Fact-esque

AFL-CIO's Trumka v Rahm on the Public Option

For once, Rahm Emanuel lost an arm-twisting session. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, browbeaten into agreeing to a meeting with President COS Emanuel, refused to climb down off his white horse. He flat-out told The Enforcer that the public option was the best and most viable of the current (sad) crop of healthcare reform measures. FDL's Jane Hamsher spoke directly with AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale.

 I asked if Trumka considered "triggers" to be a public option. He responded:

Trumka is sticking to what he said on triggers all along - which is that we haven't seen any plans that would be as effective as the public option, and he told that to Rahm Emanuel today.

They discussed the Baucus/Pelosi plan to pay for reform by putting an unfair burden on the benefits of many AFL-CIO members.  (No doubt it's just a happy coincidence that the one big liberal institution which has pledged to withhold support from any Democrats who won't vote for a public plan is getting specifically hammered.)    Trumka reiterated that "working families shouldn't be taxed on their health care benefits, which often have been gotten by foregoing wage increases and other benefits." 

It's a good point and one that's often forgotten, even by raging progs like me. The management class used to offer benefit packages, particularly health care, in lieu of wage increases because such packages used to cost less than the pay increases being asked for. They thought it was a good deal for them, and it was until Reagan's deregulation cut the health insurance companies loose and premiums started to rise like Apollo rockets off a launching pad. Even then they could get cheaper coverage for a group (their employees) than any one of those employees could possibly get for him/herself and used the difference to wangle wage concessions and other benefit givebacks. (They used pensions and 401K payments in much the same way.)

Say What? Dept: Banks Failing, CEO's Cautious, Mergers Up

Either something weird is going on here or else the nation's financial honchos are just as confused as everybody else.

The FDIC, which as we wrote last week, is way underfunded for what it's being expected to do, has decided to ask the banksters to pay their 2010-12 premiums now rather than force the Obama Admin to bail it out to the tune of another $100Bil.

Federal regulators said Tuesday they expect bank failures to cost the deposit insurance fund about $100 billion in the next four years and the fund to begin running at a deficit this month.

That is higher than an earlier estimate of $70 billion in failure costs through 2013.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. made the projections as its board voted to propose requiring banks to prepay an estimated $45 billion in regular insurance premiums for 2010-2012. The proposal could take effect after a 30-day public comment period.

"I do think this is a good balance," FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said. The plan requires the banking industry "to step up" while spreading the financial hit to banks over a number of years, she said.

(emphasis added)

Good-o. Let the crooks pay their insurance a little in advance of when they'd have to do it anyway. It shouldn't be our problem and we shouldn't have to lay out a hundred billion $$$ to cover more bank failures created by the banksters themselves just so they can hoard their money for another year. But doesn't the expectation of all these failures the FDIC is getting ready to cover suggest that things aren't all hunky-dory in BanksterLand? That maybe the economy isn't "recovering" all that well despite a massive infusion of money into our financial pirates' coffers? More banks expected to fail than were expected to a few weeks ago doesn't exactly boost our confidence that "everything is returning to normal".

Unemployment: 6 to 1 and Rising, So Where's Main Street's Bail-Out Bucks?

We now have a Labor Dept that doesn't fuck with numbers as much as Elaine Chao's used to, and as a result we're getting a fairly grim picture.

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

“There’s too much uncertainty out there,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “There’s not going to be an upsurge in job openings for quite a while, not until employers feel confident the economy is really growing.”

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't that the point of Obama's promises during the campaign? To jump start the job market a la FDR so people would have money to spend, thus bringing the economy out of the oligarchic doldrums?

CSB: Deaths in Imperial Sugar Explosion "Entirely Preventable"

The Chemical Safety Board has finished its investigation and reports out what we all knew already: Sheptor's management was a disgrace and Sheptor himself is a murderer. 13 times.

Released Thursday, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board's long-awaited final

report blamed Imperial for the Feb. 7, 2008, explosions and fire, which also injured dozens of others.

The report said company officials long knew the dangers of combustible sugar dust, which the board and other agencies say fueled the inferno.

"The explosion at Imperial Sugar was entirely preventable, and the deaths and injuries ... should not have happened," board chairman John Bresland said at a news conference.

Citing "poor equipment design, poor maintenance and poor housekeeping," Bresland said, "It's not rocket science; it really isn't."

Sheptor has been pretending otherwise. Maybe to him, it is rocket science. He isn't the brightest bulb ion the tree. He's a CEO. From Texas. His specialty is saving money by screwing workers. You don't have to be smart to do that, you just need to have the power and be willing to use it ruthlessly. He does and he is and he did. He ignored 200 warning violations from OSHA because he didn't want to spend the few thousand it would have taken to clean up the plant's act and put in place safety devices and safety training. More importantly, he didn't want to lose the production time that might have cost him as much as 1/4% off his weekly profit statement.

Surely 13 lives is a small price to pay to prevent such a travesty. They think so inTexas.

Friday Palin: Ducking and Weaving

Well, it has been quite  week for The Sarahcuda. A month or so ago, Palin, in an attempt to build support with military voters for her presidential run in '12, put herself up for sale on Ebay as a charity date - $25K+ (that was the opening bid) to a charity for wounded veterans and the winner could enjoy a "private" dinner with the 'Cuda herself. There were just a few little provisos.

Be warned though: there are plenty of reasons why you might not be allowed to do this!

According to the lengthy disclaimer, bidders must pass a mandatory background check, like you were buying a gun or something! Palin will determine the site of the dinner -- probably a picnic table right next to her favorite Alaskan turkey-grinding machine -- and reserves the right to bring three guests of her choosing, in case you totally start boring her or asking tough questions about domestic policy. Also, the winner may only bring "one item of reasonable size" to the dinner, so...no, Sarah Palin will not be autographing your Beanie Baby collection, sorry.

Also, there's this:

Dinner shall last no more than four hours, but could be less, in the sole discretion of Sarah Palin.* Governor Palin reserves the right to refuse dinner with a winning bidder if, in her sole discretion, the winning bidder is not a suitable bidder based on her subjective standards of suitability, professionalism, background and other factors.

I don't know. Paying out all that bread just to have Sarah decide she doesn't want to do it? Remember, this woman has a reputation for early retirements.

Ben Nelson Protects Medicare Advantage (And Big Pharma)

Prime Blue Dog Ben Nelson, who hasn't made many non-Republican friends lately - or ever - has just sold the New York Times a Bridge to Nowhere, convincing one Robert Pear that, really, Medicare Advantage isn't a huge giveaway to Big Pharma that costs seniors A LOT of $$$ they wouldn't otherwise have to pay for their drug treatments, it's..well, let him tell it in his own inimitable way.

The bill taken up this week by the committee would cut Medicare payments to insurance

companies that care for more than 10 million older Americans, including nearly one million in Florida. The program, known as Medicare Advantage, is popular because it offers extra benefits, including vision and dental care and even, in some cases, membership in health clubs or fitness centers.

Yuh. At 3X normal rates. And of course health clubs and fitness centers are very well known for the massive numbers of senior citizens who go there to work on their abs and get shinier, more healthy quads, running on treadmills and bench-pressing free weights. And since when is there no vision or dental care with Medicare? When did that happen? Or does "extra" mean they pay for rhinestones on the hornrims?

Making Sense of Beck and His GOP: Ever Read Lord of the Flies?

The left-wing, including, gleefully, yours truly, has been having a lot of fun with the way right-wing whackos have blindly, ignorantly jammed together mutually exclusive concepts without realizing that they were, you know, mutully exclusive. For instance.But while they are slowly moving closer and closer to the truth about the Republicans and wingo mouthpieces like Glenn Beck, even the best of them seem to be having trouble accepting the obvious: that they're pure political propagandists. They keep looking for a consistent throughline of some kind as if what's left of the GOP and RWNM are still locked in the ideological framework of the Bush years. Here's Glenn Greenwald:

Like the establishment leadership of both political parties, [Glenn Beck] has no core political principles or fixed, identifiable ideology.  His description of himself as a "rodeo clown" might be the most perceptive thing he's ever said.  Attempts to classify him on the conventional political spectrum are destined to fail, and attempts to demonize him as some sort of standard Republican bogeyman will inevitably be so over-simplified as to be false. Such efforts assume far more coherence than he possesses.

Good. He clearly "gets" Beck now. But on the political party front, he still can't understand how they can say one thing one day and it's opposite the next with equal fervor.

Balance in Healthcare

If you haven't seen this yet, it's perfect. (For the record, I ganked this from Adam at A Violently Executed Blog who yoinked it from C&L.)

Entities Not Too Big to Fail...Wait...The FDIC?!

I started out this afternoon by running into tech ticker's Top Ten List of BIG Companies Facing Bankruptcy, which included a few surprises, like Hertz, Goodyear tire, and - oops! - CBS. O yes.

7. CBS

Weak advertising and falling license fees have sent CBS's earnings off a cliff in 2009.

If they remain depressed for too long, the company could have trouble refinancing $3.2 billion of debt coming due over the next five years.

It will really come down to whether or not CBS’s earnings collapse is merely cyclical, or the result of structural trend whereby traditional TV is dying.

I wouldn't worry too much. $3.2BIL is just about what the CIS franchise alone will make over the next five years. Still, the thought that traditional tv might be dead is delicious even if it is 50 years too late.

Famous People Support the Public Health Insurance Plan Option. Case Closed.

This video does two things:

• It explains what I've been doing when I'm not studying health care policy and realizing how much I don't know about EVERYTHING; 
• It features John Hamm talking about health care policy, which, in light of the first thing, leads me to the conclusion that we are soulmates.  

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell