Archive for 2013

Noam Chomsky: We’re no longer a functioning democracy, we’re really a plutocracy

Sunday, December 29th, 2013

The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.

“There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and they’re getting more and more serious,” Chomsky said. “The one is the continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It’s very serious, and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe, which is getting more and more serious.”

Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR’s “Smiley and West” program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream media.

He told the hosts that the world was racing toward an environmental disaster with potentially lethal consequence, which the world’s most developed nations were doing nothing to prevent – and in fact were speeding up the process.

“If there ever is future historians, they’re going to look back at this period of history with some astonishment,” Chomsky said. “The danger, the threat, is evident to anyone who has eyes open and pays attention at all to the scientific literature, and there are attempts to retard it, there are also at the other end attempts to accelerate the disaster, and if you look who’s involved it’s pretty shocking.”

Chomsky noted efforts to halt environmental damage by indigenous people in countries all over the world – from Canada’s First Nations to tribal people in Latin America and India to aboriginal people in Australia—but the nation’s richest, most advanced and most powerful countries, such as the United States, were doing nothing to forestall disaster.

“When people here talk enthusiastically about a hundred years of energy independence, what they’re saying is, ‘Let’s try to get every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground so as to accelerate the disaster that we’re racing towards,’” Chomsky said. “These are problems that overlie all of the domestic problems of oppression, of poverty, of attacks on the education system (and) massive inequality, huge unemployment.”

He blamed the “financialization” of the U.S. economy for income inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were “too big to fail” skimmed enormous wealth from the market.

“In fact, there was a recent (International Monetary Fund) study that estimated that virtually all the profits of the big banks can be traced back to this government insurance policy, and in general they’re quite harmful, I think, quite harmful to the economy,” Chomsky said.

Those harmful effects can be easily observed by looking at unemployment numbers and stock market gains, he said.

“There are tens of millions of people unemployed, looking for work, wanting to work (and) there are huge resources available,” Chomsky said. “Corporate profits are going through the roof, there’s endless amounts of work to be done – just drive through a city and see all sorts of things that have to be done – infrastructure is collapsing, the schools have to be revived. We have a situation in which huge numbers of people want to work, there are plenty, huge resources available, an enormous amount to be done, and the system is so rotten they can’t put them together.”

The reason for this is simple, Chomsky said.

“There is plenty of profit being made by those who pretty much dominate and control the system,” he said. “We’ve moved from the days where there was some kind of functioning democracy. It’s by now really a plutocracy.”

Chomsky strongly disagreed with Smiley and West that he had been marginalized for his views, saying that he regretfully turned down dozens of invitations to speak on a daily basis because he was otherwise engaged.

He also disagreed that a platform in the mainstream media was necessary to influence the debate.

“If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place in the country, say, just in the last 50 years – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and so on – they’re not led by any debate in the media,” Chomsky said. “No, they were led by popular organizations, by activists on the ground.”

He recalled the earliest days of the antiwar movement, in the early 1960s, when he spoke in living rooms and church basements to just a handful of other activists and they were harassed – even in liberal Boston – by the authorities and media.

But that movement eventually grew and helped hasten the end of the Vietnam War, and Chomsky said it’s grown and become so mainstream that antiwar activists can limit wars before they even begin.

He said President Ronald Reagan was unable to launch a full-scale war in Central America during the 1980s because of the antiwar movement, and he bitterly disputed the idea that antiwar activists had no impact on the Iraq War.

“I don’t agree; it had a big effect,” Chomsky said. “It sharply limited the means that were available to the government to try to carry out the invasion and subdue the population. In fact, it’s one reason why the U.S. ended up really defeated in Iraq, seriously had to give up all of its war aims. The major victor in Iraq turns out to be Iran.”

Despite these limitations, he said the Iraq War had been one of the new millennium’s worst atrocities and had provoked a violent schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that had sparked regional conflicts throughout the Middle East.

“The United States is now involved in a global terror campaign largely against the tribal people of the world, mostly Muslim tribes, and it’s all over. The intention is to go on and on,” Chomsky said. “These are all terrible consequences, but nevertheless they’re not as bad as they would be if there weren’t public opposition.”

– To the original article:  

 

Cicada 3301

Monday, December 23rd, 2013

– I’ve been a programmer and systems analyst most of my life.  I started with computers the year before I graduated from university (1976) and I’ve loved the work ever since.   Indeed, I threw over the career that my degree in Microbiology qualified me for to pursue the new (then) world of computers.

– I’ve been all around the block with this career, as you might expect, given the years I’ve spent in it.   And I was lucky (or brash enough) to have found my self in widely disparate areas of the field ranging from applications, web-based and database work to the lowest levels of operating systems written in assembly language.   

– But, no matter how much you’ve seen and how far down the rabbit hole you’ve wandered, there’s always more.  The following article brought that home to me clearly.  

– The Internet that we know is not the Internet that actually exists.  Beyond what most of us have seen as either users or programmers, there’s still another entire world out there.

– Digital spelunking, anyone?   I’ve posted links to two articles you may enjoy, below.

– dennis

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tunnelsWikipedia’s take

A first hand account

David Simon: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show’

Sunday, December 15th, 2013

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at theFestival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract

America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It’s astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.

There’s no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We’ve somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you’re seeing this more and more in the west. I don’t think it’s unique to America.

I think we’ve perfected a lot of the tragedy and we’re getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.

I’m not a Marxist in the sense that I don’t think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn’t attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

You know if you’ve read Capital or if you’ve got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.

We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we’re supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?

And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we’re going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.

Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess.

After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.

Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.

It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn’t need, and that was the engine that drove us.

It wasn’t just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.

And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.

Labour doesn’t get to win all its arguments, capital doesn’t get to. But it’s in the tension, it’s in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.

The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn’t matter that they won all the time, it didn’t matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It’s astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don’t need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I’m not connected to society. I don’t care how the road got built, I don’t care where the firefighter comes from, I don’t care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It’s the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

That we’ve gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state’s journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we’ve descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we’re all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.

Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.

And so in my country you’re seeing a horror show. You’re seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you’re seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You’re seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.

Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, “Oh by the way I’m not a Marxist you know”. I lived through the 20th century. I don’t believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don’t.

I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.

And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That’s the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.

And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour’s a cost. And if labour is diminished, let’s translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn’t want to go forward at this point without it. But it’s not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It’s a juvenile notion and it’s still being argued in my country passionately and we’re going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I’m astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can’t even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: “Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I’m going to pay to keep other people healthy? It’s socialism, motherfucker.”

What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, “Do you have group health insurance where you …?” “Oh yeah, I get …” you know, “my law firm …” So when you get sick you’re able to afford the treatment.

The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you’re able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you’re relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go “Brother, that’s socialism. You know it is.”

And … you know when you say, OK, we’re going to do what we’re doing for your law firm but we’re going to do it for 300 million Americans and we’re going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you’re going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don’t want to hear it. It’s too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.

So I’m astonished that at this late date I’m standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don’t mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don’t embrace some other values for human endeavour.

And that’s what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

That’s the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we’ve managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people’s racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.

And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it’s not just about race, it’s about something even more terrifying. It’s about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?

So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody’s going to get left behind. We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.

We’re either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we’re going to keep going the way we’re going, at which point there’s going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody’s going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there’s always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I’m losing faith.

The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn’t there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.

The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what’s a good idea or what’s not, or what’s valued and what’s not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.

Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.

So I don’t know what we do if we can’t actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I’m arguing for now, I’m not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.

 

– To the original Article:  

– research thanks to Gus H.

 

“Managing Transparency”

Sunday, December 15th, 2013

By George Monbiot of the UK’s Guardian – 2 December 2013

Politicians and officials are desperately seeking to justify their transatlantic assault on democracy.

Panic spreads through the European Commission like ferrets in a rabbit warren. Its plans to create a single market incorporating Europe and the United States, progressing so nicely when hardly anyone knew, have been blown wide open. All over Europe people are asking why this is happening; why we were not consulted; for whom it is being done.

They have good reason to ask. The Commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement. Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments(1).

This mechanism could threaten almost any means by which governments might seek to defend their citizens or protect the natural world. Already it is being used by mining companies to sue governments trying to keep them out of protected areas(2,3); by banks fighting financial regulation(4); by a nuclear company contesting Germany’s decision to switch off atomic power(5). After a big political fight we’ve now been promised plain packaging for cigarettes. But it could be nixed by an offshore arbitration panel. The tobacco company Philip Morris is currently suing Australia through the same mechanism in another treaty(6).

No longer able to keep this process quiet, the European Commission has instead devised a strategy for lying to us. A few days ago an internal document was leaked(7). This reveals that a “dedicated communications operation” is being “coordinated across the Commission”. It involves, to use the EC’s chilling phrase, the “management of stakeholders, social media and transparency.” Managing transparency should be adopted as its motto.

The message is that the trade deal is about “delivering growth and jobs” and will not “undermine regulation and existing levels of protection in areas like health, safety and the environment”. Just one problem: it’s not true.

From the outset, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has been driven by corporations and their lobby groups, who boast of being able to “co-write” it(8,9). Persistant digging by the Corporate Europe Observatory reveals that the commission has held eight meetings on the issue with civil society groups, and 119 with corporations and their lobby groups(10). Unlike the civil society meetings, these have taken place behind closed doors and have not been disclosed online.

Though the Commission now tells the public that it will protect “the state’s right to regulate”(11), this isn’t the message the corporations have been hearing. In an interview last week, Stuart Eizenstat, co-chair of the Transatlantic Business Council, instrumental in driving the process, was asked whether companies whose products had been banned by regulators would be able to sue(12). Yes. “If a suit like that was brought and was successful, it would mean that the country banning the product would have to pay compensation to the industry involved or let the product in.” Would that apply to the European ban on chicken carcasses washed with chlorine, a controversial practice permitted in the US? “That’s one example where it might.”

What the Commission and its member governments fail to explain is why we need offshore arbitration at all. It insists that domestic courts “might be biased or lack independence”(13), but which courts is it talking about? It won’t say. Last month, while trying to defend the treaty, the British minister Kenneth Clarke said something revealing:

“Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least.”(14) So what is it doing in an EU-US deal? Why are we using measures designed to protect corporate interests in failed states in countries with a functioning judicial system? Perhaps it’s because functioning courts are less useful to corporations than opaque and injust arbitration by corporate lawyers.

As for the Commission’s claim that the trade deal will produce growth and jobs, this is also likely to be false. Barack Obama promised that the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement would increase US exports by $10bn. They immediately fell by $3.5bn(15). The 70,000 jobs it would deliver? Er, 40,000 were lost. Bill Clinton promised that the North American Free Trade Agreement would create 200,000 new jobs for the US; 680,000 went down the pan(16,17). As the commentator Glyn Moody says, “the benefits are slight and illusory, while the risks are very real.”(18)

So where are our elected representatives? Fast asleep. Labour MEPs, now frantically trying to keep investor-state dispute mechanisms out of the agreement, are the  exception(19); the rest are in Neverland. The LibDem MEP Sir Graham Watson wrote in his newsletter, before dismissing the idea, “I am told that columnists on The Guardian and The Independent claim it will hugely advantage US multinational companies to the detriment of Europe.”(20) We said no such thing, as he would know had he read the articles, rather than idiotically relying on hearsay. The treaty is likely to advantage the corporations of both the US and the EU, while disadvantaging their people. It presents a danger to democracy and public protection throughout the trading area.

Caroline Lucas, one of the few MPs who remains interested in the sovereignty of parliament, has published an early day motion on the issue(21). It has so far been signed by only seven MPs. For the government, Kenneth Clarke argues that to ignore the potential economic gains of the trade agreement “in favour of blowing up a controversy around one small part of the negotiations, known as investor protection, seems to me positively Scrooge-like.”(22)

Quite right too. Overriding our laws, stripping away our rights, making parliament redundant: these are trivial and irrelevant beside the issue of how much money could be made. Don’t worry your little heads about it.

– To the original Article:  

– Research thanks to Piers L.

 

 

The Ayn Rand-Worshipping Sears CEO That Blew Up His Multibillion Dollar Empire

Wednesday, December 11th, 2013

The invisible hand waves goodbye to America’s most delusional CEO.

 

Once upon a time, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert was living a Wall Street fairy tale. His fairy godmother was Ayn Rand, the dashing diva of free-market ideology whose quirky economic notions would transform him into a glamorous business hero.

For a while, it seemed to work like a charm. Pundits called him the “ Steve Jobs of the investment world.” The new Warren Buffett. By 2006 he was flying high, the richest man in Connecticut, managing over $15 billion thorough his hedge fund, ESL Investments.

Stoked by his Wall Street success, Lampert plunged headlong into the retail world. Undaunted by his lack of industry experience and hailed a genius, Lampert boldly pushed to merge Kmart and Sears with a layoff and cost-cutting strategy that would, he promised, send profits into the stratosphere. Meanwhile the hotshot threw cash around like an oil sheikh, buying a $40 million pad in Florida’s Biscayne Bay, a record even for that star-studded county.

Fast-forward to 2013: The fairy tale has become a nightmare.

Lampert is now known as one of the worst CEOs in America — the man who flushed Sears down the toilet with his demented management style and harebrained approach to retail. Sears stock is tanking. His hedge fun is down 40 percent, and the business press has turned from praising Lampert’s genius towatching gleefully as his ship sinks. Investors are running from “Crazy Eddie” like the plague.

That’s what happens when Ayn Rand is the basis for your business plan.

Crazy Eddie has been one of America’s most vocal advocates of discredited free-market economics, so obsessed with Ayn Rand he could rattle off memorized passages of her novels. As Mina Kimes explained in a fascinating profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match. This, he believed, would cause them to act rationally and boost performance.

If you think that sounds batshit crazy, congratulations. You understand more than most of America’s business school graduates.

Instead of enhancing Sears’ bottom line, the heads of various divisions began to undermine each other and fight tooth and claw for the profits of their individual fiefdoms at the expense of the overall brand. By this time Crazy Eddie was completely in thrall to his own bloated ego, and fancied he could bend underlings to his will by putting them through humiliating rituals, like annual conference calls in which unit managers were forced to bow and scrape for money and resources. But the chaos only grew.

Lampert took to hiding behind a pen name and spying on and goading employees through an internal social network. He became obsessed with technology, wasting resources on developing apps as Sears’ physical stores became dilapidated and filthy. Instead of investing in workers and developing useful products, he sold off valuable real estate, shuttered stores, and engineered stock buybacks in order to manipulate stock prices and line his own pockets.

Eddie’s crazy didn’t stop there. As a Wall Street creature fantastically out of touch with the kind of ordinary folks who shop at Sears, he inserted his love of luxury into the mix, trying to sell Rolex watches and $4,400 designer handbags through America’s iconic budget-friendly brand.

As his company was descending into Randian mayhem, Lampert continued to cheerfully inform stockholders that his revolutionary ideas would soon produce earth-shattering results. Reality: Sears has lost half its value in five years. Since 2010, Sears has closed more than half of its stores. Sears Holdings is financially distressed and Lampert’s own hedge fund has reduced its stake in the company. The Sears store in Oakland, California, open for business with boarded-up windows, has even been cited for urban blight.

– to the original story:  

 

No single rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

– That little saying is a favorite of mine.  

– Here’s a story from my city, Christchurch, New Zealand, that will illustrate the problem quite well.

– If you will, please, read the story below and then at the end I will tell you how it is all going to turn out – and you will see the point of the saying that “No single raindrop thinks that it is responsible for the flood”.

– dennis

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Big shakeup coming for Chch hospitals

New Zealand’s private healthcare system is set to be shaken up by the imminent arrival of a new hospital in Christchurch.

Forte Health, the multimillion-dollar specialist, short-stay hospital owned entirely by surgeons, is two months from opening and is already causing controversy.

The newcomer’s 25 shareholders are all specialist surgeons – absorbing every urologist in Christchurch, half of the city’s orthopaedic surgeons and most of its ear, nose and throat specialists, The Press understands.

Concerns have been raised about Forte’s shareholder-surgeons having a vested interest in shepherding patients towards their hospital for personal gain and health economists have criticised Forte’s short-stay model as “cherry-picking” the private market.

Christchurch’s two existing private hospitals are feeling the squeeze from Forte and will inevitably lose millions of dollars in revenue once it opens.

St George’s and Southern Cross hospitals both have 10 operating theatres in Christchurch and Forte will be adding another four into the mix, while gunning for the biggest volume of surgery in the market.

Forte is targeting the less-complex day surgeries from four key specialties: Ear, nose and throat; urology; gynaecology; and orthopaedics.

St George’s Hospital chief executive Greg Brooks said Forte’s arrival raised some difficult questions about the future.

Brooks was already investigating other potential revenue streams to help ease the loss of day surgeries.

“The challenge from our perspective is that as surgeons they can direct patients to their hospital and so it is a real risk for us,” he said.

Auckland University health economist Professor Toni Ashton said if a patient goes to a Forte surgeon for a consultation “of course they are going to direct them into their business, they are the shareholders for goodness sake”.

This new surgeon-shareholder business model will force Christchurch’s existing private hospitals out of the competition for day surgery, Brooks said.

And, if this model gains momentum, surgeons across the country could view it as a “vehicle for income opportunities” and this could lead to an upheaval of private healthcare in New Zealand, he said.

“We are all waiting to see what will happen.”

Forte Health chairman David Barker said the hospital had grown out of the earthquake-damaged Oxford Clinic and that it would be “replacing and enhancing competition” in the private market that was lost as a result of the quake.

Forte surgeons would continue to operate in the public sector and at the city’s other two private hospitals, he said.

The shareholder-surgeons were aware of their ethical responsibilities and would only direct patients toward Forte “if their surgery is suited to that environment”, Barker said.

Ian Powell, a senior doctors’ spokesman speaking in a personal capacity, said Forte was defining a niche within the market by targeting less complex surgeries, but “if I was in St George’s chair, I would see that as cherry-picking”.

The cost of running short-stay facilities was considerably less to other hospitals and New Zealand Medical Association chairman Dr Mark Peterson said Forte’s costs must reflect “that they are a lower-risk facility”.

“If they are charging the same rates for a lower acuity facility, I might have some concerns about that,” he said.

Southern Cross Hospitals chief operating officer Tau-Loon Ho said there had been recent increases in specialist owned short-stay clinics aimed at providing less complex care, but “what is concerning is the increasingly high cost of simple procedures being undertaken by many of these facilities”.

Academic Dr Michael Gousmett, who is an expert on charitable hospitals, said Forte would also put pressure on the public sector by “spreading our surgeons too thinly on the ground”.

Yet, CDHB chief executive David Meates said the establishment of Forte Health would not have any significant impact on the public sector.

The new hospital is expected to open on January 20.

QUALITY CARE OR PRIME CUT?

It is the lull before the storm for Christchurch’s private-health sector.

Come January next year, a new multimillion-dollar, glass-encased surgical hospital in Kilmore St will open its doors and cause a huge upheaval in the region’s health arena.

Forte Health is poised to enter the private-hospital realm with a small army of 25 specialist surgeons as its shareholders.

It will be targeting the biggest volume of surgery in the market – the short-stay, less-complex procedures – from four key specialties: ear, nose and throat, urology, orthopaedics and gynaecology.

It is understood all of the city’s urologists, at least half of its orthopaedic surgeons and all but one ear, nose and throat surgeon are shareholders in the venture.

The three-storey hospital will have 14 patient beds, four operating theatres and in excess of 100 staff and clinicians.

It is the most competitive beast to enter Christchurch’s private-health sector and, with the countdown on for open day, the city’s two existing private hospitals, St George’s and Southern Cross, are starting to sweat.

The newcomer will soak up hundreds of surgeries and million of dollars of revenue from their books.

Forte is less than two months off opening and questions have started to circle on the ethics of a private hospital owned entirely by surgeons who will have a vested interest in directing patients toward their hospital for financial gain.

Health economists and experts also query the way the new enterprise appears to be “cherry-picking the private sector” by targeting the easiest operations.

“This is a significant issue for us,” St George’s Hospital chief executive Greg Brooks said.

“The challenge from our perspective is that as surgeons they can direct their patients to their hospital and so it is a real risk for us.” Brooks said.

“What we need to be able to do is counter that by being able to provide good quality facilities so that the surgeons are encouraged to deliver their care here.”

Both St George’s and Southern Cross would struggle to compete for day surgeries against Forte because “our ability to influence the patients’ choice of selection is very small because the surgeon always meets the patient”, Brooks said.

This would leave St George’s and Southern Cross with the day-surgery leftovers and the more complex patients that Forte did not have the ability to care for.

St George’s was already actively looking at “diversification of revenue streams” to mitigate the birth of Forte, he said.

“You have to accept that competition comes and you have to adapt the business the best you can.”

If Forte’s shareholder-surgeon model gained momentum “and surgeons view this as a vehicle for income opportunities for the future”, it might be replicated all over New Zealand which would have a massive impact on our country’s health sector, Brooks said.

“We are all waiting to see what will happen.”

Southern Cross Hospitals chief operating officer Tau-Loon Ho said there had been a recent increase in the number of specialist-owned, short-stay facilities that were “geared toward the lower-cost, less-complex end of the spectrum”.

The cost of running such facilities was considerably less than more comprehensive hospitals, but “what is concerning is the increasingly high cost of simple procedures being undertaken by many of these facilities”, he said.

Forte Health was born out of the closure of the Oxford Clinic after it was damaged in the earthquakes.

The private clinic was run off the shareholder-surgeon model and, when it needed to relocate, other specialists in the city saw this as an opportunity to join forces and build a multimillion-dollar “larger and more comprehensive short-stay facility”, Forte Health chairman David Barker said.

The new hospital would be “restoring some competition in the private-hospital market which was lost as a result of the earthquakes”, he said.

The hospital’s surgeon-shareholder model was not an ethical issue as surgeons were aware of their responsibilities.

Patients would be directed to the most appropriate facility for their care, Barker said.

Surgical costs were still unknown for Forte but, Barker said, “we want to be efficient in all aspects, not just clinical but also financial”.

Senior doctors’ spokesman Ian Powell said Forte was smart to focus on the less complex procedures, but this could also be deemed as “cherry-picking the market”.

Powell, who is the executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists but was speaking in a personal capacity, said the private sector entered the market only when it could see a demand and “like a corner dairy, they will only put products on shelves that they know will sell”.

If the facility was set up only for easy, low-risk procedures, its prices should reflect this, Powell said.

Other hospitals around the country were run off the shareholder-surgeon model and there were strong ethical guidelines around this, he said.

“If they are deliberately directing people to use private services because of their personal advantage than that’s a no-no and, if people behave naughty, or in a way that’s unprofessional, they can put their employment with the DHB at risk.”

Professor Tony Blakely, of Otago University’s department of public health in Wellington, said there was a best- and worst-case scenario with the arrival of Forte.

The best-case scenario was that the new venture would provide cost-effective services in the most efficient manner possible.

The worst-case scenario was that it “merely serves to boost specialist incomes, divert specialists away from public delivery of services and cream skims off easier patients”.

To the original article:  

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– After reading the story, you can see that this is going to be good for the physicians that setup the new private hospital and it is going to be bad for the public healthcare system which is going to inherit the tougher in-patient cases while losing the more profitable out-patient cases.

– But, as an American, speaking from our history, I can tell you it will get worse than that in time.

– After these 25 doctors own this private hospital for a while and it becomes obvious that it is a successful and going concern, then either the urge to take it public will become irresistible or some existing corporation with deep pockets will simply come along and buy the entire thing.  

– In either case, the owner physicians will stand to make a huge chuck of money and the organization itself will pass into the hands of a public for-profit corporation.

– Sadly, we’ve seen this cycle in the U.S.  

– Originally, a few decades ago, most U.S. doctors had their own private practices.  But, after a time, running their own accounting, acquiring and owning their own medical equipment (very expensive) and each having his or her own office staff and quarters became burdensome.  

– So they began to band together into group clinics with shared medical equipment and receptionists.  They farmed their accounting out to specialist medical accounting services and they got down to just having to have one or two nurses on-staff.

– Eventually, they were ‘noticed’ by large American corporations who realized that these clinics were absolute ‘cash cows’ and they started to buy them up.  This buying up has now consolidated most previously independent medical practices in the U.S. into medical corporations.

– The doctors in the clinics were persuaded to join this consolidation by money and how easy life was going to be for them post-acquisition.   No staffing worries – it would all be handled by the corporate mothership.  No equipment worries.  Nice offices were provided.  All the insurance and other logistical nightmare would all be sorted out for them.   All they had to do after the acquisitions was to come into work and be doctors and see patients.   What a sweet deal.

– But, of course, the darker side was that corporation’s primary reason for existing was and is to maximize the return on their shareholder’s investments in them. 

– And implementing such maximization involves a few simple ideas:  minimize costs and maximize profits.  All good?  Then go around and repeat again.

– Hence the bean counters arrived and now every medical procedure, like an MRI or an optional lab test, had to be ‘justified’,  Justified not only on the physician’s thought that it was going to be a necessary part of the diagnosis but on the basis of whether or not it was justified in terms of being cost effective.  Is there a cheaper way?  How many patients might be lost they don’t receive the procedure or test?   How many can we lose and it still will be an acceptable rate?   And etc.

– I know a physician in the U.S. who was my G.P. for two decades and who became a friend of mine as well.  

– We were discussing this one day and he told me that each time he prescribes an MRI to investigate some issue or other, he has to fill out 30 minutes worth of paper work for each procedure to justify it and its the costs.   And since he is booked (mandated by the corporation for efficiency reasons) to see a new patient every 20 or 30 minutes all day long, there’s rarely any time during the work day to fill these papers out.  So, if he wants to order the tests, then he has to stay over at the end of the day to do the paperwork.

– He said that some days he’s just exhausted at day’s end and because of that, if a case is really marginal and the patient might be OK without the MRI, he might just skip it.  

– He told me that he worries that one or two of the folks he skipped might have received a life-saving diagnosis, if they would have had their MRI.  And thus they died unnecessarily.  And that this played on his conscience and he felt it was a direct result of medicine in the U.S. being turned into a for-profit corporate exercise wherein decisions were being made on a cost basis rather than on a patient health basis.

– So, when I say that the new private Christchurch Hospital will be worse that most folks can imagine now, this is what I mean.  

– Each doctor in the new hospital obviously sees a nice opportunity to make money by doing this.  And thus begins the dance that will end badly.  

– Thus I say, “No single raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood“.

– How long will the New Zealand Public Health System be able to subsidize private hospitals like this?  

Why do I say ‘subsidize?  

– Because when the new hospital grabs up all the easy out-patient work and leaves the public system with all the harder and more costly in-patient work, that is an indirect but very functional form of subsidization.  The easy money goes to the private hospital and the public has to pony up for the addition cost born by the private system.

– We in the U.S. have been down that road before and New Zealanders should be warned by our example. 

 – dennis

 

LOBBYISTS FOR THE HAVENS: ICIJ’S GUIDE TO THE OFFSHORE SYSTEM’S DEFENDERS

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

– I’ve been following ICIJ’s work (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) since they broke their big story revealing the names of many of the rich and famous who hide their money in off-shore tax havens.

– And, while I don’t like taxes anymore than the next fellow, I applaud what they are doing.  

– If taxes must be paid, then the burden on all of us is lessened if everyone pays their fair share.

– The issue of what we are paying our taxes for is, however, a very different question.  I.e., are we paying our taxes to fund subsidies for the oil industry or for foreign wars?  Or, are we paying for services that improve the quality of life for everyone in our society.  Services like roads, food inspections and public schools.

– Here, ICIJ reveals who is defending the off-shore tax havens.  And how indirectly structured those defenses are.  The people funding the defense efforts don’t want to be seen as defending the havens.  So, they setup and quietly fund the defensive organizations while remaining quietly in the background.

– I say turn over all the rocks and let’s see what scuttles away in the light of day.  To see whatsort of creature causes all of us to have to pay more taxes to make up for their lost contributions.   And the irony is that most of the folks and companies doing this are not in any way stretched thin.   The vast majority of them posses wealth that most of us can only dream about.

– dennis

= = = = = = = = = =

Across the world, tax havens are under attack. Leading global organizations like the G20 and OECD have put cracking down on offshore tax avoidance at the top of their agendas. Ambitious plans for automatic sharing of tax data between countries are in the works.

But as ICIJ noted this week, reports of the demise of offshore tax havens have often been greatly exaggerated. Highly touted clampdowns in 2000 and 2009 yielded few results. In the last five years, two French presidents have vowed to wipe tax havens off the map entirely, but so far no one has come close to dealing a coup de grâce.

The resilience of offshore tax havens is not merely a result of clever financial tricks. Offshore havens and tax avoidance have influential defenders who have lobbied hard to maintain the status quo. Many of the world’s biggest corporations, accounting firms and law firms are pushing back against the latest efforts to curb the use of offshore.

Much of the lobbying is not done by corporations themselves, but by little-known business associations that represent them. Google, General Electric and Mitsubishi may be household names, but the U.S. Council for International Business and Japan Foreign Trade Council draw little attention from the public. “They want to have these arguments made on their behalf by others, because they have been in the spotlight and under fire for these things,” Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Treasure Islands, a book critical of offshore secrecy, said of the corporations that belong to these lobby groups.

ICIJ has consulted experts, reviewed media coverage and examined the comments made on proposed offshore reforms by the OECD in order to identify the groups that are standing in the way of the current round of offshore financial reforms. This roundup is far from complete, and we will update it based on news developments and suggestions from our readers.

Here is our rundown of six of the groups resisting reforms to offshore finance:

 – To read more:  

 

Teacher NZ’s first victim of superbug

Tuesday, November 19th, 2013

– This story is a first for New Zealand but it will not be the last.  

– All around the world, antibiotic resistance, among virulent strains of bacteria, is rising as a result of the indiscriminate and careless application of antibiotics.

– The problem is that people are prescribed a course of antibiotics but they only take part of them.  They decide, all on their own and against medical advice, that they feel fine and don’t need to finish the entire course.

– But what happens, when you are taking a course of antibiotics, is that the weakest of the bugs succumb first to the drugs and it takes until near the end of the course before the strongest and most resistant of the bugs succumbs.

– So, if you stop early, you’ve only killed the weakest ones and the strongest one survive and carry on.  

– When such bugs pass through person after person, each of whom doesn’t complete the course, the net effect is like a filter that acts to concentrate and strengthen and nastiest of the bugs.  

– And, eventually, the bugs strength and resistance is such that antibiotics will no longer touch them.

– People have misused antibiotics in this way since they were invented.  

– For a long time, the answer to increasing resistance was to invent or discover a new antibiotics to deal with the bugs that had become resistant to other antibiotics.

– But, it has become more and more difficult to invent or discover new antibiotics even as the abuse of the existing antibiotics continues.

– So, the net effect world-wide is that the bugs are getting stronger and the antibiotics less effective and there will be a time, soon, when we will return to the bad-old-days; the way they were before we had antibiotics.

– So, unless we discover some new antibiotics, those bad-old-days, which are soon to come again, will be upon us.  And simply being near someone with, say, tuberculosis could be a death sentence.

– Think about this the next time someone coughs near you in public.

– There are several morals to this story, if such things appeal to you:

– (1) No single rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood.

– (2) Electing politicians who don’t ‘believe’ in science is a sure guarantee of future pandemics.

– (3) Thinking about where you live in terms of population density, the quality of your medical care and the level of intelligence among your politicians – these things are in your best interest.

– (4) If you think this is not happening around you, you’ve been ignoring science and the warnings it has been issuing for a long time now.

– And remember, nature doesn’t care what you ‘believe’.   And nature bats last.

– dennis

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

He died fighting a superbug that no antibiotic in the world could touch.

Wellington teacher Brian Pool is believed to be New Zealand’s first victim of an aggressive superbug, caught while he was overseas, that is resistant to every type of antibiotic.

Pool, 68, spent most of the last six months of his life in quarantine, unable to leave his room even to sit in the courtyard.

“It was sad because we couldn’t give him a hug, we couldn’t really kiss him,” twin sister Maureen Dunn said.

“He just wanted to get out in the sun, and we couldn’t take him out.

“Being his twin sister, I would be the one who always rescued him . . . it was terrible, but there was nothing we could do.”

Her brother died on July 6, from complications caused by a stroke and unrelated to the bug.

But doctors say his immune system was weakened by fighting the nightmare bacteria.

The adventurous teacher, known for his quirky sense of humour, was living in Vietnam and teaching English when he suffered a brain haemorrhage on January 6.

He had surgery in Vietnam, where part of his skull was removed to relieve pressure on his brain, and was flown to New Zealand.

In Wellington Hospital, he was immediately isolated, a standard precaution for overseas patients.

Tests revealed he was carrying a strain of bacterium known as KPC-Oxa 48 – a “pan-resistant” organism that repels every kind of antibiotic.

“Nothing would touch it. Absolutely nothing,” Wellington Hospital clinical microbiologist Mark Jones said yesterday.

“It’s the first one that we’ve ever seen that is resistant to every single antibiotic known.

“This man was in the post-antibiotic era, and this is why so many agencies over the world are raising alarm bells.”

Earlier this year, British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a “catastrophic global threat” that should be ranked alongside terrorism.

New Zealand hospitals are already seeing increasing cases of multi-resistant “superbugs”, which can be treated by only a limited number of expensive antibiotics.

Dunn said the family was frightened, and even Mr Pool’s doctors did not seem to know what the superbug might do.

“They were shit scared, to put it bluntly, in case these bugs were transferred to another patient or taken out into the community.”

– To the original story:  

– Still doubtful, Sweet Pea?   Check this out:

 

Why Scandinavian women make the rest of the world jealous

Monday, November 18th, 2013

Icelanders are among the happiest and healthiestpeople on Earth. They publish more books per capita than any other country, and they havemore artists. They boast the most prevalent belief in evolution — and elves, too. Iceland is the world’s most peaceful nation (the cops don’t even carry guns), and the best place for kids. Oh, and they had a lesbian head of state, the world’s first. Granted, the national dish is putrefied shark meat, but you can’t have everything.

Iceland is also the best place to have a uterus, according to the folks at the World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report ranks countries based on where women have the most equal access to education and healthcare, and where they can participate most fully in the country’s political and economic life.

According to the 2013 report, Icelandic women pretty much have it all. Their sisters in Finland, Norway, and Sweden have it pretty good, too: those countries came in second, third and fourth, respectively. Denmark is not far behind at number seven.

The U.S. comes in at a dismal 23rd, which is a notch down from last year. At least we’re not Yemen, which is dead last out of 136 countries.

So how did a string of countries settled by Vikings become leaders in gender enlightenment? Bloodthirsty raiding parties don’t exactly sound like models of egalitarianism, and the early days weren’t pretty. Medieval Icelandic law prohibited women from bearing arms or even having short hair. Viking women could not be chiefs or judges, and they had to remain silent in assemblies. On the flip side, they could request a divorce and inherit property. But that’s not quite a blueprint for the world’s premier egalitarian society.

The change came with literacy, for one thing. Today almost everybody in Scandinavia can read, a legacy of the Reformation and early Christian missionaries, who were interested in teaching all citizens to read the Bible. Following a long period of turmoil, Nordic states also turned to literacy as a stabilizing force in the late 18th century. By 1842, Sweden had made education compulsory for both boys and girls.

Researchers have found that the more literate the society in general, the more egalitarian it is likely to be, and vice versa. But the literacy rate is very high in the U.S., too, so there must be something else going on in Scandinavia. Turns out that a whole smorgasbord of ingredients makes gender equality a high priority in Nordic countries.

– More:

 

AND NOW THE REST OF THE STORY ABOUT OBAMACARE

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

ObamaCare – we’ve all been hearing a lot of ‘bad’ news about it (and all that bad news is well funded and backed by the very people (read big business) who stand to lose money if people in the U.S. actually got a better deal on healthcare).

– Well, here’s the other side of the story that you WON’T find on the big U.S. networks (controlled as they are by big business).  

– Thanks to my friend, Ron, at the Sky Valley Chronicle in the U.S. for writing this.

-dennis

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Just a few facts the nightly news left out

You would think that after the past few weeks watching the mainstream/lamestream nightly TV news shows and reading some newspapers that the screw ups with the rollout of the national website for the Affordable Health care Act (e.g. Obamacare) was of world importance.

Something right up there with global terrorism and young guys walking into schools, malls and airports with AK-47’s and commencing target practice.

Night after night (as modern Europe watches this surrealistic circus show and shakes its collective head in disbelief) Americans have been treated to lead stories about how horrible this terrible thing is/was/will forever be.

The screw up, we are led to believe is on the same par with the United States invading the wrong country (Iraq) that had nothing to do with the 911 terrorist attacks.

To find out how much that little number has cost you so far in your “hard earned tax dollars” and how much is still being rung up on the national credit card each second of every day, check here .

Makes the health care web site screw up look like a Pee Wee Herman movie by comparison.

And when it comes to right wing leaning media like Fox News, this government screw up is the equivalent of the end of Western Civilization.

According to Fox News there are as we speak roving bands of wild eyed, blood drooling socialists going house to house strangling with their bare hands women and children and little old grandmas.

And as they squeeze the last living breath out of them, the murdering socialists (who are probably atheists as well) look their victims straight in the eye and scream, “Obamacare sent us! And we’re gonna kill ya all!”

The world has come to an end. The sky is falling. Fade to black.

But is it possible, just barely possible that a few things are being left out of that story?

Let us look and see, shall we?

AND NOW, THE REST OF THE STORY

There is a woman most of you have probably never heard of as her story was one of many like it that perhaps never made it as a lead story on the nightly Big Three network news or at Fox News of late.

Her name is Lela Petersen and she is the owner of a small store called “Anything And Everything” in Flagler, Colorado.

She is one of millions of small business people across America that the GOP is always so concerned about. The GOP is forever saying this and that will “harm small business people.”

So the GOP will probably love this story because Ms. Petersen and her hubbie can now look forward to a retirement thanks to Obamacare.

You see, under the current spiffy “free market” health care “system” Petersen, 57 and her husband Mike, 60, have been stuck with God awful expensive health insurance.

The HMO policy they’ve had since 1992 is now costing $1,950 per month, just for the two of them. It is, and has been, eating them alive financially.

Lela told a reporter for National Public Radio (NPR), “When you pay $1,950 for insurance you might as well forget retirement. There’s just no way.”

Five years ago she was looking at early retirement but never in her wildest dreams did she imagine health insurance costing as much as the rest of her bills combined.

For Lela that free market health care boogie wasn’t working very well. But thanks to America’s new Affordable Care Act ,Lela expects her insurance bill will be cut by more than half in January

In case you didn’t catch that as the nightly news did not: a MORE than a 50% reduction in her family’s cost for insurance.

At the start of October she checked out Colorado’s insurance exchange and found the exact same policy from the same insurer for only $832 a month. “It’s dropping us down about $1,100 a month. We can retire. We can go fishing. We can actually see a future,” Petersen told NPR.

Here is what made the difference. Becoming part of an insurance “pool” created by the act helped Petersen reduce her cost. The federal law also forbids insurance companies from charging more for pre-existing conditions. That saved her a ton of dough and then federal tax credits brought the cost down even further.

Now, there are millions of small business people across this country who are in exactly the same boat as Lela was/is. See the significance?

MILLIONS.

Does it strike you as odd these stories weren’t part of the bombastic news coverage of late?

And according to NPR’s coverage, “The Affordable Care Act will bring big changes for a lot of people,especially those who want to retire before they’re eligible for Medicare.

A 2012 survey by Employee Benefit Research Institute found 53 percent of workers polled planned to stay in their jobs longer than they wanted to, so they could keep health insurance through their employer.”

Read more about Lela’s new lifeline to a retirement here .

THE HORROR STORIES OF OBAMACARE

Would it surprise you to know that some journalists have followed up on some of these horror stories of late about Obamacare that have been carried on the TV news and right wing media sites and found that…well, they only told part of the story?

A recent post on CNN noted, “Here are just some of the mythical stories journalists have helped dispel and the lessons we can learn from them about the reality of the Affordable Care Act.”

Among the stories was one about Deborah Cavallaro who “was making the rounds on television complaining about how her current insurance plan was canceled under Obamacare.”

So a Washington Post columnist named Michael Hiltzik talked to her. He found out her current plan cost $293 per month but had a deductible of $5,000 per year and out-of-pocket annual limits of $8,500. Also, the current plan covered just two doctor’s visits per year.

But in the California insurance exchange (that ol’ debil Obamacare) which Hiltzik helped Cavallaro check, she could get a “silver” plan for $333 per month — $40 more than she’s currently paying.

But the kicker is this: the new plan has only a $2,000 deductible and maximum out-of-pocket expenses at $6,350. Plus all doctor visits would be covered. Hiltzik writes, “Is that better than her current plan? Yes, by a mile.”

So the real story here is this: the tootie-fruitie fruit loop Cavallaro was suckering TV shows into letting her slobber all over the tube an untrue sob story about how Obamacare was hurting her – because she didn’t have brains enough to check things out herself – when the reality is Obamacare is saving her little tooshie money and getting her better health coverage to boot.

Or how about a woman named Dianne Barrette?

She shows up on a CBS News (that bastion of news credibility) report in which she bitched and moaned that her $54-per-month insurance plan had been “canceled” under Obamacare.

Then a woman named Nancy Metcalf at Consumer Reports looks into Barrette’s sob story and found that her current policy was a “textbook example of a junk plan that isn’t real health insurance at all.”

“According to Metcalf, if Barrette had ever tried to use her insurance for anything more than a sporadic doctor’s visit, “she would have ended up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt,” according to the CNN report.

Do you still trust CBS News, the fabled “news” network “that Murrow built”?

Metcalf also found that Barrett’s plan, for instance, only pays for hospitalization in cases of “complications of pregnancy.”

“Instead, Metcalf found that Barrette could get a “silver” plan in the state insurance exchange for $165 per month that would actually cover Barrette in the case of any sort of serious or even moderate illness. Which is the very definition of insurance, isn’t it?,” says the CNN report.

Editor’s Note 11/9/13: A few days after this story was published, CBS News was forced to make a very public and embarrassing retraction of an “exclusive” news story it broadcast on the CBS news magazine show “Sixty Minutes,” about ten days ago as of this writing.

Why did the network have to retract it? Because much like the Dianne Barrette incident noted in this story that left egg on their newsie faces, the great journalists at CBS simply took somebody’s word for something without thoroughly checking that somebody out.

For the sordid truth about how CBS checks its sources go here .

Or how about this item from the same CNN report:

“According to a report by Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo, a Seattle woman named Donna received a cancellation letter from her insurance company regarding her current plan. The letter steered Donna and her family into a more expensive option and said, “If you’re happy with this plan, do nothing.”

The letter made no mention of the Washington State insurance exchange, where Donna could find plenty of other more affordable choices, because the company wanted a convenient excuse to jack up Donna’s rates.

Had Donna “done nothing,” she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more per month on insurance than the cost of insurance she ultimately chose through the Obamacare exchange. In fact, the practice of trying to mislead customers has become so widespread that Washington state regulators issued a consumer alert to customers.”

You can find more such stories in that CNN report here .

Reuters ran a story recently about Mark Sullivan, a 31-year-old Texan who says he managed to sign up for coverage on the screwed up Obamacare website HealthCare.gov, and he says his new policy will save him enough money that he’ll l be able to start a new web-based business.

“A lot of reporters want to talk about the problems with the website,” Sullivan told Reuters. “I can understand that focus, but a lot are missing the bigger story” that many people in Obamacare will save money on their insurance.

Ah yes, the bigger story. What we called “the rest of the story” at the start of this piece.

Here is another part of that rest of the story. You’ve heard complaints from some people that their insurance companies are jacking up their rates or canceling their policies and blaming it on the Affordable Care Act?

The fact of the matter is insurance companies can do whatever they want in regards to raising your rates at the moment because the part of the Affordable Health Care Act that protects you from things like that will not come into fruition until 2014.

At that time the law will protect you from your rates being raised arbitrarily by an insurance industry that is not exactly known for looking out for consumers. (Look up the fun health insurance industry practice known as “rescission” – for years an industry secret – for an eye opener about this industry).

THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT: NOT A CURE ALL FOR A LONG SCREWED UP “THING”

And finally, it is good to remember that the Affordable Care Act does not fix every little thing that is wrong with a long screwed up, long out of control patchwork health insurance/health care thing (it’s not really a “system”) in this country. Far from it.

The Affordable Care Act is, after all, a huge compromise and one that was painfully made to satisfy Republicans and hard core conservatives who wanted nothing whatsoever done to fix America’s out of control health care nightmare, ergo their never ending false tales of “socialized medicine” and “death panels.”

You see by keeping the health insurance nightmare as it was, some people made a fortune off the misery of others.

Those people and corporations who made a fortune then spent lavishly on the campaigns of lawmakers who would in turn fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo — and make sure that millions of Americans never got access to affordable health insurance, even though they desperately needed it.

America is the only modern nation in the world where we make health care a game of winners and losers.

When all those European nations looked around at how to construct a health care/health insurance package for their citizens, it is telling that not one of them chose the system of winners and losers that was made famous in America

Not one.

Some think that if sensible minds had prevailed Democrats would have disregarded the GOP assault on health care reform and, when they had the votes in both houses, pushed through a simple, single payer system much like they have in Europe and that alone might have ended a good portion of the nightmare of health insurance in this country.

But even though it is a vast compromise, the Affordable health Care Act does make a huge difference in terms of offering better coverage to far more people and particularly women — such as eliminating co-pays for cancer screenings, adding in additional detection and prevention services such as mammograms and providing guaranteed treatment to women with preexisting conditions.

Many consider the Affordable Health Care Act as simply a first step, one of many, toward reforming health care in America so that it works for everyone — not just the rich, not just those who can afford it or have it supplied to them by an employer.

And in terms of women, over 45 million women have already taken advantage of the services provided to them since Obamacare was signed into law.

And for those who truly have lost a good health insurance plan they wanted to keep and will need to spend a bit more money due to requirements of the Affordable health Care Act – and there are some in that boat – President Obama has apologized that people are, “Finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me… we’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them, and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

“We didn’t do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law,” Obama told NBC News.

THE LOWDOWN

Most people buying insurance through the state run health exchanges will be eligible for federal subsidies in the form of tax credits.

Taking into account these subsidies, the administration has said a family of four with an income of $50,000 will generally be able to buy a silver-level plan for $282 a month, while a 27-year-old with income of $25,000 will be able to get such coverage for $145 a month.

The government says in Washington State for example, 758,004 people (91%) of Washington’s uninsured and eligible population may qualify for lower costs on coverage in the Marketplace, including through Medicaid.

Here in Washington State the insurance-exchange marketplace went online October 1st as theWashington HealthPlanFinder which is designed to be a one-stop shopping site to help and guide those that need affordable insurance but are not covered by a health plan where they work.

RATES

A chart produced by the New York Times on costs of the plans, state by state, shows a 27-year old individual who makes $45,960 a year in Iowa will be able to afford to buy a quality health insurance plan for $189 a month and a family of four in the same state that has an annual income of $50,000 a year and getting subsidies will be able to cover the entire family with health insurance for $282 a month.

That state by state chart can be found here .

However there are some exchanges across the country that won’t be fully operational for weeks and in some cases months.

Any insurance coverage that is purchased through the exchanges won’t actually take effect until January 1, 2014 when the health care law starts requiring most Americans to have insurance or pay a tax penalty.

To be covered starting Jan. 1st, people need to sign up for coverage through the exchanges by Dec. 15th.

The first open enrollment period runs from Oct. 1 to March 31.

Gary Cohen, Director of the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight said premiums will be generally lower in states with strong competition in their insurance markets.

In the 36 states where the federal government has primary responsibility for the exchanges Cohen said people will be able to choose from an average of 53 health plans.

More on how the new health care exchanges operate can be found here .

The Seattle Times has a comprehensive “users guide” to the changes that are going into effect today that you’ll find here .

– To the original story: