Undernews For August 9, 2009

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
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9 AUGUST

OBAMA'S PLAN TO HELP HOMEOWNERS IS A BUST

Zach Carter, Alternet - In February of 2009, newly inaugurated President Obama unveiled a foreclosure prevention program called Making Home Affordable, promising to keep "up to 3 to 4 million" borrowers from losing their homes. But like a similar initiative adopted under the Bush administration, the Obama plan is flawed because it relies on the housing industry itself -- namely the industry's debt collectors, known as mortgage servicers -- to fix the problem. And like the Bush plan, it isn't working especially well, as the Obama administration's own numbers now show. While 1.5 million homes have gone into foreclosure in 2009 as of June 30, just 235,247 borrowers have been granted trial loan modifications under the Obama plan since its inception. . .

Making Home Affordable asks mortgage servicers to identify troubled borrowers and fast-track them to relief. But servicers specialize in squeezing borrowers for money, and have never been interested in devising long-term solutions for people in trouble. The poorly paid individuals, some of them offshore, that they hire to contact homeowners are not trained to renegotiate loans. Obama's program, like the Bush plan, is strictly voluntary -- if servicers don't want to participate, they don't have to. As in the Bush plan, servicers who do participate face no penalties for failing to assist qualified borrowers, and no government agency is policing servicers to make sure they live up to the terms of the contract. Meanwhile, they actually benefit from letting homes fall into foreclosure, because foreclosure means they are guaranteed an upfront payment from the sale of the home.

"Nothing has changed," says Daniel Lindsey, an attorney with Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago who heads the group's home ownership preservation effort. . .

Economists at the Boston Federal Reserve published a paper last month indicating that only 8.5 percent of seriously delinquent borrowers received any kind of loan modification in 2007 and 2008, while only 3 percent received a loan modification that actually reduced their monthly payment. A lot of this so-called help actually drove borrowers deeper into debt and increased their monthly bills. Instead of cutting the interest rate or the loan principal -- that is, the total amount the borrower owes -- servicers would add missed payments and penalty fees to the principal, resulting in more overall debt and higher monthly bills for borrowers. According to an analysis by the Center for Responsible Lending, an advocacy group that promotes fair lending practices, less than 20 percent of the loan modifications reported by Hope Now actually reduced borrowers' monthly payments. . .

Talking to a mortgage servicer is like haggling with the phone company -- except over hundreds of thousands of dollars, your credit rating and your future financial security. When you call a servicer, you're first treated to an electronic call management system. A digital voice warns you that you are talking to a debt collection service and any information you offer will be used for those purposes. The voice then asks you for information about your loan, your house and yourself. Once this is over, you listen to hold music while you wait for an actual person to answer the phone. Depending on the servicer and the time of day, it can take 15 minutes just to get through to an actual human being.

When and if the caller does get through to a live person, many borrowers are simply told they cannot be helped and need to send in payments. But some borrowers get placed on hold and referred to another person in another department and another expert. This can happen several times before you speak to someone with the corporate authority to actually help you. Sometimes calls dead-end in an answering machine. Servicer employees often take down borrower information and take weeks to get back to them. And servicers rarely assign specific people to handle individual borrower cases, so every time a borrower calls, they're subjected to the same bureaucratic mess. . .

THE HEALTH INSURERS HAVE ALREADY WON

Business Week - As the health reform fight shifts this month from a vacationing Washington to congressional districts and local airwaves around the country, much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and WellPoint. The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling. . .

The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business. UnitedHealth has distinguished itself by more deftly and aggressively feeding sophisticated pricing and actuarial data to information-starved congressional staff members. With its rivals, the carrier has also achieved a secondary aim of constraining the new benefits that will become available to tens of millions of people who are currently uninsured. That will make the new customers more lucrative to the industry. . .

PHARMA CEOS MAKE HUGE SALARIES

Unsilent Generation - One aspect of the health care reform battle which gets little attention is the cushy environment of the drug company executive. Fiercepharma blog, which tracks the industry not long ago ran a listing of all the dough these CEOs make.. . . Figures are for 2008.

1. Bill Weldon - Johnson & Johnson - $29.4M
2. Miles White - Abbott Laboratories - $28.3M
3. Bernard Poussot - Wyeth - $25M
4. Jim Cornelius - Bristol-Myers Squibb - $25M
5. Richard Clark - Merck - $19.9M
6. Robert Parkinson - Baxter International - $16M
7. David Vasella - Novartis - $15.1M
8. Jeffrey Kindler - Pfizer - $14.8M
9. Frank Baldino - Cephalon - $14.5M
10. John Lechleiter - Eli Lilly - $13M

OBAMA'S SNEAKY SECRET PHARMA DEAL

ABC News - In June, the Senate Finance Committee and the White House jubilantly announced that they'd come to a deal with the pharmaceutical industry. But as details of that deal have come out, the White House has issued mixed and conflicting messages as to what they knew and what they'd signed off on.

At the time, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chair of the Senate Finance Committee, announced that pharmaceutical companies had agreed to a deal as part of an overall health care reform package, where the companies will provide, as Baucus put it, "affordable prices on prescription drugs when Medicare benefits don't cover the cost of prescriptions," as well as kicking in some money for health care reform efforts.

President Obama said in a paper statement that "the agreement reached today to lower prescription drug costs for seniors will be an important part of the legislation I expect to sign into law in December. This is a tangible example of the type of reform that will lower costs while assuring quality health care for every American."

But on Thursday the New York Times' David Kirkpatrick reported that under pressure from pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, the White House "assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion."

On the campaign trail, then-Sen. Obama had supported measures to allow the government to re-negotiate drug costs, but apparently this deal would preclude such a move.

Former House Energy and Commerce chairman Bill Tauzin, R-La., now the head of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, told the Times, "We were assured: 'We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal.' Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don't keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead.”

"They wanted a big player to come in and set the bar for everybody else," Tauzin told the Times, asserting that in terms of contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, "$80 billion is the max, no more or less. Adding other stuff changes the deal."

Tauzin said that after the deal was reached with Baucus, he confirmed the terms of the deal with White House Chief if Staff Rahm Emanuel, deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, and health care reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle.

"They blessed the deal," Tauzin told the Times. "As far we are concerned, that is a done deal. It's up to the White House and Senator Baucus to follow through.". . .

After the Times story appeared, some Democrats on the Hill expressed disappointment that the White House and Senate Finance Committee had made this deal with the lobbying group without consulting them, eliminating a way to help pay for the health care reform legislation.
slation and save money for the government.

PASSENGERS IMPRISONED OVERNIGHT ON SMALL PLANE AT AIRPORT

Star Tribune, MN - Forty seven passengers spent the night trapped inside a small airplane, parked at the Rochester airport, complete with crying babies and the aroma of over-used toilets.

The Express Jet Airlines that operated the plane says the flight was diverted to Rochester because of Twin Cities thunderstorms, and that airline regulations prevented passengers from getting off the plane. . .

The airline crew on the plane reached their maximum work hours in the air, so another crew had to be flown in. The alternative of chartering a bus didn't work out. And letting the passengers into the Rochester airport was not possible because they would have to go through security screening again, and the screeners had gone home for the day.

What about just letting the passengers sleep in the airport terminal? "That was not provided as an option by ground services personnel at the airport,'' said Nicholas.

SENIORS WORRIED ABOUT HEALTHCARE PLANS

Ceci Connolly, Washington Post - Senior citizens are emerging as a formidable obstacle to President Obama's ambitious health-care reform plans.

The discontent in the powerful and highly organized voting bloc has risen to such a level that the administration is scrambling to devise a strategy to woo the elderly.

Obama's task will not be easy. Proposals to squeeze more than $500 billion out of the growth of Medicare over the next decade have fueled fears that his effort to expand coverage to millions of younger, uninsured Americans will damage elder care. As a result, barely one-third of seniors support a health-care overhaul, several polls found. . .

From the raw numbers, it appears seniors are the net losers under bills approved by three House committees last week. The legislation trims $563 billion out of Medicare's growth rate over the next 10 years while pumping in about $320 billion. Without any changes, the program is expected to cost about $6.4 trillion over the same period.

But three retiree groups and several independent policy analysts say most of the proposed savings affect providers, rather than beneficiaries, and have the potential to improve quality over the long term. Discounts for prescription drugs, higher reimbursements for many doctors and elimination of co-payments for preventive services are some of the ideas advocates applauded.

"I don't see anything that will affect beneficiaries' access to care, though some of it will depend on implementation," said Joseph Baker, president of the Medicare Rights Center, a nonprofit group focused on older Americans. . .

Hospitals would receive smaller-than-anticipated payments under the House plans. One provision would slash payments to hospitals that have high readmission rates. Medicare estimates that 19 percent of the unpleasant, costly readmissions are "preventable." . . .

BLASTING THE RIGHT IS NOT A POLICY

Sam Smith, Progressive Review - Liberalism has been long been trapped by the notion that its virtues are defined by the evils of the political right. In fact, while opposing the right may be a necessity, it's not a policy.

The dangers of MSNBC style liberalism - i.e. behaving like Bill O'Reilly but just flipping the issues - has been well demonstrated during the healthcare debate. By obsessing on things like the conservative protests at Democratic town meetings, there has been little interest in looking at the Democratic health plans and seeing why so many are so easily worried by them.

For example, the Democratic plans don't build on what's working now i.e. lowering the age of Medicare or otherwise expanding its approach.

They are hopelessly complex, an open invitation to political disaster.

They contains a lot of cutesy provisions that may appeal to health industry lobbies but make what's going in the bills seem opaque.

They treat health too much as a budget issue without dealing adequately with people's medical concerns.

They are far too friendly with the health industry and the bills show it.

If the Democrats bomb on healthcare, the primary blame rests with them. The right's opposition was a given from the start. What wasn't a given was that the Democrats would mess things up so badly.

It didn't have to be like this. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 53% of Americans strongly support lowering Medicare to 55. Another 26% support it some what. That's 79% of Americans favorable to a plan the Democrats wouldn't even consider.

ADD FRANK RICH TO THE OBAMA SKEPTICS

Frank Rich, NY Times - In this maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week The Los Angeles Times reported - and The New York Times confirmed - that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span. . .

Obama promised change we could actually believe in. His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys' club of Robert Rubin proteges and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Stree's latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner's role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren't going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks - which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers' money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion - are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009. . .

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It's a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.posted by TPR |

THE FOG OF NUMBERS

James Howard Kunstler - One of main reasons behind the vast confusion now reigning in the USA, our failure to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us (or what to do about it), is our foolish obsession with econometrics -- viewing the world solely through the "lens" of mathematical models. We think that just because we can measure things in numbers, we can make sense of them.

For decades we measured the health of our economy (and therefore of our society) by the number of "housing starts" recorded month-to-month. For decades, this translated into the number of suburban tract houses being built in the asteroid belts of our towns and cities. When housing starts were up, the simple-minded declared that things were good; when down, bad.
What this view failed to consider was that all these suburban houses added up to a living arrangement with no future. . .

It's especially ironic that given our preoccupation with numbers, we have arrived at the point where numbers just can't be comprehended anymore. This week, outstanding world derivatives were declared to have reached the 1 quadrillion mark. Commentators lately -- e.g. NPR's "Planet Money" broadcast -- have struggled to explain to listeners exactly what a trillion is in images such as the number of dollar bills stacked up to the planet Venus or the number of seconds that add up to three ice ages plus two warmings. . . We have flown up our own collective numeric bung-hole.

America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government. Who, for instance, can really comprehend what to do about the number problems infesting Fannie Mae and the mortgages associated with her? There's really only one way out of this predicament: to get ready for a much lower standard of living and much different daily living arrangements.

PHARMAS HIKING DRUG PRICES TO PAY FOR FREE SAMPLES

Amy Calder, Morning Sentinel, ME - A report in the May issue of PLoS Medicine, an international medical journal, argues that the practice of giving free drug samples to patients not only poses a health risk to them, but also raises the cost of care.

The report explains that drug companies often make up for the costs of giving away free samples, considered by them a cost of marketing, through higher prices and increased sales. The report's authors, Susan Chimonas of the Center on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, and Jerome P. Kassirer, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a Tufts University School of Medicine professor, also dispute some long-held claims that the gift of free samples to patients can benefit people of low income.

Studies show that fewer than one-third of people who receive free samples are poor and uninsured, and those patients might not be able to continue taking the medicine once the samples are used up -- because they cannot afford to pay for a prescription.

Drug-expiration dates on free samples might be overlooked, posing risks to patients, the report adds.

THE SMALL STATE GANG THAT RUNS THE SENATE

This is an issue the Review has raised for the past four decades. This is one of the few times we have seen it mentioned in the conventional media.

Alec MacGillis, Washington Post - Wonder why President Obama is having a hard time enacting his agenda after sweeping to victory and with large congressional majorities on his side? Look to the Senate, the chamber designed to thwart popular will.

There is much grousing on the left about the filibuster, the threat of which has taken such hold that routine bills now need 60 votes. Getting less attention is the undemocratic character of the Senate itself. .

The Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six" that is drafting health-care legislation that may shape the final deal -- without a public insurance option -- represents six states that are among the least populous in the country: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Maine, New Mexico and Iowa.

Between them, those six states hold 8.4 million people -- less than New Jersey -- and represent 3 percent of the U.S. population. North Dakota and Wyoming each have fewer than 80,000 uninsured people, in a country where about 47 million lack insurance. In the House, those six states have 13 seats out of 435, 3 percent of the whole. In the Senate, those six members are crafting what may well be the blueprint for reform.

Climate change legislation, which passed in the House, also faces daunting odds. Why? Because agriculture, coal and oil interests hold far more sway in the Senate. In the House, the big coal state of Wyoming has a single vote to New York's 29 and California's 53. In the Senate, each state has two. The two Dakotas (total population: 1.4 million) together have twice as much say in the Senate as does Florida (18.3 million) or Texas (24.3 million) or Illinois (12.9 million). . .

Was this really what the founders had in mind? One popular story tells of In Philadelphia in 1787, the smaller states favored the New Jersey Plan -- one chamber with equal representation per state -- while James Madison argued for two chambers, both apportioned by population, which would benefit his Virginia.

The delegates finally settled on the Connecticut Compromise, or the Great Compromise. Seats in the lower chamber would be apportioned by population (with some residents counting more than others, of course) while seats in the upper chamber would be awarded two per state.

The idea was to safeguard states' rights at a time when the former colonies were still trying to get used to this new country of theirs. But the big/small divide was nothing like what we have today. Virginia, the biggest of the original 13 states, had 538,000 people in 1780, or 12 times as many people as the smallest state, Delaware.

Today, California is 70 times as large as the smallest state, Wyoming, whose population of 533,000 is smaller than that of the average congressional district, and, yes, smaller than that of Washington D.C., which has zero votes in Congress to Wyoming's three. The 10 largest states are home to more than half the people in the country, yet have only a fifth of the votes in the Senate. The 21 smallest states together hold fewer people than California's 36.7 million -- which means there are 42 senators who together represent fewer constituents than Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. And under Senate rules, of course, those 42 senators -- representing barely more than a tenth of the country's population -- can mount a filibuster.. . .

URBAN STATEHOOD: WHY WE NEED MORE STATES By Sam Smith

OVER A BILLION PEOPLE LIVE IN WATER SCARCE AREAS

World Watch - The Stockholm International Water Institute calculated in 2008 that 1.4 billion people live in "closed basins"-regions where existing water cannot meet the agricultural, industrial, municipal, and environmental needs of all. Their estimate is consistent with a 2007 Food and Agriculture Organization calculation that 1.2 billion people live in countries and regions that are water-scarce. And the situation is projected to worsen rapidly: FAO estimates that the number of water-scarce will rise to 1.8 billion by 2025. . .

"Water scarcity" has several meanings. Physical water scarcity exists wherever available water is insufficient to meet demand: parts of the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, northern China, and southeastern Australia are characterized by physical water scarcity. Economic water scarcity occurs when water is available but inaccessible because of a lack of investment in water provision or poor management and regulation of water resources. Much of the water scarcity of sub-Saharan Africa falls into this category.

Signs of scarcity are plentiful. Several major rivers, including the Indus, Rio Grande, Colorado, Murray-Darling, and Yellow, no longer reach the sea year-round as a growing share of their waters are claimed for various uses. Water tables are falling as groundwater is overpumped in South Asia, northern China, the Middle East, North Africa, and the southwestern United States, often propping up food production unsustainably. The World Bank estimates that some 15 percent of India's food, for example, is produced using water from nonrenewable aquifers. Another sign of scarcity is that desalination, a limited and expensive water supply solution, is on the rise.

Water scarcity has many causes. Population growth is a major driver at the regional and global levels, but other factors play a large role locally. Pollution reduces the amount of usable water available to farmers, industry, and cities. The World Bank and the government of China have estimated, for instance, that 54 percent of the water in seven main rivers in China is unusable because of pollution. In addition, urbanization tends to increase domestic and industrial demand for water, as does rising incomes-two trends prominent in rapidly developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil.

A looming new threat to water supplies is climate change, which is causing rainfall patterns to shift, ice stocks to melt, and soil moisture content and runoff to change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the area of our planet classified as "very dry" has more than doubled since the 1970s, and the volume of glaciers in many regions and snow pack in northern hemisphere mountains-two important freshwater sources-has decreased significantly. . .

TASER TALE OF THE DAY

Casper Star Tribune - State agents are investigating a Saturday incident in which a 76-year-old man driving a tractor in Glenrock was tasered by police after allegedly failing to obey their orders. The Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation will look into whether anyone connected to the incident committed a crime, said Special Agent Tim Hill.

The incident happened at Glenrock's annual Deer Creek Days event. Glenrock police said the man, who was operating an antique tractor, failed to obey directions in a parade, Hill said. At some point afterward, police subdued and tasered the man. During the incident, the man's tractor apparently ran into a police car, Hill said.

UNDERSTANDING THE EMPLOYMENT FIGURES

Robert Reich - The economy is getting worse more slowly. That's just about the only clear reading that's coming from the economic reports, including this morning's important one on employment. The pace of job losses slowed -- payrolls fell by 247,000, after a 443,000 loss in June, and the official jobless rate dropped from 9.5 to 9.4 percent.

Be careful with these figures, though. They don't include the increasing numbers of people working part-time who'd rather have full-time jobs. Nor do they include a large number who have given up looking for work. They don't reflect the many millions who have found new jobs that pay less than the old ones they lost. And they don't include one of the shortest typical workweeks on record, for those who still have full-time jobs. . . Nor, for that matter, do the numbers reflect the 130,000 people who are coming into the labor force each month ready and willing to work, who can't find jobs.

If all these people are included, my estimate is that one out of five Americans who would otherwise be working full time are now underemployed. We are still experiencing the biggest decline of any post-World War II economic slump.

The overall economy continues to contract but more slowly than before. Consumers are not buying, exports are still dropping, and business investment is still in the doldrums, so the only clear reason is that the stimulus is beginning to kick in. Yet -- here's another important thing to watch -- job losses continue to outpace that contraction. In other words, employers are using this downdraft to lay off more workers, proportionately, than they have since the Great Depression. . .

So let's be grateful that the economy is getting worse more slowly than it was. But don't be lured into thinking we're ever going back to where we were. Most of the jobs that have been lost are never coming back. .

MAJOR GLACIERS IN MELTDOWN

CNN - U.S. scientists monitoring shrinking glaciers in Washington and Alaska reported this week that a major meltdown is under way. The Gulcana glacier in Alaska is one of three glaciers considered a benchmark by the U.S. Geological Survey.

A 50-year government study found that the world's glaciers are melting at a rapid and alarming rate. . . The melt of glaciers is resulting in higher sea levels and affecting ecosystems and the rivers that emanate from these glaciers. . .

FOLLOW THE BOUNCING SPECTER

538 - In the first month or so after becoming a Democrat, [Arlen] Specter was voting with his new party about two-thirds of the time on contentious votes. While there are some less loyal Democrats -- say, Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- who only vote with their party about half the time, this was certainly less than what most Democratic observers were hoping for.

But since then, indeed, something has changed. Well, a couple of things have changed. On May 27th, Congressman Joe Sestak announced that he intended to challenge Specter for the Democratic nomination. And since that time, Specter has voted with his party on 28 out of 29 contentious votes, or 97 percent of the time.

Specter's overall party loyalty score since becoming a Democrat -- counting votes both before and after the primary challenge -- is 87 percent. This contrasts with the 44 percent of the time that he broke ranks to side with the Democratic on contentious votes while still a member of the Republican Party. He's basically been behaving like a mainline, liberal Democrat.

CALIFORNIA TOWN SHUTS DOWN 8 YEAR OLD'S LEMONADE STAND FOR LACK OF BUSINESS LICENSE

Fresno Bee - Eight-year-old Daniela Earnest has made lemonade out of lemons in more ways than one this week.

Hoping to raise money for a family trip to Disneyland, the Tulare girl opened a lemonade stand Monday. But because Daniela didn't have a business license, the city of Tulare shut it down the same day.

From that came a radio station's offer of Disneyland tickets to Daniela's family -- in exchange for 30 cups of lemonade -- and an appearance in front of the Tulare City Council on Tuesday night that will likely lead to a compromise allowing her lemonade stand and other pint-sized business ventures to operate legally . . .

Tulare officials said they cannot recall ever shutting down a lemonade stand before this week. But it's not altogether uncommon. Authorities across the nation have done the same. And in Fresno, a Huntington Boulevard shaved ice machine run by a resident mostly so neighborhood kids could get a sno-cone on hot days was shut down by a Fresno code enforcer .

Ed Earnest, Daniela's father, said Garcia got "a bad rap" from critics about his enforcement actions. "He was just doing his job," Earnest said. . .

Vice Mayor Philip Vandegrift said a compromise -- possibly asking lemonade stand operators to pay a nominal fee or establishing a license fee waiver for children under a certain age -- could be the outcome of Daniela's experience.

However, the city needs to enforce vendor laws, Vandegrift said, "otherwise we'll have people on every corner."

WHY AMERICAN POLITICS DOESN'T WORK

Counterpunch - Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (R) has loaned herself $19 million for her 2010 [California] gubernatorial campaign. She raised an additional $6.8 million, bringing her to over $25 million for the 2Q-2009. Money isn't always a guarantee of success in a race like this: Northwest Airlines CEO Al Checchi (D) spent $40 million from his own pocket in his 1998 run for California Governor but captured just 12.5% in the crowded primary..

BILL CLINTON'S KOREA TRIP HANDLED LIKE CAMPAIGN EVENT

NY Post- Bill Clinton's triumphant return from North Korea with two rescued US journalists had Hollywood written all over it -- from the Burbank airport to the big-time producer who bankrolled the expedition to the celebrity public-relations firm that orchestrated the homecoming.

A key player in Clinton's high-flying diplomatic mission to rescue Laura Ling and Euna Lee was entertainment mogul Steve Bing, a longtime "Friend of Bill" who lent the ex-president his private Boeing 737.

The multimillionaire mogul paid about $200,000 in fuel and other costs that came with the trans-Pacific flight.

Bing's Shangri-La entertainment firm also funded a major logistical effort to carefully showcase Clinton's arrival in Tinseltown -- which featured Ling lauding the former president while almost in tears.

The company knows a blockbuster when it sees one, having produced Tom Hanks' "Polar Express," "Beowulf," starring Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie, and Martin Scorsese's 2008 Rolling Stones rock-umentary, "Shine a Light," filmed at Clinton's 60th birthday bash at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side.

Hollywood p.r. firm Rogers & Cowan, which represents Bing along with a bevy of A-list celebs, began organizing the arrival ceremony after it got word Tuesday morning -- while Clinton was still on the ground in Pyongyang -- to get ready, according to a Hollywood source.

The firm chose as its venue Hangar 25 at Bob Hope International Airport in Burbank, a solar-powered facility that has hosted other press events.

Bing is a major financial backer of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and environmental causes, and has a business constructing environmentally friendly hangars. . .

The p.r. firm closely coordinated with Bill Clinton's foundation, which worked with former Vice President Al Gore's Current TV to have family members on hand for the homecoming.

STUDY FOUND NOT HAVING CHILDREN MORE IMPORTANT THAN MANY ECO-FRIENDLY POLICIES

Live Science - A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives - things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

"In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime," said study team member Paul Murtaugh. "Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources."

Reproductive choices haven't gained as much attention in the consideration of human impact to the Earth, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child - and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future - the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime. . .

The impact doesn't only come through increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases - larger populations also generate more waste and tax water supplies.

AMERICAN NOTES: STREET SPORTS

Halfball

Half Ball - If you lived in and around a major city in the 1950's and 1960's you probably played halfball all day long. In fact you probably thought you invented halfball.

Halfball began when a group of kids were playing a stickball game and the white pimple ball split in half. Having no money for a new ball, the boys started throwing the ball at each other. All of a sudden one of the halfballs began to float toward the batter like a flying saucer. Legend has it that the batter doubled off a triple decker. Halfball was born.

Not only from school walls to triple deckers, from Dorchester to Roslindale, and all the way to the Cape, the game still flourishes today in cities and neighborhoods across the country, and in the memories of those of us who don't swing so hard anymore.

Pitchers try to strike out batters; one strike is an out, but the missed halfball has to be caught by the catcher to make an out. If the catcher misses the pitch, the batter is not out and gets another chance. Obviously, a half of a ball can be made to sail ---upshoot, left-curve, right-curve, drop balls etc.-- in countless directions, and some pitchers get to be extremely good. Batters, meanwhile, attempt to make contact. No baserunning is involved in the game; a grounder past the pitcher is a single. If the pitcher fields it before it gets past his position, it is an out. Fly balls past the pitcher, unless caught for outs, are doubles, and balls hit to a pre-designated distance are home runs.

It has also been said that half ball began because a half ball had a shorter range than a full ball.
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Tireball

Street Play - Another popular street game, at least in Philadelphia was "tire ball." Originally it was played with a cut-up balloon bicycle tire, usually about 4 inches in length. But bicycle tires were more often repaired, or their inner tubes were, because they were expensive. So "tire ball" was usually played with cut up rubber garden hoses. Unlike half ball, tire ball couldn't be played against a wall, or the end house in a row, because it was hard, and likely to break windows. It couldn't be played across a street because the hose ball would travel three times the distance of a half ball. So it was usually played lenghwise in a driveway.

Spaldeen

Wikipedia - A Spalding Hi-Bounce Ball, often called a Spaldeen, is a small pink rubber ball, somewhat similar to a racquetball, supposedly made from the defective core of a tennis ball without the felt. It was the more expensive and more popular version of the Pensie Pinkie (made by the Penn tennis ball company). These balls are commonly used in street games developed in the mid-20th century, such as Chinese handball (a variation on American handball), stoop ball, hit-the-penny (involving trying to make a penny flip on a sidewalk), box ball, punchball, and stickball (a variation of baseball). Contents [hide]

The term most likely arose from a New York City-accented pronunciation of Spalding, the sporting goods company that produced the balls. Across the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey, the ball was referred to as a "high bouncer." It may also have originated with a misreading of A. G. Spalding's signature on the ball. The name has become so common that Spalding now uses it in marketing, and it is now a registered trademark.

Spaldeens were available from 1949 to 1979 to city kids. In urban areas sparse in grass, Spaldeens became integral to many street games due to their bounciness and light weight. Citing the declining popularity of stickball, Spalding took the ball off the market in 1979, but it returned in 1999 to much fanfare. . . Since its return in 1999 Spaldeens have been manufactured in a variety of other colors other than pink. Some of them are black, blue, green, orange, purple, red, and yellow.

Handball

NY Times - Handball is ubiquitous throughout the city. Played by everyone from preteens to aging masters, it's like open-air racketball, but with no racket, just one wall and the symphony of the New York streets disrupting your concentration. . . with around 2,000 handball courts all over the city.

Stickball

NY Times - Like baseball but played in the street, with a stick or broom handle for a bat and fire hydrants, cars or manhole covers serving as bases, stickball thrived in a New York where automobiles had not yet come to dominate the asphalt. Today, the game is less the province of idle kids and more the pastime of adults who organize into leagues. . . With the sport mostly restricted to league play, pick-up games are hard to come by

THE INCREDIBLE, SHRINKING HEALTH CARE PLAN

Norman Solomon, Counterpunch - Like soap in a rainstorm, "healthcare reform" is wasting away. As this week began, a leading follower of conventional wisdom, journalist Cokie Roberts, told NPR listeners: "This is evolving legislation. And the administration is now talking about a glide path towards universal coverage, rather than immediate universal coverage."

Notions of universal healthcare are fading in the power centers of politics -- while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.

Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign's 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: "health insurance reform."

The difference between the promise of healthcare for everyone and the new mantra of health insurance reform is akin to what Mark Twain once described as "the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

The "health insurance reform" now being spun as "a glide path towards universal coverage" is apt to reinforce the huge power of the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries in the United States. . .

Days ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed an emerging "consensus" and "common ground" on Capitol Hill. In passing, the article mentioned that lawmakers "agree on the need to provide federal subsidies to help make insurance affordable for people with modest incomes. For poor people, Medicaid eligibility would be expanded."

It's a scenario that amounts to expansion of healthcare ghettos nationwide. Medicaid's reimbursement rates for medical providers are so paltry that "Medicaid patient" is often a synonym for someone who can't find a doctor willing to help.

But what about "the public plan" -- enabling the government to offer health insurance that would be an alternative to the wares of for-profit insurance firms? "Under pressure from industry and their lobbyists, the public plan has been watered down to a small and ineffectual option at best, if it ever survives to being enacted," says John Geyman, professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington.

A public plan option "would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers' dominant role," according to the letter from 3,500 physicians. "Even a robust public option would forego 90 percent of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. . . "

WHAT IF YOU BUY A CONDO IN A 32 STORY BUILDING AND NOBODY ELSE DOES?

Ft Meyers News Press - Victor Vangelakos and his family . . . are the only residents in the 32-story Oasis I condo on the east edge of downtown Fort Myers.

The Weehawken, N.J., firefighter bought the condo from The Related Group, based in Miami, for $430,000 and closed on it in November. He planned to make it a vacation getaway and eventually his full-time residence when he retires in four years - but prices have fallen hard since the real estate bubble burst in early 2006.

Only a handful of those who put down deposits on the tower's units actually closed on the deal. Those who did have swapped their Oasis I units for condos in Oasis II next door.

Vangelakos didn't, because he was unable to persuade his lender, JPMorgan Chase, to agree to the swap, said Betsy Lu McCoy, vice president and associate corporate counsel for Related.

That leaves the Vangelakos family splitting their time between New Jersey and a surreal life in Oasis I.

They're the only ones using the well-appointed clubhouse, but they can't watch its big plasma TV. "We haven't found the remote controls," Vangelakos said. . .

At night, Vangelakos said, they often hear people on the grounds or even inside the darkened building itself. It's not hard to break in one of the many entrances. Especially popular for intruders is the swimming pool, Vangelakos said. They heard people there one night "and the next day, all our chairs were in the pool.". . .

His relationship with Related is testy at best. Once, he said, when management turned off his water to fix a leak in a pipe, "we came back 10 days later and the water was off, but our TV was on."

Now, after months of exchanging letters with Related about building maintenance and other issues, Vangelakos said he just wants out.

He hasn't filed a lawsuit, but his attorney, Fort Lauderdale-based John Ewing, said Related hasn't delivered the marina, pro shop and fancy restaurants that were promised.

THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE OLBERMAN-O'REILLY TRUCE

Daiv Sirota, Open Left - The New York Times story about MSNBC's corporate parent, General Electric, forcing the network to soften its criticism of Fox News has generated a lot of buzz over the weekend. . .

What the Times story and the aftershock gossip focuses on is the personality feud and new detente between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. That's supposedly the "news." And yet the real story is the heavy-handed intervention by the CEO of General Electric effectively forcing MSNBC's news team off a crucially important set of stories - namely, Fox News' politicization/Republicanization of media.

For years, Establishment media voices like Charlie Rose (yes, the same Charlie Rose who the Times story says played a direct role in the corporate parents' intervention at MSNBC and Fox) have insisted that it's a black-helicopter-style conspiracy theory to assert that corporate parent companies pressure/impact/limit the newsrooms they control.

But, of course, the evidence has become overwhelming in the last 15 years. The three most obvious that come to mind are:

- 1995: CBS' 60 Minutes backs off it's expose of the tobacco industry, due, in part, to pressure from its parent company and the tobacco industry. This sordid affair was made famous by the movie The Insider.

- 2001: NBC's president engages in direct political lobbying against a government order that would force NBC's parent company, General Electric, to clean up its mess in the Hudson River. At the same time, environmentalists noted that NBC did not give the Hudson River cleanup story nearly enough attention.

- 2009: The Washington Post's parent company offers corporations and their lobbyists "off-the-record access" to its reporters and editors in exchange for direct financial contributions of up to $250,000.

This, of course, says nothing of the even more nefarious and arguably more widespread practice of these same corporate media outlets promoting as "objective" voices reporters and editorialists who have secret financial interests in the news they cover - all without any disclosure. Just a few examples:

- Richard Wolffe: This former Newsweek reporter is now a paid corporate PR consultant. Yet, he appears on MSNBC as a disinterested "political analyst," even hosting Olbermann's show. Wolffe, in fact, publicly sells his media prominence on MSNBC as a reason for corporations to hire him. . .

- Doug Bandow: In 2005, Business Week reported that this senior fellow at the Cato Institute "resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients." . . .

- Armstrong Williams: In 2005, this syndicated radio host and columnist took a quarter million dollars from the Education Department to promote President Bush's controversial education policy "on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same," according to USA Today.

- Thomas Friedman: This New York Times columnist has become the single most prominent media voice in support of the multinational corporate agenda and the ultra-wealthy - and his credibility is based on the perception that Friedman is a completely disinterested commentator. However, Friedman - by marriage - is a member of the Bucksbaum empire, one of the biggest real estate conglomerates in the world.

- Former Generals: David Barstow of The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for "reveal[ing] how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended."

More. . .

FORMER HEAD OF NYTIMES.COM ON PAY FOR VIEW: MASS DELUSION

Jeff Jarvis, Guardian, UK - Vivian Schiller, now CEO of National Public Radio in the US, said in an interview with Newsweek that talk of charging for news online is "mass delusion". She should know. Schiller was head of nytimes.com when it charged and then stopped charging for its content. .

Charging for content brings marketing and customer-service costs. Online, it reduces audience and the advertising they justify. Putting content behind a wall cuts it off from search and links; they cut off your Googlejuice.

When publishers build those walls, they open the door for free competitors, who can now enter the content business with virtually no barrier to entry. Publishers who fool themselves into thinking pay will save the day only further forestall the innovation and experimentation that is the only possible path to success online.

Pete Rose agreed to a lifetime ban from baseball in 1989 after an investigation concluded he bet on the Cincinnati Reds to win while he was manager of the team.

"How long does a person have to die?" Aaron said. "I think the thing that bothers me is that he is missing out on a lot of things. He made a mistake. I don’t know what else can be done, or what else can be said. I just think at some point he needs to start enjoying being a Hall of Famer."

MORE PHARMA PHRAUD UNVEILED

NY Times - Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.

But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients.

The ghostwritten papers were typically review articles, in which an author weighs a large body of medical research and offers a bottom-line judgment about how to treat a particular ailment. The articles appeared in 18 medical journals, including The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology.

POLICE BLOTTER: LOOSE MOOSE

Bangor Daily News - A moose on the loose in the Knox Mill Center generated excitement [in Camden] before it was sedated, transported and set free that afternoon in the Ruffingham Meadow State Game Management Area in Searsmont. The 500-pound cow moose apparently wandered into the building about 8:30 a.m. through an open back door used by Sage Market. Its lumbering bulk was a shock to staff and residents of the mixed-use complex on the Megunticook River formerly used by credit card company MBNA. "You can't make this stuff up," said Lt. Randy Gagne of the Camden Police Department. "I've chased moose all over town, but I've never had one go into a building. You don't see that every day." . . . When the moose was in the building, it seemed a little panicky, witnesses said, but didn't hurt anyone or get hurt itself. ". . . At about noon Connolly and biologist Keel Kemper jabbed the animal with two doses of tranquilizer. Once the moose was sedated, the biologists had help from the Police Department and complex staff to move it outside on a tarp. The moose was loaded onto the back of a pickup truck with a backhoe, said Gagne.

FURTHERMORE. . .

PUSHING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS ON THREE YEAR OLDS

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