Politics Plus

A rather unusual case is making its way to the Supreme Court.  Injustice will be done even if the four Justices are joined by one or more of the five Injustices in the better decision.  The case involves a man who was falsely arrested in 2006 for having the audacity to criticize a war criminal, ChickenHawk Cheney.  (I refuse to call him Dick, lest I be accosted by a gang of angry male body parts.)

The US Supreme Court agreed on Monday to examine whether two Secret Service agents can be sued for arresting a Colorado man who criticized US policy in Iraq during a public appearance by Vice President Dick Cheney at a shopping center in 2006.

Secret Service agents arrested the man, Steven Howards, in part because they did not like what he said to Mr. Cheney.  They later justified the arrest by claiming Mr. Howards lied to them about whether he “touched” the vice president during the brief encounter.

At issue in Reichle v. Howards is whether the two agents must face a civil trial – and a Colorado jury – over allegations that they conducted a false arrest and violated Howards’s First Amendment right to express his political opinion in public to an elected official.

The agents claim the actions they took against Howards were part of their job protecting the vice president. They say they are immune from Howards’s civil lawsuit and that it should be dismissed.

A federal judge and a federal appeals court panel disagreed, ruling that Howards’s lawsuit against the two agents could move forward. The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse those decisions.

In recent years, the high court has made it significantly easier for government officials to defend themselves from allegations that they violated someone’s constitutional rights. Many of the cases have arisen in the context of the war on terror and threats to national security… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Christian Science Monitor>

The greatest injustice that could occur would be for Howard to get no relief.  The agents said the arrest was justified, because they heard him say on his cell phone that he intended to ask Cheney “how many kids he’s killed today”.  However rude, the question was certainly valid.

The problem is that the wrong people are on trial.  Secret Service Agents are fanatic about protecting their charges.  They have to be fanatic to be willing to step in and take a bullet.  That is a good thing, even when the official being protected is a monster.  They were acting under Cheney’s authority and according to Cheney’s instructions.

Cheney is the one who should be sued.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still remained firmly committed to Universal, single payer health care for all Americans, administered like Medicare, but organized around pay for result, not pay for service.  That said, not everything about the PPACA (usually noted as the ACA) is bad.  One of the law’s best features takes effect on the first of next month.  When the bill passed, the naysayers accused that the final regulations on this item would be tailored to fit the needs of Big Insurance.  The naysayers were wrong.

Aaaaand, the fuse has been lit. Insurers are not happy. Not even a little bit. What they feared most about the Affordable Care Act — more than insuring people with pre-existing conditions, more than leaving children on their parents’ policies until age 26, more than having to lift lifetime caps, more than any of those things — was the limited Medical Loss Ratio (MLR).

The PPACA limits the "padding" between actual claims paid and premium collections to 15% for large groups and 20% for individuals and small groups. Any excess the insurer has must be refunded to insureds by the end of the year for which the MLR is determined. Everyone scoffed at the time over these limits, figuring the regulations would be broad and wide enough for insurers to run through the loopholes.

But no. Final rules were issued last week and insurers didn’t get anything they wanted. Via Rick Ungar [propaganda delinked] at Forbes:

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid. If they could, we likely would never have seen the extraordinary efforts made by these companies to avoid paying benefits to their customers at the very moment they need it the most.

Ungar’s logic at the end is a little bit wrong. The current MLR, just for perspective, is about 40-45%. That means for every dollar paid toward health coverage, only 60 cents or so goes to actual health costs. The rest is considered overhead — agents’ commissions, big CEO salaries, and of course, that shareholder profit that benefits those with the money to actually buy shares in these companies. Medicare, on the other hand, has a very low overhead attached to it — about 7-8%, because it is in the business of providing medical benefits, and not making a profit or paying CEOs handsome salaries.

The only reason for insurers’ efforts to deny benefits was simply to boost up the bottom line, and in many cases, the only reason for big premium hikes was also to boost that bottom line and the profits distributed to shareholders. Now insurers will find themselves in the business of actually paying for medical benefits. The regulations, by the way, do not allow them to include agents’ commissions in their "medical expense" column… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

I’d go a little further than calling Ungar a little bit wrong.  I call it lying through his teeth to disseminate Republican propaganda.

The author’s estimate of Medicare overhead seems high.  According to the CBO, it’s more like 2%.

Kudos to the Obama administration for standing up to tremendous insurance industry pressure and delivering what the plan promised.

Now, to the greedy corporate criminals of Big Insurance, who have been screwing us for years, Happy New Year!

I know we often talk about the 99% and the 1%, but it’s not actually so cut and dried.  Many of the 99% goose-step with the 1%.  Faux Noise sheeple are the operative example there.  And a few of the 1% support the 99% in our goal to make our society responsive to the needs of all, not the wants of millionaires, billionaires and corporate criminals.  One such is Nick Hanauer, a billionaire who says, “Raise my taxes!”

It seems millionaire Nick Hanauer’s recent op-ed on why we need to be taxing the rich in America has, as Steve Benen explained, “caused a stir, and with good reason.”

Political Animal – Raise Nick Hanauer’s Taxes:

If Hanauer’s name doesn’t sound familiar, he’s a very successful venture capitalist, playing a role in the creation of companies like Amazon.com. This week, he took on a standard Republican talking point: the notion that job creation suffers if taxes go up on the rich. Hanauer explained very well why the GOP’s approach is backwards.

I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

It appears that Hanauer, unlike GOP policymakers, understands supply and demand, and that three decades of concentrating wealth at the top doesn’t create an economic base that ensures broad prosperity. Republicans can keep lavishing more and more money on the rich, but they’ll only spend so much. […]

Hanauer’s advice? Raise his taxes, make public investments, and get some money in the pockets of middle-class consumers.

Digby’s take on this rings true: “This is a person who really doesn’t want to kill the golden goose of capitalism but would like to save it. It doesn’t speak well for the future of capitalism that there are so few entrepreneurs like him.”

Damn straight.

Be sure to go read the entire editorial here — Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer.

Hanauer was a guest on Neil Cavuto’s show on Fox Business this Wednesday and he did a great job knocking down every one of Cavuto’s arguments and straw men as Cavuto desperately tried to rebut Hanauer’s assertions on why the rich aren’t paying enough in taxes… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

Here’s the video.

Note how that shameless Republican propagandist, Neil Cavuto squirms in his futile attempt to hide the truth.  Faux must have assumed that Hanauer would goose-step, because he’s so rich.

We need more 1 percenters like Hanauer and fewer 99 percenters like Faux Noise sheeple!

Now that Barney Frank is retiring, we need another Democrat in Congress who will take his place and speak the truth with no holds barred.  We used to have an excellent spokesman in the person of Alan Grayson (D-FL).  In 2010, he was the most targeted Democrat and criminal corporations, like Koch Industries, spent millions unseating him.  We need him back.  He wrote the following article.

During my two years in Congress, I heard an awful lot of speeches. Some of them were delivered by some of the finest public speakers in America today — like Barack Obama, Neil Abercrombie, John Lewis, Anthony Weiner and Alcee Hastings. But none of them was as profound and poignant as the one that I’m about to share with you. It was delivered to a joint session of Congress by President Abraham Lincoln, exactly 150 years ago today. The focus of the President’s speech was, of course, the Civil War. But President Lincoln took a short detour, and with a few bare sentences, he summed up an issue that remains with us to this day.

This is what President Lincoln said to Congress, to America, and to us:

It is not needed, nor fitting here [in discussing the Civil War] that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.

If I were still in Congress, I would have repeated President Lincoln’s speech on the floor of the House this week, in the same spot where he rendered it 150 years ago. "Labor is the superior of capital." And we must not "place capital… above labor in the structure of government." Thank you, Mr. Lincoln. If I had to sum up my job as a congressman in 25 words or less, that would do it… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

Labor is the superior of capital.  What a magnificent concept!  Labor is performed by people.  Corporations are financial constructs of capital.  Capital is not people.  Therefore corporations are not people. Therefore labor is therefore also the superior of corporations.

If Abe could see what his party has become, he would insist that his head in the Lincoln Memorial be covered with a paper bag.

I encourage you all to get behind Alan Grayson’s campaign.