CIT SPRINGS AN EXTRAORDINARILY SELECTIVE BANKRUPTCY. GUESS WHO'S ON THE SHORT END?

CIT preparing to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as Sunday
Filing could wipe out U.S. stake and have broad ripple effect

By Tomoeh Murakami Tse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 31, 2009

NEW YORK -- CIT Group, a major lender to small businesses, is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as this weekend, sources familiar with the matter said Friday, which would likely wipe out the federal government's $2.3 billion stake in the company.

A CIT bankruptcy filing would be one of the largest in U.S. history, with potentially broad ripple effects. The firm provides loans to about 1 million companies, including many already struggling in the economic downturn.

. . . Under the pre-packaged bankruptcy, CIT bondholders would recover 70 cents on the dollar in new notes and equity in the reorganized company. But documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that preferred shareholders -- including the U.S. government -- would get nothing. The documents state that the government could recover some value if new securities in the reorganized company trade at a high enough level, although that is unlikely, a source with knowledge of the matter said.

. . . CIT has said it envisions a quick restructuring in bankruptcy that will result in a better-capitalized firm. The company has said that neither its bank nor its operating units would be part of the bankruptcy filing, which would allow the company to keep servicing its small-business customers during the proceedings.

--read entire article--

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A re-organization under Chapter 11 has to be approved by the court. And, it seems you and I, with the active participation of our Fed, have been slipped the smelly package of sucking up our $2.3 billion dollar investment. The Fed kicked that over pretty quickly, in an environment where the only thing standing between American citizens and decent health-care is a third of what was given in tax relief to these same rich bankruptcy supplicants.

Interesting also, that CIT's bank, Goldman Sachs, and the now cleaned up and shiny operating units are not included in the default. That ought to help the stock price of the newly emerged company and save the bonuses that always follow.

And so, the stage is set once again for private profit at the cost of the public hauling out the ashes. At least, when my old daddy made me haul the ashes all the way to the alley, I'd been warmed by the fire that created them.

We have a new category of ashes these days. It's called financially equitable America and it's burned beyond recognition.

To be fair, other free and democratic countries do this as well and have for decades. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany come to mind to varying degrees. Pretty nice places to live. They are home to such terrible burdens as Mercedes, Nokia, IKEA and other wonderfully run companies, whose CEOs are neither billionaires nor opportunists.

But they are branded ontheir foreheads with the term socialism, a hot-button compound word, hauled out at every neocon opportunity and occasion, from health-care to financial control, shaken in our faces like a puppy-soiled rag.

In America we bottle our milk differently than those nasty old socialists. We privatize the cream and socialize the skim and sour-milk, calling it by acronym. TARP, as an example, is either the Troubled Asset Relief Program (one can but wonder whose assets are troubled) or an old canvas pulled over garbage to quiet the stink.

Now that's a puppy-soiled rag.

LARRY HALPERIN, AN ICON AMONG LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS, LOST IN MID-CAREER AT 93

October 28, 2009
Lawrence Halprin, Landscape Architect, Dies at 93
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Lawrence Halprin, the tribal elder of American landscape architecture, who used the word choreography to describe his melding of modernism, nature and movement in hundreds of projects, including the memorial to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, died on Sunday at his home in Kentfield, Calif. He was 93.

The cause was complications from a fall, his wife, Anna Halprin said.

. . . Places he shaped include Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis; a sequence of urban spaces with dazzling fountains in Portland, Ore.; a park atop a freeway in Seattle; and large plazas in Los Angeles.

“He almost single-handedly reclaimed the city as the purview of the landscape architect,” said Charles Birnbaum, founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

. . . Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic, wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that a plaza he designed in Portland was “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

. . . “All of Halprin’s designs reflect this passion to give people as many options as possible to go this way or that, to reverse directions, to pause, to start over, to be alone, to meet others, and to experience as many different sights, smells and sounds as the site permits,” Mr. Forgey wrote in The Smithsonian in 1988.

--read entire article--

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Larry Halprin was shot out of the saddle in mid-gallop to yet another amazing project, at age 93. Not retired and looking back on the accolades of an amazing career, but active and vibrant, connected and probably dead with a slightly surprised look.

Who but Halprin could have conceived, let along completed, a peaceful and intriguing public park from the snarl of a ‘spaghetti-bowl’ of intersecting freeways in Seattle? Probably not another man of his time.

Yet there it stands, a third of a century after its creation, still a private-scale magnet in a public space disaster.

Larry apprenticed himself to Tommy Church and that was probably a lucky break for them both. Tommy was primarily a residential designer and Larry more attracted to public space, but the seed (to use too easy a metaphor) never falls far from the tree. Larry Halprin grew to be an oak among those twigs, like myself, who reached for and never attained his mastery.

But then, what are iconic figures good for if not to make us strive, to change the public conversation about the tools and uses of their trade?

Because it is a trade. Profession is too austere a term for the landscape architects like Olmstead, Church and Halprin, who gave us a whole new vocabulary concerning the choices by which we live.

Too few of us know his work. If you can spare a moment to follow the “read entire article” link and want to acquaint yourself with an artist, I encourage you to take the time. Just the photo of him, at age 89, is worth the effort, not to mention a lovely shot of the FDR Memorial in Washington.

I never met him, but he made me reach throughout my career.

What can possibly be better than that?

GOVERNMENT HAS NO DAMN BUSINESS RULING ON EXECUTIVE PAY

Top employees leave financial firms ahead of pay cuts
Grass is greener where bonuses are sky-high

By Tomoeh Murakami Tse and Brady Dennis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 23, 2009

NEW YORK -- Even before the Obama administration formally tightened executive compensation at bailed-out companies, the prospect of pay cuts had led some top employees to depart.

The administration had tasked Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department's special master on compensation, to evaluate the pay packages of 25 of the most highly compensated executives at each of seven firms receiving exceptionally large amounts of taxpayer assistance.

. . . At Bank of America, for instance, only 14 of the 25 highly paid executives remained by the time Feinberg announced his decision. Under his plan, compensation for the most highly paid employees at the bank would be a maximum of $9.9 million. The bank had sought permission to pay as much as $21 million, according to Treasury Department documents.

. . . Feinberg did not detail how he plans to tackle the politically sensitive issue of nearly $200 million in bonuses due in March to employees at AIG Financial Products, the unit whose complex derivatives contracts led to the collapse of AIG last fall. Feinberg has urged the company to find a way to scale back the bonuses in hopes of preventing another round of public outrage.

--read entire article--

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The public is, of course, long on outrage and short on common sense, an ill-defined word at best . . . there being so little of it out there among the American public.

They ought to be outraged at a government that panders to public perceptions while it taps the public coffers supporting what should have been allowed to fail. There would be precious little need for executive pay restrictions, had Bank of America, AIG and the rest of the fraudsters been let go down the tubes.

Still . . . all these months (about to become years) later, there are no meaningful government restrictions on the outright criminality that brought world economies to their knees. Bank of America is my favorite example of "to big to die a natural death."

My old daddy used to say that, "if you owe the bank $10,000, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $10 million, you own the bank." Wise man, my old daddy, even if the times and the numbers were more 1940 than 2010. The same is true in reverse.

Just over 100 banks have thus-far failed in America since 2007, without so much as a ripple. Presumably, their executives have gone elsewhere, wherever elsewhere might be for a failed bank executive.

Yet the bailed-out BofA style behemoths argue that $9.9 million annual salary is an affront to their dignity and worth. The Corn Belt Bank and Trust Company of Pittsfield, Illinois didn't unravel world finance, and yet it disappeared without a whimper, sucked under by a system in which it had precious little control. I don't know where Jeffrey K Stark, President of Corn Belt is busying himself today, but I doubt he'd be complaining about a compensation package.

The cold fact is that these dudes who are still at the wheel are the same guys who ran the bus into the ditch. Having had the taxpayer haul them back onto the road and pound out the dented fenders . . .

. . . they still insist on driving.

My old daddy, who grounded me for far less egregious activity, would have had a laugh at that. But a focus on executive pay is pissing on the tip of an iceberg and thinking it has an effect.

HALLOWEEN IS CHILD'S PLAY--THE REAL SCARE IS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

Bill Moyers on PBS:

BILL MOYERS: That's the progressive Representative from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, she's with me now. She has a Masters from the University of Michigan, did graduate study at M.I.T. and still lives in the same house in the Toledo working class neighborhood where she grew up.

She's in her 14th term in Congress, the longest-serving Democratic woman in the history of the House, and she's an outspoken financial watchdog on three important Committees: Appropriations, Budget and Oversight and Government Reform.

Also with me is a familiar face to viewers of this broadcast. Simon Johnson is the former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He now teaches Global Economics and Management at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. He's one of the founders of the website Baselinescenario.com. I check it out daily for Simon's take on the economic and financial crisis.

It's been a year since the great collapse and both my guests are well equipped to assess what's happened since then. Welcome to you both . . .

--watch entire video--

Voices of Power: Elizabeth Warren

Thursday, October 8, 2009 5:56 AM

LOIS ROMANO: Welcome, Elizabeth Warren, Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Committee that is tasked with scrutinizing how the Treasury Department has spent $700 billion to shore up our failing financial institutions. Thanks for joining us today . . .

ROMANO: There's a wonderful moment when he (Michael Moore) asks you where the $700 billion is, and you look at him and you say, I don't know. So the question is: why don't you know?

WARREN: Well, we don't know where the $700 billion is because the system was initially designed to make sure that we didn't know.

When Secretary Paulson first put this money out into the banks, he didn't ask "what are you going to do with it?" He didn't put any restrictions on it. He didn't put any tabs on where it was going to go; in other words, he didn't ask. And if you don't ask, no one tells. And so we have a system that originally put more than $200 billion into the financial institutions basically saying just take it.

--watch entire video--

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These good people are not conspiracy theorists. Bill Moyers, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Simon Johnson and Elizabeth Warren are all thoughtful people with extensive credentials. I (very nearly) beg you to hear them out.

OK, I do beg you.

Set aside a few minutes from what is no doubt a busy schedule and begin to understand the un-understandable. It's all here. Bewildered as we are by all the partisan shouting . . . it's all here.

IN TOUGH FINANCIAL TIMES, IT'S GOOD TO KNOW SOMEONE IS MAKING A BUCK

Overdraft-Fee Revenue Up 35 Percent, Study Says
Bank Customers Paid $23.7 Billion In Charges in 2008

By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 6, 2009

The revenue that banks and credit unions generate by letting customers overspend their accounts, then charging them a fee, increased 35 percent in two years, the Center for Responsible Lending reports in a study released Tuesday.

Culling figures gathered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the consumer advocacy group found that customers paid $23.7 billion in overdraft fees in 2008, up $6.2 billion from two years before.

In the past 12 months, an estimated 51 million Americans spent more than they had in their checking accounts, triggering either an overdraft or a non-sufficient-funds fee, the study found.

--read entire article--

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Well, that's a hunk of change, no doubt about it. 51 million of us. That's a hell of a profit base, $450 or so on average across almost 14% of the population.

Who wouldn't want a piece of that action?

Lucky Luciano, the fabled Mafia boss of bosses is said to have quipped, after a tour of the NY Stock Exchange, that "I realized I'd joined the wrong mob."

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE BAILOUT

TWO HEADLINES FROM THE SAME NEW YORK TIMES:

October 5, 2009
Report on Bailouts Says Treasury Misled Public
By LOUISE STORY

WASHINGTON — The inspector general who oversees the government’s bailout of the banking system is criticizing the Treasury Department for some misleading public statements last fall and raising the possibility that it had unfairly disbursed money to the biggest banks.

--read entire article--

October 5, 2009
Program to Buy Bad Assets Nearly in Place, U.S. Says
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said on Sunday that its scaled-down program to help banks unload their troubled mortgages and mortgage securities would begin operating at full strength by the end of this month, more than a year after Congress authorized $700 billion for that purpose.

--read entire article--

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If any of this makes you nervous or causes a double-take, relax. It's your brand new Obamafied Bushies at work (and we all know how well that last one worked out).

Things have gotten so cozy once again, that Alan Greenspan actually appeared on a weekend talk-show--something with that Greek guy, George Stephanopoulos. It was sort of like watching Henry Kissinger or Dick Nixon rehabilitate themselves--the caretaker Fed Chairman returning to the scene of the break-in.

Proof that irony is not yet dead.

Anyone been around yet to take any of your personal bad assets off your hands? I thought not.

Not to worry. The future belongs to us little dogs, once the big dogs have had their fill and they're all nuzzling their way up to the food-bowl. Another fifteen million or so lost jobs down the road, things may turn, begin to trickle-down.

Meantime, that trickling feeling is just sweat. The same sweat you experience when three very large guys approach on a late-night deserted street and they all begin to fan out.

Like I said, relax.

TOO DUMB FOR NEW YORK CITY, TOO UGLY FOR LA

'Capitalism' filmmaker Michael Moore isn't feeling the love

By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — Michael Moore is adding someone new to the list of people who drive him crazy.

You.

You know who you are. You saw Bowling for Columbine and didn't bother entering the gun control debate. You saw Sicko and didn't write your legislator. You watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and didn't vote.

. . . "I went through eight years of fighting one of the most disastrous presidencies this country has ever seen," he says. "And you know what, folks? I'm not doing this alone anymore. If you're going to sit on the bench and just wait for my next movie to come out, or watch Obama have to fight all these crazies (alone), I've got better things to do."

. . . "Sometime Michael Moore asks too much of us," says Michael Levine, author of Guerilla P.R., which examines grassroots marketing.

"He wants us to address health care, or the deficit, and frankly, people already feel overwhelmed and would rather be entertained," Levine says. "He comes in and says, quite compellingly, that this house is pretty dirty. But a lot of people are saying they'll clean it tomorrow —American Idol is on tonight."

--read entire article--

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It's a sad (and dangerous) thing for a commentator to point a finger at his audience, but "Too Dumb for New York City, too Ugly for LA" is a Waylon Jennings song that points a self-deprecating finger at himself, so maybe it's OK. Maybe it's time to point the gun at our own heads.

Michael Levine says we'd rather be entertained, while 20% of Americans are out of work. Every available job has six unemployed scratching for it and all five of those six can do is explain to their partners that times are tough--wondering what to do about the mortgage and credit-cards close to default.

Where the hell are we going to live? What if the kids get sick? It's always the kids--dad doesn't realize the stress he's under is more likely to put himself out of commission.

The Great Depression of 1929 got some things accomplished that were out of control (but 'unsolvable') in 1928. The nation was flat on its ass.

Do we really have to go there again before we care enough to hear the drumroll in the background? I guess so. Perhaps six houses in the neighborhood up for sale and friends we no longer stay in touch with because it's just too painful since they lost their job, is not yet enough.

Moore is feeling down, but he'll be up again because it's in his DNA. It's you and I who are too dumb for New York City, too ugly for LA.

What's on at seven o'clock tonight?

BRIBERY TAKES ON LEADERSHIP--AND WINS

Leadership PACs Provide a Ticket to Luxury Lawmaking

By Marcus Stern and Jennifer LaFleur

When it comes to golf, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has champagne taste.

In California, he's putted at Pebble Beach, where a round of golf costs $495. In Florida, he's driven the ball down the fairways of the Boca Raton Resort, with its signature island green on the 18th hole. These are among the dozen premier resorts where Chambliss played golf in 2007 and 2008 at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars. Yet Chambliss is hardly rich. His net worth is between $181,006 and $415,000, according to his 2007 financial disclosure report, ranking him 91st in the Senate in terms of wealth.

The congressman pays for his golf through a political leadership fund, the Republican Majority Fund, which took in $692,618 during the 2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Almost all of it came from lobbyists, political action committees and corporate leaders.

--read entire article--

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PAC, if you are not already aware, is the acronym for Political Action Committee.

And boy, do they get action.

In a Congress that trumpets financial reform among its members, while quietly slipping a mute on the trumpet, the PAC is a whole orchestra of gimmies and gotchas, pandering and gratification among the claimants to integrity. Nothing much has changed since Mark Twain's prophetic statement of a hundred years ago, that;

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."

The mechanics have changed. Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay hardwired an already vicious lobbyist flow of bribery money into the system during the Clinton administration by empowering lobbyists to sit at the table by reservation only. Prior to that, it was a free-market system for purchasing the Senator or Representative of your choice. These two slugs raked the chips over to the Republican side.

But now the Democratic party of change has revealed itself to be no better at washing its hands before coming to the table than those old nasty Republicans. Were you surprised? Dismayed? Unsettled or discouraged?

C'mon, folks--grow up.

Until we join the fray and organize a lobbying group to represent (and pay for) the legislation necessary to support the common citizenry, we have no cause for complaint--other than ethical. I once owned a domain-name to start such a group and then let it lapse. It may yet be available. Anyone want to run it?

http:www.buybackamerica.com

SAM ZELL--POSTER BOY FOR EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH BUSINESS TODAY

Why We May Help Pay for Tribune to Unload the Cubs

By Deals Allan Sloan
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Chicago Cubs aren't going to win anything this year despite having one of baseball's largest payrolls. But their bankrupt owner, Sam Zell's Tribune Co., may be about to hit a home run -- at your expense.

Zell, whose tax dodging is a frequent topic of mine, is trying to unload the team in a deal that would divert almost $300 million from taxpayers to the creditors of Tribune, the nation's second-biggest newspaper company.

. . . Zell, who took over Tribune in late 2007 and put it into bankruptcy protection a year later, turned out to be too clever for his own good -- or his creditors' good. He obsessed over sheltering Tribune's post-buyout profits but buried the company in so much debt -- $13 billion, just as the newspaper business fell off a cliff -- that there were no profits to shelter.

. . . Zell's nonsale sale of the Cubs, which would work like this. The Ricketts family, founders of Ameritrade (now TD Ameritrade), would put $150 million of cash into a partnership that would also borrow up to $698 million. Tribune would put the Cubs, Wrigley Field and related assets into the partnership.

. . . similar to the 2008 deal in which Zell unloaded 97.14 percent of the Long Island newspaper Newsday onto Cablevision Systems, walking off with $650 million in cash. "This is somewhat less egregious, but it's still egregious," said Willens, whose views are followed closely on Wall Street and in Washington.

--read entire article--

_____________________________________

Aside from the disclaimer that I am a lifelong Cubs-sufferer, Zell's manipulation of the rules of 'business' and 'taxes' is precisely why American-style capitalism no longer works.

Zell overpaid for Tribune Company, but he did it with the employee's money, via the pension fund. Then he proceeded to ruin the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, it's many and associated media outlets, along with the hapless Cubs. Following that, he bankrupted the whole works and, with $600 million of his own money in it, plans to take the $8+ billion loss off his taxable income from other stuff that he owns.

Smart business, some would say. But when you bring no value to the table, wreck lives, professions and the machinery that supports those lives and professions, you ought not to be able to walk away from all that destruction with a profit.

Zell walked away.

Unless the IRS sees otherwise, it will be at an enormous profit.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, LIFE ITSELF IS A 'PRE-EXISTING CONDITION'

Acne, Pregnancy Among Disqualifying Conditions

By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 19, 2009

A proposal to make preexisting health conditions irrelevant in the sale of insurance policies could help not just the seriously ill but also people who might consider themselves healthy, documents released Friday by a California-based advocacy group illustrate.

Health insurers have issued guidelines saying they could deny coverage to people suffering from such conditions as acne, hemorrhoids and bunions.

. . . Uninsurable conditions included pregnancy, and being an "expectant father" was grounds for "automatic rejection." So was having received "therapy/counseling" within six months of the application. There was also this more general disqualifier: "currently experiencing/experienced within the last 12 months symptoms for which a physician has not been consulted."

--read entire article--

________________________________________________

So, as an example, if you had a case of diarrhea in something just under the past year and failed to trot yourself off to the doc, pray you are not later diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

Average life expectancy is around 36.8 years according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, although improvements in treatments mean persons born in recent years may expect to live longer.

Improvements in treatments are not of much use if you can't get treatment because, on the history taken by the doctor you finally went to, ' diarrhea during past twelve months' has been checked off.

Bingo! Rejected for treatment. Policy canceled. No matter that you (or your employer) has been paying the premium for the past ten years. In this game, you can pay for 40 years and then get canceled when you finally hit the disease jackpot.

And yet the lobbyists tell us 70% of Americans are 'satisfied' with their health care plans.

The other 30% must be those who have been thrown out the door or have no health care with which to be 'satisfied.'

Great system that, exactly like our destroyed economy, is overwhelmingly supported by those who massively profit from its continuation.

Side effects may include death, disability, losing your home, watching a child or partner die or family unit bankruptcy.

It's in the small print. Don't worry about it.

DROWNING IN SHALLOWER WATER

Household Wealth Increases for First Time in Two Years
Frank Ahrens, Washington Post

So here's some actual good economic news, as opposed to the not-as-bad-as-expected economic news I've been dealing you lately: For the first time in two years, Americans' household wealth grew during the spring of this year, the Fed Reserve reported moments ago.

The Fed said household net wealth grew by $2 trillion to $53.1 trillion from April to June of this year.

Naturally, that is directly attributable to the stock market rally since the early March bottom. Look in your own 401(k); you've seen it. The Dow and S&P 500 are both up 50 percent and the Nasdaq is up higher.

Overall net worth -- which is everything you own: house, car, investments, etc. -- rose by 4 percent during the quarter.

It's worth noting that the $53.1 trillion figure is down from the all-time high of $65.3 trillion recorded in the third quarter of 2007, when the Dow peaked at 14,000. By comparison, the Dow is trading at about 9,800.
____________________________________________

Another case of "Figures don't lie, but liars figure."

First, your household net worth only grew if you owned stocks. Somewhere around a quarter of American families own some sort of stocks--in 1990 the figure was 23%.

So, 74% of us are still in the dumper, losing jobs at record pace and losing homes as well, no longer able to send kids to college and on the brink of credit-card default. The wealthy had to get very well indeed for 25% of them to raise the entire household wealth barometer.

Nothing new in that--business as usual.

Yet even in those exalted places, you have to be an extreme optimist to count recovery of $2 trillion from the $12 trillion lost since 2007. Unless my arithmatic fails me once again, the American family is still $10 trillion in the dumper.

Hardly something to trumpet as a 'wealth increase.'

HATE THE CORRUPTER, LOVE THE CORRUPT

Abramoff Associate Was a 'Corrupter,' Not a Lobbyist, Prosecutors Tell Jury

By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 12, 2009

Federal prosecutors told jurors Friday that Kevin Ring, an associate of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's, lavished meals and tickets on lawmakers and public officials in the hopes of illegally influencing them.

"He was a lobbyist in name but a corruptor in reality," said Nathaniel B. Edmonds, a Justice Department prosecutor. "Ring is the sugar daddy, giving out the goodies to public officials over and over again."

. . . They said Ring gave lawmakers and officials gifts and tough-to-get tickets to concerts by such popular performers as U2, Paul McCartney and the Dave Matthews Band.

. . . At one point, Ring gave tickets to concerts and the Wizards to a Justice Department official in the hopes of boosting government funding for a client, an Indian tribe, that wanted to build a jail in Mississippi. It worked, prosecutors said.

Ring told other lobbyists to "thank your friends on the Hill and in the Administration."

"In fact, thank them over and over this week -- preferably for long periods of time and at expensive establishments," he added. "Thank them until it hurts -- and until we have a June bill that reflects the fact our client is about to get a $16.3 million check from the Department of Justice!!!"

--read entire article--

_____________________________________

Concerts and the Wizards? He's on trial for concert and sports tickets?

Senator Chuck Schumer 'raised' $15 million for the 2008 election cycle alone--in cash. Schumer, of course, is not on trial. That's because Schumer and his co-conspirators in the House and Senate have made it legal to pocket cash in such amounts that representative legislative activity has come to mean corporate legislative activity.

In order to get out of the feed-trough and back into representing the people who elected them, congress would have to change the laws that put the feed in the trough. Anyone care to hang by the thumbs until that happens?

A case in point is health care costs. The Congress wails about the cost of Obama's plan--perhaps 9/10ths of a trillion over ten years.

Where will we get the money?

We've thrown 7-9 trillion at Wall Street already, most of it in 'guarantees' to cap costs that have not yet occurred.

(Reminder) there is still $60 trillion out there in worthless credit-default swaps that AIG profited enormously from and you and I will have to cover.

(Reminder) George Bush gave away $4 trillion in tax gifts to the guys who profited so hugely by wrecking the world economy.

(Reminder) they are still out there, dreaming up new schemes--the latest is buying life insurance policies from the elderly, packaging them in derivatives and selling them as investments to the same poor boobs who bought crappy home-loan derivatives.

There's currently $26 trillion available to be plucked from grandma and grandpa's life insurance.

Nobody watches that because there's enough money to go around, including to Congress to look the other way.

It's a no-no to counsel the old folks on end-of-life options, but perfectly wonderful to fleece the surviving spouse out of his or her insurance.

And Kevin Ring may go to jail for dinners and concert-tickets?

The vengeful-right is marching around Washington, bitching and complaining over budget deficits caused by the vengeful right.

We have lost our way, folks.

THE OPERATIVE PHRASE HERE IS "BUYING SEATS ON THOSE AGRICULTURE COMMITTEES"

Big Food vs. Big Insurance
By MICHAEL POLLAN

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

. . . AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

--read entire article--

___________________________________

Interesting point from an interesting guy--but then I am a Michael Pollan fan. He knows the food industry better than Michael Moore knows GM.

The point that's being made and I sincerely hope you read the entire article (and forward it to friends) is that two government interests are at odds with one another. Agricultural subsidies support corn syrup, which is largely responsible for our national obesity and spiraling Type 2 diabetes rates. Meanwhile, government is trying (without much success or encouragement) to find ways to control healthcare costs.

One in three children born after 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The average lifetime care for that disease tops $400,000.00.

Anyone for a Big Mac and a Coke?

AMERICANS WILL PAY A LITTLE MORE--HONEST THEY WILL

As Cheaper Chinese Tires Roll In, Obama Faces an Early Trade Test

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 8, 2009

ALBANY, Ga. -- At the vast Cooper Tire plant here, workers heard for years about their rivals in Chinese factories.

In meetings, managers urged employees to run production lines faster and more efficiently to help the company keep up. Overseas laborers were toiling for as little as 20 cents an hour, they were told, and working harder.

Even more ominously, while browsing the aisles of Kmart and Wal-Mart, Cooper employees could see that, sure enough, the Chinese tires were cheapest.

"They would have these meetings and say we're up against the Chinese," said Larry Burkes, 29, who worked at the plant, which rises on the city's outskirts just beyond a mobile-home park. "We'd hear it all the time: 'They work for less.' There was pressure."

Now the plant that employed 2,100 people in this small south Georgia city is being shut down, and the troubles afflicting the U.S. tire industry are at the core of what many consider to be one of President Obama's first major decisions on trade policy.

--read entire article--

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It's not about cheaper tires or strawberries, it's about what it's always about. Profits.

Goodyear, Firestone and Cooper make perfectly fine tires and Americans are willing to pay for them. But to equate a 20 cent an hour Chinese wage with the reason the Georgie plant is closing is just plain disingenuous.

America once had a tariff policy, just as it once had a manufacturing base and once had good jobs at good wages. The American worker didn't throw that out, American corporations did, with a global trade policy. Most of us stood by as trade meeting after trade meeting was bombarded by protesters waving placards that claimed the trade policies were eating the heart out of American enterprise.

We looked the other way, as those who were trying to save us were hauled off to jail.

And so, here we are, a mere decade or so down the road with privatized health care, privatized airlines and taking our shoes off in airports while corporate helicopters ply the Hudson, saving executives the commute we make to catch a plane. It's free-market economics, where the freedom is for profit and the cost is paid by lost jobs. Some freedom.

I was as guilty as anyone, cheering on good old Milton Friedman and his free markets. Milton was a success in South America, breaking the back of labor as he freed up capital and profits, while enslaving workers. Then, when Argentina collapsed, we jumped in with U.S. tax dollars to bail them out. Ditto Asia and Russia in the 90s.

Who, one might ask, will bail out the United States of America?

Good question.

EXTRA! EXTRA! WASHINGTON POST CONFIRMS INFOMERCIAL AS BONAFIED NEWS SOURCE

Study Raises Questions About Cost Savings From Preventive Care
Reform's Backers Say Such Measures Will Help Pay for Overhaul of Health System

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Preventive services for the chronically ill may reduce health-care costs, but they are unlikely to generate the kind of fantastic savings that President Obama and other Democrats have said could help pay for an overhaul of the nation's health system, according to a study being published Tuesday.

. . . The study comes a week before lawmakers are due back in Washington to continue the debate over Obama's signature domestic initiative, a debate that has come to focus heavily on cost.

. . . The study was funded in part by the National Changing Diabetes Program, which is primarily funded by Novo Nordisk, a maker of diabetes medicines.

--read entire article--

_________________________________________

There's a couple of things, interesting to me, going on here. The first, is a willingness to authenticate by comparison, the cost-benefit ratio of national health. Certainly that might be important to a mother with a child suffering from early-onset LCA.

(Wikipedia) Leber Congenital Amaurosis damages the light receptors in the retina and usually begins affecting sight in early childhood, with worsening vision until complete blindness around the age of 30.

The study used a common cold virus to deliver a normal version of the gene called RPE65 directly into the eyes of affected patients. Remarkably all 3 patients aged 19, 22 and 25 responded well to the treatment and reported improved vision following the procedure. Due to the age of the patients and the degenerative nature of LCA the improvement of vision in gene therapy patients is encouraging for researchers. It is hoped that gene therapy may be even more effective in younger LCA patients who have experienced limited vision loss as well as in other blind or partially blind individuals.

Unless, of course, you are relegated to a life with a white cane, because your government didn't like the C/B ratio. A guide-dog might be a better bargain.

If our outrageously spendthrift history of throwing money at the ill-named 'war on drugs' was subjected to such a cost/benefit analysis, we'd quickly realize that spending $18 billion a year to mitigate (not eliminate) 17,000 illicit drug-induced deaths annually. That's over $1 million per death, but don't get me started.

The second point of interest, is the unflinching and uninquisitive manner by which newspapering has fallen to the quick-and-dirty (profitable as well) habit of blazing headlines based on the 'research' of interested parties.

Novo Nordisk is a Danish company that manufactures and markets pharmaceutical products and services, particularly focused on the diabetes market. That by no means impugns their motives in entering the debate, but it does lead to shoddy and uninvestigative reporting.

Consistently, the health care debate is being framed in terms that almost completely ignore the reasons we pursue it;

• protecting those without an empowered advocacy
• catching up to the more enlightened single-payer systems that have left us behind, with a #1 cost and #37 effectiveness rating
• containing runaway costs that threaten our ability to provide other needed public services
• making sure children have a fair run at adult health, and
• taking bribery of our elected officials out of the equation

It's just like being at the dog-track. The rabbit we are chasing is not real.

WORRIED ABOUT THE ECONOMY? FORGET IT, TAKE A PILL--IT'S THE AMERICAN WAY

Depression and The Recession: Cymbalta Sales Are on the Rise

By Caitlin McDevitt
Sunday, August 30, 2009

During a downturn, we tend to seek the "bright spots" -- sectors or products that are doing well when all the rest are struggling. For example, there were plenty of reports over the past year about retail items -- lipstick, chocolate, and macaroni and cheese -- that were bucking downward trends and selling well during the slump. While these stories were cautiously upbeat, news of an uptick in antidepressant sales despite -- or perhaps because of -- the recession was just plain depressing.

Helplessness, pessimism and persistent sadness -- the main symptoms of depression -- didn't seem to abate as the economy crumbled. About 164 million antidepressant prescriptions were written in 2008, 4 million more than in 2007, according to IMS Health, a health-care information and consulting company.

Antidepressants were the third most prescribed type of drug in 2008, hitting $9.6 billion in sales, up from $9.4 billion the year before. Last month, Eli Lilly reported that second-quarter sales for Cymbalta -- which is on the verge of surpassing Effexor as the nation's best-selling antidepressant -- increased 14 percent over the past year. Our national reliance on these drugs is a stubborn trend. A study published in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry found that from 1996 to 2005, antidepressant use in the United States doubled.

--read entire article--

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Ah well, not to worry--if life is going to hell on every level, just cure it. We need cures, we Americans. We demand them and we demand them now. In place of grocery money or catching up on the mortgage, we elect to swill down nearly $10 billion to distract ourselves.

Pity the poor and desperate during the last Great Depression (economic as well as mental). An evening at the local movie house (complete with its Arabian Nights stars in the ceilings) was all there was, short of a stiff shot of Old Underarm. No side effects other than a hangover or a used ticket-stub.

Eli Lilly is not depressed, the firm is doing great, chasing down Wyeth's Effexor in a race to suicide and vacuousness. On the Wyeth site, they state (no doubt to be displayed in court, shortly after the funeral);

Suicidality and Antidepressant Drugs

Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, teens, and young adults. Depression and certain other psychiatric disorders are themselves associated with increases in the risk of suicide. Patients of all ages who are started on antidepressant therapy should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior. EFFEXOR XR® (venlafaxine HCl) is not approved for use in children and teens.

Running hard at their heels down the homestretch of the Zombie Stakes, Cymbalta (can't you just hear the Music Man's cymbal crash?) provides, without the slightest degree of embarrassment:

• Nausea
• Drowsiness
• Headaches
• Dry mouth
• Dizziness
• Insomnia
• Constipation
• Fatigue
• Diarrhea
• Loss of appetite
• Sore throat or runny nose
• Weakness
• Sweating
• Vomiting
• A decreased sex drive (Lilly offers CIALIS for that)
• Upper respiratory tract infection
• Coughing

So, in your nauseated state, sweating and unable to sleep, yet fatigued and fighting diarrhea, weak and vomiting, you at least by god will not be depressed.

Obese, ignorant, wigged out on drugs and lied to by our doctors and pill-makers, we stumble toward the defeat of any meaningful health care reform, in the thrall of those grabbing our dough and poisoning our kids.

Meanwhile, the useless and ignorant Department of Homeland Security wages what they dare to call a War on Drugs. I have little use for 'wars' on anything societal, but if we must have one, let's please name the enemy--he is among us, wrecking lives each and every day.

Prescription anti-depressant use in this country doubled in the past nine years. The imploding American Dream is fast turning into the American Mirage, hazily perceived as we lurch from toilet to bed, too nauseated to sleep, too drugged to care.

The main detractors to a meaningful reorganization of our broken health care system are Eli Lilly and their pharmaceutical co-conspirators. We're going to let them succeed, because we're too frightened and overwhelmed to stop them.

What a legacy for the just-buried Edward Kennedy.