possession? He simply won’t tell us or doesn’t know,” said Katie Schwartzmann, Legal Director for the ACLU of Louisiana.

What is known is that from January 2007 until June 2009, on average just 2.24% arrests in New Orleans were for violent felonies. 86% of arrests were for misdemeanors, municipal, traffic violations, and other arrests. At the same time, roughly a third of the prisoners held at OPP are federal and state prisoners who have already been sentenced and should be held at state or federal facilities.

The expanded jail would provide one bed for every 60 residents of Orleans Parish. In comparison, the ACLU points out, the ratio in New York City is one jail bed for every 413 residents; in Los Angeles it is one for every 504; and in Chicago it is one for every 542.

Louisiana is known for its swift–if frequently unfair–justice. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned “looters” that they would be sent “straight to Angola.” Instead, the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Burl Cain, hurried down to New Orleans to set up a temporary jail in the bus station, known as “Camp Greyhound.” Any people suspected of stealing a quart of milk for their starving children were summarily locked up–if they weren’t simply shot by cops or vigilantes.

Don’t expect anything of the sort for those BP execs. Eric Holder says “nothing is off the table,” but there’s little chance we’ll ever see them behind bars. Here’s what McClatchy’s Scott Hiaasen wrote on the subject last week:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder promises an aggressive criminal investigation of BP and its contractors for their actions leading up to the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, already the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. But if history is any guide, don’t expect to see the CEO of BP in handcuffs.

Over the years, the Justice Department has repeatedly pursued criminal charges in major environmental accidents, from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident a decade earlier. But in most high-profile environmental cases, criminal charges are brought mainly against the companies involved, while corporate executives typically escape punishment.

If BP is prosecuted and convicted of crimes, the company could face millions in criminal fines as well as civil penalties. But that won’t be nearly as satisfying as seeing its leaders in a cell at Angola.

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Categories: Obama Administration · corporations · environment · legal issues · prisons / criminal justice
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The Pentagon’s Afghan Mineral Hype

June 14, 2010 · 6 Comments

This morning’s New York Times includes a story headlined, ”US Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan.’’ In fact the country’s  mineral wealth has been known for centuries. Records of it date back to the time of Marco Polo. Mineral stories were mapped by the Soviets during their occupation of the country, and more recently by other mining experts. While it’s possible that the team of Pentagon officials and American geologists credited with the “discovery” may have added some detail to existing knowledge on the subject, it’s hardly the revelation their reports–and the article–suggest.

So could this “revelation” in fact be an Obama administration PR campaign to buttress U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan? For years, we were told of Afghanistan’s potential valuable oil prospects. When oil faded from the picture there was no economic reason to be there. The place wasn’t like Iraq, where the international oil companies got their hands on a huge oil reserve. But now, with the Times apparently swallowing the Pentagon’s bait, we’ve suddenly got a new reason to fight: Getting our hands on a lucrative mining colony. James Risen in the Times reports : 

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

Running counter to the claims of a huge discovery is an existing undated  report called Minerals in Afghanistan, prepared by the Afghan minining ministry  jointly with the British Geological Survey and easily obtained on the web. The report has  this to say on the subject:

In central Afghanistan occurrences of rare metals have been identified in sediments below several lakes and depressions where lake brines contain higher than average metal concentrations. Trial pits have indicated that salt deposits covered by clay and loam layers contain high concentrations of lithium, boron, lead and zinc.

In a 2006 special edition on Afghanistan of Mining Journal, pre-eminent publication in the field, the mining minister, Hon.Eng. Ibrahim Adel, writes in the introduction,

It is a privilege for me to draw your attention to this Mining Journal special supplement on Afghanistan. Mining in Afghanistan has a history dating back over 6,000 years, and despite all the upheavals over the past 25 years, mining has continued to operate. The main task facing us now is to expand the industry from its present small base. The Government regards the development of Afghanistan’s natural resources as the most important driver of economic growth, and essential to the reconstruction and development of the country…For example, construction minerals production has grown dramatically with the increased need for raw materials to feed road building and reconstruction. I expect this will be followed shortly by further investment in the coal, cement and hydrocarbons industries. The first signs of grassroots mineral exploration for gold have started, and with the appointment of Tender Advisors for the future development of the world class Aynak copper deposit, I expect this to lead to really significant investment in the mining sector of the economy in the very near future. Aynak is one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposits and it has already attracted interest from a wide spectrum of international companies.

Mining Journal provides an in depth account of the history and potential for mining all sorts of minerals. Here is the Journal‘s overview: 

Afghanistan has some of the most complex and varied geology in the world. The oldest rocks are Archean and they are succeeded by rocks from the Proterozoic and every Phanerozoic system up to the present day. The country also has a long and complicated tectonic history, partly related to its position at the western end of the Himalayas.

This diverse geological foundation has resulted in a significant mineral heritage with over 1,400 mineral occurrences recorded to date. Historical mining concentrated mostly on precious stone production, with some of the oldest known mines in the world established in Afghanistan to produce lapis lazuli for the Egyptian Pharaohs. 

More recent exploration in the 1960s and 70s resulted in the discovery of significant resources ofmetallic minerals, including copper, iron and gold, and non-metallic minerals, including halite, talc and mica. The bedrock geology of Afghanistan can be thought of as a jigsaw of crustal blocks separated by fault zones, each with a different geological history and mineral prospectivity. This jigsaw has been put together by a series of tectonic events dating from the Jurassic up to the present.

Among other things, Afghan emeralds are generally considered to be among the most beautiful in the world, rivaling the emeralds produced in Colombia. They were mined and sold for arms during the time of the Northern Alliance; the famous Mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud funded his campaign by selling emeralds from the Panjshir Valley. More recently, sources with first hand knowledge of the business have reported that Afghan emeralds were blocked by the Colombian emerald cartel, though there are reports of Afghan emeralds being traded on the sly through Eastern Europe.

Categories: Obama Administration · international · media
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The Peterson Foundation’s Retirement Plan: Debtors Prisons

June 11, 2010 · 3 Comments

For readers interested in the emerging entitlement wars, and the insidious influence of Pete Peterson’s anti-entitlement campaign on the public debate (and, apparently, on Obama’s Deficit Commission), yesterday’s post on “Entitled to Know,” the blog of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, needs no introduction. I’m quoting the post in full, but you can click through to the original post to watch the segment on CNBC–and while you’re there, subscribe to the blog to receive the latest information on these issues. 

Apparently, these are the “good-old days” our nation’s fiscal hawks relish.  The Peterson Foundation’s David Walker co-hosted CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning (personally, we yearn for the good-old days when so-called “news” shows were hosted by journalists—not partisan advocates—but that’s another debate). 

The discussion followed the classic Peterson Foundation talking points—government bad, business good—but ultimately led to a nostalgic reminiscence for the good old days when Americans faced debtors prisons and had no sense of “entitlement” (presumably to the Social Security and Medicare benefits workers have funded for their entire working lives):

“The fact of the matter is we have to change how we do things. We are on an imprudent and unsustainable path in a number of ways. You talk about debtors prisons, we used to have debtors prisons, now bankruptcy is no taint. Bankruptcy is an exit strategy. Our society and our culture have changed. We need to get back to opportunity and move away from entitlement. We need to be able to provide reasonable risk but hold people accountable when they do imprudent things…it’s pretty fundamental.”… (David Walker, Peterson Foundation, CNBC Jun 10, 2010)

Now, maybe in the Peterson Foundation’s circle of Wall Street types and multi-billionaires, bankruptcy is an exit strategy, but for millions of middle-class Americans bankruptcy is, in fact, a life-altering and often debilitating choice.  As for pitting “opportunity” vs “entitlement”—that’s classic Peterson Foundation messaging designed to convince us that America’s seniors are somehow riding high on the hog and soaking taxpayers with all of their “entitlements”. 

Of course, these fiscal hawks never mention that fact that the government doesn’t pay for those “entitlements”, American workers do. It’s not the government’s money…it’s not Wall Street’s money…and those so-called “entitlements” have been paid for by you and me.  The truth is, retirees are entitled to receive the benefits they’ve been promised; however, fiscal hawks like David Walker would apparently rather roll back the clock, ignore those promises, and build more debtor’s prisons.

Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · generations / intergenerational issues · media · pensions / retirement funds
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